a return to sanity?/The Grouch Reads

shall we back up a bit?.....

My previous post may have been a bit over the top. I mean, can you really responsible say, "I hate a city", or the population therein?

To be sure, once you divide a mass of people into individuals, and get to know them a bit, actual hate is difficult. Reason backwards then: musn't my experience of EPTX mostly be at the group level--that of anonymous individuals in enormous trucks with painfully bright lights?

Have you seen Hitchcock's "Psycho"? Too old school for you? Not high tech enough? I hope not. What? Is it redundant to say "H's"?

There's a scene where Janet Leigh is driving at night in a rain storm. Cars are coming towards her. But what she sees is bright glaring lights moving towards her. It is hard to imagine how she can see where she is going, how she can avoid an accident. And, at the same time, the sound track is pumping us up, increasing tension: dum--bum-bum-bum;dum-bum-bum-bum (strings I guess, accent on the first beat; with some extra sound every fourth or fifth measure--I think....don't quote me...)

Well, if you recall that scene, let me tell you: whenever I dare to drive to the grocery store in El Paso Texas, I feel like Janet Leigh in that scene in Psycho. Large trucks on either side of me. Some coming towards me. Constant stress and tension. Not pleasant. And then when one of the monsters parks beside you, you can hardly get out of your car.... yes, I do, in fact, hate cars and hate driving.... (Dyer Street, by the way, is on the top of my hate list in the crowded streets department. I think it is sheer idiocy to have so many lanes of traffic moving so quickly.... and of course the sheer size of the vehicles only aggravates the insanity......What in the world are the so-called traffic engineers thinking? I bet their math doesn't count in human psychology.....)

And speaking of bright glaring lights, have auto headlights gotten brighter in the past twenty years? It is painful for me to take a walk in EPTX. The streets are poorly lit, and the cars coming towards me seem to aim directly at my retinas with their overly bright lights, as if to boast of their pride in their imaginary achievement (I've bought an enormous monstrosity of glass, steel, and plastic, a climate destroying monster, a noisy monster, and I'm proud of it! Who are you to walk around naked in the night without the protection of a climate destroyer?!)

Let's hope this post constitutes a return to partial sanity...

as a final coup de grace, here's what I'm reading these days:

THE GROUCH READS (slowly....?poorly?.....lazily?...too rarely.....)

Robert Brenner, "the Economics of Global Turbulence".

(Verso, London and New York, 2006, originally 1998) Capitalist economies have been in decline since the 1970's. Why? A popular theory says it is the fault of workers, and their unions, for demanding higher wages. Brenner is critiquing that thesis. So far as I understand, he sees the problem in the undisciplined and chaotic nature of competition between capitalist firms.

Terry Penner, "Socratic Ethics and Socratic Psychology of Action", in Morrison ed. The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge UP 2011):

This essay is too pregnant with rich ideas for me to say much right now.... except that on Penner's interpretation Socratic ethics was then and is now truly revolutionary.... as I think of it now, given the way that Penner's Socrates rejects a special moral "ought" and the idea of purely selfless action (the latter sounding perverse to common sense in any case), I wonder whether that wouldn't give us a new handle on America's sick puritanism.....I've noticed in my USA born and bred family members a tendency to be embarrassed when they are enjoying themselves...(we're supposed to work all the time like machines).... If that thought bears up under examination, that would be very interesting because Plato (from whom we have the most philosophically interesting portrait of Socrates) was no hedonist....(ahh but Socrates' argument in the "Protagoras"????....not now, please, dear conscience....) I prove my worth by working for others even at the cost of pain or the absence of pleasure-- VERSUS I should enjoy my life and recognize that my own happiness is tied to the happiness of other people, (with the consequence that I can't purchase my happiness at the price of someone else's misery).........(With that inconclusive, but hopefully suggestive, thought I will stop....)