A PACK OF WILD CHIHUAHUAS

That’s all; I just wanted to say that and picture it. O my goodness, nipped to death!

That’s cause we’ve got a chihuahua named Chi Chi.


CHILDREN’S TV AND ITS SHORTCOMINGS

Was watching Barney yesterday morning. One segment had to do with playing together and playing nicely together. Now isn’t that one of the platitudes parents always try to inculcate in their children with very little success? If you ask me, children are born with more or less aggressive or cooperative personalities. These traits are genetic. You can see it in kittens and puppies too.

But if you make cooperation a virtue and praise it until it runs out of children’s ears, what of the introvert who mostly likes to be alone or the little damn bully I was who didn’t like or trust anyone? Those poor kids trying to play nice with me sure got some surprises. When Mr. Wilson many years later met me at the imported food store where I was working my way through college, I was surprised when he said, “Gosh, I thought you’d be in prison by now.” But I guess I shouldn’t have been.

After watching that Barney segment, I guess I know why I’ve had so much contempt for the middle-class life and its values. Play nice now, world. . . . All those zillions of shrill mothers throughout history, warning junior to play nice in Jesus’s name, or whatever god they appeal to, and I can’t see the world’s people one whit less violent and cruel to one another. Talk about carrying water in a holey bucket!


KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE FOREWARN US

Lately, I’ve been warning that America is about 200 years behind Europe in sophistication, manners and mores and that we might pass through a fascist phase of our own. We’re close to that now if Bush can imagine America has the unilateral right to just do anything it likes in the world community. Most interesting, how Kierkegaard warns us about the press nearly 150 years ago and worries, it seems to me, about intellectual chaos. “The fact that an anonymous author by the help of the press can day by day find occasion to say (even about intellectual, moral, and religious matters) whatever he pleases to say, and what perhaps he would be very far from having the courage to say as an individual; that every time he opens his mouth . . . he at once is addressing thousands of thousands; that he can get ten thousand times ten thousand to repeat after him what he has said—an with all this nobody has any responsibility. . . .” Kierkegaard also seems to dislike the “voting” public. (Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre, pp. 97-98)

Then I find Nietzsche jumping into the fray too. “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently; the advent of nihilism. . . . Our whole European culture is moving for some time now, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end. . . .” (Existentialism. . . , pp. 130-131)

Nietzsche was prescient about Hitler and about the wars coming. The 200 hundred years he speaks of still have between 5 and 8 more decades to go.
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On Berlin, Tracey Ullman says, "I wish they hadn't taken the wall down. Now it's full of East Germans wearing Versace shirts."