House of Eratosthenes

In less than two weeks we’re having a contest with our friends, the liberals, to figure out who gets to have influence for the next two years. There are those who attach unusual importance to this election, and there are others who are tired of the biannual drumbeat-of-superlative and refuse to attach any. I’m in between the two. But, like many others, I’m struggling to figure out who these people are. More precisely, what exactly it is they want.

Their answer to rising prices is abortions. Who are these people? After spending a good chunk of a lifetime trying to figure it out, I’ve gained some better insight by looking within. Music. Music helps me to understand the liberals.

There is this passage in Romeo and Juliet by Tchaikovsky that fills me with shame when I hear it. It’s the part I should have practiced more when I was playing it, and I didn’t do the necessary practicing so I was one of those mediocre players who did the “Random Bullshit Go!!” thing when the time came, counting on others to cover for me. Tsk, tsk. It’s actually a common practice among musicians who are not great. It is here, time index 13:07. Yes, I can see the problem: Just two seconds earlier, and ten seconds later, I know exactly what to do and I sound okay. At least, back in the day. So this was just a few moments of muddled mess, and after that it was over. My sin seemed small, and so the necessary practicing was just something I never got around to doing. But you know what? That makes it all the more egregious. In fact, this right here is the difference between a musician who should stick with it, and one who should give up and move on to something else. The practicing I needed to do, to make things better, was very slight. My sense of commitment must have been beneath even that.

Other pieces, other passages, I might have been good enough to play solo but I didn’t ask because I knew what the answer would be: You’re good enough to play solo all of it, or else none of it. Do the practicing you know you should be doing or else don’t waste anybody else’s time. For this reason, I never asked. In fact, I stopped playing. Anything. I’m not right for music. The years that came after I had this realization, I have spent concentrating on things I’m good enough to do without hiding behind anyone. I’m still not perfect, not built to be; but I’ve enjoyed better satisfaction that way, better life-fulfillment, and I have no regrets. I don’t do what we call “fake it ’til you make it” anymore.

But a very long time ago, in other pursuits, I did. And so I can start to understand.

How does this correlate to liberals? It’s got to do with living location and population density. Some of us congregate in tightly packed cities, others of us spread out over the sparsely populated farmland. A high population density offers an option of hiding behind others, to those who need such a thing. To the substandard performers. The softies.

The blue-state fantasy is that wisdom should proliferate outward, from the tightly packed cities, invading the sparsely populated farmland. This isn’t evident to the casual observer, because there’s too much emphasis placed on what should be taught. The truth is that the liberals don’t care. They want to do the teaching, they want us rubes to do the learning. That’s their wish. It’s a wish that can never come to fruition, and that’s because of the way people are made. When the population density is high, and it becomes possible to play piss-poor because you didn’t practice enough, hiding behind others, pretending you know what you’re doing when you really don’t — that’s what people will do. You can’t do that out in the farmland. It’s not merely a matter of being happy alone, or being tough or big or strong. You have to know what you’re doing so you don’t need to hide behind anyone else. It’s a process of gestation. An organism that gestates in a tough environment, reaches maturity with a hardness that’s missing from things that grow up in kinder, more forgiving environments. Since this attribute of kindness to the growing organism and forgiveness of any missteps, is linked to pretending, there is a truth-fiction dichotomy linked to the hard-soft dichotomy.

Sisyphus They’re soft. They hide behind each other.

We’re hard. There are consequences involved in our mistakes, so if we don’t know what we’re doing, we go get help. And then we figure out what we’re doing before we do anymore.

They pretend. They recite talking points they don’t really understand, like “Sure there was fraud, but not enough to change the results,” or “No human is illegal” or “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”

We don’t pretend. We can’t. And we can’t compress the work we do into a slogan.

They don’t define…really, anything.

We have to define everything. If we don’t, someone gets hurt.

Big-city-center denizens who pretend to know what they’re doing when they really don’t, hiding behind others, can’t invade the prairie, orchard or farmland. They may want to, but they’re not suited. It’s not because they’re stupid and we’re smart, or because they quit too easily and we’re stubborn. It’s the hard-and-soft thing, period, full stop. It would be talcum penetrating diamond. The softer material is going to have to yield. It’s physics. How do you argue with physics?

That’s the inherent futility of liberalism, in America, in a nutshell. Soft people who don’t know what they’re doing, pretending to know everything, seeking to impose their way of doing things on others who know what they’re doing. Softness trying to invade hardness. Every time it doesn’t work, and it never will, they get more and more grumpy and upset. Then they try to use their anger as an ancillary tool, to do the invading they’ve already learned they can’t do. Now you understand American politics. This is why we’re being told, with some legitimacy, every two years that “This election is the most important one of our lifetime.” It’s the liberals trying, once again, to invade the hardness with their softness, just like Sisyphus in the afterlife struggling to push his boulder up the mountain, only to see it roll back down again. That’s their struggle, and ours. It lacks even the faintest prospect of success, but they lack the understanding to realize this, so around and around we go.

Their champion is a senile old man who doesn’t know where he is, who likes to eat ice cream.

Boy, you nailed it on this one. Hard vs. soft. Knowledge vs. Bullshit.
I have fantasies of bringing them to a farm, and saying, “There’s this animal in the field that has horns and identifies as a female. Milk him.”
- rau | 06/03/2023 @ 09:49

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