The Map is Not The Territory

One thing is also another. If Marxism is a road map, it is one in which the signs are meant to be serious. One class is one, and the other is the other, and never shall the twain meet. However, people are both genders and more, and we absorb other races, and the signs are not so separate, even unto class.

LS is another system of signs. We think that signes are also singes (monkeys) playing about. In that, we are something like the Buddhists (playful), BUT the Buddhists have the big fatso as their ultimate sign, while we have the scrawny Christ. The Buddha looks like he's eaten everything for miles around especially in those mountain top Buddha shrines such as the one in the harbor of Hong Kong that takes up so much space.

I had this whole idea mapped out last night while sleeping, but it evaporated upon waking. I wanted to contrast fat with thin: Falstaff against Gaunt, Eastwood against Michael Moore, Kate Moss against Andrea Dworkin, Augustine against Marx. But it evaporated upon waking. I have the signs still in my mind, but not their significance.

But LS exists to some extent to "wave red flags" I remember this phrase because I wanted to signal the influx of Buddhists as to what I'm up to here. I wave red flags a bit. This pulls out the bull in others, who attack the red flags. Somehow I was going to work the term "bullshit" in, but I also wanted to stipulate that signs are both REAL and SYMBOLIC. Michael Moore is a symbol of a certain kind of fatuous thought, but he is also a real person. He's fat, but his thought is very thin.

I must have been thinking this while driving to New York City yesterday while holding a map on the steering wheel, watching the exit signs go past. All the way down, all the way back, without missing a single exit. Perfect execution. At bottom the map is a system of signs, but the road also does exist. It is more than a system of signs.

Coney Island is a system of signs, but at bottom it does also exist. The carnies are symbols of carnies, but they are more than that, too. They have a home life in which they are presumably not carnies.

Be careful what you sign up for. If Kate Moss is a sign of one kind of woman, and Andrea Dworkin a sign of another entirely, they nevertheless meet under the sign of women. And yet they are both real, too.

Some maps are better than others. The map I was using yesterday was excellent. It had all the exits in blue, and they were the correct numbers. At bottom LS is a kind of detective excursion into mapping on a global level, in which I posit that Lutheranism is a better system of signs than that of other systems. This is partially due to its authorship. Luther was a better author than others. He makes you cry he's so careful about giving direction. And yet even he got lost a few times. The remarks on the Jews are a sign that he too could get lost. Allowing the bigamy of Philip of Hesse was a wink and a nudge in exchange for protection from the Catholic armies that wanted to roll up Luther's new map, in the local dialect, which kept them from treating the citizenry of Europe the way con artists treat their marks.

Aquinas spent too much time on the afterlife. Hundreds of pages positing non-empirical reasoned out statements with regard to whether fingernails will grow in the afterlife. Luther simply said, "We'll see." He returns it to the empirical.

Luther took two books out of the Bible. One is James, and the notion of Good Works. The other is Revelations. He red flagged these as bullshit, and unreliable.

Lutheran Surrealism is a detective game, but we are only the Inspector Clouseaus of signage.

Luther allowed the arts and the sciences to have complete freedom of inquiry. This is not so in Marxist and Islamic countries. In Marxist countries the arts and sciences are under the political wing, and have to get the go-ahead from the Party for every discovery. Something similar was true in Catholic countries. Whenever you find censorship, or some parties denied the ability to read or publish (many Islamics disallow women to read, and or publish) you stunt the mental growth of your country. Catholic countries still lag in literacy. Marxist countries are totally stunted in literacy. See North Korea. Lutheran countries supreme.

It's not the Lutherans that are supreme, it's the freedom of inquiry for the whole nation that is supreme.

The World Trade Center was a SIGN which Bin Laden censored.

His is a system AGAINST the freedom of capital, and individualism. He reads against it, much like the Marxists.

Michael Berube is also against reading for everyone. His symbol of himself as a bloody hockey player aligns him with OBL. They are similar in wanting to control signage and not allow others to speak (Jacques and I banned at his board).

Coney Island is a sign with a name, and a history. It isn't appreciably better than other Amusement Parks, but its history lends it an ontological reality, but here I approach the edge of the known world and all beyond is oceanic and off the map.

In her speech before the Forum on Women in Huairou China in 1995, San Suu Kyi had Buddhist arguments that she wedged against the militaristic Chinese regime which limited her speech to 1,500 listeners. She says that, "genuine tolerance requires an active effort to try to understand the point of view of others; it implies broad-mindedness and vision, as well as confidence in one's own ability to meet new challenges without resorting to intransigence or violence" (38). She also says that Lord Buddha "did not want human beings to live in silence... 'like dumb animals'" (40), and thus instituted something like a parliament at the end of the rainy season retreat. (Quoted in HUMAN RIGHTS: Great Speeches in History, edited by Laura Hitt, published in San Diego by Greenhaven Press, in 2002).

Myanmar, which has the worst human rights record in the world, refused to allow San Suu Kyi to be president of the country although she won 82% of the vote in 1990.

Communist governments have a total control of signage. When the industrial revolution went off the rails in the early 1800s the poets and the churches spoke out against it in Britain. Communists simply imprison poets and ban the churches so you get Chernobyl and the death of the Aral Sea, without anyone to speak up. The Chinese and their colonial states such as North Korea and Myanmar are well in line with the absurd Marxist tradition in this respect.

We encourage at LS instead a certain kind of humorous rankling of conflicting signage, combined with what San Suu Kyi calls "genuine tolerance" and "broad-mindedness" in the spirit of the parliament that Buddha called at the end of the rainy season.

Everyone should have the right to read, and the right to speak while realizing that we are always able to get things wrong: getting off at the wrong exit, or getting off in a terrible jumble of signs, and the mind's circus, and the outer circus, leave us unable to negotiate or find true north. In the spirit of the blind helping the blind to disorient themselves, our humble blog exists to wave red flags, and confuse one another in a spirit of comraderie between lefts and rights, souths and norths, Buddhists and surrealists, while recognizing that all these signs are also really not so separate, but are very likely to become one another, in the changing map that's also a kaleidoscope of blue and red, of bullshit and good sense.