Friday Cat Show. 9/3/2021
HOBBS: How was your trip to New York? With all this flooding and all other New York hyper activity? What have you learned from the once almighty capital of the world?
VG: I am not surprised that you’ve asked. NYC is like another country. With its own laws, and culture, and politics, and its own chaos, which is getting more and more pronounced. Especially when you are not used to it.
ALICE: I wish I lived in New York. I can relate to the people in the city. They all are like cats. So self-absorbed, but sometimes friendly and affectionate. And they all have their subservient dogs, which they have to keep on the leash. That’s exactly how these nasty and dangerous animals need to be treated.
VG: But cats are usually curious, not sure New Yorkers are. They act as if they’ve seen it all and known it all. I guess you can’t live in such an intense and chaotic city and pay attention to all the strange and unusual details. You have to suppress a lot, and therefore, all the details that do not fit New Yorker’s world picture are ignored. In that sense, New Yorkers are like politicians. They know what they know, and what they don’t know, does not matter, for a simple reason that they don’t know it. And New York media does it best to confirm this bias: “give us 22 minutes and we’ll give you the world.” Or, “all news that fit to print,” that is, if it is not printed by NYT, it is not the news, because it is not worth knowing.
HOBBS: Well, Alice is a perfect New Yorker, as you describe it. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. She trusts only NYT and NPR, she knows all the players who are worth knowing, and therefore, all the opinions which are worth knowing. I guess, that’s the survivor’s strategy. If you drive on a busy Manhattan street, you have to watch only for shifty yellow cabs, that cut in front of you, or for giant trucks that might decide to stop and park on the second or third lane of traffic, or for an occasional pothole. And suppress the rest, whatever crazy stuff is going on around you.
ALICE: The only thing you two can do, is to mock and malign. The most knowledgeable people live in New York, the most powerful, the most successful, the most talented and ambitious, and – like me – the most creative. Look at their museums. Or advertisement. Or the way they manage the chaos and deal with the multitude of faces, cacophony of sounds, explosion of colors.
VG: That’s precisely what bothers me. Remember Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie”? I used the term “suppress” but we might as well, use “abstract.” If you are a New Yorker, you have to abstract, you just have to replace a human face with a dot or a patch of paint. Why call a simple survival strategy – creativity? Are politicians or generals who reduce thousands of people to mere abstraction – creative? Or rather sociopathic? When Samantha Power rushes to one of her noble and ambitious humanitarian projects through the streets of Africa and her motorcade crushes a little boy - -is she really a creative humanitarian? Or selfish thug?
HOBBS: Agree with Vladimir. Let’s go to the Roman gladiators. To survive on the arena, you have to ignore everything else except your desire to survive. Same is on the political arena, and same is in any other field where the stakes are high. And the skills that help you survive are frequently the skills that turn you into a monster. The world becomes a grand chessboard, where you sacrifice pawns and knights to imprison the king and get the queen? Remember the master strategist and the brain behind the Democratic Party establishment, Mr. Zbig and his “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”? A Pole playing chess and establishing American Primacy? What can possibly go wrong?
ALICE: Chess is an amazing tool that helps us to strategize, divide the world into black and white, or give the relative value to various individuals: she is a queen worth knowing or just a stupid pawn, all these abstractions are fundamental for success, and Russians are always bragging about their mastery of the game. Why are you all of a sudden complaining about it? Because good old Zbig outsmarted Russians in Afghanistan?
HOBBS: He clearly outsmarted himself and his adopted country, convincing all his followers that he knows all there is to know, exactly how any successful New York over-achiever will do it. So you arm a baby bin Laden to the teeth in spite Russians. Brilliant strategy that simply can’t backfire. How wrong Goya was, when he created his “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” It is precisely, the abstract reason that produces monsters. And yes, Russia has known its share of similar monsters; the country can be as chaotic and disorganized as New York.
VG: Talking about New York creativity. Yesterday, I was struck by the exhibition at the Met: female photographs and their self-portraits. How does one do a self-portrait? How does one sees oneself? How would recent political power players do a self-portrait, for example? Against an abstract map of the world? On the top of the hill? With the hand held phone device sending messages to other leaders? It can tell us a lot about a person, their self-portraits. But I suspect that most of today’s leaders would refuse to do them. For fear of revealing how truly monstrous they all are.
