The unbearable weight of being Stagg R. Leigh

I guess I'm I glad I'll never hit the big time.

A couple nights ago, I went out to see "American Fiction." Incidentally, it's a great movie, and one that works on many levels. If you haven't seen it yet, go see it now.

But in particular, I was emailing with Marie earlier this evening. I mentioned the movie and told her I'd liked it. She went online and found a trailer, and said it looks like "The Producers." I replied that it is nothing at all like "The Producers." (Not to say anything against "The Producers"! It's the funniest movie ever made. But "American Fiction" breathes a whole different air.)

So I started to think to myself, What do I like about it so much?

Fair warning: In what follows there are likely to be SPOILERS! So don't read any farther unless you have already seen the movie or just don't care.

Freedom is overrated

Freedom is overrated.

I guess I've talked about this before, not always in those words. I find only two places where I have said literally this: here in 2010, and here in 2023. But my post here, arguing that freedom is failure, comes pretty close to saying the same thing.

I first figured it out by watching Father. Back when he owned our family business he had a terrible time of it: I talk about that some here and here, and probably in other places too. At the time, I thought he was being imprisoned by the business; and it was plainly killing him. When he finally sold it, I thought, Now at last he'll be able to do all those things he has wanted to do for so long!

But he didn't. He'd start one project, and then he'd start another, and then he'd email crazy conspiracy theories with his old Army buddies, and then he'd stay up to watch the Late Show, and then … on and on and on. [I have no idea how far he got on any of these projects, but Mother would like me to find out.] But he never got anything actually Done, because he didn't Have To. He was free—as free as anyone I've ever known.

It didn't make him happy. Not having to go out and see people on a regular basis just made him sour and solitary. (He died in 2015, but compare also this post, just for example.)

I worried that could happen to me when my job ended, if I didn't get a regular full-time job to replace it. And, … well, you know, … it's hard to say I was wrong. Just in the last year I talk about that here (after coming home from Scotland) and here (after coming home from France and then Thanksgiving).

Ironically, there's even an argument that this is true of political freedom as well. A few days ago, I posted this over on the Patio, explaining the argument that the best regimes in the world are places like Niger, Uganda, and Angola—none of them "free countries" by any normal metric. 

It's funny. We feel a natural irritation when someone tells us what to do. Who do they think they are? I'll decide what I want to do! But when we have that freedom—well, for some of us, at any rate, it doesn't make us happy. I bet that's true for many of us. It's probably true of me, not that I'm about to surrender my freedom. It's easier to surrender my happiness.

Freedom is overrated.   

          

Did I need to hear this?

It's late at night. I've been drinking too much. I should be in bed. So I clicked on a recent clip on YouTube from Bill Maher.

And this is me. It's totally me. So is this going to kill me? Do I need to worry about it? Was this just some random video, or do I need to take it seriously?

Inquiring minds want to know ….

                

Willing and wanting

Willpower is a funny thing. Ten years ago I wrote about how true self-discipline is not "violent self-mastery through an iron will," but rather a form of "informed, intelligent self-manipulation" that "understand[s] yourself well enough to know what you have to do to set up conditions so that you will naturally act in the way you need to act." I still think that's not far wrong.

When did you start ...? (A follow-up post)

Just about ten years ago, I posted a rumination about what age people lose their virginity, and what age they start regularly fucking. Among other things, I posed the question whether these things travel in families? If your parents lost their virginity early (or late), did you do the same? How about your kids?

Of course it's political!

Just saw this post on LinkedIn. Someone argues that gender fluidity is spreading across the globe and then cautions, "This is not a political matter."

Of course it's a political matter. If it's not being caused by politics, then what's causing it? Biology? Doesn't change that fast. Social attitudes, values, cultural preferences? Those are all just part of politics writ large.

She links to this video, where she talks about the rate at which these changes are taking place. Nothing else besides politics moves that fast.

          

Gender role test

Meanwhile, I found a "gender role test" online, courtesy of some outfit called IDR Labs. Guess how I scored? 

(Right away I remembered having once written this post here.)

Or maybe all these generalizations are just a little silly.

          

Was Tacitus talking about my marriage?

This morning I was reading this article by Charles Eisenstein (highly recommended!) and I stumbled across the following quote:

And … sure, I know he (Eisenstein, that is, not Tacitus) is talking about the relationship between the American government and the American people. But I can't help wondering whether these same principles also explain Wife's intense anger and animosity towards me for so many years? The idea would be consistent with this post, at any rate. Maybe there are others like it too, but I'm not going to hunt for them right now.

          

LinkedIn on tribalism

I saw this morning a post on LinkedIn about tribalism:

Right away it put me in mind of T. E. Lawrence, at least in the movie.

Maybe there are advantages (if only a few) to aligning with nobody. (Reference any number of my earlier posts.)

          

On the incommunicability of political conversion

Two years ago I got a phone call out of the blue from an old college friend Cassius, to tell me that K—a mutual friend back in the day, with whom I had absolutely not kept up any contact—had recently died. Cassius and I went on to have a long talk about a lot of things, catching up on 37 years of past history. (Besides this post, see also this one.) During this talk (among a lot of other topics) Cassius filled me in on what had happened in the interim with K and Mrs. K. 

K and Mrs. K had gotten together while I was still a student. K's previous girlfriend had been a good friend of mine (but never my girlfriend), and the woman who later became Mrs. K had been a radical political lesbian. (I remember one spring festival on campus where she wandered around topless; her overall frame was small and her breasts were proportionally sized, but they were beautifully formed.) But somehow she and K hit it off … and then fell into bed together … after which K ended things with his former girlfriend to focus on one woman at a time. Not long thereafter K and his new girlfriend moved in together, and in due course they married. That's how far my knowledge went before I talked with Cassius.

What I learned was that since then, K had found work in some lucrative corner of the computer industry, and was able to retire at around the age of 50 (so roughly a decade before I did) to a life of elegant leisure and collecting art. Also, some time during the intervening years the K's had migrated from the left-wing politics which had been conventional on campus (back when we were all undergraduates) to something that Cassius characterized as right-wing. He didn't go into a lot of detail, but I assume this meant that they voted Republican rather than Democratic.

Cassius did say that once—only once—he asked them about their political migration, but that the conversation was not informative:

Cassius: I don't get it. You used to be on the Left. What happened to you guys, anyway?

Mrs. K: We finally opened our eyes!

Meeting my Shadow

Last night during dinner I had an encounter with my Shadow. The Jungian kind. Perhaps I'd better start again.

I haven't read very much Jung, and I'm no expert in the tenets of Jungian psychology. Most of what I know about the Shadow archetype, I've learned from reading John Michael Greer—for example, in this essay here. See also this YouTube video as a quick summary:

But his description has always been a bit difficult for me to apply to myself. 

• Your Shadow consists of all the parts of yourself that you don't like. OK, so far, so good. 
• But specifically they are things you hate so much that you refuse to acknowledge that they are part of you. This makes it harder, because I freely acknowledge many of the unpleasant sides of my own character. I talk about them in this venue, not infrequently. Do I have to rule out all of those?
• Because you can't admit that your Shadow characteristics are part of you, you project them onto your enemies. Gosh, do I have enemies?
• And whenever you see someone else exhibit one of these behaviors, it makes you crazy.

I wasn't sure what that left me. But it turns out that's because I have a bad memory.