Film Review: All The President’s Men
All The President’s Men was on the telly (again!) some two or three nights past - and having wallowed (night and day) in thoughts of the effeminate, i decided that it was high time for me to politicise my mind - my emotions - my soul - to fill my ideologies increasingly gaping holes? so i grabbed my wine and i sat on my arse.
hoffman and redford astound as the leads and the guy who plays bradley won gold for best support (i looked it up? type bradley and wait? avoiding topics: lies, corruption, president, out of mind/out of sight - what was the film about?) and commend the academy for getting it right.
same actor was poof hater in hanks philadelphia - you know the one? that film (i was young) sent a blazing rage through my developing moral code - films do that, you know? (and they’re not alone - our ideology is formed in-between mouthfuls of popcorn - at pop concerts - from elders - it’s rarely, if ever, our own)
but an ideology formed in a cushioned seat is fought for from a cushioned seat (tears welling and teeth clenched in disgust, yes, but still a comfy butt) and so what did I do? don’t ask! i drank up? and mused three days later upon my will-i-leave-this-life-and-go-and-fight-for-what’s-right comfy (distanced) question of existence
the celluloid experience - five stars, every time - the sinking feeling of guilt and worthlessness - the dog or the bomb or whatever you like that is less than one star and six less than five - i suspect (yes i do) that someone’s pulling some invisible strings to make individuals believe that in the whole they are nothing.
Yes! Isn’t it strange, in a world where advertising enforces the message, constantly, “you are number ONE! you MATTER! we listen to YOU! your consumer rights are IMPORTANT! we want to make you HAPPY!” that an ever-increasing number of people feel that, when it comes down to the real functioning of their society, they have absolutely NO part to play at all. It’s like people have chosen consumer rights over human rights, narrowed their vision to focus only on the trivial and useless. Which, of course, have been falsely elevated to the level of great beauty and importantce by the effect of advertising. I wonder, if the invisible strings were broken tomorrow, how long it would take people to work this petty-individualist virus of importance out of their systems. Sometimes it seems like people make their own invisible strings, deep inside them.
I think the desire to be shown to be important, matter, have an existance outside our own heads, is part of being human. It’s one of the driving factors behind religion (God cares about you, you matter, in Christianity and Judaism you even look a bit like God if you’re a man) and ambition (leave your mark on the world) This desire might be always with us; what I don’t know is if it can go from ‘remember me’ to ‘remember us’.
It’s the idea of the Total Perspective Vortes in Hitchhikers’s. The enirety of the universe, throughout tine, all around you, with a tiny infinitsmal dot marked ‘you.’ And then your brain explodes.
I wonder if intense paraniod-schizophrenia is a response to this fear of being nothing. You create a scenario where they’re all out to get you, because then you’re important. Be interesting to look at the numbers, if you could seperate the effect of improved dignostics.
Is saying that ‘people make their own invisible strings’ a symptomatic response to being persuaded by pupetteers that that is how one should feel… or… is ‘being persuaded’ a delusion caused by the making of ones own invisible strings?
Maybe no one has ever tried hard enough to change the world. I guess Ghandi came close and in many respects did change a significant chunk. I will be the first to admit that I’m too shit scared to change the world myself. Maybe one day. For now I’ll have to settle for good flicks and bad wine.
It’s a funny thing, though… one vote is not enough to change an election result but that huge mass of votes that we see preventing our insignificant vote (with its insignificant power) is still just a collective of individual votes… a paradox? I could get over the simplicity of that equation if elections weren’t (disturbingly) funded, malipulative and corrupt. I really could… but as it stands… I can’t.
Love and peace for now. Ablett.
This Space for Rent — at first I thought your schizophrenia comment was wrong, but when I flicked around (I read on this) I realise you’ve made a very interesting point. Paranoia for schizophrenics is an UNFOUNDED disbelief of others’ motives and unfounded sensation of being attacked from all sides, but, in - like Ablett says - this country the goverment really does seem to be manipulative and corrupt, and indeed it does truly seem to be plotting our demise and also the demise of peoples around the entire world - and solar system if it could get its hands on ‘em. In a country where the prevailing feeling is one of FOUNDED paranoia, might not the psychotically prone be more likely to develop paranoid disorders, in reflection and mimic of the macrocosm? It would interest me to see if more people developed paranoid delusions in countries where the government was distrusted than in countries where the government was trusted. For this survey though you’d have to find a country that trusted their government. The Pope is going to die on April Fool’s Day — I’m serious it’s on the news now. He has a critical urinary tract infection.
Comrades,
Even demi-gods like Gary Ablett (senior, the real one, who plays footy) succumb to paranoia. Here’s the story that did the rounds at the time…
Ablett, a born again Christian, had recently seperated from his wife. He went to visit or was just driving by when he saw a car parked in the driveway of his ex-wife. Now Ablett, as anyone who saw him play at Kardinia Parkwill attest to, was a strong bastard. He marched in, found there that it was man in his wife’s house and without much more ado, broke the guy’s nose. Which must have come as a bit of a surprise, standing as he was waiting on change for the pizza he’d just delivered.
What’s the moral of the story? Sportsmen can do anything? Don’t work for Pizza Hut? I dunno.
I agree that it’s significant that rates of depression, suicide and feeligns of isolation are so high in developed societies that place so much emphasis on the single unit human being. (What role internet, one could ask?) I’d like to say that things are better elsewhere, but I’m not sure. I live in one of the poorest countries in world and there is a strong focus on family values and Buddhism and morality, whatever that means. But there is hypocrasy here too. Family values means the women kow tow and the men sleep around. Buddhism is mostly empty prayers or animism disguised with a saffron robe. And morality? In the last week, in seperate cases, a 12-year-old and an 83-year-old have been arrested for raping 6-year old girls.
Gary Ablett, I think history is littered with people who tried to change the world. Good on ‘em. Today, I met two cyclists who were promoting world peace by cycling across Asia. They had no actual plan or creed or anything, they just kind of naively hoped that if they went to enough countries and said “world peace” enough times, it might work. ‘Aw fark… world peace - never thought of that! That Miss Universe chick was right after all!’ It’s cheap to be cynical, I know, but difficult not to be. Wolfewitz to head the World Bank? Bush at the helm? Even the dignified Kofi Annan has been tainted.
I don’t think there’s anything for it but to vote in Gary Ablett (our one, not the pizza boy punching one). So, Dear Leader, here’s a top-5 list for you old boy: if you were the president of the world and had to pick your cabinet of advisors from the ranks of musicians and writers, who would you choose?
Until then I remain, mannishly,
scoop
surely most people in the world could be considered delusional in some ways. Puppets
and puppeteers alike. For a start we all buy into the same world image: a projection of
technology, wealth/poverty, power struggles, man’s supremacy over animals and nature, right and wrong, ethics, moral codes…etc. Is this really reality, or just a mask? a delusion? even if we don’t agree with the model (rich getting richer, uninspiring governance, poverty, GM crops and more and more advanced technology for examples) we still accept that that’s the way the world is, and that those are important issues in the world, however much we may not like it. Just because we ’see’ the world in this way, does this actually mean that that is the real ‘reality’ of the world?
and how about the puppeteers? - leaders of nations, convincing themselves that they’re
acting in the best interests of their country (see Blair and Bush), or the really corrupt
ones convincing themselves that they’re acting in their own best interests (to provide
themselves with more wealth and power). But where’s that going to get them? So what if they become billionaires, so what if they get their names in the history books? Will it ultimately make the world a better place? Will it make them any happier or more fulfilled? Surely they’re as delusional as most other people, maybe more so.
We live in this ‘reality’ of 9 to 5 jobs/education, television, consumerism, media,
drugs, alcohol, religion, cars, friends, lovers, wars, self indulgent philosophising
(!) ..etc and I’m not saying its necessarily a BAD way to live, I’m just saying that
perhaps its not the BEST way we could be living (or at least not the ONLY way), but
that no one really wants to consider that there could be another way, because its
easier not to. Hence the delusion - people convince themselves that this is the way the
world is and the only way it could realistically be, and that it won’t really change,
and yet perhaps we don’t quite realise how precarious and transient this world we’ve
created really is…(?) and perhaps if we saw it for the illusion that it really is, it would be more conducive to a useful way of living.
The fact that we haven’t yet been presented with a viable alternative to this ‘reality’
suggests that its a model that works well (at the moment) and that we pretty much have to accept it as it is, and maybe that seems pretty ‘reasonable’ in the circumstances.
But its interesting to consider that perhaps the world in which we live is no more
substantial than a piece of sugar paper left outside, and that one day it might rain
and then the sugar paper will just disappear(!). I think we should at least keep our
options open, when it comes to another system of living (perhaps we should all take
courses in how to survive in the wild, become anarchists, invest in our spirituality or all become zen
masters or something(!)… I don’t know), and then one day perhaps we won’t be so
surprised when the world as we know it is destroyed (by tsunamis, earthquakes, war..etc) and we are ‘reduced’ (or perhaps ‘elavated’) to living without technology and have to rely on nature and our inherent human-being/animal skills that we’d all but forgotten. Then we’d pretty soon forget this so called ‘reality’ that we live in now as we struggled to survive in a ‘new world’ that had in fact been hiding behind the other one the whole time.
I’m just suggesting that occassionally it may be useful to view the world as more than it appears (recognise the illusion) in order to get our priorities straight, and maybe to be prepared for when the world does change, which it almost certainly will, from what we know. Everything changes, after all.
Is it possible that the world as we know it is merely a front, a thin layer of
delusion, and that someone somewhere is laughing at us really hard, for being so
freekin stupid and missing the entire point? I think it is possible. The thing is, I’m not sure if it is USEFUL or necessary to view the world like this or not, or even to consider the idea. hmm…
Its a useful, successful and effective ‘reality’ model that we live in,… but actually I do think that maybe we need to start realising that there may be more to the world than what we are being shown.
…i think i got a bit carried away back there! I quite enjoyed writing it tho.
but what do you guys think? is it useful to view the world that we live in as a delusion of sorts in order to utilise it better and live better lives? Could we actually improve our lives in any way by doing this? or would it be too confusing/depressing/ridiculous/untenable?
or is it merely unecessary and pointless self indulgence? Do you think we should basically just accept things the way they are, and make the most of the society and world around us that we’re used to? or do you think we should find an option somewhere in between?
I suppose its interesting to consider the delusional theory, because I know so few people who are actually completely happy with their lives (and the world in which they live in), or really happy in general. How many people do you know who are completely happy or content with their lives the way they are? and how many PRETEND that they’re happy with their lives, or just unconciously accept that they’re don’t and won’t feel completely fulfilled in their jobs/social circles/lives ..etc? Is this really the way we should be living?
I know lots of people who are really happy being unhappy.
For a start, I don’t think we have any kind of ‘right’ to be happy. People seem to have come to assume that we do - it’s part of this current system of thought that we have ‘rights’ to anything and everything, a right to be beautiful, contented, sexually-fulfilled, happy at all times. I think we have a ‘right’ not to be arrested and tortured, I think we have a ‘right’ not to be oppressed by real tangible forces, but happiness is an abstaction, something that no-one can define or understand, not a quantifiable thing we have any sort of rights to. I heard a woman saying once that she has a ‘right’ to have an orgasm when she has sex. Is this not absolutely ridiculous? An orgasm is a very nice thing, without a doubt, as is the idea of perfect happiness. But it is not something anyone has a ‘right’ to have.
One of the only useful things I have ever really heard about happines is the phrase “happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of travelling.” I don’t think anyone ever gets to the point where they think, “this is it, I’ve reached happiness,” and then time stops and everything is perfect. Happiness is not a thing you can gain and keep, like being promoted to a new level in a career. I think too many people assume that happiness is some sort of answer to an equation - all they need to do is add different factors togther and the net result will be happiness. It’s true that some people are happier, in general, than others. But sometimes I kind of forget what’s so important about happiness anyway - it has come to be seen as a sort of holy grail of emotions, something to be endlessly quested after and won. This is not the point. Sounds very obvious, but if you always see happiness as something on the horizon, that you will reach if you are just a little bit richer, a little bit less in pain, a little bit more in love, then YOU ARE NOT HAPPY.
You identify the popular idea of happiness as static. Yes, but surely it’s a fool’s trick: I know I am truly unhappy when things are static. Which leads me to my favourite, favourite word of all time: nympholepsy. It means overwhelming desire for the unobtainable. Nympholepsies are what keep us all going. I’ve tried to write a book called The Nympholeptics, but couldn’t end it. The things we like best are the things we don’t have.
Having the self-awareness to realise that what keeps you going are the things you don’t have is very difficult. You have to keep them on the edge of your grasp but not fall off your chair trying to reach them. Like snatching pretty butterflies: no win, no win. It’s all about composure and subtlety. Not in politics though. What I’ve just said equals apathy perhaps.
Said thing one and thing two: we are fools. Sorry about that. Two pearls in one oyster:always a fake.
I’ve been told that in collectivist cultures such as China - where goals are traditionally seen in terms of the whole group, rather than individual acheivement - rates of depression are much lower. Could be rubbish, though.
Happiness is a way of travelling … what if what makes you happiest is to be travelling in a gas-guzzling urban tractor? I’m not being flippant.
Megabus is a way of travelling!
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietsche wrote that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious scepticism. In my comfortable spheres I can entertain at ease the question of whether and where I will vote. It is remarkable easy being a drunk cynic and discussing the plight of the world with a glass of of Pinotage from our armchair. Perhaps If I couldn’t vote I’d want to more. I don’t feel like a citizen. I feel like my vote should somehow be treated with a majestic respect and significance. Perhaps that’s why people don’t vote: It makes them feel small as part of a huge and dispirate population.
Two pearls in one oyster? I’ve just purchased an Oyster Card to ease my london travels and it’s brilliant! Bus journeys are only 80p instead of £1.20! I think that oyster is a way of travelling happily.
Perhaps because we give the individual too much significance and place our ego at the centre of a very communal universe we find it hard to derive much satisfaction out of the results of mass action and opinion.
It’s very hard to change the world by sitting at a computer -please feel free to give me a list of examples in which this is proved wrong.
something else which is wrong is that spinach makes you strong
In reality, spinach has no more iron in it than any other vegetable. This spinach misconception dates back to the 1950’s when a food analyst made an error while calculating the iron in spinach. His decimal place was off by one place, suggesting that spinach had ten times as much iron content than it really did.
Popeye is a fraud
Is complete happiness obtainable in life? or is it merely a concept or term to measure other things against, similar to the idea of ‘perfection’?
If this is the case then pure ‘happiness’ seems to be an extreme (maybe even a single aim or state?), and maybe unobtainable. I like the idea of happiness being the manner of travelling idea, but I’m not sure I agree with it. Maybe it is I don’t know. If happiness is the journey, what then would be the destination? Is our natural state to always be striving for something more?
If happiness is a state of mind, can we have moments of happiness, but still consider ourselves to be not generally happy? and can we have moments of unhappiness but still consider ourselves to be generally happy?
Perhaps people would say that they were happy (at least at times) when they were children. So perhaps on the one hand happiness is equated with innocence and lack of knowledge/danger,.. but at the other extreme perhaps its also equated with a great amount of knowledge in the form of enlightenment/acceptance/awareness. I just don’t know. Its a funny idea.
Perhaps we’re most happy when we’re doing something we enjoy and not really thinking about anything but what we’re doing, like children often do. I suppose that’s the buddhist idea of mindfullness…etc. Living completely in the moment. If we assumed that that is essentially what happiness is, would it actually be a ’state’ of being, or a transient, journey like thing, considering that if you live totally in the present, in some ways every act is a beginning and an end in itself?
But perhaps the idea of ‘happiness’ is actually meaningless. Obviously its a word that we use to describe a state that we find ourselves in emotionally, physically..etc, but if this is the case then it can never be exactly the same for any two people, and so maybe its pointless to speculate on what it is, or whether a kind of ultimate happiness really exists or not, because its only a word that’s being used to try to define something that’s basically undefinable.
I agree with what you said about ‘rights’ scroots, because the idea of our rights is just something that we are given to believe in by society, a word/definition - it is just part of the illusion of our reality.
but perhaps happiness is that too.
the thing is, if you accept the reality/society that we live in (by being a part of it, following its rules, accepting the way it is) then don’t you have to accept the idea of us having rights too?
so perhaps you’d agree with what I was saying originally that sometimes it might be useful to see through the delusion and look at the world from outside the construct that we live in, in order to see things more clearly?
i like spinach
I think you have a right to a receipt every time you have sex. And while this is slightly shifting from the original topic, I think most men expect an orgasm during sex, mainly because particularly with younger men, it’s quite easy to achieve. The phrase hair-trigger springs to mind.
We’ve started to substitute the word rights for things we really want. While this makes amusing news stories, (a prisoner in Europe claimed it infringed his human rights to not be given child pornography, as it compromised his right to free expression) it also makes Michael Howard suggest we scrap the human rights act because it’s nonsense. Exactly as you say scrutes, we do have certain rights, and just because people have started to abuse the idea, it doesn’t mean we should scrap the whole thing.
Maslow came up with a hierarchy of needs, for what we need to be fulfilled. Firstly, physiological stuff like food, sleep, warmth, secondly, safety from threats, thirdly, love and belongingness (sex is under this category), fourthy ego needs, respect from others, and finally self-actualisation (purpose, acting on potential, personal growth) It could be that in developed countries, for most people the first two are taken care of so they have lots of time to spend being upset about the other three. Sensitive aren’t I?
I wonder as well if conspiracy theories are an expression of a desire for order. If there is a secret cabal of Jews, world leaders, aliens or whoever are the normal choices, this implies a great deal of organisation and ability. Someone has to be buying robes, notepaper, arranging meetings, and skilled enough to run the world. We really, really want this to be true, as even though these people might be amoral or have different priorities, they’re very organised. As opposed to another possibility, that most people muddle through, it’s all pretty chaotic, there’s no overarching purpose, shit happens and human existance is spent balanced on a knife edge.
Oliver, going back to earlier, the government isn’t trying to kill you, because if you consider how easy it is to kill someone if you put your mind to it, if they really wanted you dead, you would be. They’re not even plotting your demise. It’s more that the government doesn’t care about you, and so does things that fuck you over, that help those they do care about. Now which is worse, someone activly trying to kill you or you dying because no one really cares that you exist, and you being collateral damage?
Right. My cabinet, as per your request, Mr Scoop (and don’t think I don’t know who you are, Comrade!) …
1. Kelly’s friend Nietsche would be my Minister for Education (can I include dead people?). I believe that he would alter education to remove (or at least diminish) the idea (and power) of ‘truths’. This way, as children, we would not be endlessly convinced that Happiness, Love, A Big House with a Picket Fence, Et All are in some way (as Scrutiny illustrated) our rights. He had an idea (among many) that there was always a devil (or something like that) on your back (we don’t want to scare the kids… but they get them devil stories anyway) and that at any given moment he can say ‘cut’ on your life and that that moment will then be endlessly recurring… for eternity. This gives us something to aim for, I believe… to be satisfied with the present (abandon want, etcetera) and live.
2. My Treasurer would be Woody Guthrie (can I include dead people?) who would “take all the money and give it out equal”… pretty simple that.
3. My Minister For Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security would be John Lennon (can I choose dead people?) because…” imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for and no religion too, imagine all the people living life in peace.” It’d be good. And besides he was a hard Liverpudlian cunt and he’d inforce it. And I’d be able to stay in England without all my crap visa restrictions. And if you opened all borders (as so many in this country and many other countries are fearful of) no one would want to come here anyway… the world’s wealth would even out into poorer lands and everyone would realise that the weather in England is shit and they’d all move to Asia and South America and Africa (and Australia!)
4. My Minister for Sport would be Arran (The Sociable Truth) Glass because (as anyone who’s ever seen him play rounders can testify) he is completely incompetent and it encourages the people to enjoy their irony… and irony is playing with (and therefore dimnishing the strength of) truth! Hurrah! Also… it’d be good to have one alive person in the cabinet… someone who knows a bit about the world today.
5. My Vice President would be Ghandi (dead!?) because once the cabinet was ordered and arranged and the world was up and running I’d want someone who I can trust to take over… after all, I ain’t gonna be there… I’m gonna “build me a cabin in Utah, marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout, have a bunch of kids who call me Pa… that must be what it’s all about”
Anyone with any suggestions for The Best Cabinet For The Governence Of The World? Please… speak up… no one’s position is sacred! Some female suggestions would be good…unles they think that they have the right to an orgasm… that’s just weird.
Three things …
Numbah one! In response to daMan’s “If happiness is the journey, what then would be the destination? Is our natural state to always be striving for something more?” I would like to say no, I really don’t think that our natural state is to strive endlessly for more, more, more. Admittedly it’s hard - impossible? - in this day and age, to disentangle what is natural from what is unnatural in human emotion and behaviour, but the reason I keep going on about rights and advertising is because I think it is modern culture that force-feeds us with a perpetual, abstract desire for more things and not something deep inside ourselves. This same culture also encourages us to think that there is necessarily a destination to be reached, a point of ultimate achievement. This is because our culture is a consumerist culture (as Daniel Quinn puts it, a Taker culture rather than a Leaver culture), a culture whose very existence depends on the constant desire for more, and in order to justify this desire it creates the image of a destination to be reached, an end to all this means - a purpose to life, if you like. But there will be no end, there is no destination, because if people ever stop wanting more things society itself would fall apart.
Numbah two! In response to this space for rent’s “I wonder as well if conspiracy theories are an expression of a desire for order,” I reckon absolutely. Actually I wonder whether conspiracy theories aren’t part of a desire for God, quite literally. It is extremely comforting to believe that there might be some a mysterious collective who has the world in perfect running order, even if its designs are evil - it’s like the appearance of the Devil, some otherwordly force refashioning the world in its own image (and God and the Devil are the same thing, really, are they not?) Also, conspiracy theories are very convenient for people because they are a way of avoiding their own sense of responsibility for the world, always shifting the blame onto something higher up the ladder of power than they are. Conspiracy theories simplify the world, divide it into black and white, us and them, the mortal and the supernatural. People cling very stubbornly to their simplifications.
Numbah three! In response to Gary Ablett’s Best Cabinet for the Governance of the World, I’d like to quote an old anarchist saying: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.” I’m not trying to be clever. But I really do feel that the world should have had enough of the whole politician game by now.
I really don’t think she can have meant ‘the right to orgasm’ — much more likely ‘the equal right to…’
I’ve had enough of the whole politician game… that’s why I chose 4 dead guys and The Sociable Truth… dead guys find it hard to fuck people over… and The Sociable Truth’s always too busy fucking himself over.
It’s a ghost cabinet (not even myself, the appointed leader of the world, is there). Some may read this as shirking my responsibilities. I see it more as putting faith in the people to govern themselves. Oh! it would be wonderful! Chaos, even.
I suspect that if all the politicians in the world were to suddenly disappear, the first thing people would do is smash windows and steal shit. Beause that’s what we all really want, isn’t it? That shit in the window. Woof Woof!
Not too Anonymous that… was it?
I’ve never been too busy to fuck myself over!
Woof Woof!
Any suggestions for the new pope?
I suggest the continent of Africa.
Damn it! I’ve done it again. Anonymity is assuming my identity.
Still… it makes my original post look more interesting with all of these comments attached (what was my original post?)
You politician
I live in a house with a white picket fence,
Wheres my american dream?