Fragments #2 – Turning 30, Dick Cheney Killed Biden, Atlantis, Gay Frogs, RIP Unabomber, Boys Scouts vs. Hitler Youth, Abortion Debate Settled, Plato’s Russian Collusion
Links and thoughts from this week.
Below is the second installment of a new format I am trying out of shorter-form content to come out weekly. Installment number 1 is here. Hopefully, this will break up the extended interregnums between my long-form pieces (I know you have been begging for more). If you like it: good; if you hate it: even better.
This past week I turned 30 years old. It felt like a monumental sea change in my life. The ancients would agree:
In ancient Athens, men were only allowed to be elected to Council once they turned 30. The male citizens of Sparta, who lived in harsh communal military barracks from the age of 7, were finally allowed to live on their own, join the assembly, and take a wife at 30 – women in Sparta were allowed to marry at 20 meaning an institutionalization of cradle-robbing and an abhorrent violation of the half-your-age-plus-seven maxim – Al Pacino would be proud. To me, a third decade means purposeful mastery and growth, now with a child I actually have some skin in the game for this world, and I need to figure out what to do with it. – what legacy to leave. I’m sure these posts are helping build just that.
In ancient Arcadia all freemen studied music to the age of 30. The word music comes from the Greek mousike, which originally meant devotion to any Muse. Plato’s Academy was called a Museion or Museum because it was at its core a religious cult (thiasos) dedicated to the muses. The muses and music were central to Greek life, all poetry and epics were to be accompanied by instruments – us reading Homer or Pindar without imagining an accompanying lyre or flute would be like reading the words of Wagner’s operas or listening to Jay-Z acapella. The lyre is the very root of the word lyric – you wouldn’t have one without the other.
Plato’s academy was called as such because it was built in a grove on the outskirts of Athens named after a local hero named Academus or Hekademos who is reputed to have saved Helen from Theseus. Because of these etymological roots I graduated from a school called Episcopal Academy, we have the Police Academy film series (7 movies in total), and John Anthony West calls any historians “Quackademics” if they dispute that there was an advanced civilization (Atlantis) that built the Sphynx before the cataclysmic flood (Meltwater pulse 1B) 11,500 years ago. I only bring this up because it’s a fascinating way in which our words and their original meanings can escape us. Imagine what we would be calling these things if the grove had been named after anyone else…
The aforementioned Spartan military barracks are infamously severe and torturous. The aim was to create a cruel militaristic citizenry that would be harsh enough to rule over a society of slaves and non-citizens that outnumbered them 47-to-1. They believed the only saving grace for man was honor won in war. Heraclitus stated, “War is the father of all things.” Clausewitz stated that “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” and also that “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Nietzsche, in My Conception of Freedom, states that war trained men to be free – to fight off liberalism or as he put it: “the transformation of mankind into cattle.” In Nietzsche’s ideal state there would be mandatory military service.
Nietzsche’s above passage, from Twilight of the Idols is one of my favorites, and yet I am sure I am the most antithetical person for compulsory military service – I am extremely stubborn and anti-authoritarian (at least when boot comes down on my neck – perhaps not for my enemies). My wife tells me she thinks I could never fall into a cult, but perhaps I should start my own – will you join me? Sign-up below:
More war quotes: Bourne stated “War is the health of the state,” but military service may be very insalubrious to the individual. Across Iraq and Afghanistan Dick Cheyney’s Halliburton operated open-air burn pits on military bases where plastics; batteries; old ordnances; asbestos; pesticide containers; tires; biomedical, chemical and nuclear waste; dead animals; human feces; body parts; and corpses were burned. The toxic fumes from these pits harmed thousands of soldiers, potentially gave Joe Biden’s son Beau fatal brain cancer, and the government has been loath to take blame or compensate those harmed.
Healthcare & Iraq is an iffy subject – US sanctions in the 90’s killed over half-a-million children in Iraq, but Secretary of State Madeline Albright said “the price is worth it” – and Osama Bin Laden cited those deaths as his reasoning for calling jihad against the US and using CIA recruits to fly planes into southern Manhattan. Except maybe it’s all a lie. Either way – what a world.
Pollution is no laughing matter. Measures of microplastic levels in the sea have increased 100x in the past 40 years. Mark Shepard states that top-soil runoff is the largest export by mass in the US, and fertilizer runoff leads to unprecedented hypoxic dead-zones in the oceans. Historically Japan, Ancient Athens, and many other societies with high cultural achievement had essentially pescatarian diets. 60% of humans live within 100 miles from the coast. Perhaps humans and fish just go together. But if we keep poisoning our oceans, is our maritime bond feasible to maintain? There’s a conspiracy theory that beneath the earth’s crust there are massive reserves of freshwater, so perhaps all is not lost. Regardless, environmental toxins are a big deal – Round-Up is mixing with aluminum and giving kids autism, Atrazine is turning the frogs gay. And the one person with enough gumption to do anything about it just passed away: RIP Unabomber!
Theodore John Kaczynski, nicknamed for his University aNd Airline BOMBings, injured 23 people, killed 3 more, and published 2 books. I find Luddism and anti-industrial revolutionary stances to often be a shallow rebranding of man’s Original Sin and The Fall. However, that doesn’t absolve modernity of its many ills – and when it comes to those Uncle Ted is a masterful diagnostician. Though neither were his original ideas, his critique of oversocialization and its effects and the necessity of the power process in human fulfillment I find to be some of the handiest lenses with which to view and critique this clown world with. If you haven’t read (and re-read) Industrial Society and Its Future it’s well worth it:
“the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another.” - Uncle Ted
While on environmentalism: Did you know that the first green/ecological movements were enacted under Nazi minister of agriculture, Walter Darre? Or that the roots of organic farming lie in fascism? Or even further that the great outdoor enthusiast organization The Boy Scouts was seeking to align itself with the Hitler Youth? Balden-Powell the founder of the scouts called Mein Kampf a “wonderful book” and met with von Ribbentrop. Before talking about how green and brown clash, it’s also worth noting that Hashomer Hatzair, the Zionist youth movement was modeled after the German Wandervogel movement, the predecessor to the Hitler Youth. History is messy stuff…
So is health. The ancient physician Hippocrates was born in Kos, a Greek isle off the coast of Turkey around 460 BC. Hippocrates in Greek means roughly “horsepower” or “one superior in horses,” while our word hypocrite comes from the Greek hypokreites or word for actor (literally answerer [to the chorus]), which is of distinct etymological ætiology. Hippocrates was a celebrated physician and is credited with being the first to link disease with natural causes versus superstitions of gods. Doctors today take the Hippocratic Oath – and though they focus on the “first do no harm” part, they elide that two sentences later his oath states “I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.” So, we can consider the debate finally settled: doctors cannot give abortions – I don’t really see what all the confusion was about, seems pretty cut-and-dry (no pun intended). If you think my judgement comes because I am some pro-life partisan you should know I was a Planned Parenthood Generation Action member in my youth and almost got my catholic university ex-communicated and myself expelled for my guerilla activism (story for another time). If my politics confuse you, I have summed them up neatly in the pic below:
In Plato’s envisioned utopia, when citizens turned 30 they would be tested for mental and character fitness – those that failed would be pushed to the military, those that excelled would be let into the leadership class and eventually have the chance to become Philosopher-Kings. Plato’s republic has many uncanny resemblances to today, all children were to be brought up by the state (my thoughts here) and women were to have equal access of opportunity with men. However, most uncanny perhaps is the concept of the Noble Lie the idea that the common folk must all buy into a false narrative because it would establish order and keep them under control. 2,400 years after Plato, Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch and puppet master behind Yeltsin and Putin in the 2000’s came up with a scheme where he would transform Russia into a fake two-party state, one side neoconservative the other social-democratic, where the public would be entrenched in polarizing but meaningless symbolic issues while behind the scenes both sides would be controlled by the same elites. However, Berezovsky died under mysterious circumstances before he could put his plan in action. And thank God! Can you imagine living in a world where such noble lies were carried out?
That’s all for this week and thanks for reading,
Zay