Macabre with Lee Rogers New Ruskin College
www.NewRuskincollege.com
Lecture Notes: 10-03-04
One of the pleasures of Uncle Lee’s Radio Show is that you know that at 2:00 am he starts looking for the morning story. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, at 2 or 3, and it is a comfort as I fall back to sleep to know that Uncle Lee is sitting under the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling of his kitchen, pouring over the newsprint of dozens of newspapers, searching for just that one story of the macabre.
I realize that now he sits at a computer terminal surfing the net, but I prefer to see him in one of those New Yorker cartoons, with the wife in a pyramid of curlers standing at the door, the dog on its back, little stubs of legs sticking up in the air. Searching.
And what is an Uncle Lee morning story? The classic was about the mathematics graduate student in Washington who was jilted by his girlfriend. This would be a good start for anyone’s radio show but what separates it out from the mass and elevates it to Uncle Lee’s Show is that the man decides to revenge himself, not on the girl, but on someone, chosen at random.
Uncle Lee adds to the story in the retelling by commenting on the places where it takes place in Washington as he and his co-host and the station manager, his co-host’s husband, Jack Swanson, have all just returned to the Bay Area from Washington. Uncle Lee’s recollections about the university campus, the city, the weather, add vivid details as the story of love and revenge unfolds.
The graduate student locates his victim on the university campus, walks up behind the stranger and strikes him on the head with a hammer. Oh? No, shoots him with a gun. (I am getting my mathematics graduate student murders mixed up.)
So far all of this would be standard for any morning radio show, but what qualifies it for Uncle Lee’s Show is the final twist that only Uncle Lee can provide. After a pause he adds, that the victim turns to see who, why? “Can you imagine?” Uncle Lee asks, “In his dieing moments, as the blood is gushing from his wound, he turns to see who is his attacker . . . and just before the blood flows from his brain, while he still has his last consciousness, he looks into the face of his murderer . . . to see . . . who? . . . And he does not even recognize him. Can you imagine?”
This is the final twist that only Uncle Lee would have thought to supply. (Notice that Uncle Lee has perhaps himself imagined being murdered and turning to face his attacker.) But what Uncle Lee thought most horrible, not that someone would want to kill you, well, ok, probably lots of people would like to kill Uncle Lee, this goes without saying, but can you imagine, . . . not even recognizing the guy?
That the murderer should have simply chosen the victim at random seemed monstrous to Uncle Lee. How deranged! However, I disagree with Uncle Lee.
A man who has arrived at the conclusion that he might just as well kill someone at random is a lot closer to sanity than a murderer who thinks he has a reason for killing a particular victim.
If you have arrived at this point in your reasoning, that killing is so useless that you might as well kill at random as kill anyone in particular, then you are very close to the final step in the process of seeing that there is no reason to kill anyone at all.
In seeing that there was no reason to kill his girlfriend, the murderer may well have thought that he should kill his rival, or her parents, or her friends? Teachers? Clergyman? Then there is the whole society that created the social situation, the social environment, etc. etc. At this point, seeing as how there was no logical point of starting the killing, or stopping, I think the murderer reasoned he may as well pick someone out at random.
But it is just at this point that if we could have spoken to him we could have shown that just as it is futile to determine who to kill, so it is futile to kill anyone. The murderer must have reasoned that there were billions of starting points for the patterns of thought, lines of reasoning, for the question: why did she jilt me? Since it is impossible to affix responsibility to anyone person in the vast network of possible explanations he reasoned then to just pick someone at random.
Selection on the basis of random chance is an admission of futility.
If futile why anyone at all? Why bother? Revenge?
If you see that there is no logical way to affix responsibility, that there is nothing out there, the last step is to see that there is no one inside to be revenged. Just as the girl is just part of a vast network of causality so too you are yourself similarly just a part of other vast networks of causality.
full text at www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 10-03-04
One of the pleasures of Uncle Lee’s Radio Show is that you know that at 2:00 am he starts looking for the morning story. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, at 2 or 3, and it is a comfort as I fall back to sleep to know that Uncle Lee is sitting under the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling of his kitchen, pouring over the newsprint of dozens of newspapers, searching for just that one story of the macabre.
I realize that now he sits at a computer terminal surfing the net, but I prefer to see him in one of those New Yorker cartoons, with the wife in a pyramid of curlers standing at the door, the dog on its back, little stubs of legs sticking up in the air. Searching.
And what is an Uncle Lee morning story? The classic was about the mathematics graduate student in Washington who was jilted by his girlfriend. This would be a good start for anyone’s radio show but what separates it out from the mass and elevates it to Uncle Lee’s Show is that the man decides to revenge himself, not on the girl, but on someone, chosen at random.
Uncle Lee adds to the story in the retelling by commenting on the places where it takes place in Washington as he and his co-host and the station manager, his co-host’s husband, Jack Swanson, have all just returned to the Bay Area from Washington. Uncle Lee’s recollections about the university campus, the city, the weather, add vivid details as the story of love and revenge unfolds.
The graduate student locates his victim on the university campus, walks up behind the stranger and strikes him on the head with a hammer. Oh? No, shoots him with a gun. (I am getting my mathematics graduate student murders mixed up.)
So far all of this would be standard for any morning radio show, but what qualifies it for Uncle Lee’s Show is the final twist that only Uncle Lee can provide. After a pause he adds, that the victim turns to see who, why? “Can you imagine?” Uncle Lee asks, “In his dieing moments, as the blood is gushing from his wound, he turns to see who is his attacker . . . and just before the blood flows from his brain, while he still has his last consciousness, he looks into the face of his murderer . . . to see . . . who? . . . And he does not even recognize him. Can you imagine?”
This is the final twist that only Uncle Lee would have thought to supply. (Notice that Uncle Lee has perhaps himself imagined being murdered and turning to face his attacker.) But what Uncle Lee thought most horrible, not that someone would want to kill you, well, ok, probably lots of people would like to kill Uncle Lee, this goes without saying, but can you imagine, . . . not even recognizing the guy?
That the murderer should have simply chosen the victim at random seemed monstrous to Uncle Lee. How deranged! However, I disagree with Uncle Lee.
A man who has arrived at the conclusion that he might just as well kill someone at random is a lot closer to sanity than a murderer who thinks he has a reason for killing a particular victim.
If you have arrived at this point in your reasoning, that killing is so useless that you might as well kill at random as kill anyone in particular, then you are very close to the final step in the process of seeing that there is no reason to kill anyone at all.
In seeing that there was no reason to kill his girlfriend, the murderer may well have thought that he should kill his rival, or her parents, or her friends? Teachers? Clergyman? Then there is the whole society that created the social situation, the social environment, etc. etc. At this point, seeing as how there was no logical point of starting the killing, or stopping, I think the murderer reasoned he may as well pick someone out at random.
But it is just at this point that if we could have spoken to him we could have shown that just as it is futile to determine who to kill, so it is futile to kill anyone. The murderer must have reasoned that there were billions of starting points for the patterns of thought, lines of reasoning, for the question: why did she jilt me? Since it is impossible to affix responsibility to anyone person in the vast network of possible explanations he reasoned then to just pick someone at random.
Selection on the basis of random chance is an admission of futility.
If futile why anyone at all? Why bother? Revenge?
If you see that there is no logical way to affix responsibility, that there is nothing out there, the last step is to see that there is no one inside to be revenged. Just as the girl is just part of a vast network of causality so too you are yourself similarly just a part of other vast networks of causality.
full text at www.NewRuskinCollege.com
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