The Art of Rhetoric

That's just it. Rhetoric is an art. Anyone with the right tools, the right pieces of information, proper timing and an air of authority can win an argument/debate. Winning arguments can be as easy as knowing the other sides weak points and monopolizing on them. A subsidiary form of sword fighting, or male-ego pissing contest. It seems that men in trivia contests in bars and die-hard feminists find me, and it is from these dicks I shy. I find these sophists tres drole. They don't care about truths, they care about always being right. Being right in the way my teachers have been teaching me to write papers. Start with your thesis and find points to support that thesis. Are we serious? Is that really how life works? I like to start very general, my thesis changes several times in a "good" research paper. Generally I always start with a question, and only in the end do I come up with a loose answer. Not because I'm wishy washy, but because life is wishy washy, life is grey. I believe we were put on this Earth for at least one thing and we're doing a shitty job of it so far.

Excerpts from Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship"

If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.

But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be -- Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity -- to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

To argue without context, simply pretense, to play merely because you're bored, the desire to lay one's card on the table, especially when one has been bluffing the entire time, well these are all . . . base. My Nana taught me long ago, never lay your hand all out on the table unless it comes down to it and you have to. Can you beat a royal straight flush?

You may ask me why does the caged bird sing? Because still, no one is listening.

Max wore a wolf costume. But if you're getting at the truth . . . I only remember the picture on one side of the page when Max is returning home. I remember the Wild Things reaching for . . . I never remembered what they were reaching for until I stumbled across the book almost 14 years later. In my scant library I have many books by Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss . . . Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are is the only children's book in prose form. Because it was never about the words. You really should read your source material.