TV « In Which No Pleasure Is In Itself Evil »
Monday, July 20, 2015 at 10:38AM 
Nevermind
by DICK CHENEY
True Detective
creator Nic Pizzolatto
The New York Post had a headline this weekend that read 'Don Voyage.' Apparently questioning someone's service in the Vietnam War is enough to exclude you from consideration for anything. Bulworth is still a fairly prescient movie. I never served in the Vietnam War, or in any other places, but I have a lot of ideas about it. My main one is that it is just about as bad as it looks, but regular people never see it, not really.
There are a lot of things from which we are protected. Ever seen a dead body, for real, on television? Someone always has an excuse for why the most horrible thing is beyond all reason, but what does that make the second, third, and fourth most horrible things? Just fucking fine?
Colin Farrell got a new look, but she still looks like skunk. No justice.
Just one time I would like to turn on my television or read a book and find out what things were really like. I have to say I don't think it's terribly important, things that happened forty or five years ago. They might as well not have occurred. I passed by a protest of nuclear weapons the other day. About 2,000 people had turned up for this important cause. Their cell phones and tablets were being powered by something, made by someone.
If the world makes us hypocrites, then we might as well sit in our own shit comfortably. "The minute you smelled shit," Vince Vaughn explains to his prissy, infertile wife, "you would be on the next plane." He is conveying to the love of his life why they can't just be farmers.
Ask her to marry you, Ray.
There is a sign outside the Chipotle I went to until it was closed down because of rats like so many others in the chain. It says No GMOs. This campaign against science — and it is a campaign against science — tells us that food becomes somehow awful if we grow it for a purpose. Do you know how fucked up a thing that is to say to someone who is starving? Do you have any idea how babies are made? Where's Alan Sokal when we need him?
What happened to the guy who used to run the evidence room? Is he Rust Cohle's new partner? Give me something!
It is amazing how every ideology, no matter how innocent, makes enemies. I believe I can summarize each major character on True Detective by showing how their worldview is not completely their own:
Taylor Kitsch/Kierkegaard "Love builds up by presupposing that love is present."
Colin Farrell/Hegel "The inclination to act as the laws command, a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition."
A romantic walk on the beach. If only they could switch haircuts.
Rachel McAdams/Karl Jaspers "A choice made now, today, projects itself backwards and changes our past actions."
Kelly Reilly/Epicurus "No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves"
Adoption is a hell of drug.
Vince Vaughn/Erasmus "This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind."
Ben Casper/Nietzche "Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?"
What are the chances of these two ending up in bed together?
It is not religion that is disappearing — it was always some definite, resilient portion of the population determined to make God real. It is philosophy that has vanished from our society. I remember taking a class on Kierkegaard in college. The European professor explained how we had to know that Kierkegaard was a sexist, but that these ideas were divorced from his intellectual ones. I said, this isn't like Shakespeare cheating on his wife! How a philosopher treats human beings seems pretty important.
But that too has been lost. I don't care how a person treats people they barely know — strangers are dogshit anyway. I want to know how they treat the people they love. That's why Ray Velcoro's "just alcohol" redemption tour rings so hollow. I hope his wife gets full custody. And Rachel McAdams probably needed that harassment support group — after all, she was sleeping with a subordinate. Granted it was a nice gesture to allow him access to her pooper, but that doesn't make her Florence Nightengale. The law isn't a convenience. It may be pointless or unjust, but it is not a means. It is an end.
See, it really isn't that hard to write like Nic Pizzolatto. You just need to spend a lot of time on wikiquote.
He's looking at Velcoro with a bit too much intensity, but I have to say I loved his mother-in-law.
Vince Vaughn's Frank Seymon had to default on his mortgage and move into a small apartment. Velcoro couldn't even come by to help him unpack. I don't know exactly how you can be set up to hurt a man when you're a police officer and you can fully be expected to do the research yourself on whether he assaulted your wife. Abigail Spencer's new boyfriend better check himself. That guy is just meansies.
I wish there were more Donald Trumps so we can find out if all the things people assume are true are actually factual. Tiptoeing around reality only benefits those for whom that reality represents sustaining power and wealth. I believe Foucault said that, or maybe it was my wife in the throes of ecstasy. It's not surprising I could confuse those two sources.
Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.
"Let the Laughter In" - Hannah Peel (mp3)
"Pale Green Ghosts" - Hannah Peel (mp3)
Reader Comments (5)
on friendship day, friendship day, friendship day 2015, friendship poems, friendship day
history, friendship day celebrations, friendship day special, friendship day quotes, friendship
day recipes, friendship day gifts, friendship day cards, friendship day date, friendship day
date 2015, friendship day in india, friendship day gift ideas, friendship day prayer,
friendship day songs