There's only so much you can learn in one place.
The more that I wait, the more time that I waste.
- Madonna (Jump)
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Why why why why why ....
We are just killer beasts. Why can't we see it? Because if we did we'd get all depressed. And then we couldn't get up in the morning and go out there and um ...
So we try to create our little islands of safety and meaning (usually established via depriving some other life forms of their little islands of safety and meaning).
Why do we love violence so much? So much that we created a "sport" that under mutual agreement suspends the normal legal penalties for assault. We want to see somebody beaten. Mike Tyson was big because he promised and delivered just that.
Don't mind me. I'm reading The Last Great Fight and Bad Intentions, the two best books about Mike Tyson. And I'm sparring every one of these summer days at the club like a mad dog so here we go again, basically I've slid down into one of my recurring BFS (Boxing Fantasy Syndrome) phases. So don't mind me. Close your browser window now!
Because it only gets worse. Why does a pro fighter become popular? And start to have "fans", who cheer him and seek his autograph? Because they identify with the power of the winner. To be a fan of a winning fighter disassociates you from the loser, the girly man who couldn't make the count. Which is stupid. Because if somebody paid your admired fighter adequate purse, that same guy would happily punch you out too. So fanship in the fight game is a very strange and revealing phenomenon. A fan is just revealing his own fear.
But maybe if some paid assassin took you out, they'd be doing you a favor? Are they aiding your spiritual growth by removing you from this vale of tears?
Remember in movie Saving Private Ryan, the one very protracted hand-to-hand combat scene where the two opposing soldiers roll around for what seems like hours trying to get the upper hand in a brutal grappling battle with a knife? Of course Spielberg protracts the scene almost beyond reason, to establish the obvious contrastive point, aligning this primitive mano a mano thing with the bulk of the movie devoted to long range ballistics and tanks and other prosthetic devices. Anyway the scene ends peacefully as the winner establishes an unbreakable pin over the other soldier and the winner slowly slides the knife through the loser's heart while whispering "Shhh.... quiet... shhhh"... very gentle.
I guess that's a better way to go than getting your intestines draped all over the barbed wire by an errant shell as in WWI. How can we ever escape this cycle of endless competitive violence? There seems to be no escape.
? You still here? I already told you up above, you're barking up the wrong tree reading this blog.
