We are Really, Really Stupid

Working my way back over the Columbia University Lit. Hum. syllabus has helped me make some positive changes in my life. I guess I should not say “back,” since I probably skipped half of the reading when I was a snotty-nosed undergrad (now I’m a snotty-nosed geezer or “overgrad”). Anyway, things are getting better.

Lit. Hum. has reminded me that reading (books, not Google search results and Wikipedia) is a good thing. It has also reminded me that it’s not okay to stuff your mind with cotton candy all the time. You can’t spend ten hours a day watching Naked and Afraid and Spongebob Squarepants and not expect to find the equivalent of termites and dry rot when you examine the walls of the house that is your mind.

I think about this when I set the DVR. Okay, shut up. Yes, it’s TV, but you can’t survive without a little TV. It’s a great thing to have when you’re doing something that doesn’t occupy your brain.

I look for good stuff to watch. I record Modern Marvels, for example. Also historical shows. I found a bunch of Shakespeare plays on Turner Classic Movies, and I recorded them. Unfortunately, you really need to read the plays before watching performances, so I added work to my life.

Last night Marv and I checked out a 1970 production of King Lear, which was on the reading list a thousand years ago in my Lit. Hum. class.

I have a soft spot for this play, because it got me one of the only two compliments I ever received from instructors at Columbia. I wrote a paper on it, and my prof. wrote “Absolutely brillant” on the first page. That felt pretty good. Better than being told to get out a couple of years later. The memory of that remark was helpful to me later in life, when people were working hard to convince me I was stupid and worthless.

Last night as I watched, I was surprised to see how much of it I remembered. I’m surprised when I remember anything. But little bits of it got away from me, and I decided I should look at the text. Naturally, it’s available free on your smartphone. Believe it or not, I found an MIT page that had the whole play. I guess MIT students do have to speak English and read an occasional book that wasn’t written by Paul Dirac or an Indian guy.

When I started reading the text, I saw that the movie omitted about half of the material. Good Lord. Who does that? It’s like the famous story about the Arab theater owner who saved time while showing The Sound of Music by cutting out the songs. Who edits Shakespeare?

I deleted the movie from the DVR. I will find another source. I’m sure the play is on Youtube or something.

Apparently, getting your Shakespeare from movies is about as smart as learning history from movies. No, Thomas Jefferson was not a transgendered black womyn who wore a Che T-shirt. George Washington wasn’t gay. JFK was not assassinated by NRA operatives recruited by Jerry Falwell. Read a book and see.

I was only a few lines into the play when I was stricken by a fresh understanding of how stupid modern Americans are.

Shakespeare lived about 400 years ago, but he knew things we do not know today. He understood human nature. He understood that the universe was ordered, and that we were not at the top of the food chain. He knew that people had to cultivate virtue, or they would be no better than rats.

We don’t know these things today. We’ve been taught that “Question Authority” is a commandment. Most people are too stupid to question authority. That’s why it’s authority. If we all did what we thought was right, 99% of us would spend our entire lives screwing up. Oh, wait. That’s actually happening.

The writers we admire today are idiots compared to Shakespeare. They entertain, but they don’t enlighten. Take Hemingway. He was a fake; a poser. He was absorbed in convincing everyone he was the strongest, manliest man who ever manned. He rubbed his phony manliness in our faces. He talked about eating mussels alive and watching them squirm when he put lemon juice on them. He talked about the “comical” way horses looked when they were gored in the bull ring and their intestines dragged behind them.

No one really thinks that’s comical. You could have the male hormones of a thousand goats and Charlie Sheen and still not find it comical.

Where is the wisdom in that? Nowhere. If you want to be a poser, Hemingway and other posers (like Kerouac) are wonderful guides. They will help you grow up to be a little boy who thrives on denial. You can be the grown equivalent of the little boy who gets up and dances on his desk to get the teacher’s attention.

I remember that kid. His name was John Simmons.

Hemingway tried his he-man routing on boxer Gene Tunney, who got tired of trying to warn Hemingway off and gave him a carefully administered “little liver punch” that took all the color out of him and put an end to his manly act.

Shakespeare extolled things like honesty, humility, altruism, and knowing one’s place. That would never fly today.

Most people don’t understand Shakespeare. For example, they think Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful love story about two crazy kids who told their uptight parents to jam it and enjoyed a tragic but beautiful romance. That’s not true. To Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet were immature, selfish brats who ruined their own lives and wrecked their families.

In King Lear, the King hands his kingdom over to two nasty, insincere daughters who refuse to flatter him, and he disowns the honest daughter who really loves him yet refuses to stroke his ego. Here is what his advisor, Kent, says, after Lear warns him that his own anger is like an arrow about to leave the bow:

Let it fall rather, though the fork invade
The region of my heart: be Kent unmannerly,
When Lear is mad. What wilt thou do, old man?
Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound,
When majesty stoops to folly.

Here is what Kent would say today. “Yo. It’s cool. No judging here.”

Kent is saying he would rather be shot with an arrow than fail to correct Lear and by correcting, help him avoid disaster. He says an honorable person must speak plainly when the king is crazy. He says power should not bow to flattery.

He’s giving Lear a lecture on classic morals and good sense. Pericles and Marcus Aurelius probably would have agreed, although they lived in the distant past, when people were supposedly backward. Kanye West would disagree; he wouldn’t even understand the words. And the state gave him a free education.

Lear is a fool (oddly, his fool is not), and he can’t receive the advice. He uses his sword to threaten Kent, who says:

Do:
Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
Upon thy foul disease. Revoke thy doom;
Or, whilst I can vent clamour from my throat,
I’ll tell thee thou dost evil.

That’s genius. It sums up foolishness in a nutshell. “Kill the physician and pay the disease.” That’s exactly what stupid people do. They kill prophets. They shoot messengers. They hate good parents who correct them.

Look what Lear says when Cordelia explains that she has to be truthful instead of flattering him:

Let it be so; thy truth, then, be thy dower

Here is a fool speaking wisdom he doesn’t understand. He took away her inheritance, and he thinks that preferring the truth to money is imprudent and sure to lead to disaster. He has everything backward; in Shakespeare’s world, the penalty for doing evil isn’t poverty; the price is that you become an evil person. The reward for virtue is virtue, as the proverb says. The truth really is her dowery, but he doesn’t get it.

The play is packed with stuff like this. So are his other works. It’s sad, because modern Americans can’t receive it. We prefer pride, mockery, greed, and every type of sensual indulgence. Our heroes are the imbeciles in Hollywood and on MTV. You could never get a significant percentage of us to accept Shakespeare’s values. We swim gladly in a giant septic tank, swallowing as much as we can and thinking it’s champagne.

Shakespeare isn’t perfect; he’s not a prophet or apostle. He was a big proponent of fornication. If you look at his love poems and replace “will” with its real 1500s meaning, “genitalia,” this becomes clear. But he was way ahead of you and me. Maybe in his better moments he sincerely promoted values he himself could not live up to.

Wisdom is not accumulated through experience. At least, not enough to save us. It’s inherited. The people who lived before us built it up, and we can have it for nothing, if we will accept it. When we insist on proving everything by experience, we burden ourselves with the impossible task of recreating, in one lifetime, what others developed over millennia.

We don’t just eat candy and garbage; we eat infectious excrement, in big, deep gulps. It’s good to realize it’s excrement, but then you have to deal with the pain of being unable to convince other people.

I used to live with the sensation that I was under water, maybe a foot below the surface, always able to see the air above me, but never able to reach it. That’s gone; it left me quietly without announcing its departure. I believe it was caused by my immersion in poisonous worldly ideas.

In the Bible, water is words. Words are many things; they are ideas, urges, statements, denials, promises, and threats. The Sea of Galilee symbolized the world, which is inundated in the words of Satan and the people he controls. The water of this world is foolishness and poison.

When you only have the world to listen to, you’re under the surface of the sea of words. You are the tail, not the head. You are under the power of blind men and inferior loser spirits. When you start to hear from the Holy Spirit, and you spend time praying in tongues, the word of God flows through you.

The Bible says water flows from his throne, and the Holy Spirit’s flow within you is living (running) water. In the Bible, stagnant water is bad; it’s not clean, and it can’t be used for baptism.

I suppose the flow of living water is the reason why I no longer have the sensation of being submerged.

Jesus walked on water, not to impress people, but to show that he was above the backward thoughts of men and devils. He was dominant because he listened to God, not man. Noah was lifted by water that drowned the wicked. It protected Noah but killed his enemies.

Whether the water was death or life depended entirely on a person’s attitude toward it. Noah had the right attitude. His neighbors had the wrong attitude, and it made the water death to them.

Modern entertainment is a swamp of stagnant water. Modern culture is a poison.

It’s no wonder singers and actors do so much harm. Satan was a musician, and he’s also an actor. He plays the role of God every day.

It’s funny that in 2016, two thousand years after the crucifixion, there was no human being available to tell me this stuff. Surely the apostles knew it, but the people who followed them spat on their inheritance and refused to take it. Because they didn’t inherit good things, we couldn’t inherit anything good from them. So we stagger through life blinded, until the Holy Spirit comes to us and gives us what we should have been able to receive from our parents and neighbors.

If you’re too caught up in low-quality secular entertainment, take heart. There are alternatives. All you have to do is change channels and open books.