Stupid is still stupid
I saw Bruce at Tango last night. I like talking to Bruce. He’s the kind of guy I always looked up to as a kid. He was ‘educated’, he knew stuff, he’d read books I hadn’t. He knows the names of people, that I feel stupid I don’t know. I like talking to Bruce.
Last night I said to him ‘hey Bruce, I keep getting these flashbacks from my life’ as a kind of conversational opener. He started telling me about this professor he had at university in California, who told him the story of Freud. Freud, while writing a reasoned argument to Jung, would get stuck, and go off and write to somebody else. In the action of writing to somebody else, he’d come back to Jung and know exactly what he wanted to say. Bruce said it was all about metaphor, about packing stuff into a metaphor and then unpacking it to see what the relationship was between the outside world and stimulus and the inside the body reaction.
You see, I like talking to Bruce. Then he put out his cigarette and as a parting word he asked me if I’d read Proust. I said I’d tried. He said I should try again. Maybe I will.
When I was a kid, my childhood friend was also called Bruce. His dad was a professor of Anthropology at McMaster. It was a highlight of hanging around the neighbourhood to go to Bruce’s house and chat to his dad. The house smelled of rotten eggs because it sat on some sulphur water in their well. But it was also full of graduate students. I wasn’t really sure exactly what a graduate student was, but they were exotic.
You know, I kind of thought the whole point of growing up was to learn more and more, and think, and learn how to learn and to get a buzz out of it. I didn’t realise that other people didn’t feel the same as me. A mistake, I have made many times since.
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Apropos of nothing. I’m terrified by guns and bombast and hate and intolerance and discrimination and racism.
When I was young, I thought all the big battles had been fought and won. Funny. No. Does anybody really want to argue that we’re still going forward?
I can’t help but admit this piece is triggered by Donald Trump. Have you seen the guy speak? He comes across as a moron. I’m sure he’s not, he’s just a psychopath. No biggy then.
And the people who support him? Well, they’re just people. I can’t condemn them, and when I see and hear interviews with these people, I feel sorry. I’m not exactly sure what I feel sorry for, but I feel sorry.
No jobs. No security. No health insurance. Life is short and miserable. Or maybe not so short. Maybe just miserable.
I live in Berlin, where exactly the same thing happened. Things were shit. Man with a loud voice and a hectoring style, backed up by thugs, stole the show.
Because the intellectuals and the socialists and the readers of books, don’t want to shoot anybody. We don’t make good soldiers and thugs. We don’t. We make reasoned arguments. But nobody wants to listen to a good argument. Who cares anyway? It’s not analysis we need. No. We need to stop sending marijuana dealers to jail and send bankers there instead. And politicians. I mean, would you trust a person who wanted to be a politician. What did these people want to be when they were children?
We’re fucked. I don’t want to fight about it. People don’t change their minds. Minds evolve. Or they don’t. Ideas have always been dangerous.
