[MD] Bill's Intellectual Level

[david buchanan]

Ant, Arlo, Steve, Platt and all honorable MOQers:

Ant quoted from LILA:
"There's always been something wrong, logically," the author went on.  "How 
can an act of love, that does no injury to anyone, be so evil? . . . Think 
about it.  Who was injured?" ...

"I mean was it Lila who was to blame for your friend's misfortune or was it 
his wife and his so-called friends and his superiors at the bank?  Who 
really did him in?"

Ant commented:
Now, that's a damn good moral question.  I think it was the social 
prejudices of Jim's "friends", wife and "superiors" at the bank who really 
did him in...

dmb says:
Yea, exactly. I especially like the part where Dick Rigel says "people 
forgave him for his weakness, but they lost respect for him and that was 
what finished him". Oh, such forgiveness. Its the kind of forgivness that 
leads to the total destruction of his home and family, the loss of his 
freinds and his career and he's shamed into leaving town like some ancient 
form of exile. Oh, sweet forgiveness. We forgive you and everything cause 
we're so moral and forgiving, but that doesn't mean we won't destroyu your 
life you, you, you haver of sex you! I mean, Dick is so matter-of-fact and 
self righteous even while he's being a cruel, judgemental gossip. And the 
penalty is so much more immoral than the crime that it would be laughable if 
it weren't so darn true to life. I can see why the guy's wife might be very 
upset, but where's the sense of proportion in Rigel's view?

Same with Bill's blowjob and the subsequent impeachment trial. No sense of 
proportion. Reversing 100 million votes over a wet willie? That's way outta 
wack.

Dick is such an asshole! I hate guys like that. Especially when its me.

Speaking of dishonor, I heard something interesting about the re-training 
process going on in Iraq in the wake of the recently disclosed massacres. 
Turns out that one of the biggest problems with the relations between U.S. 
troops and the Iraqi civilians stems from the fact that the Iraqi people 
have a very keen sense of honor and the U.S. troops don't know anything 
about it. As a result, they routinely violate their sense of honor. So now 
they're taking classes on the topic, hearing lectures that spell out a whole 
different set of "rules of engagement". They explain that if troops bust 
into a guys house, drag him out into the street and put a boot on his neck, 
which is a pretty standard way to be safe, you haven't just neutralized the 
suspect, you've dishonored a patriarch in front of his family. Now everybody 
in the family is your enemy and I imagine the guy with a boot on his neck 
will believe he's within his code of honor when he kills the guy wearing the 
boot. I imagine his code of honor might even demand that he kill the one who 
took his honor.

And I think this sense of honor is not very far removed from our own culture 
if we go back just a few generations. The Victorians had a brittle form of 
it. I've certainly seen it in cowboy movies and I'm sure they still make 
quite a lot of it in military schools and such. The mafia has a strange form 
of it, or so I've heard. Apparently, most gangs have a code of honor. Any 
small, quasi-tribal community will likely have some form of it even if its 
an unwritten code. I guess we all know what this is like since we've all 
been to high school. I think it used to be kinda like if a guy ruined your 
reputation or gravely insulted you, well, you just couldn't live with that. 
One of you had to die. So you'd have to challenge him to a duel, maybe by 
slapping him with a white glove. Or, as it was depicted in the westerns, 
you'd have to say "this town ain't big enough for the both of us."

I can see why this sort of thing has gone out of fashion and today if 
somebody slapped me with a white glove I'd probably just laugh my ass off. 
And if the point and purpose of morality is to protect and serve the ongoing 
process of life, then how is morality served by destroying or killing a guy? 
Its not just disproportionate, it sorta misses the whole point of morality. 
But we all still live with this sense of a public reputation in some sense. 
It still outrages and angers us to be insulted in front of others. We hear 
it street lingo too, as in "don't dis me like that". Dis-respect, 
dis-regard, dis-miss, dis-honor. I guess "dis" is short for all that. We 
still sense the loss of status. And that's what honor is really all about, 
isn't it? Social status. Our reputations, so to speak? Its not about 
morality so much as it is about ego, eh? That's how it looks to me in the 
case of Richard Rigel. He's just using Jim and Lila to make himself feel 
morally superior, to improve his status in the eyes of others.

But isn't later revealed that old Dick also had an affair with Lila? Or 
maybe that would just figure so well that I only imagined it.

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/