July 12th through 14th, Whether the Weather . . . in 2016

The night of the 12th was fine. I had tea ceremony and it went pretty well. I didn’t do as well as I expected in some areas, I did better in others. Little by little, I’m getting better, and that’s what matters. Beyond that, nothing of interest happened. Kitchen Inoue was delicious. That’s . . . about it.
July 13th was fun. I was at Riusui. I love the first and second graders there. Nene-chan brought out the folding fan and kept holding onto it all through class. Needless to say, I adore that girl. Also her whole freaking gaggle of siblings. Also just about everybody else. We had fun.
The 3rd and 4th grade class was fun. Chu-chan won another fan (which made Nene jealous later on during recess) and a little boy won a gold medal. It was the last elementary day before I go back to the US, so I figured that I could stand to be a bit generous. The 5th and 6th graders are awful, though. At least, several of them are. The teacher keeps me on a short leash and doesn’t use me well, and he lets the kids get away with a lot. I tried to shut one down, but it’s hard to be effective when you don’t have the requisite vocabulary to shut somebody down. Also when it’s been made clear that you have no authority. Impotent rage. It’s just the worst.
At lunch, I ate with the 5th and 6th graders. They weren’t awful, which indicates that maybe the teacher talked to them. I also started passive-aggressively shunning the biggest troublemakers, which may be more effective than direct confrontation.
Lunch was fun. However, Nene’s kidnapping of me resulted in some drama because everybody wants me, but she seems to have really determined that I’m her’s. But so have a few other students. It’s difficult to be peacemaker when you’re only about 20% sure of what’s going on at any point in time.
At the end of the time, I went back to the BOE and tried to maintain sanity. My legs are going crazy from lack of use these days. Knees are bothering me. I think it may also very well be the awful weather.
I went to Kitchen Inoue for dinner, but they were slammed so I ended up with a slightly smaller version of their ginger stir fry (which is delicious). Well, I think they were slammed. There was, evidently, a private party in the back (there often is), and, of course, I didn’t get to see it. While there, or shortly thereafter, I finished the biography of John Tyler. Which was much more interesting than I’d thought.
I didn’t do Eikaiwa or Dancing this week. I feel a migraine coming on, and I’m hoping to avoid it by taking things as easy as I can. I talked to Shige-papa on the phone for a while and we tried to schedule a time to meet, but, it’s very difficult because he and I both seem to have crazy schedules. I also talked to a guy that I know from JET about maybe joining Pathfinder. That could be rather interesting. One hopes.
Today I’m at Miyachu. It’s pouring. The Sendai is so flooded that the tip of the little stone tablet on the island that saved my life during the swim is only a few inches above the water. It’s weird to see trees that are just bobbing leaves a bit further into the center. I wish that it’d stop raining, briefly, tonight around 7 so that I could walk around the river. It’s beautiful. I wish I had a bike to better see the riverbanks. I’m allegedly with Ebihara, but, in reality, I’m with Tateishi. To nobody’s surprise. Tomorrow, I’ll go to some even in Kagoshima that deals with the summer camp where I’ll be teaching. Fun times, one hopes.
I feel very bored and restless. I suppose that’s why I’ve been playing Civ. It’s to quiet my mind. I’m tired of reading, and the rain is making me go a bit stir crazy. I really want a desk and chair for my computer. I’m amazed at how much easier it is to focus on a real computer on a real desk with a real chair. The tablet on the school desk, or the laptop on my kotatsu, just isn’t the same. I need to clean, but it’s hard to make myself do it. I should accomplish a bit of that tonight.
The weather is miserable. Yesterday it would go back and forth between rain and non rain multiple times per hour. Today is pouring down rain with periodic lightning. We’ll see what happens. I’m hoping no migraine comes up.
I felt like I had more to write, but nothing is coming up. I’m hot and my knees hurt. It’s hard to focus. After the break between first and second hours, I’ll try walking a bit. Possibly. The humidity is just offensive, and it’s too hot as well, though the sheer quantity of rain is cooling things a bit.
Hopefully I’ll have something of interest to say eventually.
Oh, that’s what it was.
John Tyler.
Obviously it’s impossible to really like him as he is our only traitor president. Joining the south during The Civil War was a dick move of historical proportions, and nothing can salvage that. However, I do wonder at just how misinformed I was about his administration. While he was a one term, accidental, president, he was hardly a lame duck. He got a lot done. However, like another president who comes to mind, he expanded executive authority WAY beyond what was legal or acceptable because he couldn’t get Congress to do what he wanted.
I’m fascinated with a few things that this biography has brought up, or has brought to mind. One is the comments by people who lived around the war years. The idea was, “I know all of the southern rhetoric sounds idiotic and nonsensical, but it TOTALLY made sense at the time.” We’re all vaguely aware of that, but to see how many people went on record saying that The Civil War completely re-framed people’s basic conception of reality is pretty impressive, honestly. I think one of the reasons why young people today as so quick to condemn . . . everybody . . . is that they can’t put themselves in the positions of these people. The self evident morality of today was the blasphemy of yesterday and will be the heresy of tomorrow. It’s really interesting to see the revolution of thinking that transpired in people’s minds. John Quincy Adams, for being a generation removed from the founders, almost counts as one. He’d been there with his father for a lot of the major events, and he’d been a part of the Washington administration. The historical break between him and Andrew Jackson is just interesting to watch. It really was a new world coming into being. The Jacksonian revolution really was something quite profound. I feel like Jefferson’s self proclaimed “revolution” was more of a Pepsi/Coke kind of thing, while Jackson really did bring about, essentially, a new nation. Van Buren helped to bring about this new direction. Harrison was carried along by it. Tyler . . . he was interesting because he was a part of this new world but saw himself as a continuation of the old. This mental strain resulted in a lot of political errors that can best be attributed to self delusion. He wanted to play a role. But the theater was two towns over, and that show had closed a week before. Yet, in his mind, there he was: On stage, with a picked audience, playing the part he’d always wanted.
I really want to try to understand the southern thinking during this time period. To me, their beliefs are self evidently wrong. However, to millions, they weren’t. I think that maybe reading a biography of Calhoun would be good for me. Every time I see him come up in every biography, he’s a prick, a dick, and a waste of carbon. Yet, he represented a philosophy that dominated a section of the country.
It’s also somewhat entertaining that the prophets of moral relativism are trying to judge the men of history that they’ve deemed as villains by the standards of today, while I, still somewhat in favor of moral objectivity, am trying to embrace a kind of historical relativism. I think that what I aim for is to find a balance between the philosophy of the ideal and the philosophy of the possible. Ideally there is a moral standard that we should all be judged by. However, in reality, we are all (to an extent) the product of our times. People who surpass their times to become timeless sages, generally, don’t have the leisure to pursue national political careers. That little aside, though, brings up something else that I think is interesting.
Moral relativism has died as a movement. I remember when it was the boogeyman of the faculty and students at SCS. Now, we’ve got something much worse: New Puritans. To the best of my knowledge, a secular moral orthodoxy that is enforced from the top down is relatively new under the sun. Secular orthodoxy isn’t new. But the moral aspect of it . . . maybe it started in the Soviet days, or maybe in the French Revolution? I certainly haven’t found it in any of my reading so far, inasmuch as I haven’t looked for it. I think that moral relativism won because it was the easy argument of the Puritans in waiting. “Freedom” is what the oppressor cries out until he’s able to take yours away. We destroyed one system and one way of life, and now we’re trying to go farther. I understand, and support, the separation of church and state, yet the extent to which de-christianization has become accepted in academic and government circles is worrisome. The baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. To this extent, I think that I better sympathize with the early church leaders, and even Julian the Apostate, with understanding the great difficulty of embracing Classical culture while rejecting the religion. That was the difficulty then, too: We have this amazing culture that’s tied up in a religion; how can we keep the culture without the religion? The solution of the early Christian emperors was, more or less, to preserve a lot of the old culture. Most of it. Nowadays, it seems that the Christian legacy is being erased by its intellectual descendants. I wonder if what I am writing now will seem as strange and as foreign, a hundred and fifty years hence, as what I am reading now? Maybe this will be a strange and lonely echo reverberating in a future that cannot understand from whence this noise came.
At any rate, the current events bother me because we are not embracing a New Puritanism that is based on . . . what exactly? Science is rejected by these extremists because it goes against their beliefs. I cannot find any coherent ideology that unites the various factions of the large SJW movement. They seem to be opposed to traditional American (and Western) everything, but, beyond that, they seem to have no idea what they really want. At least, not from what I can find. It’s a social movement that exists almost entirely as opposition. It wants to destroy one way of being and to replace it with another, but what is that other? It’s, essentially, a secular religion.
I’ve called Atheism a secular religion before, and I stand by it to an extent. I think that some atheists are genuinely people who have sat down, decided that there is nothing out there, and moved on with their lives. These people are who I would call true Atheists. However, many others are evangelical in their active pursuit to spread their belief. When something becomes evangelical, it starts to smell of religion. Once religion is gone, the traditional underpinning of society disappears and people need something else to fill a fundamental void. Most of us don’t want to think and we need a ready-made set of beliefs we can subscribe to for a low monthly fee (that we seldom deign to pay). Well, that’s where movements like Atheism+ come in, but that’s a bit off track for an already rambly ramble. What makes the modern social movements a secular religion is the rejection of facts and critical thinking in favor of faith. “Listen and believe,” should not be the rallying cry of a movement that claims to not rely on divine revelation. I worry that I am strawmanning my opponents, but whenever I try to engage with people who disagree with me, they refuse to talk to me or answer my questions. The exception being Andy who launched into an immediate unanswerable tirade. I’d love a relaxed, point by point, analytical discussion. Probably this will never happen. Oh well.
The study of history is enlightening because it reminds me of my own limits, and of everyone else’s. I think that it’s critical to remember just how little we know, how little we can know, and how very shaky the intellectual foundation of everything is. That having been said, we can’t rely on unquestioned proclamations to tell us what to do and how to live. We need to see what works.