This Baby Got Legs

Think I'll try a post, since I seem to have abandoned my other blog.

That excursion into the personal was oddly satisfying, but it seems to have served it's purpose.  I'll probably go back to it.  I think much of it was not so much the discussion of the personal as it was of the private, by which I mean the emotions everybody has but which are of relationships, and so limited in public scope; but it's the stuff we each live by so it's of exceptional value; it is the stuff of the novelist.  I will go back to it.  --In this blog, in fact, even though I expect to discuss the public, I may try to create the tone of the personal.  I'm not sure just what that means, but I think if I can create a personality observing events, rather than just be a mind stating a view, I might  be doing something with more emotional meat-on-the-bones than has been the case before.   --I'm not sure what I mean, I do have a sense of what I mean.

I think I'll discuss the Tea Party, a movement as exciting as any I've ever seen.  Basically it's simply a movement against over-reach.

Generally, most people have a private life and it's that life which is life, everything else is peripheral.  They might have knowledge of a corrupt class but if that class is distant it's merely offensive, it doesn't impinge on the private.  America certainly has a corrupt class, which I would define presently as just about anybody who has power, and that class is no longer content simply with graft and splendor within their own set, they want control; and there are so many now, and they are so insistent, that they have pervasively penetrated to the private, and that's their over-reach.  And so there is a rebellion, they're "mess'n with people".

I've been offended with people "mess'n" with me my entire life, from the first day I attended school and found I had a teacher who insisted I should stop playing with some really neat big green blocks I found and instead sit around in a circle and listen while she read "See Spot run".  I couldn't believe anybody could do that to me and I've never liked any group since.  I'm extreme, but everybody has this sense, just with different periphery; but everybody in the "ruling class" has the opposite sense, they will make you sit in a circle, and they will shove their crap down your throat.

This impulse to control I find a matter for analysis.  I innately understand the impulse to independence, I innately understand the impulse to self-aggrandizement, what I find puzzling is the impulse to control when it simply isn't necessary in terms of acquiring personal wealth,  and really isn't necessary either in terms of acquiring power --that is, if the purpose of power is to contend with another power; instead it seems simply the impulse to control the citizenry, for no real purpose other than to control the citizenry.

Why?  I think it's the impulse of hollow men to define themselves as having substance: if you can control, you're superior; if superior, of substance.  I believe this is the whole soul of the present ruling class, of the modern intellectual class.  There's nothing there, not of capacity, understanding, belief, or achievement.  Nothing.  But there is control, and if there are enough, and enough of the same mindset, with virtually no opposition, they can control; and in the mind of a man of nothing something is a lot.  It is substance, it's as much as he'll ever have, as much as he can ever feel.

I see the whole impulse of the nanny state, and of modern Academe, as a drive to establish self conception.  This self-conception, of course is splendiferous, and in practice a conception, a "substance" gained, not by achieving excellence (difficult, no modern writer is Dostoevsky), but by changing nature.  In politics it's the servant nature of the ruling class to the democratic populace that's changed; in everything else nature is changed simply by definition; excellence is defined as excrescence and (their own) excrescence defined as excellence.  And you gotta swallow it.  --If there are enough of them, at the very least they can shove it in your face ("Piss Christ").

--And so this is what the Tea Party is against.  They know how inferior these empty men are, and so they rise up unafraid.  And the empty men?  They can't possibly understand a populace that does have values, that can recognize excellence, that can properly place themselves within that hierarchy of the excellent.  Empty men can't possibly understand the motivation of people of spiritual substance, they can't possibly fathom the contempt they engender.  And so they can respond only in the same way they have always: more control, and more contempt for those they can't comprehend.  This is adding fuel to the rebellion.  People who don't like people doubly don't like people when the feeling is returned.  But there are more in the Tea Party than the elite, and as long as there is still a vote, there is simply no way the Tea Party won't win.  I can't see any possibility that the movement can lose force before there's been an upset in power.  Contempt is a mighty force.  For the elites, once they've earned contempt, especially an activist contempt, they'll never again earn respect.  No member of the Tea Party movement will ever again placidly accept authority from those they now oppose.  This baby got legs.

(Argument a bit scattered, concentration horse shit, but in just one or two posts more I should be back in rhythm.) (The edit lost the bottom two paragraphs.  May make them the next post.)