Sunday, August 28, 2016

Professionals! Your Betters!

     We here at Bloody Nib Manor have never been especially fond of professional actors or athletes. We've always held them in our esteem as college philosophy professors. In other words, adolescents living a prolonged adolescence. Often a much too long prolonged adolescence.
     Ask yourself this question:
     Why should a man or woman be paid a lot of money to do the same thing that you did for free, or had to pay to do (child sports and theatre) as a child or as a young person? If your answer is because of the excellence of their performance you've made the wrong answer. Those same people who are paid a mighty sum of money to pretend to be who they aren't or who play a game better than the average bear would, if they were really interested in the thing that they excel in, do that thing as a hobby while working at the local machine shop or as a para-legal because, according to their own words, they have a "passion" for it,
     But they don't have a passion for their acting or sport. They have a passion for the money it brings them. No man or woman over the age of 30 would risk ruining his or her knees by playing weekend football or soccer while working a 9 to 5 job. And acting, while easier on the body than athletics, reveals the actors and wannabes by the few people sitting in the seats of the local Little Theatre. The person who is now a big star would have, after a half dozen plays with a quarter filled theatres would have chucked it all and gone back to the job at the bank. The "passion" lasts as long as the money does.
     The Romans of the Classical and Empire times, while liking theatre and various sports, held actors and professional athletes in low regard. Those two groups were considered little more than jesters who offered a moment's distraction from daily life. To be sure, many upper class Roman men longed for a female athlete and often impregnated one, and the Roman matrons got all hot and bothered by an actor or a gladiator. But it was considered shameful. A man consorting with proper prostitutes was considered more comely than having a fling with a female athlete (there were few, if any, female actors at the time).
     In 17th and 18th century England the theatres were considered little more than whorehouses for the upper class. Professional athletes were considered meat to be bet upon much like dogs in bull-baiting or fighting cocks.
     But for some reason both "professions" have become respectable. And instead of looking at them with at askance, we seem to have made them heroes and heroines of almost Homeric dimensions. They have become all-wise gods of some sort and not just experts in their fields.
     And this is just not true. The average guy working at the 7-11 or you mechanic or plumber or preacher or para-legal is more aware of what is going on the world than the average actor or athlete simply because they live in the real world and have to break a sweat to make the rent, feed their kids or/and pay for Obamacare. They are down on the ground. Actors and actresses are often made much of because they are accidents of birth (they are pretty or good liars) and professional athletes are accidents of birth by their talents. But their talents, both the theatre crowd and the stadium crowd, are not wise. They are not cultured. They are vulgar and esily swayed because they want to be something that they are not. They want to be considered smart and wise because they know the gag better than we do. They know that they are, in the big picture, nothing. They will soon be forgotten by the people who now adore them. A new model will come along.
     Your old great granny and her granny and their wisdom and smarts will be more of you and your DNA and be much longer remembered than a paid liar or a paid athlete. Their names may go into a book. But your granny's wisdom lives in the blood and will be passed on to the kids who call you granny or gramps.
     And those bastards hate that.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Who Ya Callin' Naked, Mohammed?

     We here at Bloody Nib Manor have never been beach-goers. There was a time for about three years when we lived near a beach and we never visited it.. But we have no animus against the beach and beach-goers. It was always that other people did, but not us, for some reason.
     Having said that, this writer finds this whole "burkini" (or is it "burquini"?) thing in France interesting,
     For those not in the know, a burkini is a full bodied covering that some Mohammedan women wear to the beach. It covers the body from the ankles to the top of the head with an opening for the face. It makes a Victorian woman's bathing costume look almost scanty with bare shoulders and stockinged legs below the knees
      Several French municipalities on the Med have decided to ban the burkini because they see the thing as a threat to French civil and secular society and an expression of Mohammedan aspirations for dominance. Other people, of the more liberal an Kumbaya crowd, see the banning of the burkini as a sort of racism or anti-religionism (and it's very odd that they only worry about anti-religionism when it deals with Islam and not with Christians in a purportedly Christian nation.
     There has been a lot of talking about this thing among the eggheads of various flavors and they have all gotten it wrong.
     Societies regularly put limits on what people can or cannot wear in public ion that society. A native woman from the deepest Congo cannot parade around the streets of Paris or London bare-breasted and wearing only a colored cord belt around her waist. And a man from the same tribe cannot go to the local 7-11 wearing only a penile sheath and a smile. And a person cannot walk into a bank with his or her face covered and expect not to be thought hincky. Traditionally the beach has been a place for people to shed some of their clothes (sometimes, in the matter of fat men and Speedos all too much) and soak up some sun and enjoy the sea water. In this society (and this writer means European and American society) a full body covering from head to toe is reserved to Catholic nuns. And well some people may ask what separates Catholic nuns from Mohammedan women the answer is simply this: nuns are separate from society and they have made vows. Mohammedan women are not. They are women who live in society and who deal with society and in the Western society they have to conform to to that society (not a bikini or even a one piece bathing suit, but perhaps in a blouse and clam-diggers). If they don't they have no desire to become part of the society to which they have thrown their lot. In other words, they are, whether by the insistence of their husbands or not) termites undermining the pillars of the society into which they have moved and and are bringing the very thing that they claimed to have escaped to the society to which they have moved. In other words, they escape one thing and bring that thing to the place to which they have escaped.
     Nations have cultures. Anyone who enters that culture should be expected to conform to that culture. If one moves to France one should learn to speak French and behave like a French person. The only rebels allowed are, at the nearest, the third generation of the immigrant. And only then when that person can only speak the language of the nation instead of being bi-lingual with the the country of origin.
     Consider the Amish. They are a closed and very conservative society. They get by. They not only get by, but they prosper. The men and women dress as if it was the early 19th century. They may go to the beach, but they where their normal everyday dress. And the nation almost adores them because they are not only examples of a life long gone, but because they do not force themselves on the greater society. When was the last time you, dear reader, saw a Mohammedan of a conservative religious bent, not demand that society conform to him or her?
     The "burkini" is an insult to Western society. It's like the Mohammedan's flipping a giant bird to western society. And one finds one's self wondering if women in Saudi Arabia or Iraq where such a silly thing to the beach in their nations. One wonders how the Mohammedan women in Burma some one hundred years ago could get through the day walking to and from their fields bare-breasted and not feel the shame that the Wahabists have now put upon them. And the reason is because they had a sort of common sense that Wahabist Mohammadism doesn't.
     It's been charged that Christian missionaries have ruined micro-cultures by the teaching Christ. But, know for a fact, that the Livingston and Judson never demanded that their converts dressed as Victorian ladies instead of people living in the bush and jungle.
      So should the "burkini" be banned according to the denizens of Bloody Nib Manor? The answer is "yes." If the women who wear this bad they should just wear a wet suit and pretend to be surfers.