animedad posted:

you weren't voted most likely to succeed in high school

i was voted most likely to succeed. i now doubt any political or economic system based on the wisdom of the crowd.

Edited by solzhesnitchin (Aug. 18, 2013 01:37:55)

getfiscal posted:

adult onset islam.

getfiscal posted:

i would probably be dead by now in most times in history (not full communism, where i will thrive)

A couple of years ago I read The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, which for me personally read as a love letter to Soviet bureaucracy. Wallace killed himself without finishing it, but the most polished and complete section is the long story narrated by a character named Chris Fogle. It's this narrative that is the most meaningful in the book, that in fact comes right out and states Wallace's purpose, which is to laud the anonymous bureaucrat. But the starting point of Fogle's story is as a failson, and his early life can be well-summed up in the excerpt below, his ultimate failson moment:

At the moment he entered, two of us were slumped on the davenport with our dirty feet up on his special coffee table, and the carpeting was all littered with beer cans and Taco Bell wrappers—the cans were my father’s beer, which he bought in bulk twice a year and stored in the utility room closet and normally drank maybe a total of two per week of—with us sitting there totally wasted and watching The Searchers on WGN, and one of the guys listening to Deep Purple on my father’s special stereo headphones for listening to classical music on, and the coffee table’s special oak or maple top with big rings of condensation from the beer cans all over it because we’d turned the house’s heat way up past where he normally allowed it to be, in terms of energy conservation and expense, and the other guy next to me on the davenport leaning over in the middle of taking a huge bong hit—this guy was famous for being able to take massive hits.

...with the three of us now slumped there all totally wasted and paralyzed, one of the guys wearing a ratty old tee shirt that actually said FUCK YOU across the chest, the other coughing out his mammoth hit in shock, so that a plume of pot smoke went rolling out across the living room towards my father—in short, my memory is of the scene being the worst confirmation of the worst kind of generation-gap stereotype and parental disgust for their decadent, wastoid kids, and of my father slowly putting down his bag and case and just standing there, with no expression and not saying anything for what felt like such a long time, and then he slowly made a gesture of putting one arm up in the air a little and looking up and said, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!,’ and then picked up his overnight bag again and without a word walked up the upstairs stairs and went into their old bedroom and closed the door. He didn’t slam it, but you could hear the door close quite firmly.

I do remember feeling like complete shit, not so much like I’d been ‘busted’ or was in trouble as just childish, like a spoiled little selfish child, and imagining what I must have looked like to him, sitting there in litter in his house, wasted, with my dirty feet on the marked-up coffee table he and my mother had saved up for and gotten at an antique store in Rockford when they were still young and didn’t have much money, and which he prized, and rubbed lemon oil in all the time, and said all he asked was that I should please keep my feet off of it and use a coaster—like, for a second or two seeing what I actually must have looked like to him as he stood there looking at us treating his living room like that. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and it felt even worse as he hadn’t yelled or squeezed my shoes about it—he just looked weary, and sort of embarrassed for both of us—and I remember for a second or two I could actually feel what he must have been feeling, and for an instant saw myself through his eyes, which made the whole thing much, much worse than if he’d been furious, or yelled, which he never did, not even the next time he and I were alone in the same room

Fogle later accidentally went to the wrong class, an accounting class being taught by a Jesuit priest. The priest delivers a sort of sermon on the heroics of monotony, of drudgery, of the low-level bureaucrat:

I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic. Please note that I have said "inform" and not "opine" or "allege" or "posit." The truth is that what you soon go home to your carols and toddies and books and CPA examination preparation guides to stand on the cusp of is- heroism.

Exacting? Prosaic? Banausic to the point of drudgery? Sometimes. Often tedious? Perhaps. But brave? Worthy? Fitting, sweet? Romantic? Chivalric? Heroic?

Gentlemen- by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood- gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism.

By which I mean true heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or tales of childhood. You are now nearly at childhood’s end; you are ready for the truth’s weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the moral danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all- all designed to appear heroic, to execute and gratify an audience. An audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality- there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth- actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care- with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk. You and the return, you and the cash-flow data, you and the inventory protocol, you and the depreciation schedules, you and the numbers.

True heroism is a priori incompatible with audience or applause or even the bare notice of the common run of man. In fact, the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine.

To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting- this is heroism. To attend fully to the interests of the client and to balance those interests against the high ethical standards of the FASB and extant law- yea, to serve those who care not for service but only for results- this is heroism. This may be the first time you’ve heard the truth put plainly, starkly. Effacement. Sacrifice. Service. To give oneself to the care of others’ money- this is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor. Here this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui- these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.

Too much, you say? Cowboy, paladin, hero? Gentlemen, read your history. Yesterday’s hero pushed back at bounds and frontiers- he penetrated, tamed, hewed, shaped, made, brought things into being. Yesterday’s society’s heroes generated facts. For this is what society is-an agglomeration of facts. But it is now today’s era, the modern era. In today’s world, boundaries are fixed and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation.

To put it another way, the pie has been made- the contest is now in the slicing. Gentlemen, you aspire to hold the knife. Wield it. To admeasure. To shape each given slice, the knife’s angle and depth of cut. A baker wears a hat, but it is not our hat. Gentlemen, prepare to wear the hat. You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed, in the codified form in which it’s apposite. You deal in facts gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. It is you- tell them that. Who ride, man the walls, define the pie. Gentlemen, you are called to account.

I can just imagine myself before a group of young comrades, just starting out in the Soviet machine, and opening this book, The Pale King, and reciting this speech, and moving them into love for the dull parts of socialism, love not just for the socialist system, but for the cogs, and their own place as well-oiled cogs in a fully functioning machine. Loving themselves. It is this speech that inspires Fogle, that gives direction to his life and leads to an eventual job at the IRS.

The portion of the book narrated by Fogle is his only significant appearance in the work. Outside that section, he is only mentioned in passing by other characters, as a square who will ramble on if you talk to him. They call him "Irrelevant Chris Fogle." He should wear that name as a badge of honor. Why do we fear what is boring? David Foster Wallace himself steps into the work to tell us:

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly… but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUV’s backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

But boredom is powerful, it is a weapon. Just moments earlier, Wallace writes, Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. Why can we not all harness boredom, become bureaucracts, and work toward full communism? Maybe we can.

Ale-coloured sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quarts and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Edited by ilmdge (Aug. 19, 2013 21:21:34)