fm wrote-
Quote:I couldnt come up with a relevant Spengler or WIttgenstein or SPinoza bumper sticker, so I thought Id actually respond to the question asked by you , and do it in a completely non cynical manner. Remind me to never do that again with you, you are such a waste of time.
Yet you are here and I feel a certain parental responsibility to provide clues and roadsigns to help you in your long journey to understand American culture.
A good teacher can always come up with something. He is trained to think on his feet.
I'm glad that the odour of your piece of flatulence is screened out by our masters.
Is this the guy?
Quote:Vine Deloria, Jr.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information `superhighway' now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness -- and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is no question that information, in and of itself, is useless and that as more data is generated, ethical and moral decisions are taking on a fantasy dimension in which a `lack of evidence to indict' is the moral equivalent of the good deed."
I think American culture is a rather diffused concept. Have you any particular part of it with which you might faciliate my understanding of the whole shooting match.
I have studied Veblen and not only have I found no evidence to contradict his scientific observations but they are more and more confirmed as the economic categories he delineated, studiously eschewing the slightest hint of psychological causes or personal bias, have "trickled down" so far and to such an extent that I fear the very health of the Dow Index is dependent not only on their having done so but that they continue on their downward path accelerating at about 3% per year.
What he shows plainly, way back, as a madness, in the eyes of any self-respecting scientific thinker I mean, is in its entirety a spiritual condition of the self and one which he saved me from and which has resulted in my reaping many satisfying benefits relating to those conditions of the organism which every single animal in the evolutionary canon only ever considers worthwhile expending energy upon in contradistinction to those spiritual values, having seafood gunking up the bowthrusters for example or wearing pretty ear-rings at the school board meeting, which now seem to beset your wonderful nation. I discovered the intellectual, scientific explanation for what Rabelais and Cervantes, Shakespeare even, and many more laughed at so exhorbitantly.
There's only one hero for all of them. It's the asshole.
Very few writers are prepared to waste good ideas by putting them all into one play. One at a time makes most money. So you have to find stories in which the asshole plays a small part. We don't want to be drawing too much attention to him now do we? Spendius was a fundie. Always watch the side-kicks. Look at Stan Laurel as an instance.
My reading of Mr Deloria Jr's paragraph there is not what I thought you would approve of.
