a month late about the NRA response to the Newtown massacre

A week after 20 children and six adult staff members were murdered during a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, US, the NRA's Executive VP and CEO, Wayne LaPierre, read a public statement representing the NRA's response. The NRA called for installing armed security at schools, reasoning that banks, courthouses, office buildings, etc., all have armed security. The NRA's statement went on to at least partially attribute the appearance of escalating public violence to video games and movies.

In the wake LaPierre's reading, one line from the statement came to represent the whole of it:

The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away ... or a minute away?

Critics and detractors panned the statement, calling it paranoid and delusional. Politically, it had its strengths and weaknesses. But the takeway statement--that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun--that part is special.

This line is special because it harmonizes the interests of the NRA's individual members with those of gun manufacturers and sellers. See, gun manufacturers and sellers accept bad guys' money as surely as they accept good guys'. In their ideal scenario, everyone is armed. Good guys have a gun; bad guys have a gun. And the industry has the cash.

Meanwhile, the NRA's individual members all imagine they are good guys--good guys armed for the benefit of all the would-be victims out there.

about Søren Kierkegaard's "Either/Or"

This review is incomplete. In fact, this isn't properly a review of Either/Or at all. I struggled to stay interested, and by the latter third of this collection of essays, I was barely even skimming the text.

My edition is abridged, and the editor's preface reasons that passages in the original complete text could (read: should) have been edited out in the first place. After having pushed through a majority of these pages, I can understand the temptation to trim a text in hopes of avoiding the kind of wheel-spinning that can mar an otherwise valuable work.

Now, Either/Or.

Kierkegaard wrote and published Either/Or using pseudonyms. He even fronted the text with an editor's preface that gives a fictional account of the book's contents--various writings roughly divided into an aesthetically-oriented first half, followed by an ethically, duty-oriented second.

The aesthetic portion is a collection of essays largely about artistic appreciation, love, and boredom. It's also largely consumed with melancholy. Kierkegaard's fictional authors discuss real works of art, and focus on the abstract, lending otherworldly qualities to the finer arts. Early on, there is some discussion that reminds me of Plato's forms--things themselves and ideas of things.

The "Shadowgraphs" essay has some of the more interesting content in this half. Here is a striking, although very historically-situated passage:

The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is constantly in search of its object; the searching is the unrest of sorrow and its life. But this searching is a constant fluctuation, and if the outer were at every moment a perfect reflection of the inner, to represent reflective sorrow would require an entire series of pictures and no one picture would require genuine artistic value, since it would not be beautiful but true. We would have to look at the pictures as we do at the second hand of the watch; the works themselves are invisible, but the inner movement constantly expresses itself in the constant change of the outer. But this change cannot be represented in art, yet it is the whole point.

And, soon after, Kierkegaard's fictional author compares the pain of broken engagements to that of a broken marriage; this comparison is especially meaningful coming from Kierkegaard because, prior to Either/Or's publishing, he broke off an engagement and was much scandalized for it publicly, and much tormented by it privately. He reasoned in his journals that he broke the engagement because he did not have faith, supposedly. In Either/Or, he writes:

What must evoke reflective sorrow even more ... is the fact that it is only an engagement that has been broken off. An engagement is a possibility, not something actual, yet just because it is only a possibility, it might seem that the effect of its being broken off would be less, that it is much easier to withstand this blow. And sometimes that may well be true. On the other hand, the fact that it is only a possibility that is destroyed tempts reflection much more to the fore. When something actual is brought to an end, generally the break is far more radical, every nerve is cut asunder and in itself the fracture, regarded as such, remains complete. When a possibility is broken off, the instantaneous pain may not be as great, but then it leaves one or another small ligament whole an unharmed, which becomes a constant source of continued suffering. The destroyed possibility appears transfigured in a higher possibility, while the temptation to conjure up such a new possibility is less when it is something actual that is broken off, because actuality is higher than possibility.

Then the book continues with exercises in art appreciation. The focus on seen and unseen aspects of art continue, as the speaker strives to see real works as higher representations. Obviously, Kierkegaard does not regard the aesthetic as the equivalent of hedonism.

The second half (maybe less than half) of the book focuses on ethical considerations and a sense of duty. I didn't necessarily see these halves as being in direct tension. But my attention started to wane. So much so that I won't continue here. I'll have to revisit this later.

Did you know: O.J. Simpson played for the 49ers, 1978-79

After he was injured in 1977, the Bills traded O.J. Simpson to the San Francisco 49ers for a second-round draft pick. He retired in 1979.

about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

We join a father and son journeying down a desolate but dangerous road cut through postapocalyptic America. They, suffering, were just trying to get to the end. I felt the same, reading this story in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

We're the good guys, the father says. But in time the boy begins to doubt, then grows wholly disbelieving. Through his seared-in allegiance to his son's preservation, the man abandons his capacity to trust, and so loses his humanity.

After figuring this out, the boy sees that, though he is his father's burden, he is the one shouldering the world. His humanity still budding, the boy worries for each damned soul they pass.

Having reached the coast and been turned back around, The Road finally concludes with father-protector dying, and son taking the hand of a stranger; whether this show of desperate hope and resigned trust will be rewarded is unknown.

Cormac McCarthy links hope and trust; and those, with youth. So what does this futuristic tale, published in 2006, say about our fate?

Unlike Cormac McCarthy's one-dimensional dustbin of days, our terrain grows more and more complicated, but also more open, with more people connected and more isolated and stratified at the same time. And here, again, we see that caution and the drive for self-preservation is as indispensable as the capacity for hope and trust. But, moreover, in Cormac McCarthy's world, both persist with us until our dying day. Cynical, pointless doom.

I appreciated that McCarthy's sparse prose reflected the desolate world he created, but I never got into this, and did not enjoy it in any sense.


 

Mother

Clouds tumbled overhead, an ash avalanche, a silent disaster film, while she, the money counter, stationed herself bedside, gazing upon the ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds arranged on the comforter, catching dull the morning light like eyes of dead children arranged before the killer. Her husband made noise in the kitchen: microwave beeping, plates knocking. She knew he hungered always for her fear and submission, but tomorrow she would serve him his death. She paid the hitman tonight.