The Wrath of Bacon
Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations.
— Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies
From time to time...I like to speak like Lt. Col. Nicholson, regarding my ordinary affairs. While looking off my front porch...I wonder what difference my cutting of the grass really means. ~Big Duke6 1 year ago
“Shut up,” he explained.
The persuasiveness of such “explanations” can be considerable, especially if they are delivered in a loud voice and accompanied by a threatening gesture with a baseball bat. In BACON’s article, however, they are accompanied only by the literary equivalent of such noise and threat, i.e., by what semanticists call “snarl words” — words which express mammalian rage but do not contain information.
It seems part of our glorious primate heritage that such noise and threat is often mistaken for argument, even though it should more properly be called quarrel. Politicians, advertisers and, above all, the rev. clergy have been very industrious in spreading the notion that there is no difference between noise and information and that the loud noise is itself informative. It is no surprise, in this mammalian context, that BACON actually includes in his piece the helpful suggestion that the appropriate response to certain annoying questions is to hit the questioner with a chair.
As I say, I do not deny the vigor of such rhetoric,
but I find it lacking in intellectual coherence. I do discern a kind of a trace of an adumbration of a hint of an argument in the midst of BACON’s territorial howls, but I cannot be perfectly sure I have grasped it, since the noise of BACON’s rage tends to drown out the content of whatever he is trying to say.
"Where Did You Learn Your Trade? You Stupid Fu..." ~Frank Bacon
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