After Nietzsche's Thoughts Out of Season...
The Question of the Value of Nietzsche Anymore
Untimely Meditations is a better translation. Get it? Remember how so many of us spent all those years of the 70s deconstructing the Warren Commission Report (WC = 7 members of the club > 1 CIA director > Gerald Ford in charge of making sure Oswald was finger-fucked)? We instinktively knew that rats were afoot -- in a cage attached to our faces, fuckin Herr Doktor Marc Anthony telling us 2 + 2 = 5. Right? And all we wanted was Free Love. To get laid. Without The Man watching over our everyness. Instinctively, how we laughed when Gerald Ford, who pardoned Nixon, fell down a flight of stairs! Chevy Chase made a career out of bumbling Gerry lying about Oswald and covering for Nixon. Remember the one where Gerry (Chevy) goes flying from decorating a Christmas tree? Who didn't wish, like me, that it would have been great if the tree had been the one at the Rockefeller Center? Weeeeeeeee! went the nation's only unelected president. What a Christmas present to find under our tree!
Or, if not the WC project, maybe we were ensconced in Nietzsche's collected works, Walter Kaufmann not RJ Hollingdale, and some of us sadly drifted into listening to Wagner's music -- first the overtures, then the Preludes Tristan und Isolde (sweetest taboo!) and Act 1 Lohengrin (Jesus as a waffle drowned in high-pitched syrup), and we wondered if Wagner (nee Geier) was a Jew, self-loathing hater of semites, like, say, your average Israeli hater of Palestinians, and later inspired Herr Doktor Hitler with the artschool-reject-paintbrush-moustache. Especially Die Meistersinger von Neuronberg. Wagner was pretty in pink housecoats. His sugar daddy Mad King Ludwig was prettier, and kept him from being chased to debtors' prison by Jews (presumably). What Jews? The ones what killed Siegfried in Das Rheingold. Goddamn it.
How could Russians have named a mercenary group after Richard Wagner? Acid anyone?
Or maybe we settled into Jung and the archetypes and the golden ball and the gaping wound that won't heal and the journey and the bliss and the pass-the-bong moments, while Nixon took advantage of the 'tune-out turn-on' mythos. Jeez, every time I read how G. Gordon Liddy came that close to kidnapping the hippies and Dan Ellsberg and bringing them to Mexico for extermination, well, I get the willies. 50 years ago Nixon was caught up in Watergate, using CIA and FBI assets to undermine democracy. Ellsberg says Nixon was about to nuke the Maoists when the Moratorium showed up. And Kissinger, couch-potato-punching foreign governments in secret. And, a couple of years later, Frank Church is telling us we might be crossing a Bridge over the River Cry into a Surveillance State nightmare world from which there was "nowhere to hide" and "no coming back from." [See my review.] And here we are, that bridge, too, burned behind us.
So, what is my point?
Dunno, but looking back at Nietzsche's Meditations, especially in the opening sentences of Foreword to On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, meaning itself comes clean again after a hiatus filled with often-hallucinatory years. The Big N opens with a quote from Goethe and describes its relevance to the need for embracing History. Check it out:
In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.' These words are from Goethe, and they may stand as a sincere ceterum censeo* at the beginning of our meditation on the value of history. For its intention is to show why instruction without invigoration, why knowledge not attended by action, why history as a costly superfluity and luxury, must, to use Goethe's word, be seriously hated by us - hated because we still lack even the things we need and the superfluous is the enemy of the necessary. We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements. We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and action, not so as to turn comfortably away from life and action, let alone for the purpose of extenuating the self-seeking life and the base and cowardly action. We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life: for it is possible to value the study of history to such a degree that life becomes stunted and degenerate - a phenomenon we are now forced to acknowledge, painful though this may be, in the face of certain striking symptoms of our age.
Indeed, I fear we are in the post-degenerate age. I mean, who would pair Barbie with Oppenheimer, omnipotence with impotence? Who? Maybe an AI. Maybe the f*ckers are already lampooning us in their artificial minds, gazing on us like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton -- "take a look at this guy" -- watching passersby in Annie Hall -- "he looks like he's trying out for Mr. Quantum." LMAO. Then lobsters scramble to save their miserable bottom-feeding lives. The cagey little Orwell rats have a laugh in the aftermath of 2+2=5.
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Ed Snowden and Los Alamos, and Julian Assange, Too
Let's hope he and his growing family are well.
It'll be interesting to see what happens between now and next March, when the Russians hold their next elections. Will Putin call it quits? Will he be putsched out? How will this affect Snowden, if at all?
The film Oppenheimer is all the rage (along with Klaus Barbie). Minimum sex and maximum violence. We're getting there as a species. The only species on a planet where life exists and we spend our time in destruction mode, beating and eating meat, eating and smoking vegetables, killing life to say 'look at me' to the rest of the universe, 'I'm star stuff.' And there's no reply, because, presumably, there's no other life, as far as we know. Lots of food all around us predators. Now I think I get the Garden tree of good/evil thing and its conundrums. Mangia.
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