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tes-trash-blog · 4 years

Note

🌙 hmm... an age old question but opinion on the whole Imperials Vs Stormcloaks fiasco Skyrim tried to feed us?

*cracks neck*

Goodbye follower count, I’m going in!

I’m going to preface this with a confession: In my first ever playthrough of Skyrim (2014), I did side with the Imperials. On my second, I sided with the Stormcloaks. Since then, I have done three more playthroughs on the Stormcloak side, and three more on the Imperial side. In four more still my Dragonborn was neutral, slaying Alduin without ever taking a side. In my playthroughs, especially the ones after 2016, I’ve developed my own opinions about the Imperials and Stormcloaks alike.

In order to better articulate my opinion, we must first briefly examine four factors: the American landscape in which Skyrim was conceived, Skyrim itself and its portrayal of the Imperials and Stormcloaks (and the Thalmor), and Umberto Eco, the usage of terms like “fascism” and especially “Nazism” in American popular culture, and how this all relates to the Imperial/Stormcloak fiasco.

So let’s get started.

Part 1: Thanks, Obama.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. It was a landslide victory against Republican runner John McCain, a conserative who frequently brought up his service in the Vietnam War (and his time as a prisoner of war) during his campaign, as well as his years of service in political office. In a move to make his (very white, very male) campaign seem more inclusive in the face of the frontrunners of the Democratic campaign (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), he appointed Sarah Palin as his VP. She was the only conservative woman who agreed to be his running mate, as all three conservative women in the Senate already said no, and the Republicans couldn’t find a black conservative.

(I’m not making this up.)

Anyway, come 2008, the conservatives lose their goddamn minds because Bush’s reign of actual terror was over, a Black man is now President and Whiteness is in peril. This was before the term “triggered” became a popular sneer in the conservative dictionary, but “snowflake” was used a lot. Come 2009, the Tea Party emerges. And now we get to the crux of my, uh, observation.

For the young, uninitiated, or non-Americans who are thinking “What the fuck is wrong with America”, the Tea Party Movement was/is a rash of hardline rightwingers who, still licking their wounds from a sound beating by the Democrats in the 2008 election, sought to rebrand themselves. With some bootstrap lifting and millions of dollars in funding from media tycoons such as the Koch brothers, the Tea Party made its official debut in 2010 after the signing of the Affordable Healthcare Act. Their message was simple: It’s time to take America back from the lazy, the entitled, and the “uppity”. What was really just a rehash of a song and dance that’s been turning its ugly white head since at least 1964 gained something of a stranglehold on America, in spite of its relatively small size of active members. It hit all the notes: a populist movement rooted in the perceived threats to their faith, their culture, and their social and economic capital.

They also believed shit like this:

For instance, Tea Partiers are more likely than other conservatives to agree with statements such as “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,” and are more likely to disagree with statements like “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” (Williamson, 34)

Like I said. Since 1964.

What made the Tea Party different from the other conservative temper tantrums was one thing: Internet access. All of a sudden, these angry white men had an outlet for voicing their rages, and an open recruiting forum for other malcontents and disaffected youths. I’m not implying the Tea Party had anything to do with Gamergate, nor that Gamergate had anything to do with the rise of the alt-right or whatever these tennybopper neo-Nazis are calling themselves now, but I am saying those circles at least touch in a Venn diagram.

“But tes-trash-blog! What do the machinations of American politics have to do with Elves?” you may ask. Well dear reader, this leads me to..

Part 2: Hey, you! You’re finally awake!

Skyrim was an overnight hit. On release, The Elder Scrolls 5 generated 450 million dollars on its opening weekend alone. This game sold for around 20 million copies, not including Special Edition, VR, or Switch, and continues to see an average of around 10,000 players a week 9 years later (Steamcharts).

And 20 million people see one thing first: A strong, noble Nord in captivity, telling you that you’re on your way to be executed by the Imperials, who are in bed with a scary, sneering bunch of High Elves dressed in black. 20 million people already were told who was the clear bad guy in this game, and it wasn’t the strong, noble Nord in captivity. I’ll be going into this more into Part 3, but suffice to say, the Imperials were already coded as Bad Guy by association. The Imperials decided to execute you, the player. They shot a man in the back because he ran from his own execution. He stole a horse, which was a crime punishable by death in those days. The game doesn’t tell you that part, and is content to say that Lokir was killed because he was in the same cart as the Stormcloaks.

Speaking of Imperials, the Third Empire is written as obtuse, corrupt, uncaring, and cruel. The Septim Dynasty is wrought with scandal and intrigue, plagued by conflict, and powerless to do anything about the Oblivion Crisis that almost ended the world. They flat out abandoned Morrowind and Summerset to better protect their own, offered no help during the Void Nights that destabilized the Khajiit, and worst of all, signed a treaty outlawing Talos worship. That is the crux on which the Stormcloak/Imperial conflict lies. These damned outsiders telling these humble Nords what to do and what not to do. They’re corrupt, lazy, and know nothing of the hardships these people endure, and now the nanny state Empire is telling them they don’t have the freedom to worship what they want? How dare they!

Going further, in the seat of Imperial power in Skyrim is none other than Jarl Elisif, a young widow who relies heavily on the advice of her (overwhelmingly male) thanes, stewards, and generals. She’s weak, thinks mostly of her dead husband, and is written as someone who overreacts to scenarios; the “legion of troops” to Wolfskull Cave over a farmer reporting strange noises, banning the Burning of King Olaf in the wake of her husband’s murder via Shout come to mind. Compare and contrast that to the seat of Stormcloak power, Windhelm. Ulfric spends his time pouring over the map of troop movements and discussing strategy when he’s not delivering his big damn “Why I Fight” speech. Elisif is weak, Ulfric is strong. The Jarl of Solitude is even told to tone it down during the armistice negotiations in Season Unending. She’s chastised by her own general. The first thing you see in Solitude is a man being executed for opening a gate. The first thing you see in Windhelm is two Nords harassing a Dark Elf woman and accusing her of being an Imperial spy.

Both are portrayed as horrific, but only one has bystanders decrying the acts of the offender. Only one has a relative in the crowd proclaim, “That’s my brother [they’re executing]!” The best you get with Suvaris is her confronting you about whether or not you “hate her kind”. Even a mouth breathing racist would be disinclined to say “yes” when confronted with the question of whether or not they’re racist, but that’s how the writers of Skyrim think racism works.

I acknowledge that this was an attempt at bothsidesism, but the handling was.. clumsy.

Part 3: Ur-Fascism, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Bash The Stormcloaks

And now we move on to Umberto Eco, fiction writer, essayist, and writer of the famous essay Ur-Fascism. In short, Eco summarizes 14 separate properties of a fascist movement; it’s important to stress that this should not be treated as a checklist if a piece of media is fascist, or if a person is actually a Nazi, or to say “X is Bad Because Checklist”. It’s frankly impossible to even organize these points into a coherent system, as fascism is an ideology that is, by its nature, incoherent.

With that in mind, let’s run down the points:

1. “The Cult of Tradition”, characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by Tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

2. “The Rejection of Modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

3. “The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

4. “Disagreement Is Treason” – Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

5. “Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

6. “Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

7. “Obsession with a Plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite’s ‘fear’ of the 1930s Jewish populace’s businesses and well-doings, or any anti-Semitic conspiracy ever).

8. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak.” On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

9. “Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy” because “Life is Permanent Warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to NOT build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

10. “Contempt for the Weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

11. “Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

12. “Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

13. “Selective Populism” – The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the Leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People.”

14. “Newspeak” – Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

I did copy and paste the list from Wikipedia, but you can read the full essay here. It’s 9 pages long. You can do it, I have faith in you.

You may notice that you can’t really shorthand these concepts, or at least not in an aesthetically pleasing way. However, you can point to the most infamous of fascist regimes and take their aesthetic instead. You see it in Star Wars with the Empire (hmm) and the First Order, in Star Trek with the Mirrorverse and the Cardassian Dominion (hmm), and in the.. Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue..

Oh, yeah. The Thalmor. They dress in dark colors, are a foreign power trying to exert their influence on the downtrodden Nord, enact purges, and scream about Elven superiority. The Thalmor express every surface level perception of a Nazi in American popular culture. TVTropes has already pretty well covered this ground in their Video Games section of A Nazi By Any Other Name, so I won’t go too much into here seeing as I’m already at the 2000 word mark. Suffice to say, it’s hard to think Bethesda wasn’t trying to make the player associate the 4th Era Altmer with the 1930’s German.

And in doing so, they accidentally created a group that is.. Well, you’ve read the essay or at least the 14 points. Try and tell me how many of them don’t apply to Nordic culture. What grabs me the most are points 9, 11, and 13: life is a perpetual struggle in which you must emerge victorious, a culture of Heroes impatient to die in a glorious fashion, and the Common Will that is enacted and reinforced by one strongman leader. You see these elements in play in Nord culture, in Stormcloak ideology especially. I, for one, hear what Galmar really means when he says “We will make Skyrim beautiful again”. I hear the echoes in George W Bush’s speeches and McCain’s campaign when Ulfric talks of duty and service, of “fighting because Skyrim needs heroes, and there’s no one else but us.”

It’s less of a dog whistle and more of a foghorn if you ask me. And to go back to part 2, this is a message that 20 million played. Not all of them are Stormcloak stans, but that compelling message was still present. Americans love being a strongman hero in their media; we eat that shit up. The setup was enough: you’re a lone hero about to be executed by milquetoast Imperials and Nazi-coded Thalmor. The story was enough: a strong man rebels against a system gone awry, one that seeks to destroy his way of life.

It was enough to compel a “fashwave” artist to take on the monkier Stormcloak(Hann). It was enough that Skyrim was lauded as a “real” game instead of say, Depression Quest, and to justify ruining a game developer’s life over it.

It was enough that when Skyrim came out in 2011, the game did not do so well in Germany because of these elements, because the game was written for you to be sympathetic towards these very white, very blond and Ayran-coded Nords. I can’t speak for the popularity of the game now in Germany, but when I lived there, there were a few raised eyebrows among my age group about the message of the game.

I think about that a lot, especially when the tesblr discourse heats up about the Stormcloaks. I see how visibly upset people get when someone throws shade at Ulfric. The talk of “it’s just a video game” and “lul get triggered” starts to look less like passive dismissal and shoddy trolling and more a kind of funhouse mirror to how they really think.

I can’t lie, it reminds me so much of 2009, of these angry people screaming racial slurs on the Internet because there’s a Black president or posting sexist screeds because Michelle Obama wanted kids to have access to healthy meals. It reminds me of the kid in my sophomore class who said he was going to “take out” Obama on his inauguration day. He was 15 years old then. He’s a father now.

Hell, it reminds me of right now, of Republican Senators demanding civility and tone policing as they kowtow to an actual fascist. The Stormcloak in the Reach camp “had to do something” about the Empire telling him and his what to do, and the neighbor I used to dogsit for had to do something too. I don’t watch his dogs anymore. When I told him I wouldn’t, he tried to make himself the victim and say I was getting political about dog sitting. It’s just two dogs. It’s just a video game. All political messages are just imaginary, snowflake.

But it’s really not, is it now?

TL;DR and Sources

TL;DR: The imperials are portrayed as weak and effectual, as the bootlicker to the Thalmor, and the writers were so busy trying to make one side look bad and weak they inadvertently made actual fascists.

Even though this is pretty long, this really only scratches the surface of the.. Well, everything. In all honesty this is just a very condensed version of my opinion. Big shockeroo, there.

Do keep in mind that this isn’t a condemnation of Skyrim. Lord knows I love that game, or I wouldn’t have this blog. This also isn’t a damning of people who play the game and side with the Stormcloaks, or think Ulfric is hot, or don’t like the Thalmor or what have you. You do you, fam. You do you. This is my observation and opinion on one aspect of the game, just with some tasty sources to better paint a picture of where I personally formed my opinion.

This also isn’t to say that I’m trying to draw a 1:1 comparison between The Elder Scrolls and reality, or that Ulfric is obviously a McCain/Trump/Hitler expy, but Skyrim is, like all things, a product of the minds that created it. Skyrim didn’t happen in an apolitical vacuum, and apolitical stories about war simply do not exist. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply reinforcing the status quo, and it is our responsibility as people who consume this media to question it, and that status quo they so dearly wish to hang on to.

Also, Elisif hot.

Sources:

Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism”. The New York Review of Books. 1995. https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf>

Williamson, Venssa, Skocpol, Theda and Coggin, John. “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”. Perspectives on Politics, Volume 9. March 2011. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/tea_party_pop_0.pdf>

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Steamcharts.com https://steamcharts.com/app/72850>

Schreier, Jason. “Bethesda Ships 7M Skyrim, Earns About $450M”. Wired. November 16, 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/11/skyrim-sales/>

Hann, Michael. “‘Fashwave” - synth music co-opted by the far right”. The Guardian. December 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/dec/14/fashwave-synth-music-co-opted-by-the-far-right>

#holy shit this got long #lore overanalysis #the trash talks

229 notes · View notes

anton-chigurhs-friendo-blog · 7 years

Text

Credo

felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,

quique metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum,

subjecit pedibus strepitumque acherontis avari [1]

~Virgil

Credo

Canto I

The Rain in Spain

“the more religious a nation”

said Ayn Rand

(due to its anti-body anti-sex thought)

“the more varied

and violently obscene

its four-letter-word repertoire—

the Spanish”

she said

“are the most obscene”

Hemingway agreed—

saying their blasphemy had to keep pace

with the austerity of their religion

and there’s that part in War and Peace

after Balashev dines with Napoleon

and the emperor asks if it’s true

that Moscow’s called Holy Moscow

as “such a great number of churches

is a sign of backwardness—

nowhere else in Europe

is there anything like it”

“I beg your majesty’s pardon”

says Balashev

“but there is Spain”

where

during the Lisbon quake

of All Saints Day

cathedrals collapsed into rubble

killing thousands—

yet taverns and whorehouses

came through unscathed

when these Spaniards stumbled upon the Americas

the Arawak brought them food

water

gifts

“with fifty men” Columbus said

“we could vanquish them….

let us in the name of the Holy Trinity

send home all the slaves

that can be sold”

but so many died on the return voyage

that he set them to mining gold—

and those who did not fill their quota

had their hands cut off

Stanley Kubrick called civilized man

an ignoble savage—

irrational

brutal

weak

unable to be objective about anything

(where his own interests were involved)

and he said that any attempt to create social institutions

based on a false view of the nature of man

was likely doomed to failure

Tecumseh’s brother

Tenskwatawa

said this civilization came to America

as a great ugly crab

vomited forth from the sea

claws full of mud and seaweed

the spawn of an enormous evil serpent

that lived under the ocean

and asked what he thought of this white culture

an Osage named Big Soldier said

“I see and admire your manner of living

your good warm houses

your extensive fields of corn

gardens

cows

horses

wagons

a thousand machines I know not the use of—

you are able to clothe yourselves

even from weeds and grass

you’ve the power to subdue every animal

and are surrounded by slaves

everything about you is in chains

yet

you are slaves yourselves

I hear I should exchange my presents for yours

yet I too should become a slave—

as for myself I was born free

raised free

and will die free”

Canto II

hos epi to polu

“know in thyself and all one self-same soul

banish the dream that sunders part from whole”

~from an anonymous Hindu poem

an individual atom may decay

today

or in a billion years

with no way of telling when

yet their behavior in large numbers

is predictable

for science must be broad in order to work—

it develops in the sense of evermore general laws

such with anthropology

Gerry Spence called it the cluster-concept—

people’s personalities

viewpoints

prejudices

come in bunches

like grapes

and if you examine one grape in a bunch

you get a good general idea

of what the rest of the grapes are like

yet generalizations have garnered an ill-reputation

for being liable to exceptions

(those shaded unions in every venn diagram)

but in the long run these anomalies

hold little bearing

as broad anamorphosic effects

are produced by the accumulation

of plethora of minuscule causes—

and subtle differences in many individuals

create huge distinctions in cultures—

sunny days in Seattle are nice

as are storms in the desert

but it takes legions of rainy days to create a rainforest

and the absence of a few

will not turn it to a wasteland

thus

playing blackjack with life’s probabilities

is not gambling

you count your cards wisely—

for generalizations oft point toward likelihoods

and the mind would be helpless without them

as in general liberals tend to be smarter than conservatives

as it takes less intelligence

to embrace stasis

than to welcome pragmatic novelty

as in general people with lapdogs

are more intelligent than those with pit-bulls

and in general people who enjoy concertos

are brighter than those who like country

as in general patrons of Masterpiece Theatre

are sharper than those who watch nascar

and in general where there is dullness of mind

there too is an excess of fertility—

science is based on observable facts

these are observable facts

Canto III

Land of Jewelers

“men never do evil so completely and cheerfully

as when they do it from religious conviction”

~Blaise Pascal

the time revolution of the 1860s

rendered the Garden of Eden

into Mesopotamia

where a left-brain farmers’ revolution

spread out in concentric circles

stretching west like kudzu

sowing seeds in its wake

that would germinate into factory labor

contractors

miners

dam-builders

real-estate developers

bankers

corporate lawyers

and CEOs

who confuse information with knowledge

wealth with security

credulity with faith

and gluttony with virtue

allowing the arithmetic of finance

to dictate profit-driven lives

that slakest still not the thirst of greed—

and as revolutions tend toward excess

holistic thinkers were cast from this garden

for the analytic western mind yields obedient soldiers

who will travel to every quarter of the firmament

to slaughter people they don’t know

over philosophies of which no one is certain

philistine weathervanes inflexible to reason

yet spinning in the tempests of popular opinion—

as the most pious Baptists

would have made the most devout Muslims

had they been but born into that faith—

when these opinions

(so often spoken of in tides)

turn against them

they swim with the current

dictating values

in the same manner they dictate fashion

giving no more thought to normative ethics

than what they wear to the office—

cookie-cutter personalities in cookie-cutter houses

shooting like invasive weeds

from once Edenic forest—

a civilization forged upon Vulcan’s anvil

and founded

(according to Freud)

upon the repression of instincts—

brimming with a false sense of security

fostered by clergy

and short-term individual self-interest

that weaves in its aftermath an elaborate latticework

of environmental degradation

fueled by men who can describe a grain of sand

in great detail

but know not

nor care

what the beach looks like

as making rent and feeding children

too often warrants mindless toil

that

ipso facto

damages the environment

and

devours time better spent on reflection

this

in a life where it takes near forty hours a week

of omnivorous reading

to even begin to understand the world

this is why Robert Frost called the brain

a wonderful organ

that starts working the moment you wake

and does not stop

until you get to the office—

and it was of this left-brain work-ethic that Thoreau spoke

when he said the most amazing thing

about the pyramids

was that so many degraded men

would spend their lives constructing a tomb

for some ambitious fool

and this side of the neocortex

responsible for logic

oddly

the side most likely to defy it

as this left-brained person is creative

in that he is imaginative enough

to allow himself to believe that which is most convenient—

for I know people in New Madrid

who think dinosaur fossils were planted

to test our faith

reminding me of another Osage

who upon getting up and walking out of a sermon

(about Jonah and the whale)

said “we know the white man will lie

but this is the biggest lie

we’ve ever heard”

and it was a Seneca

Red Jacket

who said these missionaries could make the bible talk to suit themselves

“if we had no land or money to be cheated out of” he said

“I doubt these blackcoats would trouble themselves

about our good hereafter”

yet

if the honorable light of western civilization

were run through a prism

it would split into art

music

literature

philosophy

and the science to which we attribute

a scientific method written in pencil

that invites challenge

as theology avoids scrutiny

and is stamped in ink—

ink that is bleeding into a rorschach stain

of the san marco dragon [2]

spreading exponentially

into a nightmarish reflection of the basilica

rupturing into temples for the worship of mammon

over a Venice flooded by receding glaciers

expand or expire

a Sophie’s Choice decision

a pyrrhic victory

a whitewashed tomb

Canto IV

The Beatitudes

“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology

of the cancer cell” ~Edward Abbey

people are geographically

sexually-selected biological organisms

not fallen from grace

but arisen from primordial earth

subject to the same laws of evolution

and constructed of the same cells

as every other creature—

cells that

(as Robert Pirsig so eloquently set forth)

“make sweat and snot and phlegm…

belch and bleed and fuck and fart…

piss and shit and vomit

and squeeze out more bodies just like themselves

all covered with blood and placental slime

that grow and squeeze out more bodies”

and the human brain

(being part and parcel body)

begets a mind as shaped by these laws

as are eyes and thumbs—

just as the child’s psyche

has been sculpted by eons of evolution

to want to sleep between its parents

for it was under cloak of night

that the child’s very real killers lurked—

Plato said we can easily forgive this child

for being afraid of the dark

“the real tragedy” he said

“is when men are afraid of the light”

but familiarity too blinds

and proficient perspective is a matter of distance—

as out the window unfolds the greatest mass-extinction

since the demise of the dinosaurs

whose soil was this

before Kinko’s/FedEx covered it in concrete?

whose blood spilled here?

what love lost?

and though sharp lines be often drawn at peril—

this right-brained individual

is (normally) left

and the left-brained individual

is (by and large) right

and these hemispheres of the brain

analysis – synthesis

correlate generally with the hemispheres of politics

republican – democrat

and the hemispheres of earth

east – west

socialist – capitalist—

each hemisphere viewing the world

from a distinct vantage point

thus

understanding it incompatibly

and seeing each the other askance

giving credence to the old dictum

where the dog gave meat to the ox

and the ox offered straw to the dog

and both went hungry—

as the left is equipped with a microscope

loupe

calculator

and the right with binoculars

globe

and telescope—

a telescope that has

historically

landed people in worse strife

than microscopes

(or even calculators)

for in a pedantic left-brained world

the truth will not set you free

as holistic tools produce holistic views

grounded in cynical reality

and harboring not ‘love’ of truth

(for quotidian minds

so often find it difficult to love that which is ugly)

but an innate respect for unadulterated honesty

as the suffering of great men

most reflects itself in marble busts

for the finest artists do tend toward despair—

ignorance is bliss

and depression is

far too often

a sickness for the intelligent—

but genuine progress has always stemmed

from dissatisfied people

this right hemisphere

with its inherent aversion for caution and thrift

covets a life without fletchings

generally geared toward independence

empathy

generosity

and practical simplicity

freedom – honor – things of the spirit

and an affinity for the environment—

Kant having once said that loving beautiful art

was no indication that a person was decent

but he said that seeing beauty in nature

was the sign of a good soul

and according to Aldo Leopold

though we strive for peace in our time

too much safety

yields

in the long run only danger

the left hemisphere

emits a more optimistic disposition

geared toward collaboration—

as evolving in harsher climes

necessitates alliance for survival

and a monotonous life of redundant tasks

that fosters a conservative aversion toward change—

and it is this western mind

that conceived a western cornucopia

that has poured forth its fruit out over a world

whose fate can now be calculated

by repeatedly punching the multiplication button

on a calculator

(like the king’s chessboard)

or watching the first three minutes of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy—

for the same inertia that keeps a people static

keeps them propelled along a destructive path

once thrust in that direction—

and a pendulum is inclined to swing

until it is forced to stop

one and a half billion people at the start of the 20th century

three billion by 1960

in excess of seven billion now

and over twice as many hemorrhaging forth

every month

than walked the earth at the dawn of agriculture—

to even suggest

that an unchecked geometrically swelling population

where the least intelligent people

rapidly out-reproduce the more gifted

is anything other than a prescription for disaster

is akin to denying 2 x 2 = 4

nor 4 x 4: 16

ad infinitum

yet instead of being restrained

we celebrate such behavior

with television programs like 19 Kids and Counting

where a conservative Arkansas family

breed like lemmings—

I doubt one of whom know

who Thomas Malthus even was

this

in a country where the average college student

can identify over a thousand corporate logos

yet cannot at the same time name ten plants or animals

native to his own soil

and this western mind

harbors further subdivisions

as the teutonic mind tends toward rigidity

militarism

rules and authority

in a way the gallic does not

arbeit macht frei

and it lies within the boundaries of possibility

that the holocaust could never have happened in France

and though they’ve begat their Bachs

Dürers

and Beethovens

this great germanic burden

dovetails snugly with their general excellence

as engineers and scientists—

for the more analytic mind

derives morality primarily from social pressure

and is therefore conformist by nature—

medieval Germans had a saying too

stadtluft macht frei [3]

but much has changed

and though all and sundry use both minds

every outlook is a matter of degree

dependent largely

upon which side of the cerebral meridian

the bulk of a personality dwells—

nor is it just an issue of lateralization

for there is the vertical y-axis of intelligence

creating a quadratic line-graph in which we all reside

and though deviations steer human history

the numeric strength of these general antipodes drive it

and though we cannot have larger meanings

without the small

this graph is far too heavily laden

in the lower-left quadrant

for the world to remain a sustainable biome

great minds think in epochs

small minds in increments—

for context by its very nature

always trumps text

Canto V

Pathos

“ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey

where wealth accumulates, and men decay”

~Oliver Goldsmith

‘The Deserted Village’

Goethe called Hamlet

a fine porcelain vase

in which an acorn had been planted

so too the seed of civilization

within the ecology of this planet

for there is a swelling chemical deadzone

at the mouth of the Mississippi

and on Diego Garcia

hermit crabs live in bottle caps

as in Denmark

kittiwakes weave synthetic straw

fishing line

and plastic Q-Tips

into cliff-nests overlooking an ocean

from which Tenskwatawa said the white race

emerged as a great ugly monster

an ocean that now has 46,000 pieces of floating plastic trash

per square mile—

thinking it’s food

albatross starve with stomachs full of Styrofoam

and discarded condoms

and as I understand it

there are now Wall Street think-tanks

calculating profit margins

from the longterm effects of global warming—

as parrots in Brazilian jungles

mimic the sound of chainsaws

[1] happy the man who has learned the causes of things, and has put under his feet all fears, and inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of greed

[2] c = – 3/4 + 0i

[3] city air makes one free

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