New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram Confirms Her Incompetence!

December 12, 2007 at 2:36 P.M. phone calls from 678-253-0251 (1:13 P.M.) and 402-727-2510 (11:30 A.M.).

December 6, 2007 at 11:50 A.M. my cable signal was blocked, illegally, again.

December 3, 2007 at 12:21 P.M. I have just regained access to the Internet, after my signal was blocked since about 8:00 A.M. More calls from 352-357-4151.

I am unable to change the image in my profile today. I will keep trying. The updating feature of my security system is still disabled. Given the destruction or disabling of my image-posting feature in my profile, I do not know whether I will be able to provide an image for my profile again. Is this destruction of my "image" at blogger a tacit threat?

I deny -- and I am prepared to do so under oath -- that I am a lawyer. Anyone who calls me a N.J. lawyer is slandering me, viciously. Anyone who identifies me as a N.J. lawyer (or worse, a N.J. "judge," a title claimed, surreptitiously, by some at the OAE who solicit grievances then LIE about it!) is publishing "fighting words." Today's image would have been:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/entertainment/2006-12/01/xin_021203011521694148115.jpg

November 30, 2007 at 11:39 A.M. phone calls received from 303-395-2345. I am blocking:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01

"Newark: Claim of Improper Questioning," The New York Times, November 27, 2007, at p. B6.

"The New Jersey attorney general [Anne Milgram] said yesterday that a city police official acted improperly by asking about the immigration status of two journalists who witnessed a crime scene in September, violating a state directive on immigrants, and law enforcement. The journalists, a freelance photographer and the editor of the Brazilian Voice [sic.] newspaper, reported to the police that the photographer had found a woman's body in a Newark alley. They were questioned about their immigration status by the official, Deputy Chief Samuel A. DeMaio, the attorney general's office said. The directive, introduced in August, [by Ms. Milgram,] tells the police to ask the immigration status only of those arrested on indictable offenses or for drunken driving. In a statement, Attorney General Anne Milgram ... said the directive 'specifically prohibits police from inquiring about the immigration status of any victim, witness or person requesting police assistance.' The Newark police director, Garry F. McCarthy, said the Police Department would review the matter before deciding whether to reprimand Chief DeMaio."

Ms. Milgram's idiotic directive was greeted with derision and prophecies that such errors would be committed often and, sometimes, deliberately. Those prophecies and predictions have now come true. The result of this moronic directive to police officers -- in the absence of further evidence, it appears that Chief DeMaio made a good faith mistake and not a "deliberate error" -- will be to discourage immigrants from seeking police assistance, encouraging self-help, leading to more bodies being found on city streets. Nice going, Anne. Cities like Newark will become the "wild, wild west."

Whether Ms. Milgram's hostility to Latino males is due to her "militant lesbianism" (whatever that is, it sounds like fun!) cannot be determined at this time. Another effect will be to further alienate residents from the police in New Jersey. This development takes place in a state where cops have already been demonized by allegations of endemic racism, corruption, stupidity and politicking, making public cooperation with the authorities by residents far less likely. This is bound to be helpful to law enforcement efforts in the Garden State. Sure it is. So is the obvious commission of crimes by N.J. public officials against me on a daily basis. Setting an example, Anne?

N.J. State Police officers being charged with RAPE and/or assaults or cybercrimes is likely to be unhelpful in the effort to build good community relations. The word on the streets is that you can't trust N.J. cops because a lot of them are involved in organized crime (which seems to be true, especially among members of the KKK or mafia on the various forces).

Anyone heard of something called "Chivalry Film Productions"? Code name? Also, street wisdom says that it is never a good idea to trust New Jersey lawyers, prosecutors and judges -- which is probably even more true, especially in Hudson and Camden Counties. When you talk to prosecutors and cops in those counties are you also talking to the mob? Probably.

At a time when intelligence on the streets is vital to prevent further terrorist or criminal incidents, this alienating of crucial populations is a new low when it comes imbecility in high places in Trenton. Your tax dollars are well spent on public officials like Anne Milgram or Chief "Justice" Stuart Rabner of New Jersey. (Irony very much intended.) Calling attention to this problem cannot be deflected by suggesting that it adds to alienation from police. In fact, such criticism is a reflection of dissidents' existing and understandable alienation from corrupt and criminal authorities as well as the besmirched legal institutions of New Jersey.

Nothing that I am writing in these blog entries comes as news to residents of New Jersey. Absolute cynicism about government and law is poisonous in a democracy -- cynicism is also justified, proper, and unavoidable in the most corrupt jurisdiction in the United States. The recent changes in motor vehicle titles will not address the problem of corruption. Bribed clerks will supply the new titles (for a not-so-small fee) to criminals exactly as they would have provided the old ones.

Most "prominent" N.J. criminals have their own "connections" in state government to acquire things like drivers' licenses and other documents. In a state where government agencies entrusted with enforcing ethics rules engage in unethical and criminal actions, only to have those crimes covered up with the knowledge of courts, the very idea of a legal system is a joke. (See "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

What do you think will be the attitude to New Jersey on the part of the public and federal government if a second major terrorist attack is launched against a global symbol of American freedom from New Jersey, say, the Statue of Liberty? Given the history of corruption and criminality in N.J. politics, do you think that the response will be "muted"? I don't.

I think terrorists and some of the organizations devoting millions of dollars and many hours to planning attacks on America are likely to fix on launching something from New Jersey, which is a world-level joke and horror story. People who hate America, aiming to hurt and kill Americans are evil, but not stupid. Terrorists can count on communities providing support and cover in New Jersey. Terrorists also would be close to highly desirable targets by establishing a base in northern New Jersey.

"I have reason to believe" that there already is such a base in northern New Jersey, given the history of extremism that led to the first successful bombing attempt on the World Trade Center. Public officials can be bribed in Trenton and Union City with impunity. Much that would need to be accomplished can be done easily (also relatively cheaply, in terms of "corruption expenditures," as one former client -- who was probably a deceptively successful businessman, a Republican criminal -- expressed it, complaining that he could not "write off" these "costs" of bribing N.J. officials).

Wake up, boys and girls. New Jersey's levels of corruption, dishonesty and incompetence in government and courts are extremely dangerous. The eyes and ears of police in urban settings "ain't working" thanks to policies like this cretinous "immigration directive." Preventing me from posting images to accompany my profile at blogger is not much of a response to this charge (especially since it proves what I am saying), neither are ad hominem insults directed against me, or further threats or attempts to harm me or my family members, or inserting "errors" in my writings. Ethics? First Amendment? Law? Not in New Jersey.

Oh, boy! A new "error" was discovered in the foregoing paragraph. I have now corrected it. Let us see whether it turns up again soon, like Anne Milgram's haunting and uninserted errors in judgment and in relations with the immigrant community in New Jersey. Hooters anyone?

Anne Milgram will wind up on the New Jersey judicial bench at some point in her life, becoming yet another moron in judicial robes, destroying lives and the Constitution, out of ignorance and "good intentions." Judge Moses? Debbie Poritz? How about all the discovery withheld from me, illegally, Anne? Tuchin's and Riccioli's reports detailing their many crimes over a period of years? Any chance I can get that stuff to which I am entitled at some point in my life? I thought not. I'll keep asking for all of that material, publicly. I hope the cover-up is unravelling.

New Jersey -- Come see for yourself!

$5,000 a Month "Cut" for N.J. Senator Joe Coniglio!

"The federal inquiry into Coniglio is part of a broader investigation by federal officials into whether legislators have benefitted from grant money inserted into the state budget without public review since 2002." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21902199/

Hey, Joe ... whadda-ya, getting greedy? Geez. Leave a little something for the people. He, he, he ...

"The U.S. Attorney's Office has in recent months subpoenaed records from legislators and legislative staff about Coniglio and Hackensack University Medical Center, where Coniglio was paid $5,000.00 per month as a 'plumbing and construction consultant' [laughter was heard at this title] from 2004 to 2006. During that span, the hospital received more than $1.6 MILLION in state funding."

Quid pro quo, Joe? It is undisputed that this state funding was procured with the "influence" of good old Joe Coniglio. Although there is nothing to indicate whether or how much was coming back to "Big Joe" under the table -- in addition to this $5,000 on the books -- or what other ... "expressions of gratitude" were provided by the administrators at Hackensack Hospital, if any. No doubt "Big Joe" got a Christmas card and fruit basket. (New "error" inserted and corrected.) Maybe more. Annoying phone calls from 760-526-8112 on November 26, 2007 at 12:40 P.M. Probably just a coincidence.

"The investigation into Coniglio comes after two state assemblymen were among 11 public officials arrested in September for alleged bribe taking and two senators were indicted on federal corruption charges earlier this year."

"Coniglio has been in the Senate since 2002, serving on the influential Senate budget committee. He served on the Paramus council from 1981 to 1990 and is a project manager for a plumbing and electrical contracting firm."

Senator Coniglio was part of a ... "crew" that became influential in New Jersey, during the eighties and nineties, including prominent figures such as Peter Veniero, a former New Jersey Attorney General who (as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would say, "for some reason") served on the state Supreme Court, whose career and tenure both on the court and as A.G. remain tainted by allegations of participation in racial profiling and even designing the racist policy that has disgraced the state police and courts in the most corrupt state in the nation, New Jersey:

"... Peter Veniero has come under fire for allegedly misrepresenting [i.e., LYING, 'allegedly,' concerning] his knowledge of racial profiling by the state police during his tenure as attorney general." (No OAE action has been or is pending against Mr. Veniero, who is deemed "highly ethical" by Trenton's legal establishment, as are Paul Bergrin and Wayne R. Bryant.)

John McAlpin, "McGreevey: Quality of New Jersey's High Court is Diluted," Newark Star Ledger, April 27, 2002 and http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/pester/pages/view_elerts.php?elert_id=1931&print=1 4/14/2006 ("Feces-Covered?")

All of this news concerning corruption was accompanied by the happy anouncement that "N.J. Tolls Could Increase by 75 percent in 2010" because the Jersey Boys need to steal a little more from the tax-paying "chumps." That's you. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21902199

Former Chief Justice Zazzali was also associated with racial profiling, although Zazzali was more successful in distancing himself from the practice, suffering a memory lapse when questioned about it. "Say what?"

I saw Zazzali in action, as it were, conducting a hearing on behalf of a common client, who expressed the wish that I might represent him at that hearing. No doubt Zazzali would deny that today. Zazzali lost that hearing and the client was less than pleased with his cross-examination skills. I wonder whether the OAE showed up at Zazzali's office to question Zazzali's competence or the effectiveness of the assistance of counsel provided to that litigant. I doubt it. That stuff is for minority attorneys who refuse to make payoffs.

Zazzali certainly seemed to prepare thoroughly during approximately ten minutes before the hearing. I doubt that Zazzali or his firm returned the fee received for that representation, which was no doubt substantial, but he was probably not questioned about that, allegedly, "unconscionable greed" by the OAE, or treated with insulting rudeness and disdain by OAE imbeciles, most of whom have never tried a case outside their club and would not know how to do so if their lives depended on it. By far the most despicable low-lifes I encountered in law practice were so-called "ethics officials" in New Jersey.

What relationship, if any, existed or exists between Zazzali and Diana Lisa Riccioli at that time (or at this time) is not known to me. Perhaps they play canasta.

Other alleged members of this legal "crew" include Maurice J. Gallipoli, Jaynee La Vecchia, and many prominent members of the N.J. Bar Association (of all ethnicities), about whom I will write at greater length and in excruciating detail during the months and years ahead. Only one new "error" inserted by hackers since my last review of this essay? Thanks to the feds, they're dropping like flies.

What do you know, N.J. Senator Joe Coniglio?

For some reason, so far, this Coniglio incident is not news The New York Times deems "fit to print." I wonder why? Maybe they figure "it's suburban New Jersey, that's normal for them." I know, tell the editorial staff at the Times that Coniglio is a Republican. I bet they'll cover the news then! Many attacks on my computer today. Maybe that's a good sign. (Only one "error" since my last review of this essay!)

WNBC -TV, updated 12:34 P.M. ET, Thurs., Nov. 22, 2007
"FBI Searches Home, Office Of N.J. State Senator," http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21902199/


"TRENTON, N.J. -- Federal investigators on Thursday were searching the home and legislative office of state Sen. Joseph Coniglio, according to officials."

I wonder whether this search was connected to on-going investigations of shady dealings with pension funds, theft from New Jersey's hospital budgets and public health care expenditures, or any of the hundreds of inquiries into financial irregularities connected to public officials in the Garden State. (One more "error" since yesterday.)

"Terry Romano, the office administrator at Coniglio's Paramus legislative office, said FBI agents arrived at about 9:00 a.m. and began searching his office."

I wonder if Mr. Romano is related to the legislator busted for heroin possession -- and, as I recall, distribution -- from Lodi, New Jersey? Geez. Dem guys. Oh, I know ... how about the so-called "judge" in North Bergen who was swept off his feet by alleged (and once convicted) child molester Kelly Michaels? Perhaps I will write about him next. All in the family? "Judge" Romano works for The New York Times, doesn't he?

"In addition several FBI vehicles were parked in front of Coniglio's Cedar Avenue home in Paramus. Agents armed with a search warrant were seeking financial records and other documents in connection with the ongoing investigation. An FBI spokesman declined comment."

No additional "errors" inserted yet? Only three new "errors" not found in print versions of this article?

"Meanwhile, an official who had been briefed on the investigation said FBI agents are also searching Coniglio's Paramus home. The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation."

Well, well ... when FBI agents decide to conduct a search at your home on Thanksgiving Day, it usually means that they do not like you. (There is another "error" which has suddenly appeared.) Now why would they not like a person? There may be any number of connected reasons for this state of affairs. I would put my money on the FBI in this case, folks. They do not adopt such an attitude unless they have excellent reasons for it.

FBI people do not, for example, enjoy being deceived or misled. When the FBI knocks on the door. Tell them what they want to know, they'll find it out anyway. It's always better for you to help them out. Unlike New Jersey officials, who are usually corrupt and connected, FBI agents wear short haircuts and blue suits from Brooks Brothers. Curiously, even in New Jersey, the feds are usually honest. One of the things I like best about Rudy Giuliani is his U.S. Attorney experience. Right, Senator Bob? Some people like and others hate the sound of the words: "Grand Jury."

"A message left at Coniglio's home was not immediately returned on Tuesday morning."

"Coniglio dropped his re-election bid in September after being told he was being targeted in a federal corruption investigation."

A little bird told me there is more coming on this, boys and girls. Hang on to your hats. No more "errors"?

I am thankful for you.

November 19, 2007 at 6:43 P.M. I am blocking:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn;wi.728;hi.90/01
I was unable to print this message from my msn group, so I'll try to print it from this blog. The address that appears above was at the bottom of the blank page from my printer. On the upper left corner of this blank page appears the following: CHTR_Winter_TravelGuides_112007_728x90.tpl

I am thinking of you as I plan Thanksgiving dinner. Telephone calls will have to do for my preparations. My cooking is non-existent, as you know, certainly not up to preparing a Thanksgiving meal. Someday, you'll teach me to cook. I'll be with persons I love this Thursday. One important person will be missing. You. As we get older, we take care of the people who took care of us. Late at night, when everyone is sleeping -- on Thanksgiving Day -- I'll take out a little something from the fridge. I'll set up two plates. (Paper plates, but nice holiday ones.) Two Champagne glasses, filled to the brim with sparkling Diet Sprite. I'll think of you sitting opposite to me, on the floor, as we enjoy a living room picnic. I'll find something great on TCM. I'll even let you wear my Captain Kirk t-shirt. (The other night I saw Born Yesterday and thought of you!) I'll make you laugh. If you play your cards right -- and if you're good in the right way -- you may even get lucky. Naturally, I can't promise anything. Mood is crucial in such matters. You'll have to earn it. Whatever happens, remember, I am thankful for you. http://www.born-today.com/Today/pix/lake_v2.jpg

"Time is the Fire in Which We Burn ..."

Several attempts to post this juxtaposition of texts weaving and interweaving themes of time and eternity, love and death, have been frustrated by deletions, defacements, obstructions of various kinds. Unfortunately, the spacing has been altered in the T.S. Eliot poem that opens this collection of materials. Perhaps other alterations or damage of this work may be expected. I will complete the collection, asking for the reader's pardon, while hoping that my intended or suggested meaning will be conveyed -- despite these attacks -- to the intelligent student of these texts. This is the third time that I will type this work. You may wish to copy this post immediately after it appears. Daily attempts to obstruct my writing efforts making use of N.J. government computers must be expected at all times.

November 13, 2007 calls from 818-870-8140 at 9:25 A.M.; at 12:17 P.M. from 480-000-0000 (what an unusual number, N.J. police?); at 12:38 P.M. from 425-648-9413. New "errors" inserted at 9:47 P.M. I have done my best to correct them. November 14, 2007 at 10:35 A.M. calls (probably just a coincidence) from 610-915-5214. (OAE?) I am blocking:

http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01
Burnt Norton

by

T.S. Eliot

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.


"To my friend, E___ R____, this unworthy volume is respectfully dedicated."

F.H. Bradley, T.S. Eliot's tutor at Oxford and subject of the American poet's dissertation in philosophy at Harvard, attached this enigmatic dedication to his masterpiece Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan, 1897), where the following paragraph is found at page 41:

"For any process admitted destroys the 'now' from within. Before and after are diverse, and their incompatibility compels us to use a relation between them. Then at once the old wearisome game is played again. The aspects become parts, the 'now' consists of 'nows,' and in the end these 'nows' prove undiscoverable. For, as a solid part of time, the 'now' does not exist. Pieces of duration may to us appear not to be composite; but a very little reflection lays bare their inherent fraudulence. If they are not duration, they do not contain an after and before, and they have, by themselves, no beginning or end, and are by themselves outside of time. But, if so, time becomes merely the relation between them; and duration is a number of relations of the timeless, themselves also, I suppose, related somehow so as to make one duration." (emphasis added)

Bradley's final work published in his lifetime (the Aphorisms, which I do not own, appeared in 1933, after Bradley's death) is entitled Essays On Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914). The dedication to this book, is also for "E___ R___":

"To the friend without whose unfailing sympathy its defects would have been even greater this volume is dedicated."

In this final collection of essays, Bradley says:

"In philosophy we must not seek for an absolute satisfaction. Philosophy at its best is but an understanding of its object, and it is not an experience in which that object is contained wholly and possessed. It is the exercise and employment, in other words, of but one side of our nature. I do not forget that philosophy" -- or science? -- "has often been made into a religion. From time to time it has been taken as the one thing needful, as the end and rule of our lives, and as all the world to its worshippers. But the same thing, we must remember, would be true again of art and perhaps of other pursuits. It must be an unhappy world where a man can say that, if he had no philosophy, he would be destitute of practical belief. ... A true philosophy cannot justify its own apotheosis. ... Philosophy demands, and in the end it rests on, what may fairly be termed faith." (pp. 13-15.) (emphasis added) (Compare "Beauty and the Beast" with "Tales of the Forest of Arden.")

"Because such equations have no intrinsic arrow of time, there is no reason to choose one direction in time in preference to the other. But things are worse still: not only is time undirected, it should be cyclic and 'history' must repeat in keeping with Poincarre's return. Just as a circle has no end, so this eternal return appears to rule out the existence of a beginning and an ending of time."

Peter Coveney & Roger Highfield, The Arrow of Time (New York: Fawcett, 1990), p. 261 (science).

"This difficulty, and lingering inconsistencies at the heart of quantum theory itself, have convinced a growing number of researchers that something deeper is going on behind the scenes -- a 'pre-quantum' world of certainties and objective realities [Deus Principle?] which, once understood, might reveal how the strange rules of quantum physics emerge from something less strange. A few are starting to think they are starting to see its tantalising outlines."

Compare my forthcoming essay: "Umberto Eco, David Deutsch: The Universe, Multiverse, and the Hermeneutics of Freedom." I fully expect destruction or damaging of that essay on the first few postings of it, then more damage at irregualr intervals thereafter. My memoir in the form of novel could not be written at this computer. I am trying to find a way to continue working on it. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

"The proofs of unavoidable quantum weirdness centre [sic.] on entanglement, the spooky quantum link that Einstein found so distateful. Entangled pairs of particles such as photons are routinely created in the lab for all kinds of experiments. Send a photon into a 'non-linear' crystal and a pair of entangled photons emerge whose characteristics are mysteriously linked. According to quantum theory, it makes no sense to talk about the properties of just one of the entangled photons that appears from the crystal, since all of the information about the photons -- such as their 'up' or 'down' spin rates -- lies only in their joint properties. Such photons remain connected, even over vast distances ... [whether spacial or temporal distances is irrelevant.]"

Mark Buchanan, "Quantum Unentanglement," in New Scientist, November 3-9, 2007, at p. 37. (The mysterious connection -- in what? -- is the third term in which it is possible for relations to exist, the Absolute, uni- or multiverse.)

The word "entangled" was altered in the foregoing quotation. I have now corrected it three times. I expect to correct the word again the next time that I read this post. December 13, 2007 at 3:25 P.M.

"Bradley regarded philosophy as the intellectual means of adjusting oneself to the universe, of trying to see things steadily and whole; and for him such a search was both speculative and religious. He would have considered as visionless and molelike the preoccupation of some contemporary analysts with making distinctions within distinctions for their own sake, without any view to their wider bearings on the world and man's place in it. ... Many persons have wondered who the mysterious [E.R.] was to whom Appearance and Reality was dedicated. She was in fact a French woman, married to an American engineer [only one new "error" since my last reading!] who seems not to have minded the attachment to his wife of an eminent foreign philosopher. ... Many years later, at Bradley's funeral, there appeared an unknown lady, dressed and veiled in black, who disappeared as quietly as she had come. It was [Bradley's love,] arrived from France for a last salute to a friend whose affection, if not his greatness, she could understand."

Brand Blanshard, "Autobiography," in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (Illinois: Open Court, 1980), pp. 26-27. (The foregoing paragraph has been damaged repeatedly by hackers from New Jersey -- "eppur si muove ...")

I have long hoped to write a short story describing a final meeting between Bradley and his French lady.

"My poor Charles, search your heart -- you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not one act, my friend. It is no more achieved by that than you could reach Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day, Charles, each hour, it has to be taken again. Each minute the nail waits to be hammered in. You know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities, and their hate."

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (New York: Signet, 1970), p. 264. (Free and Crucified? Or Sated Slave? Neo? Or Cypher?)

Carlos Fuentes says:

"Some time ago, I was traveling in the state of Morelos in central Mexico, looking for the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata, the village of Anenecuilco. I stopped and asked a campesino, a laborer of the fields, how far it was to that village. He answered: 'If you had left at daybreak, you would be there now.' [Not all of us in life have the chance to leave at daybreak.] This man had an internal clock which marked his own time and that of his culture. For the clocks of all men and women, of all civilizations, are not set at the same hour. One of the wonders of our menaced globe is the variety of its experiences, its memories, and its desire. Any attempt to impose a uniform politics on this diversity is like a prelude to death."

"A Harvard Commencement," in Myself With Others (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1988), p. 199. (Can Democracy be exported?)

Chang Tung-sun, the Chinese Kantian-Bergsonian-Confucian, writes:

"In place of the categories, ... there are 'postulates' which [Chang Tung-sun] said are identical with Schiller's 'methodological assumptions' ... These are not entirely a priori, since they are within the realm of experience. There are, however, three postulates that are a priori. The first is 'the basic laws of logic,' that is, the laws of thought. The second includes space and time as forms, which are the a priori in intuition. ..."

Wing-tsit Chan, "Philosophies of China," in D.D. Runes, ed., Twentieth Century Philosophy: Living Schools of Thought (New York: Greenwood, 1968), p. 553. ("Gravity is the root of lightness." -- Lao-tzu.)

Sonnet 64

by

William Shakespeare

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich, proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometimes lofty towers I see down-rased
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.


Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day

by

Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
( ...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where they are now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

One of New Jersey's Highly Ethical Attorneys Has a Problem.

Several errors have been inserted in this essay. I can only hope that I have now corrected all of them. I expect that they will be reinserted. You may wish to copy this essay immediately after it is posted. It is very difficult to access or post essays at Critique. However, I will continue to struggle against all forms of censorship. Pictured at this link is New Jersey's former Attorney General, the subtle and elusive -- highly elusive -- Stuart Rabner, Esq. http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/images/rabner.jpg

Anemona Hartocollis, "A Tough Defense Lawyer Finds He's in Need of One," The New York Times, January 11, 2007 at p. B3.

"Back in the 1980s, Paul W. Bergrin was a hard-hitting prosecutor in Essex County, N.J., who then became an assistant United States attorney in Newark."

"Later, as a defense lawyer, he was known for taking on unpopular causes, including defending a sergeant convicted of abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib and an American soldier accused in the murders of three Iraqui men."

"But yesterday he found himself on the opposite end of the law, as prosecutors charged him with running a call girl service in Manhattan after its owner, who was his client, had been arrested."

"Mr. Bergrin was accused of running $800,000 in credit card receipts through two shell companies over six months in 2004 and 2005 to disguise the fact that the money was the proceeds of a TriBeCa-based call girl service called NY Confidential, prosecutors in Manhattan said."

"... Prosecutors also charged that Mr. Bergrin was receiving as much as $5,000 a week in cash payments from the proceeds of the escort service."

Women in the sexual services industry should be protected from such "pillars of the community" exploiting them, while refusing to associate with them or acknowledge them as human beings. I suspect that many women employed by "NY Confidential" are morally superior to those who profit from their professional efforts.

Protected exploiters of sex workers tend to enjoy beating up or stealing from women, who are forced to engage in sexual acts. I do not know whether Mr. Bergrin falls into that category, which is usually reserved for the lowest scum and members of New Jersey's feces-stained judiciary -- about whom I will be writing a lot more in the future. No wonder they're hacking into my computer and destroying my writings at my msn account and group. Judges Schaeffer, Tolentino, Baber and a few more New Jersey low-lifes are due for examination. Remember, I am not a "gentleman," according to a New Jersey judge. There is no need for me to be polite at this point.

"John Edwards Tiffany, Mr. Bergrin's lawyer and friend of 15 years, said yesterday that he was shocked at the charges, and could not help wondering whether Mr. Bergrin had invited some kind of retaliation by stepping on too many toes as an aggressive defense lawyer."

I know what he means. New Jersey's powers-that-be resent defense counsel who go out of their way to defend people. They want "docile" attorneys and vicious prosecutors, preferably to go after minority group members. (See "America's Holocaust.")

Evidently, running an illegal prostitution ring which, allegedly, provided a lucrative source of information on prominent or powerful customers -- information potentially useful in influencing or even blackmailing those prominent "customers" -- is only a source of concern to prosecutors in several states because Mr. Bergrin "stepped on toes." Somehow, I don't think that's it. Although it certainly may be one factor explaining why Bergrin was busted all of a sudden. Unless Bergrin was late with any alleged payoffs, of course, or failed to supply either Debbie Poritz (who is said to "like the ladies") or good old Stu with a little "shake-and-bake" on Saturday night.

How tight are Debbie and Diana? Are they really known as the "Double D's"? How are the "Thelma and Luisa" of New Jersey's legal circles? (Only one "error" inserted since earlier today?)

Prosecutors are especially offended when one of their own engages in this sort of despicable crime, allegedly, because it tarnishes the reputation of the prosecutorial enterprise -- something which may be impossible at this point in New Jersey, a state whose legal institutions cannot be further tarnished. No doubt New Jersey judges received an occasional "freebie" -- if these charges are true -- and were highly amenable to persuasion when Mr. Bergrin strolled into court.

What else is new? Ethics? in New Jersey? People laugh when they associate such words. Mr. Bergrin's lawyer took aim at the federal prosecutors (I hope they are federal!) bringing these charges against his client:

"There are prosecutors out there that may have very distinct opinions about Mr. Bergrin." Bergrin's lawyer said: "They should worry less about getting their names in the paper, and focus on their job, which is to prosecute crimes, not to attempt to tarnish or belittle the reputation of an attorney."

Well, if an attorney gets into a massive criminal conspiracy on the side, allegedly, walking out of a brothel with $5,000 in cash every week (IRS? OAE?), together with a "freebie" for himself and his political pals, also allegedly -- even prosecutors who respect his skills as an advocate and like him "personally" -- may be inclined to seek an indictment. I don't blame them. $5,000 a week in illegal cash is reserved for members of the judiciary in New Jersey, not for trial lawyers. Geez. Whatta-ya, nuts? Ya gotta share with Papa. Let them wet their beaks a little. Know what I mean?

Several judges in the Garden State are far more despicable and criminal in my opinion than Bergrin. Many deserve to be treated the way they treat others, which is all that I am doing. Nothing I have said about New Jersey compares with how I have been treated by some "judges," as crimes were and are committed against me by their agents. Hackers, viruses, obstructions to writing are my daily reality. All coming from New Jersey computers, including government computers. (See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

I am not sure who was the target of this smear? Christopher Christie in New Jersey or New York's own Michael Garcia, who will be extradicting Mr. Bergrin to New York for trial. Or so the U.S. Attorney hopes. This looks like a typical New Jersey story.

I wonder why the U.S. Attorney's Office is wary of legal proceedings in New Jersey forums. Do they fear that New Jersey courts are crooked? Is the Pope Catholic? Hey, where is Trenton's "highly efficient" OAE in all of this? "We don't know from nothing," say New Jersey's "untouchable" OAE attorneys and members of the judiciary. And where is Stuart Rabner? Jaynee? Partying? The brain dead morons at the OAE get lost in a revolving door.

Get this, Stuart is in a little pow-wow with Annie ("She Got Her Gun") Milgram! http://blog.nj.com/ledgerupdates/medium_ag.jpg Naturally, this "friendliness" will not affect Stuart's decisions when Annie shows up to "argue" before the New Jersey Supreme Court, right? (A second "error" inserted since this morning. Now we're getting warm.)

Prominent members of the New Jersey Bar and a few judges have been heard to whisper: "Now where do we go for some action on Friday night?" Hey, the other shoe dropped!

This essay has been hacked into and "errors" are routinely inserted in it. I am blocking:

http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90... (Senator Bob and the Trenton Crew!)
http://ad.doubleclick.net/N3778.MSN/B24076 ... (Debbie and the P.C. police?)

Some more guests showed up:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N763.networksite.ww (NJ)
http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/1442731/1-transparent (Replacement or deletion of letters! "error" insertions! Illegal tracking!)

"NEW YORK -- The money laundering and prostitution case against a high profile New Jersey defense attorney took another strange turn yesterday as authorities alleged [Bergrin] arranged sexual favors for friends and New Jersey law enforcement officials."

Prosecutors and judges -- perhaps even New Jersey Supreme Court justices -- indulged in a little illicit sexual delight in exchange for a lack of attention to this, allegedly, corrupt lawyer's activities. No wonder several New Jersey justices are allegedly "connected" to the Camden machine. No OAE official apprehended Mr. Bergrin -- some such officials were probably accepting his "hospitality" or, possibly, payoffs -- only the feds and New York officials were interested in this person's activities. Am I putting a dent in the profits, boys? Cramping your corrupt style? What a shame.

I wonder why Bergrin was not subjected to hypnosis, illegally, by Terry Tuchin and/or Diana Lisa Riccioli. Maybe Bergrin is not African-American or Latino. That would explain why his Constitutional rights were not violated in such a hateful way. Right, Stuart? How about it, John? "For his own good, maybe?" "I'll go to bat for you," right Terry? "You got me on your side." "Most people want to be told what to believe." Is that right, fellas?

"The Manhattan District Attorney's Office also said Newark attorney Paul Bergrin was a 'prime suspect' in the killing of a witness in a federal drug case and claimed he was grooming his son to take over the high priced call-girl operation at the heart of the investigation."

First, send the kid to law school. (A third "error" inserted since this morning.) Then have him take over the "family business." That'll show he's ethical. What does your rule book say, John?

"... Bergrin found himself in need of his own attorney after he was indicted with two others on charges of money laundering" -- political contributions are always excellent money laundering techniques! -- "solicitation of prostitution and misconduct in connection with the escort service known as NY Confidential."

The New York District Attorney said: "... after Bergrin took over New York Confidential in January 2005, he tapped the escorts for free sex and brought friends to the brothel, 'including New Jersey law enforcement.' ..."

It is rumored that several New Jersey judges are under investigation as a result of their "affiliation" with Mr. Bergrin, which would not surprise me. Lots of cops, too. "Don't trust Jaynee LaVecchia" is one good suggestion. Some of the things I have heard New Jersey judges say would make your hair stand on end. I will devote extra time to researching and detailing illegal and unethical conduct, together with outrageous comments made by New Jersey judges, during the forthcoming year. Each one of them should be removed from the bench. I am in awe of the "ethics" of these people who presume to "judge" and claim to be better than you and me. No more "errors" inserted in my essay to prove how ethical you are?

Brian T. Murray, "In Lawyer's Prostitution Case, Talk of Favors, a Killing," The Star Ledger, January 17, 2007 and http://www.nj.com/

"... sex was sold for $1,000 an hour or more."

Most women in the sexual services industry do not keep $1,000 per hour. They are usually exploited in vicious ways by people with police protection and judicial friends -- especially in a cesspool of corruption, such as New Jersey -- so that these exploiters are licensed to abuse young men and women. Often the abuse involves hypnosis techniques commonly manipulated to frame people on false charges. See Alan Feuer, "Hearing Ordered Over Whether Hypnosis Tainted L.I. Abuse Case," in The New York Times, July 24, 2007, at p. B2. (This case is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There is a lot more on the way.)

The foregoing sentence was just corrected after an "error" mysteriously appeared in the text. (As of my last scan, before 8:00 A.M., there were 18 intrusion attempts against my computer. Main attacker 24.192.244.190 -- New Jersey Supreme Court? Anybody heard of the First Amendment?)

"The dates were booked for $1,000 an hour. [The brothel] brought in about $1.2 million in the first six months," according to "Detective Myles Mahadi of the Manhattan South Vice Enforcement Unit."

Most of those women are decent struggling people, trying to care for children, with few options in life. My concern is about protecting young women and men in this industry, getting minors safely out of danger, allowing for those adults who wish to indulge in commercial sexual services to do so in a safe, legal environment (that gets rid of criminals and eliminates exploitation), while allowing for alternative career counselling, child care for those women who need it, health care, and yet permits "sex providers" to keep the proceeds of their efforts and pay taxes.

This commercializing of sex is not an activity that will ever be eliminated from human societies, so the issue is: How can we protect women, mostly, and help them to be safe and prosper in their lives? How do we get rid of exploiters and see that they, such exploitative men or abusive women, go to prison?

Most people who are honest about this industry are not trying to violate or injure women, but they want to make money. If money-making is possible in a safe, legal environment -- generating taxes -- then people will PREFER that situation. Women in the sexual services industry can become legal enterpreneurs. Most women in the industry (I believe) prefer to avoid hassels and problems, and would like nothing better than to live safe lives, where they can save for retirement and have health coverage as well as physical security.

"Federal prosecutors say they are still troubled about [Bergrin's] conduct in a 2004 narcotics case. In court motions, prosecutors charged that Bergrin twice called ________, an alleged drug kingpin, and told him a key witness against his client was a man known on the streets as 'Ki-mo.'"

"Three months later, Ki-mo was murdered execution-style. Bergrin denied any wrongdoing, but withdrew from the case."

Mr. Bergrin was not deemed an "unethical attorney" by New Jersey's OAE, many of whose officials like to "party" on Friday nights. A fitting metaphor for New Jersey's legal system is found in Newark. "The owner of a meat rendering plant in the Ironbound section of Newark was indicted yesterday on charges of polluting the air and water, state officials said. The owner, Seymour Berkowitz, 72, of allendale, faces up to to five years in state prison and fines."

Are there other "secret" owners of this establishment? Some prominent members of the New Jersey bar perhaps? Judges? Politicians? Stay tuned, there's more coming. How about it, Jaynee? Who cares about the residents of Newark? You don't, right Jaynee? Next they'll try to fix the NJ lottery. Any winners sold in Newark lately?

"... more than a million pounds of meat waste a week ... was stored outside the ground in all weather, state officials said." The stink from this illegal pollution is nothing compared with the stench of New Jersey's legal corruption and ethical rot attached to the persons depicted in the latest portraits of New Jersey's Supreme Court justices. (See "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court," then Tina Kelley, "Meat Plant Owner Charged With Pollution," in The New York Times, July 24, 2007, at p. B5.)

Guy Sterling & Brian T. Murray, "Former U.S. Prosecutor Charged in Call-Girl Ring," The Star Ledger, January 11, 2007 and http://www.nj.com/

"In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor questioned why there is such an 'intensity of rage currently being leveled at the judiciary.' Last week, the New Jersey Supreme Court gave her the answer."

Tom Fitton, "New Jersey Supreme Court Mandates Rights," http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/19803.html

Hostility to the Garden State's court is not primarily the result of disagreement over controversial decisions, but legitimate repugnance at the hypocrisy of a court that covers-up torture, rape, incompetence, and unethical or criminal conduct, like theft, by its own agents and in its own name, while indulging in a "holier-than-thou" sanctimonious reprimanding of minor offenders, as public money is wasted on expensive portraits, dinners, and other "treats" and luxuries for the so-called "justices." The true whores in this story -- whores of all genders -- are the members of New Jersey's corrupt Supreme Court.

"What was astonishing was the spread of the CORRUPTION to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which unanimously approved this action [the Democrats' naming of a successor for Robert Torricelli, D-NJ] in defiance of the plain words of the written law. ..."

Thomas Sowell, "The Houdini Award," October 11, 2002 and http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2002/10/11/the_houdini_award 1/28/2007

Many of us are not "cooperating" with a feces-covered New Jersey judiciary. Have you no decency, Stuart Rabner? Testicular fortitude? Do you need permission from a mob boss to take action? Is that why it is O.K. for New Jersey hackers to tamper with my writings?

Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.

November 25, 2012 at 2:10 P.M. Newly inserted "errors" will now be corrected. ("Who killed the liberal arts?" and "Images and Death.")

April 18, 2011 at 10:07 A.M. Along with my essay about Raymond Chandler's works, this text was severely damaged, again. I will try to make repairs. The goal of this process is to inflict the equivalent of battle fatigue on the victim, severe nerve damage from constant repairs and anxieties about further alterations of necessary creative writings resulting in permanent psychological harm. I will continue to write. I will do my best to fix what is damaged by New Jersey's protected hackers. I am sure that the federal government is "unable" to do more to protect these writings. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")

November 12, 2009 at 3:00 P.M. Spacing has been distorted, again, as further evidence of the barbarism against which I must struggle. I invite readers to share this experience in order to understand censorship and anti-intellectualism in a very direct as well as personal way. None of this could take place, publicly, without the complicity of state government in New Jersey. Does America defend freedom of speech and the rights of dissidents? You decide.

Spacing will be affected in this essay. Other defacements and alterations of the text must be expected. I am now making some of the same corrections fifty times or more. I will do my best to make corrections as they are needed. It may be difficult to read this essay because of the jumbling together of paragraphs by hackers from New Jersey. My security system is under attack. I cannot prevent regular defacements of the text. I will continue to write for as long as possible. See "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "What is it like to be tortured?"

November 2, 2007 at 4:24 P.M. Unfortunately, a long draft using T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Articles in the New Scientist, F.H. Bradley and other sources was deleted, for the second time, after I worked on it for several hours this morning. I will have to try writing it by hand on a legal pad, then typing the text into this blog because my e-mails are no longer reliable. This is one of many times when the same work has been destroyed.

November 8, 2007, at 10:42 A.M. My attempts to print from my msn group have left me with a blank paper bearing this address:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/N1243.Advertising.com/B2447956.3;sz=728x90;click=http://servedby.adver...

November 6, 2007 at 11:39 A.M. I cannot access my mail at Yahoo or see my books at Lulu. I will continue to struggle.

On November 2, 2007 (and beyond) I am blocking:

http://view.atdmt.com/NYC/iview/thundcps010000... (NY City? City Council Speaker?)

http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac01728x90... (long time no see!)

Umberto Eco, "Language, Power, Force," in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1986), pp. 239-256.

Umberto Eco, "On Symbolism," in On Literature (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 2002), pp. 140-160.

Umberto Eco, "Foreword" to Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. vii-x.

"I have always believed in the truth of signs, Adso ..."

Brother William of Baskerville.

In 1986, as I recall, I discovered a novel that captured my attention for weeks, a novel which is highly recommended to those who have not yet made their way through its pages: Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The movie starring Sean Connery is O.K., but not in the same league with the book. I found a kindred spirit in Brother William of Baskerville (Holmes) and also liked his novice, Adso (Watson).

The investigation of gruesome murders in a medieval monastery was a literary device allowing the author to explore historical and philosophical questions in a text gesturing at everything from Aristotle's view of comedy to Conan-Doyle's mysteries, from Dante to C.S. Peirce. Umberto Eco single-handedly revived the novel of ideas. Two contemporary examples of the genre, are P.D. James, Death in Holy Orders (New York: Ballantine, 2001) and Nicholas Mosley, Accident (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1965), then see C.P. Taylor's play, Good (London & New York: Methuen, 1982).

Eco is the world's foremost "semiotician." What's that? I'm getting there. Chill.

Eco is an important philosopher and literary theorist, also a practitioner of the darkest literary arts -- a literary alchemist -- whose works may be described as devoted to examining the final sentence of his greatest novel: "Stat rosa pristina nomina, nomina nuda tenemus ... "

This review is concerned with a single essay by Umberto Eco. However, it will be enriched by borrowings from other essays by this author (I've read many of them), as well as other philosophical "ruffians" (Bertrand Russell?), many from those bizarre European nations located somewhere east of the Danube -- or just any place other than France, Germany, and America. 

My focus in what follows is on power in what I will describe as a "postmodernist" culture.

I begin with some careful definitions. I then turn to Eco's essay "Language, Power, Force." An exposition and critique of the argument and discussion in this work is followed by reactions in several directions. The formal version of the "Italian Mind" is divided between philosophers and intellectuals on the side of "spirit" -- like Eco -- and others like, say, Antonio Negri (Political Descartes is a future project), who are theorists of revolution and, accordingly, on the side of the "flesh." As I say, Eco is (usually) on the spirit side of this ledger.

One must always be on guard when reading Umberto Eco's work for irony and even, surprisingly, humor. A philosopher with a good sense of humor is indeed a source of concern to defenders of normality and solemnity as opposed to seriousness. In Italy -- and maybe all of Europe -- such a phenomenon (intellectuals who are funny and willing to discuss pop culture) is not unusual. Has anyone read Italo Calvino? ("If on a winter's night a traveller ...")

In America, intellectual and aesthetic play has not yet been outlawed. However, both kinds of playing are frowned upon. Such "playing" is relegated to the category of irrelevant and unimportant trivial pursuits, even as the nation calls for greater intelligence and judgment in public life and in the important business of business.

I. Defining All of These Weird Terms.

A. What is "Semiotics"? How is "Semiotics" different From "Hermeneutics" or "Symbolism"? What is "Postmodernism" again?

Let's begin with "semiotics":

"The general study of symbolic systems, including language. The subject is traditionally divided into three areas: syntax, or the abstract study of the signs and their interrelations; semantics, or the study of the relations between the signs and those objects to which they apply; and pragmatics, or the relationship between users and the system. ... The tradition that follows Saussure is sometimes referred to as semiology."

Simon Blackburn, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 346-347.

A system of signs could be everything from the rituals in a courtroom, to the image-languages of advertising and movies, or courtship rituals in Manhattan and children's behavior on, for instance, Halloween. The study of sign-patterns and meaning-clusters is far more fascinating when participants in a language game are not aware of the language that is speaking them.

Observe a group of scientists, therapists, lawyers, or movie people at a party, then notice the meanings surrounding what anthropologists call their "interaction rituals." I am sure that actors will be fascinated by these ideas.

Always observe a woman's physical gestures. Notice hierarchical behavior among professionals in social settings, establishment of dominance, requests for tribute, sexual gifts, power. Notice that participants in these rituals are often unaware of the true language(s) being spoken by them, even as their words are measured and weighed. Every person -- especially any woman -- is dancing all the time. Often what is really being said is the exact opposite of what the words actually spoken communicate.

Unspoken words may be more vital to establishing meaning. This is especially interesting in observing powerful people. Most of all, I ask would-be philosophers and students to "notice." Just to notice things, people, messages, meanings all the time. "Attend" to others in Simone Weil's sense of the word. Henry James said that novelists are persons on whom "nothing is lost." With this advice in mind, "hermeneutics" may be thought of as --

"... [Any] method of interpretation first of texts, and secondly of the whole social, historical, and psychological world. The problems were familiar to Vico, and raised in connection with Biblical criticism by Schleiermacher. Under the title of verstehen [roughly, "understanding"] the method of interpretation was contrasted with objective scientific method by Weber and Dilthey. Its inevitable subjectivity" -- and yet, capacity to yield objective truth -- "is the topic of the major writings of Gadamer."

Dictionary of Philosophy, at p. 172.

"Symbol" is the most important of these words for Eco. He is highly cautious in using it, handling the word as a scientist would use nitroglycerin in a laboratory:

"... 'Symbol' is a word I advise my students to use very sparingly and to note the contexts in which they find it, in order to decide the meaning it has there and not elsewhere. In fact, I no longer know what a symbol is. I have tried to define the symbolic mode as a particular textual strategy. But leaving aside this textual strategy -- which I will return to later -- a symbol can be either something very clear (an unambiguous expression with a definable content) or something very obscure (a polyvalent expression, which summons up a whole nebula of content)."

Umberto Eco, "On Symbolism," in On Literature (New York: Harcourt Brce, 2002), p. 141.

Finally, "postmodernist" and "postmodern" are terms worthy of book-length treatment. I will only allude to my uses of the terms in this essay. Eco is not a postmodernist. However, his work and interests are highly relevant to postmodernist themes. Eco's dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas and his interest in the medieval mind's fascination with the "book of nature" is life-long. As we will see, postmodernist societies become more than a book. The postmodernist "setting" becomes a kind of movie or collection of images and messages, which are to be read or seen by the philosopher, who is transformed into a kind of detective adept at making his or her way through this not-so-solid jungle. (See my short stories "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")

"Is the classification of things into names truly arbitrary? Or is there not some meaning to how something is named? While a name itself is a primitive sign and cannot be dissected any further by means of a definition, at the same time there are names which, when given, seem to be replete with mystical significance. ... I am become a name."

Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 105.

For Mr. Kerr, the detective story becomes an allegory for the history of Western philosophy. Take another look at the final line of The Name of the Rose.

We live in a time when modes of communication have multiplied and replicated. Meaningful discourse today is often, necessarily, symbolic and -- this is indeed dangerous -- usually in unconscious ways for persons who are not particularly intellectually self-aware or theoretically-minded concerning ideational systems or philosophical structures in which they find themselves trapped. Such persons simply assume that "that's just how things are."

Many lawyers suffer from this form of imbecility. Perhaps "dullness" is a more polite word.

Does this help to explain the efforts to silence me? Do I upset your world-view?

I shudder to think of American intelligence agents sitting at a desk seeking to decipher a set of subtle signals and signs that deliver emotive and aesthetic-political meanings in terms of numbers, graphs, and pie charts. Lots of luck with that. Does such a blunder may have something to do with 9/11? Isn't this method of studying human meanings the opposite of intelligence? Such unintelligent intelligence agents should become lawyers in New Jersey.

Lawyers have to reduce the conceptual landscape to manageable proportions in order to function. Sometimes they forget that what they are assuming as "given" is the entire foundation of their worldview, which is not shared by others. American political leaders do not see all that they are leaving out of their analyses when visiting a foreign culture. The habit of stupidity -- especially self-chosen stupidity -- has a way of becoming ingrained and producing, automatically, the intended effect. ("Images and Death.")

A recent lecture by the President of Iran is abundant proof of cultural dislocation and difficulties of communication in a person visiting our shores.

How do American officials appear to others? The most common word used these days to describe Americans is "stupid." This phenomenon merits scholarly attention, as does the failure to see that what is "relevant" to a philosophical or political-jurisprudential discussion is itself a philosophical issue. The only response to charges of serious criminality by New Jersey officials, for example, is further attempts to destroy these writings. Is that the best you can do?

We do not live in a world in which stupidity should be a goal of policy makers and lawyers as well as judges. We can no longer afford to be proud of ignoring all that "stuff" that has to do with culture, which is often the only factor that makes political events and even history meaningful or understandable. Liberal fashionistas will point to George W. Bush as a "simplifier." However, one might just as well point to liberal fashionistas and their friends -- Susan Faludi, Mark Lilla, the usual suspects come to mind.

Ideology or group-think mentalities are nowhere more visible than in trendy corners of Manhattan or in New Jersey's legal-governmental circles. Being patronized and insulted by morons -- who then ask me to explain philosophical concepts to them -- is a surreal experience that is not unusual for minority intellectuals. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

Also common is the experience of seeing one's work destroyed (or stolen) by people incapable of producing anything half as good, but who manage to get published and favorably reviewed.

The postmodern turn is a bifurcation in the intellectual landscape. This schizoid reaction in the contemporary Western Mind will not be understood by any group of persons seeking to reduce the key concepts shaping our lives or simplifying complex intellectual systems to something "easy to understand."

Complexity, contradictory meaning-systems, and mixed messages is the world in which we must live. We have no choice about this condition. History has presented us with this challenge. Umberto Eco comments on our "hermeneutic dilemma":

"... however isolated we might consider ourselves to be in the ivory towers of the university campus, immune to the charms of Coca-Cola, more attuned to Plato than to Madison Avenue ... Calabrese is aware that this is not true, and that even the way in which we, or at least our students, read Plato -- if they do -- is determined by the existence of 'Dallas,' [any t.v. show may be substituted at this point,] even for those who never watch it. And so he tries to incorporate the events around him into his understanding." (Eco, p. vii.)

There has always been stupidity in high places and leading newspapers. Today that stupidity is condescending and smug, as evidenced by the front-page obituary of Norman Mailer in The New York Times, suggesting that Mailer was not always "coherent." Who is? Charles McGrath, "Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With a Matching Ego, Dies at 84," in The New York Times, November 11, 2007, at p. A1. 

People who are adept at navigating in our ocean of symbolic systems and meanings will be good at understanding this crazy world that we have made and which is now making us. Artists, intellectuals, mystics -- all the persons previously considered "marginal" -- have suddenly become crucial to avoiding global catastrophe.

Will we ignore thinkers' warnings? Will we listen to our "marginal" men and women before it is too late? I hope so. How can our cultural forms not become surreal or crazy after the events of the twentieth century and the quantum mechanics revolution?

In the century of Mickey Mouse and Mickey "D" (McDonald's), Nagasaki and Hiroshima, "common sense" realism is the absurdity and dream-like fantasy.

Hostility to Latinos may explain the absence of such "little brown persons" in our magazines. I do not speak with an accent, by the way, except for a slight Bronx-like pronounciation. The nomeklatura will never forgive someone who shows them to be moronic on any occasion. This does not include Mr. Denby, whose book I liked and would give to every first-year student in a liberal arts college.

I do not know how many other essays have been altered or vandalized today by New Jersey persons.

One of the most brilliant and learned academics I have known came upon a group of his colleagues seeking a definition of a word. He was not consulted because (since he spoke English with an accent) he could not possibly know "the" language very well, despite his American Ph.D. and several other doctorates. He not only defined the word for these "colleagues," but also provided an etymology with citations to authorities in Roman law.

Deleuze and Guattari seek to "subvert all theoretical and institutional barriers to 'desiring-production' in order to create new desiring 'schizo-subjects' who 'unscramble the codes' of modernity and become reconstituted as desiring machines. ... Schizoanalysis articulates new postmodern positions organized around the concepts of plurality, multiplicity, and decentredness, and attempts to create new postmodern forms of thought, politics, subjectivity."

Steven Best & Douglas Kellner, eds., Postmodern Theory (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 85-86 (emphasis added).

If everyone is pretending and working so hard to be "normal" -- when our conditions are abnormal -- is any mutual understanding really possible? Will it not be smarter to discard this nebulous idea of "normality" and to float into the abyss without drowning in it? If all the world is abnormal, then what is abnormality? New Jersey perhaps.

Modernity is (or was?) about the autonomy of reason, hope for progress, perfectibility of human institutions and, maybe, persons. Modernity was the worship of normality or reason. A secularization of rationality is at the heart of the modern, beginning with the Renaissance and culminating with the Enlightenment that followed the scientific revolution as well as the emergence of the industrial and commercial transformations of Western societies that are still underway.

Modernity as a progress-imbued, future-oriented project of eternal becoming faltered at the gates of Auschwitz. Rationalization, scientific techniques, impersonal reason brought us to the concentration camps and the totalitarian nightmares of highly efficient mega-states. Somebody should make this point to Professor Lilla: Religion is not the only thing about which we can be "irrational." Irrational confidence in the capacities of science or reason is as worrisome as religious fundamentalism. See Steven Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), pp. 1-5, 175-211.

Intellectuals began to sense this alteration in the intellectual landscape immediately after liberating millions of victims in the concentration camps:

"For Arnold Toynbee, [1947] the postmodern age would be the final phase of Western history and one dominated by anxiety, irrationalism and helplessness. In such a world, consciousness is adrift, unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past. Consciousness is thus itself 'decentered': no longer agent of action in the world, but a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect. Art becomes not so much an expression of human spirit, but another commodity." (Waugh, pp. 4-5.) (See "The Red Violin.")

The same transformation occurs to religious practice that is changed from mystical experience to dogmatic forms and various fundamentalisms. Religion and you, for that matter, also become "commodities":

"Like knowledge, therefore, [art] can no longer be critical but only functional. Moreover, we are in the postmodern condition and, implicated in a culture where all knowledge is produced through discourse, we can no longer seek transcendence. There is no position outside of culture from which to view culture. There is no Kantian 'view from nowhere' no conceptual space not already implicated in that which it seems to contest. There can only be disruption from within: micropolitics, language games, parodic skirmishes, irony, fragmentation." (Waugh, pp. 4-5.)

Be very careful about what is being discarded when truth, Goodness, meaning, God are tossed out the window in an embrace of power. Have we really escaped the forces that lead to Auschwitz? Or have we only surrendered to them by this abandonment of reason and transcendence?

Reason and transcendence are available to you, here and now, as are truth and objectivity. 

No point of view outside of history is necessary for us to achieve an absolute truth. Do we find ourselves only fashioning a new kind of reason for a post-World War II world that is less a book than a set of images or surfaces? Why has it been necessary for so many French thinkers to return to Kant? History has become cinema. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

"What this turn towards Kant indicates is an appreciation that the Nietzschean assault on a repressive reason itself depends on a dogmatic conception of the relation between knowledge and pre-cognitive interests, that an unqualified hostility to the universal in the domain of ethics and politics has a profoundly menacing -- as well as emancipatory -- aspect, and that a willful self-restriction of analysis to the fragmentary and the perspectival renders impossible any coherent understanding of our own historical and cultural situation."

Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London & New York: Verso, 1987), p. xiii. (Back to Kant in the twenty-first century.)

Either you can do this postmodernist dance or you can't. Those who are adept at manipulating our conceptual networks (while retaining substance) will thrive intellectually; those still in a classical modernist mode will become irrelevant. Finally,

"... Counter-Enlightenment, of course, is as old as the Enlightenment itself, but whereas in the past (in Romantic thought, for example), the critique of reason was accompanied by an alternative foundationalism (of the imagination), Postmodernism tends to claim an abandonment of all metanarratives which could legitimate foundations for truth."

Patricia Waugh, "Introduction," in Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Edward Arnold, 1992), pp. 4-5.

Before turning to Eco's great essay, let us keep these words and concepts in mind: reason, fragmentation, power, aestheticizing social space and the invasion by power of all aspects of inner- and outer-life following upon the retreat of reason.

Which would you prefer, power or reason? What kind of power? What kind of reason? Most importantly, the lingering hope still found in human imaginative "power," aesthetic capacity or spiritual choice as against nihilism, must not be surrendered.

If we find ourselves drowning in an ocean of images then we better learn to swim -- quickly. The answer is not to beat up or silence the "advocates" of new aesthetic and spiritual-intellectual spaces, like Umberto Eco or David Deutsch. Don't forget that some of the very best navigators of this ocean of images are Americans. Anybody know Steven Spielberg?

Scientists and literary theorists will benefit by bringing into relation the ideas of Eco and Deutsch. Those wishing to ponder conflicting qualifications and nuances in the interpretation of social reality and history are directed to: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 300-312 and Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 1-15, 15-38.

II. De Consolatione Philosophiae: Language, Power, Force.

Eco's essay begins with a comment on a lecture by Roland Barthes, delivered under the shadow of his mentor, Michel Foucault. See Susan Sontag, ed., The Barthes Reader (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), "Inaugural Lecture" at the College de France.

According to Eco, "In this lecture (which, as we shall see, focuses on play with language), Barthes, however innocently, is playing: He offers one definition of power and presupposes another." (p. 240.) (Steven Spielberg can "play," but so can Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese, Antonio Banderas, Jane Campion and Jonathan Demme.)

A text to which much of Barthes' lecture is addressed or responds is The Order of Things. The definition Barthes presupposes -- which Eco does not explain because he assumes the reader is familiar with it -- is Foucault's definition of power, supplemented by Nietzsche and Alfred Adler. I am not suggesting that Eco was thinking explicitly of Nietzsche or Adler, but Foucault sure was. Nietzsche is always a source, while Adler is under the surface of Foucault's work as an important influence on Foucault's teacher -- psychologist, Ludwig Bingswanger -- who was a Jungian-existentialist.

See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 73; and by way of comparison, see again, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1983).

Eco is introducing us to an "echo chamber," as it were: Nietzche, Adler, Freud, Jung, Foucault, then Barthes emerge in a definition of power that is offered playfully. Umberto Eco will play even with that "playful" definition.

Judith Butler's thinking is crucial at this juncture. To my knowledge, no one has connected Butler's work -- which is usually relegated to the "I-hate-men" section of the bookstore -- with Eco's semiotics. Mistake. This is philosophy as jazz. Fiorittura. Flowering a phrase in bel canto singing. Philosophers must become not only detectives, but surfers or skateboarders on this ocean of images and ideas. Gee, that's not analytical philosophy:

"... power is not 'one' and ... as it infiltrates a place where it is not felt at first, it is 'plural,' legion, like demons. '... Power is present in the most delicate mechanisms of social exchange: not only in the State, in classes, groups, but even in fashion, public opinion, entertainment, sports, news, information, family and private relations, and even in the liberating impulses which attempt to counteract it.' ..."

In being raped, censored, slandered, classified as "unethical," placed beyond the pale, subjected to hypnosis, invasions of privacy, also forced impoverishment, one enters a dance of power-relations in which the mechanisms of the seemingly all-powerful state are rendered laughable (and helpless) before philosophical intelligence, wit and humor to say nothing of modesty. Oppression creates resistance.

The dullness of govermental instrumental rationality is rendered ineffective by sheer intelligence in the service of the human spirit of revolution. It really helps to have a sense of humor if you are going to deal with lawyers. ("I can eat fifty eggs.")

For the psychologizing of power relations notice this next sentence and see my comments on the presence of sexism in feminist discourse and racism everywhere in America:

"I call the discourse of power any discourse which engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.' You carry out a revolution to destroy power, and it will be reborn, within the new state of affairs. '... Power is the parasite of a trans-social organism, linked to the whole of man's history and not only to his political, historical history. This object in which power is inscribed, for all its human eternity, is language, or, to be more precise its necessary expression: the language we speak and write,' the given language." (Eco, p. 240.) ("What is it like to be tortured?")

Make the idea of language plural. Languages are where we live, including languages of images, advertising, pop music, clothing, hair styles, personas (masks) among which we are invited to choose. In all of those languages we find power, shaping and shifting the discourse of subjectivity where we must understand ourselves and create our world.

My struggle to write, every day, is enough to convince me of these truths. So is my experience of torture and censorship. Also, it is proof of the abuse of power and the evil that results from such abuse.

When the worst possible insult directed against me -- as persons are hacking into my computer and destroying my work -- is to say: "You are not a man!" I realize that this is only a way for the speaker to reveal that he believes the worst thing a person can be is a woman, because every woman is a "non-man" and (therefore) a non-person. Why? What are you afraid of in yourself? Don't forget that love and morality are also kinds of power.

Internet "chat" or "writing" (I am running scans 24 hours per day, my updating feature is disabled, again) is about a meeting of powers, but so is Times Square or your favorite television show, and such things as race, gender, sexual-orientation, sexism, religious worship -- for example, an American "date," dancing, laughter, or what we call "comedy," which is no laughing matter. Law is always an encounter between forces in American society. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: Dover, 2005) and Leszek Kolakowski, Bergson (Indiana: St. Augustine's, 2001).

In an entertainment culture, comedy becomes a form of political struggle and philosophical insight -- also power. If there is any chance for a meeting with the people who plan to blow your head off because you're an American then it will have to take place in this postmodernist-aesthetic cultural space. Everybody inhabits this universe of media imagery and shares this territory. Internet? 

Not everybody reads these key common symbols and images in the same way. Amazingly, people in Washington, D.C. fail to see that one of our most important battles or fronts in the so-called "War on Terror" is at the multiplex and on-line. No wonder I am being censored and attacked by New Jersey's armies of morons.

Let's take another look at Foucault before determining where Eco goes with his analysis.

November 1, 2007 at 10:24 A.M. annoying phone calls from 414-208-1011.

Violence is not an option. Violence is what power wants from people like me to "justify" societal racism, along with further oppressions and tortures. Frustration is aimed at generating violence or collapse, also induced pathological behavior that can be misclassified as "unethical" provides ass-cover for censors. Never cooperate with such evil. (See again: "What is it like to be tortured?" and "What a man's gotta do.")

It is because he is a political genius and revolutionary that Mumia Abu-Jamal is incarcerated in the United States of America, not because he is believed guilty of a crime beyond any reasonable doubt. The same nation that imprisons Abu-Jamal calls on other countries to respect political dissidents and tolerate freedom of speech. ("Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

Government-inserted "errors" have been corrected in this text so many times that I can no longer say the total number of times when the work has been violated. Each of these violations of the essay is a kind of rape of its author.

We must live with these contradictions and struggle against the injustices that they produce. Crazy, isn't it? Geoffrey Hartman, "Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure," in Jacques Ehrman, ed., Structuralism (New York: Anchor Books, 1970), pp. 137-158 and Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking, 1971), pp. 84-125.

"Power is everywhere," Michel Foucault writes, "not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere. ... Power comes from below ... There is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general [I love this next word!] matrix. ..."

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, "Introduction," by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 92-94, then see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Alan Sheridan, translation (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 16-17.

Power, human corruption, is in languages (plural) where we live our subjectivities, power that is shaping us into docile subjects.

Can we escape the "Matrix"?

Eco offers an obvious solution that is anything but easy -- by playing and cheating, he says, by breaking the rules of language we escape the "Matrix." Imagination allows us to reinvent reality all the time through literature, by means of the madness of art, also in science and philosophy, legal thinking and religious expression, cinema. Scientist Lisa Randall can jack into the "Matrix," but so can Lee Smolin.

The seeming commercial product -- a blockbuster movie like, say, "The Matrix" -- may be reinvented and radically reinterpreted by us, ordinary viewers, as a subversive and self-undermining text that serves to challenge the system. The same may be said for our ideas of reason and rationality. To defend reason is not necessarily to accept traditional notions of reason and rationality. Thus, Brian Greene's use of cinematic techniques in his PBS documentary "The Elegant Universe" is light years ahead of Carl Sagan's approach to the medium, but without Sagan's "Cosmos," there would be no Brian Greene on television. Greene is developing his own scientific-televisual "reason."

The game of torture will proceed in this fashion for the foreseeable future, until enough New Jersey officials are escorted to federal prison or there are changes at the top in that system. Right, Richard J. Codey? You won't tire me out. You will not silence me. Are you a guilty bystander to censorship and torture?

In postmodernist spaces the revolutionary and guerilla leader becomes the ultimate Geek who always gets the Babe. Eco's work opens on to a postmodernist romanticism of revolution. Mega-cool! In the struggle with opponents of freedom -- whether terrorists or home-grown, blue-suited corporate masters and other government officials -- the forces of light must now be guided by creative outsiders injecting radical reinterpretations into the system. "Upgrades, hmmm ..." ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Pictures in Pakistan this week of gun-wielding young men feature background posters advertising American movies. Semiotics.

Why has no one suggested that the contradiction between the anti-Americanism of those young men and the popularity of American films to which those same young men respond with admiration should be explored? You can expect these ideas to be plagiarized soon? Have we betrayed our own cinematic values and self-images or are they merely hypocritical lies? ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")

This would also be a fitting subject for cinematic exploration. I would much prefer the explosions and killings to be on screen, not in villages or city streets. I remember a terrorist hijacking of a plane in Latin America where the Marxist opponent of America wore a Coca-Cola emblem on his cap. That's postmodernism.

Suggestion to anti-Americans: What you love in American movies and respond to with respect as well as admiration is real and may contradict some ideological bullshit that you have been taught. Many of the criticisms of American power that you have heard in a Mosque or on street corners is also being made today, by Americans, many of whom are critical of their government's current policies.

I am one such critic of abuses of power, including the censorship which you are witnessing at these blogs.

America is a very complex and fascinating place for which you already feel affection -- or you wouldn't be crazy about those movies. American culture is part of what you are, even if you define yourself as a revolutionary opposed to political oppression from the U.S., again, such as you are seeing here and now. This goes for people in Cuba who may actually read these words. (See Mel Gibson's "The Patriot.")

Postmodernist literary masterpieces -- like Vidal's Myra Breckinridge or Calvino's mad inventions -- are self-deconstructing intellectual time bombs intended to explode in the subconscious long after you first read them. Philosophical and political-jurisprudential ideas that matter in the future will do the same. They will be communicated in books, also in movies, t.v. shows, music, even on canvas, especially "here," on-line. Welcome to the Internet version of Abu Ghraib. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Michel Foiucault and the Authorship Question.")

Science is also increasingly becoming "glitzy." Compare Ai Weiwei's architecture with Botero's canvases. My situation in the U.S. may be worse than Ai Weiwei's adventures in China. That's art as social critique. Now think again about Rapping and hip hop music: Why is Cornel West in the "Matrix" movies? Or making his own Rap CD? I am thinking about writing in verse an "Ode to Bingo Gazingo," a New York street poet. If there is a "Matrix" sequel Brian Greene should be in it. 

These postmodernist reflections do not make Martin Heidegger a "postmodernist." Heidegger is one of the forerunners of what would be called postmodernism in the hands of acolytes, like Derrida, and also of the neo-modernist hermeneuticists who were influenced directly by Heidegger's works, like Gadamer and Ricoeur. There is no "Heideggerean architecture" -- fortunately. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")

You think that you understand America? You hate Mr. Bush? Or Nancy Pelosi? Mr. Romney? "The Colbert Report"? Easy. Create an alternative reality where Pelosi and Bush run off together to Las Vegas. Colbert becomes the next Republican President of the United States. Clarence Thomas anounces that he is Oprah Winfrey's long-lost brother and will be taking over her television show as Oprah becomes our new Supreme Court justice. Melissa Harris-Perry?

I promise you that no matter how weird is your invention, it will be surpassed by America's reality in a week or two. We must all become ... The One. Whoa!

If you're smiling, then you're proving my point. I have your attention. Your mind is engaged. That's 50% of the challenge in all communication in a media-advertising environment in which people are accustomed to being lied to, every day, by politicians, merchants, also Hollywood. They stop listening. Eco chuckles: "This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called literature." (p. 241.)

Rather than lying to get over on you -- as most powerful people do -- maybe it is possible to use the techniques of literay fiction and cinema, or all arts, to communicate truth.

Is this the new kind of "reason" that we need for an age of surfaces? This would be a good time to insert more "errors" in this essay, right before you plagiarize my ideas again. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

America can play this game with anyone who is willing to meet us halfway. The Jersey Boys will be thrilled because they will claim that my point about thievery in New Jersey and tortures is only literature. "It never happened!" They will shout this as they are hauled away to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (better known to residents and guests at these deluxe suites as the "MCC"), to which many guys and gals from Bayonne, North Bergen, and other mafia swamplands will soon be transported by the taxpayers. I hope.

"We don't know from nothing!" is the most often heard remark in New Jersey's Senate building. I agree with this statement.

How you doing Senator Bob? What's Debbie up to? Hey, Stuart Rabner -- you son of a gun! -- what are you planning now? Let me guess: You're taking Anne Milgram to the Hop? Hey, what's that envelope filled with cash doing in your pocket, Stuart? ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey.")

Notice that one can write a Truman Capote-like "non-fiction novel" using these improbable characters -- like Stuart Rabner and Anne Milgram -- where every fact is true (in N.J. politics there are always "untrue" facts because "it's all relative!"), reported fairly in the objective media, warranting the interpretations offered to readers. How else can one even begin to make sense of the evil and hypocrisy found in the inactivity of Rabner and Milgram as well as in the paralyzed institutions that they contaminate in the face of such great crimes (committed publicly and on a daily basis!) by underlings? ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State," then "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")

Creativity, imagination, become forms of resistance, weapons of struggle against power. The same may be said for humor. These are the weapons of those without formal power -- the billions of people on the planet with no voice other than those annoying "marginal" intellectuals and artists who refuse to go away, no matter how much you hurt them, insisting that you look at Darfur, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, New Jersey, Jena, Pakistan, or 9/11 squarely, not by way of distractions and sugar-coated misrepresentations of these grim realities, then reimagine our lives so that such things and places will no longer be possible. The pain of living with such social horrors is no longer bearable for many of us. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "America's Holocaust.")

Participation in this conversation will be more effective than tossing rocks at the police or at Americans, even firing rockets at Israelis may be less effective than Internet satire. Communication will work better than terrorism. Don't grab a rifle or a suicide bomb-kit, get your camera or start a blog.

Share the torture and censorship with me, invite your friends to do the same, and we will find solutions together.

"In the end," Terry Eagleton writes, "there are commitments we cannot walk away from however hard we may try; and these loyalties, whether commendable or obnoxious, are definitive of who we are. The commitments which run deepest are only in a limited sense ones we can choose, which is where voluntarism goes wrong."

We can only choose what they will mean for us.

"... Anyone who genuinely believed that nothing was more important than anything else, as opposed to running this line because it seems fashionably 'anti-hierarchical,' would not be quite what we recognize as a person. And you would only need to observe them in action for five minutes to recognize that they did not actually believe it at all."

After Theory (New York: Perseus, 2003), p. 200. ("Good man, Perseus ..." -- words spoken by Private Gibson in "The Sure Thing.")

Two concepts are deployed by Umberto Eco that are intended to allow us to survive in this asylum that is postmodernist culture, as "neo-" Resistance fighters. First, abandoning causality for "force" or "explanation" (Donald Davidson) in social theory:

"The inability to distinguish between power and causality leads to much childish political behavior. As we have seen, things are not all that simple. Let's replace the notion of causality (one-directional) with that of force. A force is applied to another force: They form a parallelogram of forces." (Eco, p. 249.)

Think of American politics. Anybody seen Neal Stephenson? Am I skateboarding in cyberspace? Snow Crash!

Second, the displacement of power into symbols and symbol-systems leads to the displacement of ourselves, our identities, also into symbols and symbol-systems. Your racist stereotypes will be defeated in an alternative universe (conjured by me) in which bald people, for instance, are discriminated against on the basis of absurd beliefs no more defensible than the racism you live with, every day, that destroys people. How do you remain silent in the face of racism? We need ...

" ... symbolic gestures, a theatrical finale that sanctioned in a manner also scenically pregnant, a crisis in power relationships that had been spreading, in a grass-roots way, for a long time. And without which the pseudo act of force, without symbolic power, [will be] destined to become adjusted in a little local parallelogram." (Eco, at p. 251.)

We will not "adjust." We will not "accept." We will struggle. Always struggle. We will bring the force of love into relation with, against (or as) power, in order to limit power through revolutions that are not seen until they are successful.

Don't let anybody usurp the people's power and revolution in Egypt.

III. Closing the Hermeneutic Circle by Affirming the Dark Moment of "Revolution."

Along with power and human fallibility, we find a disposition towards the good, a capacity for hope, and insistence on making the world more just and ourselves more free in language, including the languages of symbols. The contrast is, first, between the insights and warnings offered by Kojeve (Hegelian-Leftist) and Fukuyama (from the Right of the political spectrum):

"Technology has not leveled the ups and downs of our lives. Looking in a mirror long enough, however, and looking for the worst, we do get intimations of ourselves as those automatons which Alexander Kojeve has seen to emerge at the end of history when 'the species of Homo sapiens' (which will live amidst abundance and complete security)" -- in some places! -- "will be content, when the species will react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign 'language.' ..."

Henry S. Kariel, The Desperate Politics of Postmodernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), p. 4 (emphasis added); see also, Alexander Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 160-161, and Fukuyama, cited above.

On Modernities and Postmodernities within a great novel of ideas, see Malcolm Bradbury's final novel, To The Hermitage (New York: Overlook Press, 2000) and concerning the end of humanity, as allegory, see Michel Houllebecq, The Elementary Particles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), pp. 263-264. (See "'Invasion': A Movie Review." If you are a Conservative, that movie is for you.) PLEASE see Spielberg's "A.I."

Secondly, there is the celebration of autonomy and freedom, goodness and love from the Utopian and idealistic Left in a Post-68' mood, refusing to surrender to despair, lethargy, or adjustment to the status of docile bodies, resisting, struggling, waging revolutions by making love as well as beauty in affirmation of our indestructible humanity, which has something to do with that old concept of God. (See "Neo's Freedom in the Matrix.")

Christopher Peacocke, a well-behaved English Oxfordian -- who will be shocked and horrified at being quoted in this discussion by a "ruffian" like me -- says: " ... there is a significant range of normative kinds, such that each truth of that kind has an a priori component."

Besides power, therefore, there is an indestructible moral capacity ingrained in us and in language. Against power, as a kind of anti-power, there is love. We live between contradictions, automatons or anti-automatons? Racists or anti-racists? The only way to live with these contraditions is through creative dialogue and (or as) expression. We must choose sides and struggle. There is no third option:

"... for any moral proposition we are entitled to accept there is a similar division: into its a priori moral grounds on the one hand and its a posteriori non-moral grounds on the other. [Dual aspects?] ..."

The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 198-205. (See my essay, "Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "Is it rational to believe in God?")

Everything excluded, returns, in altered form in postmodernism's hall of mirrors -- including Modernist reason and God. We are left to play with "passion" and "irony," the choice is between Unger and Rorty. Compare Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xvi with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Passion: An Essay on Personality (New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 107.

Umberto Eco closes with the idea of "celebration" of our human capacity to resist dehumanization -- a "rave scene"! -- which must have thrilled Duncan Kennedy and the Wachowski brothers. This affirmation should be contrasted with Houellebecq's carefree pessimism:

"As an aspect of resistance to power, the celebration introduces an element of self-confidence, which acts to disrupt the consensus dictated by fear. Its results cannot be immediate; and furthermore, there can be no result unless other marginal attitudes correspond to the celebration ..." (Eco, p. 253.)

See Kennedy's Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 114-115. Here is where Unger comes in handy:

"In the setting of our non-instrumental relations to one another, we come to terms with our unlimited mutual need and fear. This coming to terms is a search. It is a quest for freedom -- for the basic freedom that includes an assurance of being at home in the world. To define the search for such a freedom is to formulate a conception of passion that offers alternatives to the doctrines that contrast passion to rational understanding or social convention."

Finally,

"The most radical freedom is the freedom to be, to be a unique person in the world as it is."

Passion, pp. 107-108. ("Good Will Humping" and "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down.")