The Breakfast Club (Clio)

What?!  Is this a Science Saturday?  I wish, since the pickings are slim for stories.  There is only the one, TPP, but it kind of encapsulates everything that is bad and wrong with political society today.

And as for Music all I can think of at this moment (despite a half done piece about Player Pianos and the Analog/Digital divide) is contemporary Opera and how timely is it?  Pink Floyd was my transition to popular music from long hair MBB (Mozart/Bach/Brahms) and while it was pivotal for me (as well as elevating my status on the Goth/Geek scale from actively bullied to pointedly ignored and that’s a big step up) but how long ago was it?  Forty Years?  And based on a book by George Orwell over 70 years old that metaphorically deals with events about a century ago.

Death is everywhere.

You see the thing is that people don’t change.  Since the moment we started slaughtering other animals to create a comfortable micro-climate around ourselves we’ve stopped evolving.  This is why studying at Clio’s feet is so instructive.  You have exactly the same brain as Socrates, if you’d use it.

Yesterday the animals rose up.  What it signals is an opening for a new Napoleon because sheep will be sheep even if the fancy themselves wolves and pigs will be pigs however many monocles they wear and whatever dances they do on their trotters.

I wish I were less cynical.  There are sunny days to enjoy and I observe them with a darker tinge because I know we have traded essential liberty for an illusion of security and become a nation of cowards.  I constantly mourn the days when 1984 was a cautionary tale and not an instruction manual.

Il faut étouffer les ennemis intérieurs et extérieurs de la République, ou périr avec elle ; or, dans cette situation, la première maxime de votre politique doit être qu’on conduit le peuple par la raison, et les ennemis du peuple par la terreur.

…

Le secret de la liberté est d’éclairer les hommes, comme celui de la tyrannie et de les retenir dans l’ignorance.

Jerry Seinfeld’s new bizarro world: The sadness of watching a genius age into Bill O’Reilly

by Sophia A. McClennen, Salon

The Seinfeld TV series ran from 1989-1996 and it held to the motto, “no hugging, no learning”.  The basic idea for each episode was that the main characters would obsess over an inane or innocuous detail to the detriment of their ability to connect in any meaningful way to anyone.  Thus, Jerry would break up with a woman with “man hands” and Elaine would dump a “close talker.”  When they weren’t obsessing over trivialities, they would bond through their complete inability to respect others. So George and Jerry try to find ways to talk to each other in front of Jerry’s lip-reading deaf date or Jerry would dump his cashier girlfriend, Marlene, because a cashier can’t possibly critique his comedy.  The entire show was basically about a group of affectless assholes whose only bond was their dysfunctional, sociopathic connection to each other.

The characters were designed not to grow, not to learn, and not to care about anyone. They had to stay the same. It was a hugely innovative form of comedy since it had never been done.   They were all equally shallow.  There was no foil and no character development.  And this is why in the final episode they are all carted off to jail for “criminal indifference” after they do nothing when witnessing a crime other than mock the victim.

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This is where the last episode’s final scene almost seems like foreshadowing.  In it Jerry is in jail doing a stand-up routine of prison-related jokes to an audience of fellow prisoners (among them Kramer and George). No one is laughing at Seinfeld except Kramer.  No one gets the humor because the irony is lost and the context has shifted. The audience of prisoners doesn’t like prison jokes, but their opinion of Jerry is what is funny.  It is Jerry’s lack of self-awareness and disconnect from the audience that is the joke.

There is nothing left but the obligatories since inspiration has failed.  Oh, and don’t worry.  I expect I’ll be happier once this heat wave breaks.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

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