Anyway:
I love what I’m doing. I’m just not sure it loves me back.
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Was listening to a To the Best of Our Knowledge episode about David Foster Wallace (ttbook.org/book/remembering- … er-wallace (which was really quite moving. And I suppose what made it so moving is that the main reason for doing it was a movie coming out, End of the Tour, with Jason Segal as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as his interviewer, David Lipsky. I first set aside that I really like Eisenberg’s work then point out that the main source of my response to it was listening to Wallace in an interview and recognizing what a good choice Segal was to play him: that same soft voice as well as a compassionate and humorous personality. Everything Wallace said sounded like something Segal could possibly say. It is definitely a movie I am committed to checking out as well as Wallace’s books.
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The primary trait of the so-called “independent thinker” is their tendency to talk about being one rather than just being one. But when we look at our cultural history, we find that those whom we have deemed to be independent thinkers (those who have changed the way we think (are those who have the humility to admit that they are (or were (who they are because of those great thinkers they have absorbed. It’s pretty much like the term “genius”: one best left to historians.
This claim to being an “independent thinker” (an appeal to a socially programmed response to a socially programmed cue (becomes especially odious in the political sphere. I mean it is uncanny how, in America, we watch the same cycles occur in politics –that is while media sits around and comments on it like some kind of sporting event. We get a democrat like Clinton in only to see, in the next senate and congressional election, him faced with a republican dominated hill. And the same happened with Jr. and Obama. We have to wonder if the powers that be (the aristocracy/oligarchy of global Capitalism (are not instituting an Orwellian staged event in which government is proved to be so ineffective that we must turn to corporations for leadership.
Of course the excuse for these regular shifts we are given (via media (is the so-called independent. But in terms of politics, what the fuck does it mean to be an “independent”? You don’t know what policies you support? Are you unclear about the distinction between the democratic and republican platforms? What? If there are such people, they’re little more than pretentious morons playing on socially programmed responses to socially programmed cues to make themselves feel like they’re “above the common fray". Either that or they’re basing their choices on the personality of the politician: their media friendly qualities -which puts them decidedly among the common fray.
Nothing illustrates this better than an interview on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in which Bill O’Reilly claimed that he hadn’t decided between Obama and McCain. Really? Now how many of you really think O’Reilly voted (or might have voted (for Obama.
The claim to be an “independent thinker” is a pretense: little more.