Advance Wars

For whatever reason, the Advance Wars games on Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS really bring me comfort.  Watching the goofy plot unfold, solving the little puzzles, and commanding my forces successfully always brings a smile to my face and clarity to my day.  It is inexplicable really.  Advance Wars games, while good, are certainly not masterpieces.  However, it must be that they remind me of some of the military history and military strategy stuff that I read as a teenager.  Back then, Dynasty Tactics 1-2 on PS2 had the same effect on me.  Since I have already beaten the two GBA Advance Wars games, I think that I need to find another game or series of games which has this effect on me.  Shining Force is a great series, but I don't find it relaxing, particularly since in Shining Force II on Genesis you have to do so much navigation. 

In summation, whenever you're feeling a disoriented and devoid of direction, play a little Advance Wars.

Summer As A Period of Transition

When you are in college, especially as a graduate student, every summer is a period of transition.  It is sometimes restful, sometimes productive, and always tangential to completion.  Whether it is classwork, teaching assignments, or part of the long slog through a thesis or dissertation, what was true in May will be different in August.  If you jumped ship to find a better fit between your M.A. and PhD as I am doing, you have the additional burden of having to move and adjust to a new city and new department.  Unfortunately, T.A. pay isn't exactly generous and doesn't provide for much of the year.  So, I usually spend long portions of my summer breaks at home.

Since my mom's area of residence is bereft of decent females, summers in the dating arena are really more like periods of exile than anything else.  Influxes of new girls come over the summer, but since they are moved in and ready to go out by the time that I get back, I don't feel like I'm missing out on all that much.  Those of my colleagues fortunate enough to have a long-term relationship have many advantages in graduate school life, not the least of which is having a "home" that is where they need to be to actually accomplish anything. 

I've never been attached to structure, discipline, hierarchy, schedules, or any of that other bullshit.  Or at least that is how I feel until I find myself sitting at home waiting impatiently for the days to tick by so that I can get back to my life.  Sure, I can get a little bit of work done here and there and I can catch up with my family.  Yet, it is hard to feel like a real adult living a life of any consequence if you are in your mid-20's and having to spend three months of the year beholden to your mother's schedule. 

Summer used to be my favorite season when I was a kid.  That was when my birthday fell, it was when I could stay up late playing video games, and it was when I could reboot.  Now, being forced to reboot is no longer as desirable as it once was.  In the future, I know that I'll value summer breaks so that I can get research done or recalibrate my lectures, but right now, I'm in a situation where being away from school means being removed from my arena of action. 

As a kid, summer was when I was in my element but now it is when I'm little more than a disoriented and disgruntled observer on autopilot waiting for a rather dull movie to mercifully end.  Things still happen in these periods of transition, but I am not a primary figure.  When things go wrong, I have no means by which to act to improve the situation.  As an academic, I could not possibly be more out of my element when I am faced with the uninteresting details of mundane existence.  Without texts to interpret or papers to write, my arena of action is closed.  The skills that I developed at school, such as being able to give historical analysis, suddenly become irrelevant at best and a liability at worse if I try to seek out some intelligent conversation.

So, I'm thinking that I need to find ways to stay closer to my natural habitat in the future.  When Ma Jian left Beijing to explore Buddhist sites on the outskirts of China, he eventually realized that he belonged in a place with bookshops, hospitals, and women.  For me, when I'm not near a university, the bookshops don't carry anything I haven't read and there aren't too many women around who I can relate to enough to form a relationship.  I've known it for a while, but I have been loathe to acknowledge that I feel completely worthless outside of my own sphere.  Either that, or I am just trying to devise ways to avoid wasting portions of the best years of my life in Rural Fuckopolis.  Who knows?   

Ayn Rand and Government

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”    -John Rogers

The intellectual and moral failings of Rand's writings in their own right aside, I would like to share something about Ayn Rand's own relationship with government in her life.  What follows is just a brief synopsis of a few different articles that I found about Ayn Rand's life and thought.

Since she came of age after the Bolshevik Revolution, she was able to acquire a university education since women were now allowed to attend universities.  The Bolsheviks also subsidized the cost of the theater, so Rand was able to attend many live performances which she could have never afforded otherwise due to the poverty of her family.  In America, she found herself unemployed like many aspiring writers during the Great Depression.  Luckily for her, the Works Progress Administration was putting on performances of plays by new playwrights to keep both the actors and writers from starving to death.  One of Rand's plays was put on at government expense and she was paid $10 each time it was performed.  When she was researching various topics while preparing her novels, she received free advice and materials from the New York City public library system.  Later in life, she drew and seemingly relied on Social Security.

To backtrack just a bit to talk about her "research".  In a 1957 interview shortly after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand claimed that she was the most original thinker alive and didn't owe her thoughts to anyone, except perhaps for Aristotle.  None of her ideas were Aristotelian in the least, but some of her notions of the god-like captains of industry do seem a bit Nietzchean.  Rand could have been deluded, could have been a liar, or she could have been functionally illiterate since she never seems to have understood anything that she read.  Perhaps government failed her after all. 

The Culture of the South

I would like to broach the issue of whether the peculiar(ly fucked) culture of the South contributes to or even causes personality flaws.  I am neither a psychologist nor someone with some special qualification who can approach the issue at anything other than an amateur level.  However, I would like to share a few thoughts and observations, which I think get at something like the truth even if they do so in an imperfect manner.

In the South, gender roles are more pronounced and more a part of one's personality than in other parts of the country.  Men tend to be less vocal and less interested in high culture and are expected to be unofficial mechanics.  Women, on the other hand, need not be smart if they are pretty.  If a woman is smart, then she need not be that smart since there is no competition and her looks will turn her into the Hypatia of her office or class.  Relationships between the sexes seem to have two basic dynamics: 1) the traditional patriarchal arrangement where you have a dominant male and a female who is there as a trophy and sexual partner and 2) a situation where you have a woman who is a product of a reasonably civilized environment, i.e. she grew up in a town or city, linked with a man who looks and acts like a product of the Neolithic period.  Obviously, there are innumerable people and relationships which in no way resemble what I'm talking about, but if you have been to the South, particularly to North Carolina, then you will understand.

Women in the South have a complex relationship with learning and intelligence.  On the one hand, they claim to have a sufficient amount of both, whether they have an advanced degree or wear wife-beaters while they are buying cigarettes at Wal-Mart at 2:30 A.M.  On the other hand, most of the them do not have more than a superficial interest in any subject, with the possible exception of whatever it is that they do for a living.  For most women in the South, having a career means aiming to become a nurse.  Obviously, not everyone can be a nurse and most of them fail to realize this dream.  However, it is the dream itself which is most revealing.  Nursing is predominantly a female profession and may actually be the profession most geared towards submissive women living happily in a patriarchy.  The average woman in the South reads more than her male companion, but does not read anything which gives her a mental edge.  She reads Nicolas Sparks, he reads the sports section in the local paper and between the two of them they learn nothing day after day, year after year.

While women can be smart without it being a social handicap (so long as they are passably attractive), men are seen as weak, distant, other, and effeminate if they display signs of intelligence of an academic nature.  Sure, boys and men can be mechanically gifted or even good at math or a computer whiz without incurring too much opprobrium.  However, read a book above a 6th grade level and your sexuality is up for question.  Given this social pressure, many southern males have a withdrawn attitude and rarely share their opinions about anything other than brands of motor oil and NASCAR drivers.

Women in the South tend to do most of the talking and they tend to go about saying nothing in the most verbose manner imaginable.  It seems like anytime you run into a Southern, white family woman, Archie Bunker's comments on women are vindicated in some small way.  The attitude that Southern women have that they are all smart leads to some incredibly stupid moments.  I once went on a date with a girl who was pretty enough to be a young Stepford wife and dumb enough to draw a check from the government.  She was an Elementary Education major but with a focus in History, so you'd think that she would know at least a little bit.  Well, no.  As we were talking about our classes that semester, she complained about having to read "chapter books" for a class on children's literature.  A little later, I mentioned the Gulf War as a research interest of the professor in whose class we had met.  She wrinkled her brow thoughtfully and asked, "was the Gulf War in the 50's?"  It was at that point that the date was effectively over for me.  I imagine that she is busy educating the youth of America right now, though she is probably sparing them the horrors of having to read the dreaded books with an organizational structure not centered around large illustrations. 

To get back to my main point, I believe that the elements of Southern culture that I have outlined above contribute to or cause some of the following Southern phenomena:

1.) Religiosity- believing rather than thinking is easy when thinking makes you feel like thinking is the mark of a terrible person.  Then again, perhaps religiosity causes the aversion to thinking.  It is a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
2.) Bad relationships- since legitimately smart women in the South may not come to appreciate that intellectual equality is a good thing to have in a relationship, she may unwittingly get stuck in a marriage with children with Captain Dipshit and not realize that she can have things in common with a dude until she meets someone at work or something.  Divorce ensues...
3.) Lack of cultural events- small and medium-sized towns in the South are cultural deserts.  Sure, they have running water, the internet, and (greasy, unhealthy) restaurants, but there really isn't anything to do if you aren't into cars and guns.  Southern cities are liveable, but have less per their population size than cities elsewhere in the country.
4.) Southern women tend to be extremely self-centered (not necessarily selfish though) and brag about themselves, even the smart ones.  I have met some interesting, attractive, intelligent, and accomplished women in the South, yet they somehow have all been afflicted by these traits which are the hallmarks of the Southern woman.  Women in the South "toot their own horns" more often than I find appropriate or appealing.  It was like Christmas for me when I learned that this kind of behavior is not as common in the Mid-West and other parts of the country. 
5.) Southern men are emotionally crippled.  They can express paranoia about black helicopters and they can also express their intentions to rebel against this, that, or the other, but we all know they won't ever do shit.  When it comes to sharing their feelings, they have no idea what they feel nor any clue how to express that.  In a culture that values male stoicism, you produce people who are isolated in certain ways from those around them.
6.) Southern politicians tend to be either pernicious to the national interest or benignly useless.  While I am inclined to think that the current domination of the South by corporations and the lack of unions accounts for much of the higher level of inequality in the South, I also think that the cultural disposition of the people in the region heavily contributes to this state.
7.) The Southern myth that only people in the South are polite.  In the South, women especially depend on mutual reinforcement for their self-esteem since they all have to be both beautiful and brilliant.  People who are less engaged in the fantasy (we are all in it to some degree, I imagine) must seem antisocial to a degree.
8.) Southern pride.  If you are around people who are effectively LARPing a world with strict hierarchies in reality but with an egalitarian distribution of intelligence and culture to anyone who but claims it, then you are invested in the defense of that system.  The elite of the South have always exploited poor whites by appealing to their sense of pride by giving the status of being white or being independent or some such non-sense which blinds them to the reality that they are an expendable labor force whose jobs, political habits, and blind focus on their own meaningless and repetitive lives allows the Southern elite to ride roughshod over them and to drive down wages nationwide. 

All regions of the United States and all countries in the world have their own problems.  However, the South's are the most interesting and frustrating to me personally.  I grew up mostly in the South and yet for the most part I find that I fit in much better in other parts of the country even when I have zero connection with the place.  For a place that is supposedly so friendly, it yields few friends for anyone who is intellectually curious or suffers from some other form of individuality.  This has been a fairly disorganized rant, but it's a blog post and it's late so it's good enough for now.