haiku 19 Feb 2018

Organized by Fate
Directed but by Chaos
Mankind’s course contorts

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

on our common Nazi heritage

(I had begun to write a piece lambasting Americans for our shameless and widespread use of technologies developed and perfected by the Nazis, until I realized that every person living in today's industrialized societies benefits from the murder, chaos, fear, and hatred perpetuated by those horrible people; this article has changed significantly since its inception.)

As persons living in this modern world, we benefit from and use a variety of methods and technologies that were discovered by persons known as Nazis. Many of the advances we so readily use and accept today would be impossible without the wars fought during the 20th century, wars fought specifically to counter the threat posed by the Nazis and their allies. Therefore, any individual using and otherwise benefiting from such things as highly mechanized production, the use of electric-hybrid batteries, the interstate highway system, and air-conditioning (without which neither jet-flight nor high-rise buildings would be feasible), such persons are accomplice to every atrocity and horrendous action (including the genocidal bombings at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Dresden) that made that technology possible. Those people who jettison from their lives all vestiges of this modern world, who live, wear, and eat only such things as grow in Nature, or those who kill themselves outright, these people are free of the shameful burden of Nazism; the rest of us live with the blood of thousands of innocent people on our hands. I, the author, am just as guilty as the rest of mankind.

Without the Nazis, our modern world would not amount to much. (I applaud the efforts put forth by the brave and industrious women and men in America and her allied countries who worked on and mastered the methods and ideas – rocketry, the use of mass media in propaganda, diesel engines – pioneered by Germans during the 1930s and 40s; a spade, however, shall be called a spade.) American astronauts traveled to the moon on rockets designed and built by Werner Von Braun, who was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and a slave-master at Peenemünde. Without Nazis, the citizens of the world would not enjoy the privilege of traveling rapidly, and comfortably, in jet-powered aircraft, nor would we likely have developed radar or sonar technologies, without which air and naval travel become frightening and inefficient. If not for the Nazis, Albert Einstein's course in life would have been slightly altered, resulting in unknowable changes to the space-time-continuum (if, of course, one believes in such nonsense as the space-time-continuum), and he and his ideas may have benefited some country other than this, our own. And, to conclude this stress-inducing and poorly-argued piece, without the Nazis we would not likely have allowed nationalistic, fear-mongering, borderline-racist politicians such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin to gain such prominence on the national stage, and we would likely have found it far harder to neglect and to ignore our shared, common virtues of generosity, humility, and kindness, virtues that counter-act feelings of self-loathing, hatred, contempt, and dissatisfaction.

There is nothing more evil than hatred, and there are few dangers as great as to rely solely on mass media for one's daily news. Therefore, please turn off your TV, switch off your radio, burn your morning paper, and spend some time enjoying life's simple pleasures, such as breathing. If we are not careful, however, that too may soon join the growing list of Things Only Terrorists Do.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on disc golf & Taoism

  The game of disc golf (in which players, in the fewest number of tosses, throw discus-like plastic discs from a designated point to a specially-designed metal catch basket) is in certain aspects akin to the elusive tenets of Taoism. Similar to the enduringly simple (but all-encompassing) message that Lao Tzu bound up in the Tao Teh Ching, the game of disc golf is at root an easy task, one that increases in difficulty, however, in tandem with the player's internal stress levels.

  The more pressure the player puts on herself to make, say, a difficult shot into the wind around a copse of trees, the harder that shot, and her subsequent shots, will be. She will be trying to force her body to move so that the disc goes in a very specific direction, but, from her rigid posture and from her attempted dominance over her body, her shot will fly foul. As in Taoism, so in disc golf we must always remember that any attempt to subjugate the Universe to one's own will is bound to backfire, and the most coveted things (such as making that nasty headwind bank-shot) are the hardest to get. (Therefore, the Tao teaches us not to covet anything, as coveting leads invariably to ruin.) The more the player pushes to make the shot the way she thinks the shot should be made, the less she is tapping into her body's inherent ability to not only make the shot, but to do it with finesse and without pride.

  The effective disc golfer is he who can put his ego aside. The great disc golfer she who can revert to a pure animal state by incorporating her ego into herself (thus neutralizing it), a pure animal state that allows her to throw her disc far and straight, her body moving in its own curious rhythms, her mind freed from sadness and joy, her entire being focused solely on the fraction of time at which the disc leaves her calloused fingers. In my humble opinion, this is the magical, secret point that forms the center of the teachings of Taoism: rather than telling you to worship in such way to that god at this time of year, the Tao Teh Ching focuses on reducing you to your most basic and fundamental forms, forms that compel you to act with complete impartiality, intent only on breaking time from This Moment to The Next. Taoism helps you to clear your mind of all the clutter and pollution of modern society; with the Tao, you can more readily realize your deep, latent potential: you can learn to express it. The Tao focuses on deeds, not words, on completing tasks with skill and aplomb but without taking pride in them, or letting them influence your emotional state.

  So is it, at times, with the sport of disc golf. The less thought-interference there is during the throwing phase, the more fluid your body motion. The less the ego is involved, the greater the chance that you will make that daring sidewinder shot around that group of bushes. So keep on diminishing and diminishing until there is nothing left – the Tao is like a bellows that is never made empty, even though it seems hollowed out. The more you draw from it, the harder it works; the less emphasis you put on your own personal achievement, the more you operate for the good of the world, an island of calm in a sea of chaos. One of the trickiest parts, however, is learning not to covet the Tao. To covet anything is to destroy it, so toss your discs with quiet competence, without ever yearning for success, your only desire a state of primal simplicity.

  Your body knows what to do. Now all you have to do is get your mind out of the way.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp