Stray Thoughts #3

A Snapped Cap; The Bergeron Standard; Some Overdue Recs

Greetings and salutations, all you Neo-Gonzos and Gonzettes! I hope your latest Ides of March has come and gone without incident, riddled with omens of ill-portent as it was.

I’ve been trying to be more prolific lately. One thing I’d like to do more of is Deimos Station reporting, to highlight the many weird and wonderful crew members I’ve rubbed elbows with there.

In the meantime, here’s a few random observations this stray cat found slinking around his yard this week, as well as some recommended articles and stacks.

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A Snapped Cap

🧠💥🤯

Like most couples, my wife and I have developed a shorthand over the years. This private language of ours contains many catchphrases, slogans, mottos and mantras, some of which arrive in the form of snippets of dialogue heard by either or both of us on the street.

One example of the latter is the phrase, “You snapped your cap!” shrieked by an obviously drug-addicted woman to her even more obviously drug-addicted boyfriend, in a park that was known for such shenanigans. While the precise meaning varies on the context in which we say it, it typically applies in scenarios where people appear to have suddenly and unexpectedly lost their minds.

I’ve seen my fair share of that in my time. The most recent example occurred just a few days ago. I was on my way back from a very unfortunate haircut when I stopped on a bench to look at some birds sitting on a wire. I’ll occasionally do this to gather my thoughts on a subject. In this case, it was how to explain to my wife why I looked like someone cut my hair with a rusty prison hacksaw.

For whatever reason, I noticed a person walking across the adjacent parking lot. He was a black guy on the tall end of average and wore his hair in shoulder length dreadlocks (of which I was instantly envious, given my recent follicular catastrophe). He was skinny but not emaciated and, apart from him wearing a small beige backpack, nothing about him suggested homelessness. His clothing looked clean and fashionable, and his sneakers were that kind of bright white that almost gleamed in the sunshine.

Suddenly, the man stopped in his tracks, and emitted what I can best describe as a “bark” of laughter.

The first instinct these days is to check for ear buds. After all, there was a strong chance he was listening to a podcast or something, or to the other end of a funny conversation. In the olden days this wasn’t an option. Even when cell phones first exploded onto the mass market, you could tell the difference between a genuine conversation and someone who was talking to himself (or to something both invisible and worse).

Anyway, there were no earbuds in sight. Also, the guy went on barking, and began shaking his head and wandering in little circles too. Sometimes he would pause and start to say something, but the words quickly devolved into gibberish punctuated by another short, sharp laugh.

He snapped his cap, in other words.

As I watched him, I felt a bizarre mixture of pity and anger bloom inside me. I was sad for him, because I knew whatever was causing him to laugh wasn’t in the least bit funny. The anger was more generalized at the world that currently surrounded us, a madhouse our souls had been hurled into without our consent.

It could’ve just been drugs, of course. There are some that come on suddenly like that, hitting like a slap in the face if not a freight train. But then I thought of all the lies, mayhem and carnage of the past three years. How many caps were snapping simply due to those? The ghosts of pain can also hit you hard and fast.

I feel those phantom assaults myself, sometimes. Most often they are memories of someone we lost in that Spring of 2020. Her death was an entirely senseless one, caused not by COVID-19 but by the evil and idiotic rules which sprang up in response to it. Occasionally I will be transported back to that day, into the jail of my body back then. It’s stronger, leaner and faster, a body that worked out every day. I’m wearing the tattered old camouflage tank top, and other clothes that I’ve since thrown away. Before me lay one of the most beloved people in my life, without one trace of a spark in her eyes. I’m desperately attempting CPR while the operator coaches me on speakerphone. But I already know it’s over, that she is gone.

When this particular ghost train strikes, the impact feels like more than enough to make me bark and run in circles.

So why don’t I?

I don’t know. I’ve occasionally caught myself begin to say something angry, and to no one in particular. I’ve also blown my top a couple of times these past few years. And although I’ve been known to have a temper in the past, these more recent incidents were tinged with some exotic new poison that stings and scalds. Certain conversations wind up feeling like you’re out on the street watching your home burn down, and a person you know and love decides this would be an excellent time to tell you some knock-knock jokes. Though paradoxical, cap-snapping in such moments seems like the only way to retain any shred of your sanity.

The barking man eventually wandered off and so did I. Strangely, I saw him again just yesterday. He was wearing the same little backpack, but different shoes and clothes. He was walking with purpose this time, head bowed and lips zipped. We passed each other at an intersection without incident. I somehow resisted the barking mad urge to hug him.

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The Bergeron Standard

⚖️📏🤪

While composing a reply to John Carter’s series on Julius Caesar, I found myself thinking about the concept of human excellence and its enemies. John presents Caesar as the apotheosis of both; a man whose strength of virtue and inherent talents meant a violent exit from this world was all but guaranteed.

This tragic-yet-foreseeable outcome is what’s often missing from Darwinian survival theories, which fail to account for envy, greed, lust and other monsters that lurk in the heart’s pits and cracks. For those who allow the sin of envy in particular to corrupt them, any greatness detected in others tends to carve big, red bullseyes on their chests. This is especially the case in societies where all virtues have been flipped upside-down by their elites.

On this phenomenon, art proves as instructive as ever. For example, I’ve noticed people in our circles often reach into the world of dystopian fiction to describe what’s happening right now. There are many strong candidates, but the picture that typically emerges is some hybrid of 1984, Brave New World and Farenheit 451. And rightly so; these intricate worlds and their villains seem to have aligned with what we’re seeing in prophetic ways.

But certain critical geometries are missing from this collage. I think that’s because the authors of those novels were too haunted by their nightmarish visions to see how Clown World might naturally evolve in parallel, and come to epitomize its everyday lunacies and collapsing standards.

Enter Kurt Vonnegut, stage left.

In life, Vonnegut was an elusive cat, capable of utterances both insightful and boneheaded. But in his best works, he didn’t dwell so much on the mundane evils of totalitarian systems but on their laughable absurdities. Dystopian villains like Big Brother and Captain Beatty loom large in our present-day analogies, but for my money the figure of Diana Moon Glampers from Harrison Bergeron is a much better fit. The same can be said of Harrison’s parents, George and Hazel, who serve as both framing story and Greek chorus for Vonnegut’s tragicomic myth.

Harrison himself is presented as Colossus, Adonis and Samson all rolled into one, the pinnacle of human form and expression. Once freed from his government-mandated shackles, his excellence is so irrefutable that he even breaks the bonds of gravity itself. He is not merely a king among men, but a god among mortals, who, if allowed to live, would inspire the whole world to cast off their own chains of ruthlessly enforced “equity” and “fairness.”

The punchline to this part of the tale is that even someone as curbstone dull and talentless as Glampers can put a quick stop to such rebel hijinks. In her official role as Handicapper General, she restores equilibrium with a pair of shotgun blasts, and a not-so-veiled threat.

But what is that equilibrium? If the handicaps in Bergeron’s world are meant to prevent everyone from eclipsing a given standard of beauty, ability and competency, how does this standard measure up against our own past and present versions?

In both the mundane framing story and the televised myth, the answer is crystal clear:

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It 
wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, 
like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a 
minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, 
"Ladies and Gentlemen." 

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read. 

"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big 
thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get 
a nice raise for trying so hard." 

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must 
have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. 
And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all 
the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

As mentioned above, my wife and I have amassed many mottos over the years. One the earliest of these, coined back in the very first year of our romance, was:

I don’t even recall which of us said it first. But it had a nice ring to it, and seemed so widely applicable even back in the relatively halcyon days of the late 90’s. We used it to point out the lowering of standards for just about everything around us. Little did we know how low they could go, in the game of Clown World Limbo. What we thought of as average-and-stupid twenty years ago might pass for reasonably competent today.

The same holds true for George and Hazel Bergeron, who watch their son’s triumph and downfall from the cheap seats of their squalid little den. Though neither exhibit the superhuman qualities of their offspring, we are told that George’s intelligence “was way above normal,” and as such his handicapping device prevented him from stringing together more than a few minimally-coherent thoughts at a time. Meanwhile, Hazel is presented as someone of “average intelligence,” which in this fictional world means something along the lines of “don’t let her near sharp objects or hot stoves.”

In other words, the handicapping rules aren’t simply a matter of suppressing excellence, but preventing even mediocrity from taking root. The insight here is that when the rulers and their flacks are themselves sub-par, what counts as “average” in the populace necessarily gets shoved a few standard deviations down the ladder.

I sense that even Diana Moon Glampers’ own bloodlust would be sated in the presence of such mediocrities. She’d feel no need to hamper them with millstones and sandbags, or earpieces that blast their thoughts to smithereens. That would mark a total waste of resources, as this new breed seems inherently bereft of any talent, wisdom, education or even basic common sense. There is something darkly fascinating about their antics. You know you wouldn’t let them run a candy store, let alone a country. And yet they keep coming, tumbling out of a clown car that’s simultaneously a portal to Hell.

The scenes are familiar by now. A general with a chest full of medals mounts the podium to brag about shooting down a balloon with a half-a-million-dollar missile. A derailed train carrying a million pounds of deadly chemicals is promptly turned into a mushroom cloud, and the EPA basically tells displaced residents to “grow a pair, pussy.” An endless parade of state and federal employees make comments that would flunk an 8th grade civics quiz. Public health officials don’t seem to know even the rudiments of the scientific method. The list goes on.

As we watch them, the main question looming in our minds is:

“Why aren’t they drooling and shitting themselves yet?”

In fact, it’s getting more and more difficult to parse the liars from the babbling idiots. That’s because even the lies are babbled now, as though they’ve lost the basic ability to read or write the scripts. A day may come where they say nothing at all. Where they merely grin and point at their genitals, or fling turds at a robot-operated camera that some other moron forgot to plug in.

Perhaps that figure is the apotheosis of our Clown World Idiocracy, a tribune of the cosmic horror which awaits us at the bottom of the trench. Not a dead-but-dreaming Cthulhu and his atavistic goblins. Not even Diana Moon Glampers, who was so competent when compared to this bunch that even she should watch her mouth in our world, and keep her ears peeled for the sound of a shotgun being racked behind her.

No, what awaits us down there is George and Hazel Bergeron, who are no longer passively watching the television screen but have become the stars of the show. They stammer halfway through the latest bloviated lie, only to be short-circuited by shiny objects, mischievous phantoms and the attack dogs that patrol the moral junkyards of their minds.

Like them, the “average” audiences who still tune in for our Clown Show have the insights and memories of lobotomized goldfish. Some retain the old parroting instincts, quickly repeating whichever bits of the latest lie they can recall before it vanishes into the mists of day-old Twitter threads. But even that pseudo-sentient behavior is winding down now, their ganglia drowning in a soup of depersonalizing head-meds, algorithmic pornography and an adulterated supply of processed “food.”

At the current rate of decline, our own Harrison Bergeron will not be a titan pressed into humanoid form. He might merely be the manager at the grocery store, or the local auto mechanic, or just about anyone capable of thinking clearly for more than twenty seconds in a row.

Yet despite this sad state of affairs, I must admit I’m feeling very lucky.

That’s mostly due to the collection of brilliant minds I’ve encountered here at Substack across the past seven months. You have filled me with genuine hope. In light of that, perhaps our little family motto of "Average is stupid” was only a fleeting insight into the sort of tumult that precedes any renaissance, rather than a dark prophecy of what’s to come.

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Overdue Recs

I’ve been trying to keep up more with both my Substack reading and correspondence lately. As a result, I kept putting off recommendations for various articles and writers I’ve encountered. I’ll try to repair that now.

First up is Notebooks of an Inflamed Cynic by Jon. I don’t have a specific recommendation for any particular post of his. I just generally like his voice, especially in its humor and efficiency. Jon can pack a lot of laughs and depth into very few words, and I admire him for that. Here’s just a smattering of his stuff, more or less randomly sampled (but feel free to explore; I suspect there’s a ton of gold in those hills):

Some thoughts on the "vibe shift"

Some Thoughts on the Logarithmic Nature of Perceived Time

Next up are two excellent articles posted weeks ago. Letting them pass by this long without comment feels a bit like a splinter under a fingernail.

Tree of Woe

has swiftly become one of my favorite Substack writers over the past several months, and his recent framing of the AI alignment problem is the most compelling I've read to date. It's an especially useful read given the jungle of nonsense and propaganda surrounding the topic these days.

Is AI Alignable, Even in Principle?

Though I wouldn’t dare call it a “companion piece” to my history post earlier in the week, Luc Koch’s 26 March piece “The Forgotten Esoteric Roots of Modernity” explores much the same terrain, but with a focus on the history of ideas.

The Forgotten Esoteric Roots of Modernity

And because this is getting long (again), I’ll close out with a list of links to some other writers/publications I’ve recently discovered that I think you might be interested in, hailing from many different backgrounds and perspectives. I owe them all comments, likes, Christmas presents, etc. But hopefully this gesture will make up some of the slack in the meantime:

apxhard

by Mark P Xu Neyer

Born on the Fourth of July

by William Hunter Duncan

Gathering Goateggs

Heroes and Villains

by Jerome V.

The Last Scientist

A Roll of the Dice

by Nate Epps

Sharine Creates

by Sharine Borslien

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Speaking of “slack,” we have one of those. Ours is called Deimos Station, and its members include the list of writers above as well many other exotic species of the Neo-Gonzo clade. Check out the link above if you haven’t already read about it. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you’ll see the (recently updated) invite link beneath the cut. Hope to see you there!

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P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.