as for robust American art, have you checked out Griselda? its founding member, Westside Gunn, is a patron of fine arts, fashion arts, architecture, and music. from his interviews, you could describe him as pre-Raphaelite, whereby he thinks American music is unbearably sloshy and still somehow sluggish in production. his sentiments seem to overlap with those of your final paragraph. but the difference is that while you're calling on American artist to inspire France and beyond, he encourages American artists to look toward France and beyond for inspiration. he has an album called Pray for Paris.
thank you, Fertik, for writing this. it's lit. your observations about the pitfalls of woke-ism and its broader destructive implications are spot on. your humor is brimming with impatience. it's like when i first read Juvenal's satires, the humor of it was how i knew he was sincere. although nobody has come forward claiming to have found Aristotle's lost essay on Comedy (Sean Connery played a character who found it), i think he would have had to write that comedy is not funny unless it is true. i can sense that you're about fed up with a machine that churns out perverse statements, works, and people - now music. welcome to the club.
it has been nearly 30 years since i was kidnapped and jumped into the Marines. and when my first four year contract was up, i thought i would never look back upon those days with any type of affection or nostalgia. back then, a jarhead seemed to be some type of overzealous bigot, who merely disdained the genius of youth — more from envy than any articulable gripe. like the man with no eyes in Cool Hand Luke, the jarhead seemed like just a reticent, inarticulate mercenary, trained with a porto-artificial-intelligence, styling himself a “lean, mean, fighting machine” in those minor blue, call-n-response spirituals that help them endure forced marches. those songs seemed very morbid and almost nihilistic to me — only before i started singing them.
the thought, the feeling, of fighting and winning in a battle for life and limb was an honor that we all were prepared to enjoy. and when it was time for me to get out of the Corps, enlisted and commissioned, alike, used to say “You’re gonna miss it here. In the civilian world, nobody’s in charge; and you can’t request mast.” they were right. and the moment i realized that a few months later, i also realized that i was not actually a former Marine, but a real jarhead. going to boot camp can make you a Marine. but a jarhead is someone who will sing those bluesy numbers for life.
being a jarhead isn’t easy. it’s hard to get away with detecting the presence of foreign and domestic enemies. if they cannot appropriate you, then you’re a constant threat. they can’t trust you to go along with their stupid, treasonous stunts. if you’re not ollie north, you’re a security contractor, who also delivers pizzas, works in electronics, or whatever little jobs rent you a tiny room with a closet. you’re not a scholar, though you have a high gpa. you’re not a lawyer, though you’ve tried bench and jury trials with a winning record. you’re not advocating on behalf of a single person, but rather practicing statecraft that benefits everyone. you’re protecting the People of the Preamble from lawyers, politicians, grifters, and terrorists - all of whom think it’s their Constitutional prerogative to demean and disenfranchise the People.
everybody assumes you’re insane - and they are right about that. everyone mistakes you for a bigot, and they are half-right about that. you hate every evil way. people fear you and your gaze. children and animals adore you. you stand up for everyone against anyone, knowing that there aren’t other jarheads in the room — until you show ‘em how to be jarheads. and by doing that, your victory is assured.
i was first given a secret clearance before i was 18 years old. i was eligible based upon some aptitude batteries and also some psychological tests. having worked in humintel and sigintel for three decades, i have observed the trends by which a destructive sentiment toward the country more readily and effectively gathers within the borders rather than by foreign enemies. one mode by which wokeness flourishes is by manipulating information exchanged on social media. this mode succeeds by alienating ppl from each other based upon true of false messages, by which the reader/receiver judges the supposed source not worthy of a phone call - though friends ought to call one another and check in on each other in this post-information age where data is constantly being intercepted and manipulated to convince the masses of something or another. if you and your loved ones are not remaining in contact, then seeds of dissent can be sown between yous and you're all weakened by the legion of those whose communications are permitted. whoever is willing to manipulate social media messages and impose visibility restrictions would not be above making up a thing about you or any potential ally - in order to alienate yous from each other. for example, if i heard a rumor that you were being investigated for something and i was not willing to communicate with you on the grounds that i thought the accusation were probable, i really am as woke as anyone you might have complained about. that is, i would be pretending not to know that the accusation, even if true, does not justify withdrawing from the friendship, but rather, if you had commited a moral infraction of any magnitude, my duty as a friend would be to counsel you and also protect you from the retribution that non-friends would seek to impose. when ppl claim that their friendships ended based upon a disagreement, they're are admitting that they had never achieved a friendship. i sent via email Cicero's essay on Friendship to two dozen ppl i thought would enjoy the affirmation of sentiments i hoped they shared. not one person wrote me back and said they'd look at it or they had looked at it. to this day, i don't know whether they even saw the emails, because i know that communications are being manipulated in order to prevent righteous ppl from unifying. as such, i cannot reasonably appraise whether those ppl are my friends and whether i can count on them as much as they can count on me in collaboration to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. if my friends around the corner cannot reach me by phone or email, they tend to come to the house and knock on the door. yet when i don't hear from long time friends and ppl i grew up with, wokeness hopes i assume that those ppl don't care for me anymore because i'm not woke like they are. it has been true, at times, that ppl unfriended me because they found my expressions offensive. but that had been the case when i wanted to leave the gang life and join the Marines. that had been the case when i pursued any other path that diverged from the path that a friend was taking. woke-ism works precisely because ppl think they have the luxury of hating, despising, oppressing, and opposing someone who happens to disagree about an idea. that is, before they seek reconciliation, they will just suit up and destroy a former friend, revealing that the friendship wasn't deep, but rather superficial and disingenuous. wokeness encourages family members losing sympathy for one another - like when a person i've known all my life thinks it's somehow a divine prerogative to question my sincerity because someone out there is saying the opposite of what i'm saying and offering also incentives to embrace the opposite course. all of a sudden, the person you've known since you were kids is saying that they know more about you than the ppl who you've spent the most time with lately. wokeness is precisely that opportunistic attitude, where you forget what you already knew about morality and science and a person in exchange for the power of numbers that come with pretending not to know what a woman is or that mrs. historic first is a source of pride for your family and your community, though she had spent nearly three decades destroying your family and every family. like those ppl who say "we won't support this thing that's good for community because we dislike the person who is doing it." or else claiming "he a ray cis because he said fine ppl on both sides, so we oppose his good policies with the same inexorable hatred as we would his racist policies." that's wokeism, but it succeeds precisely because so-called friends lack the compassion and sympathy for one another to pick up the phone and check upon ppl whom they have disagreed wit. if Cicero's work on friendship is correct, then we know that he was never really friends with M. Anthony or Octavianus - for when he was out of the room, they were able to conclude that he should lose his life precisely because he was not in the room. if mr. Shirer's work about the Rise and Fall of a regime is correct, those who thought they had the luxury of ignoring ppl who disagreed only found out that they were wrong after it was too late to band together: "first they came for so-n-so, and i turned away. then that came for so-n-so, and i turned away again. finally, they came for me, and there was no one to stand by me." blessings to all readers, though i have no idea whether any human is seeing it unless a human contacts me outside of this medium. a two line note or even several paragraphs in response could be faked more readily than a two-way oral conversation.
remember in Hamlet, when the two college buddies agreed to deliver intelligence to the usurping king? and hamlet, who - having observed the two in person, and having still the benefit of a true friend, Horatio, whose passed the in person test of sincerity - was able to detect that the other two were woke - meaning compromised? and later, when the usurping king relied upon the wits of those two friends to deliver the coup de grace, the fact of Hamlet's superior logic caused them to be destroyed instead and the usurping king's plans to be foiled. the whole play of Hamlet is about hierarchies of trust that were steeped in deceit and manipulation of sentiments: Polonius invoked his filial authority to deceive his daughter Ophelia, who was compelled by “honor” to pretend not to know Hamlet’s sincerity. later, Polonius met his demise while trying to deceive the palace guards as to Hamlet’s intentions toward the Queen, his mother. Later, the usurping king manipulated Laertes’s notions of honor by feigning sincere sympathy, whereas the king himself was ultimately responsible. nonetheless, Laertes invoked the duel tradition, which Hamlet, pretending to believe that Laertes had not been duped, played along rather than wising him up. spoiler alert: both were destroyed. and remember how the spirit of the Noble King injected a spirit of retribution in Hamlet that resulted in the foreseeable demise of the Queen and Hamlet, whereby the dynasty ended altogether because nobody had the courage to get in another’s face and actually encourage righteousness. everyone had an excuse for betraying the next person based upon an agenda. and thus everyone was destroyed. animals are said not to exercise reason, but you don’t see them destroying their allies like humans do for the sake of supposedly better allies.
wokeness is not the defective ideas it churns out, but rather the process by which sentiments are feigned or fabricated to further an agenda. it’s a form of warfare by disinformation. and although so-called conservatives claim to be opponents of wokeness, they practice the same techniques of deceit, seeking to convince a cohort to support certain personals on the grounds of mutual sympathy. it was a cautionary tale in it for Trump, but he doesn’t read Shakespeare but rather permits the yes men around him to interpret all literature, symbols, and data according to what purports to be mutual interests and thereby dictate to him his own sentiments. for example, Trump did not foresee that pretending to believe birthers about Obama’s national origins would one day cause ppl to question his sincerity about wanting to help folks with the political identity that Obama was supposed to promote. likewise, his assertion that the central park juveniles should face the death penalty dovetail with Bragg’s claims that he’s a dishonest person who would destroy anyone to further his agenda. ironically, for decades prior to his run for office, Trump manipulated sentiments and amassed fame and fortune by aligning with the one-party political machine in NYC. he pretended not to notice that the machine was disenfranchising ppl in exchange for the spoils. then he flipped on them and started shutting down their rackets to rehabilitate his reputation and image. unfortunately for him and the country, the same tactics of deceit that he contributed to for decades were sufficient to produce hateful sentiments against him, which in retrospect seem more deserved than in present time. that is, when Trump announced that the condition of minorities was unacceptable and that his prison reform and anti-gang initiatives were designed to remedy the condition, the minorities were finagled into believing that the initiatives would actually hurt their interests.
so, wokeness is not essentially about wrong or right ideas, but rather sincere and insincere messaging. because i need to know whether any friend is able to see this information, be it for the purposes of being enlightened or correcting me where i’m mistaken, i’m going to keep writing until either i get a woke message about why the comments are too long, too wrong, or otherwise go against “community guidelines”; or else until a friend picks up the phone and calls me and acknowledges that failing to make that phone call would only further the cause of wokeness to the detriment of everything that friends would mutually love and seek to preserve. readers will forgive me for testing how influential the woke doctrine has become, being that either it has blocked my friends from seeing this or else it has converted them to the doctrine itself.
my phone rang a few minutes ago and i talked to a live person. that’s because my contacts in the intelligence community are not the least bit woke and agree that the assessment here is worth conducting. i’m gonna keep writing and my friends are gonna publish it to the benefit of society and righteousness. those who want to get by on deceit and pretending not to see are clearly not fans of Shakespeare. indeed, though Hamlet impugned Horatio’s “philosophy” as unimaginative and misguided, Horatio is presumably the narrator of the events, being that he is the only person who observed everything and survived to tell it. thus, he used the information he received in a superior way - never misleading anyone nor was he ever self-deceived as was Hamlet — demonstrating that he, rather than Hamlet or all those other schemers, sophists, and plotters, had the superior philosophical approach.
Brilliantly funny! Très marrant !
Write more humor, Mr. Fertik! Yours rocks.
Et « flumce » ? C’est un mot nouveau et un cadeau au monde… comme l’enfant d’amour entre « flounce » et « frump » … parfait.
Et bien! Merci!
as for robust American art, have you checked out Griselda? its founding member, Westside Gunn, is a patron of fine arts, fashion arts, architecture, and music. from his interviews, you could describe him as pre-Raphaelite, whereby he thinks American music is unbearably sloshy and still somehow sluggish in production. his sentiments seem to overlap with those of your final paragraph. but the difference is that while you're calling on American artist to inspire France and beyond, he encourages American artists to look toward France and beyond for inspiration. he has an album called Pray for Paris.
I’ll look for it. Thanks for the referral.
thank you, Fertik, for writing this. it's lit. your observations about the pitfalls of woke-ism and its broader destructive implications are spot on. your humor is brimming with impatience. it's like when i first read Juvenal's satires, the humor of it was how i knew he was sincere. although nobody has come forward claiming to have found Aristotle's lost essay on Comedy (Sean Connery played a character who found it), i think he would have had to write that comedy is not funny unless it is true. i can sense that you're about fed up with a machine that churns out perverse statements, works, and people - now music. welcome to the club.
it has been nearly 30 years since i was kidnapped and jumped into the Marines. and when my first four year contract was up, i thought i would never look back upon those days with any type of affection or nostalgia. back then, a jarhead seemed to be some type of overzealous bigot, who merely disdained the genius of youth — more from envy than any articulable gripe. like the man with no eyes in Cool Hand Luke, the jarhead seemed like just a reticent, inarticulate mercenary, trained with a porto-artificial-intelligence, styling himself a “lean, mean, fighting machine” in those minor blue, call-n-response spirituals that help them endure forced marches. those songs seemed very morbid and almost nihilistic to me — only before i started singing them.
the thought, the feeling, of fighting and winning in a battle for life and limb was an honor that we all were prepared to enjoy. and when it was time for me to get out of the Corps, enlisted and commissioned, alike, used to say “You’re gonna miss it here. In the civilian world, nobody’s in charge; and you can’t request mast.” they were right. and the moment i realized that a few months later, i also realized that i was not actually a former Marine, but a real jarhead. going to boot camp can make you a Marine. but a jarhead is someone who will sing those bluesy numbers for life.
being a jarhead isn’t easy. it’s hard to get away with detecting the presence of foreign and domestic enemies. if they cannot appropriate you, then you’re a constant threat. they can’t trust you to go along with their stupid, treasonous stunts. if you’re not ollie north, you’re a security contractor, who also delivers pizzas, works in electronics, or whatever little jobs rent you a tiny room with a closet. you’re not a scholar, though you have a high gpa. you’re not a lawyer, though you’ve tried bench and jury trials with a winning record. you’re not advocating on behalf of a single person, but rather practicing statecraft that benefits everyone. you’re protecting the People of the Preamble from lawyers, politicians, grifters, and terrorists - all of whom think it’s their Constitutional prerogative to demean and disenfranchise the People.
everybody assumes you’re insane - and they are right about that. everyone mistakes you for a bigot, and they are half-right about that. you hate every evil way. people fear you and your gaze. children and animals adore you. you stand up for everyone against anyone, knowing that there aren’t other jarheads in the room — until you show ‘em how to be jarheads. and by doing that, your victory is assured.
Interesting as always. People of the Preamble. That’s good. Thank you for the close reading and the response.
i was first given a secret clearance before i was 18 years old. i was eligible based upon some aptitude batteries and also some psychological tests. having worked in humintel and sigintel for three decades, i have observed the trends by which a destructive sentiment toward the country more readily and effectively gathers within the borders rather than by foreign enemies. one mode by which wokeness flourishes is by manipulating information exchanged on social media. this mode succeeds by alienating ppl from each other based upon true of false messages, by which the reader/receiver judges the supposed source not worthy of a phone call - though friends ought to call one another and check in on each other in this post-information age where data is constantly being intercepted and manipulated to convince the masses of something or another. if you and your loved ones are not remaining in contact, then seeds of dissent can be sown between yous and you're all weakened by the legion of those whose communications are permitted. whoever is willing to manipulate social media messages and impose visibility restrictions would not be above making up a thing about you or any potential ally - in order to alienate yous from each other. for example, if i heard a rumor that you were being investigated for something and i was not willing to communicate with you on the grounds that i thought the accusation were probable, i really am as woke as anyone you might have complained about. that is, i would be pretending not to know that the accusation, even if true, does not justify withdrawing from the friendship, but rather, if you had commited a moral infraction of any magnitude, my duty as a friend would be to counsel you and also protect you from the retribution that non-friends would seek to impose. when ppl claim that their friendships ended based upon a disagreement, they're are admitting that they had never achieved a friendship. i sent via email Cicero's essay on Friendship to two dozen ppl i thought would enjoy the affirmation of sentiments i hoped they shared. not one person wrote me back and said they'd look at it or they had looked at it. to this day, i don't know whether they even saw the emails, because i know that communications are being manipulated in order to prevent righteous ppl from unifying. as such, i cannot reasonably appraise whether those ppl are my friends and whether i can count on them as much as they can count on me in collaboration to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. if my friends around the corner cannot reach me by phone or email, they tend to come to the house and knock on the door. yet when i don't hear from long time friends and ppl i grew up with, wokeness hopes i assume that those ppl don't care for me anymore because i'm not woke like they are. it has been true, at times, that ppl unfriended me because they found my expressions offensive. but that had been the case when i wanted to leave the gang life and join the Marines. that had been the case when i pursued any other path that diverged from the path that a friend was taking. woke-ism works precisely because ppl think they have the luxury of hating, despising, oppressing, and opposing someone who happens to disagree about an idea. that is, before they seek reconciliation, they will just suit up and destroy a former friend, revealing that the friendship wasn't deep, but rather superficial and disingenuous. wokeness encourages family members losing sympathy for one another - like when a person i've known all my life thinks it's somehow a divine prerogative to question my sincerity because someone out there is saying the opposite of what i'm saying and offering also incentives to embrace the opposite course. all of a sudden, the person you've known since you were kids is saying that they know more about you than the ppl who you've spent the most time with lately. wokeness is precisely that opportunistic attitude, where you forget what you already knew about morality and science and a person in exchange for the power of numbers that come with pretending not to know what a woman is or that mrs. historic first is a source of pride for your family and your community, though she had spent nearly three decades destroying your family and every family. like those ppl who say "we won't support this thing that's good for community because we dislike the person who is doing it." or else claiming "he a ray cis because he said fine ppl on both sides, so we oppose his good policies with the same inexorable hatred as we would his racist policies." that's wokeism, but it succeeds precisely because so-called friends lack the compassion and sympathy for one another to pick up the phone and check upon ppl whom they have disagreed wit. if Cicero's work on friendship is correct, then we know that he was never really friends with M. Anthony or Octavianus - for when he was out of the room, they were able to conclude that he should lose his life precisely because he was not in the room. if mr. Shirer's work about the Rise and Fall of a regime is correct, those who thought they had the luxury of ignoring ppl who disagreed only found out that they were wrong after it was too late to band together: "first they came for so-n-so, and i turned away. then that came for so-n-so, and i turned away again. finally, they came for me, and there was no one to stand by me." blessings to all readers, though i have no idea whether any human is seeing it unless a human contacts me outside of this medium. a two line note or even several paragraphs in response could be faked more readily than a two-way oral conversation.
remember in Hamlet, when the two college buddies agreed to deliver intelligence to the usurping king? and hamlet, who - having observed the two in person, and having still the benefit of a true friend, Horatio, whose passed the in person test of sincerity - was able to detect that the other two were woke - meaning compromised? and later, when the usurping king relied upon the wits of those two friends to deliver the coup de grace, the fact of Hamlet's superior logic caused them to be destroyed instead and the usurping king's plans to be foiled. the whole play of Hamlet is about hierarchies of trust that were steeped in deceit and manipulation of sentiments: Polonius invoked his filial authority to deceive his daughter Ophelia, who was compelled by “honor” to pretend not to know Hamlet’s sincerity. later, Polonius met his demise while trying to deceive the palace guards as to Hamlet’s intentions toward the Queen, his mother. Later, the usurping king manipulated Laertes’s notions of honor by feigning sincere sympathy, whereas the king himself was ultimately responsible. nonetheless, Laertes invoked the duel tradition, which Hamlet, pretending to believe that Laertes had not been duped, played along rather than wising him up. spoiler alert: both were destroyed. and remember how the spirit of the Noble King injected a spirit of retribution in Hamlet that resulted in the foreseeable demise of the Queen and Hamlet, whereby the dynasty ended altogether because nobody had the courage to get in another’s face and actually encourage righteousness. everyone had an excuse for betraying the next person based upon an agenda. and thus everyone was destroyed. animals are said not to exercise reason, but you don’t see them destroying their allies like humans do for the sake of supposedly better allies.
wokeness is not the defective ideas it churns out, but rather the process by which sentiments are feigned or fabricated to further an agenda. it’s a form of warfare by disinformation. and although so-called conservatives claim to be opponents of wokeness, they practice the same techniques of deceit, seeking to convince a cohort to support certain personals on the grounds of mutual sympathy. it was a cautionary tale in it for Trump, but he doesn’t read Shakespeare but rather permits the yes men around him to interpret all literature, symbols, and data according to what purports to be mutual interests and thereby dictate to him his own sentiments. for example, Trump did not foresee that pretending to believe birthers about Obama’s national origins would one day cause ppl to question his sincerity about wanting to help folks with the political identity that Obama was supposed to promote. likewise, his assertion that the central park juveniles should face the death penalty dovetail with Bragg’s claims that he’s a dishonest person who would destroy anyone to further his agenda. ironically, for decades prior to his run for office, Trump manipulated sentiments and amassed fame and fortune by aligning with the one-party political machine in NYC. he pretended not to notice that the machine was disenfranchising ppl in exchange for the spoils. then he flipped on them and started shutting down their rackets to rehabilitate his reputation and image. unfortunately for him and the country, the same tactics of deceit that he contributed to for decades were sufficient to produce hateful sentiments against him, which in retrospect seem more deserved than in present time. that is, when Trump announced that the condition of minorities was unacceptable and that his prison reform and anti-gang initiatives were designed to remedy the condition, the minorities were finagled into believing that the initiatives would actually hurt their interests.
so, wokeness is not essentially about wrong or right ideas, but rather sincere and insincere messaging. because i need to know whether any friend is able to see this information, be it for the purposes of being enlightened or correcting me where i’m mistaken, i’m going to keep writing until either i get a woke message about why the comments are too long, too wrong, or otherwise go against “community guidelines”; or else until a friend picks up the phone and calls me and acknowledges that failing to make that phone call would only further the cause of wokeness to the detriment of everything that friends would mutually love and seek to preserve. readers will forgive me for testing how influential the woke doctrine has become, being that either it has blocked my friends from seeing this or else it has converted them to the doctrine itself.
my phone rang a few minutes ago and i talked to a live person. that’s because my contacts in the intelligence community are not the least bit woke and agree that the assessment here is worth conducting. i’m gonna keep writing and my friends are gonna publish it to the benefit of society and righteousness. those who want to get by on deceit and pretending not to see are clearly not fans of Shakespeare. indeed, though Hamlet impugned Horatio’s “philosophy” as unimaginative and misguided, Horatio is presumably the narrator of the events, being that he is the only person who observed everything and survived to tell it. thus, he used the information he received in a superior way - never misleading anyone nor was he ever self-deceived as was Hamlet — demonstrating that he, rather than Hamlet or all those other schemers, sophists, and plotters, had the superior philosophical approach.