FUZZY THINKING (MEDITATIONS ON A HOBBYHORSE)

The woman in the lower left hand corner was not in the original negative but is in the final photo. No one knows her identity. (From the El Paso High School public pictures; excerpted from BorderZine.)


"Signals do not convey information as railway trains carry coal.  Rather we should say: signals have an information content by virtue of their potential for making selections.  Signals operate upon the alternatives forming the recipients' doubt.  They give power to discriminate amongst or select from alternatives." 
-- Sir Colin Cherry, On The Statistical Theory of Communication.


With terrible predictability, reactions in the media and online to the Elliot Rodger murders in Santa Barbara have reverted to “meditations on a hobbyhorse” fuzzy thinking and tragic, self-absorbed ranting.

  Pundits, poets, and professional scolds and defamers have taken to passionate forcing of their square peg political and cultural views into what seems to be the round hole reality of Rodger's organic madness.  

Which is to say, the self-involved, self-regarding, but sane seem disinclined to recognize that Rodger wasn’t, and want to join and unite his parents, his fantasy childhood girlfriends, the appalling (but still legal) Hunger Games franchise, and the best hobbyhorse of all, “America,” in the fetid bathwater of collective (expressly excluding themselves) guilt.

  When I worked as a very junior Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn a long time ago, I rarely heard about unsolved crimes.  There must have been some, but the crimes I handled generally involved someone “caught in the act” as in the Rodger case.  The “spontaneous exclamations” recorded by the police at the time of arrest conveyed specific statements (usually, but not always, rational) of purpose, e.g., "I needed the money,” “She burned the steak,” “I’m a dumb fuck.”  Elliot Rodger explained himself over and over.  Read "My Twisted Mind: The Story of Elliot Rodger by Elliot Rodger."  Look at the YouTube videos.

In high schools and colleges today, we are constantly assaulted by the use of the pretentious expression “critical reading.”  I think Elliot Rodger provided us more than enough material to elucidate his mad act.  It’s time to drill down on the basic text and not drag in the wheezy, sleazy Pseud's Corner bibliographical references and glosses. 

1986 Graduating class - The girl  in white, center, was not in the original negative but is in the developed photo. No one knows who she is. (From the El Paso High School public pictures; excerpted from BorderZine)


Mott The Hoople: When My Mind's Gone (Link)

THE INTERPRETER

One may be interested in the manifold interactions between the various spheres of a culture and yet reject what I have called the “exegetic method,” the method, that is, that bases its interpretations on the detection of that kind of “likeness” that leads the interpreter of the scriptures to link the passage of the Jews through the Red Sea with the Baptism of Christ.   Hegel, it will be remembered,  saw in the Egyptian sphinx an essential likeness with the position of Egyptian culture in which the Spirit began to emerge from animal nature, and carried the same metaphor through in his discussion of Egyptian religion and Egyptian hieroglyphics.  The assumption is always that some essential structural similarity must be detected which permits the interpreter to subsume the various aspects of a culture under one formula.

E.H. Gombrich, Symptoms and Syndromes chapter excerpt in In Search of Cultural History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969 

Roky Erickson: The Interpreter (Link)