Aryton Senna

•. •. •. What is success? A. Senna set records in his time for most times starting 1st (pole position), finishing 1st (winning), and assessing the most points per season more times than any other driver of his time. Then, gunning for 1st place behind Michaels Shumacher he slammed a wall @ over 185  mph. The crash took his life and sent the country of Brazil into mourning as the rest of the Formula 1 community also suffered for the loss.

         No political skirmish, with his team or Formula 1, could hold him back, no track could keep him from success, and he seemed free of any inner demons that could hold him back on a personal level either.
          I was blessed to watch the beautiful documentary on his life from Netflix and I am very glad that I did. It showed me how the petty and childish do fade away.  The true winners are winners.  They do not always find the same type of success, but it is the type that is still read about for generations and decades after the individual can no longer tell their own story.
         Senna was a hero who brought joy to a suffering country.  He gave his time and his being to the country when he was not in a race car, and he was loved greatly for it.

Ethical political responsibility.

Have you ever lost a job with the reasoning being “Your representation of this company has not been to the caliper that this company likes to have presented to the community”? Though this has not happened to me, it can be a common reason for dismissal from a place of employment. Each day comes and goes and we are presenting many different things to many different people. For some, we may be representing ourselves as a member of a family, a public official, or maybe the face of a large corporation. Whoever we are, we are seen by the public through our work or simply seen in the public. When one of these high focal figures of a company makes a huge mistake we have it thrown in our faces by the media. It gets to the point where we cannot get away from knowing about what’s going on in their lives, much like with what is going on with David Letterman now. But these are just social figures. For the most part, what they do has almost no affect on us other than the knowledge being bestowed upon us by the media and the personal feelings this knowledge bestows upon us.

How come when something that really affects us, and those close to us, we rarely know about it? If new laws have been put into place we are rarely informed in a timely manner. Sometimes a poor soul does not know about the law change until they are being punished by this law change. What about when a politician votes in a way counter to those he or she is appointed to represent? We have to have a finger firmly on the pulse of politics to even find out. Why aren’t these things news? It may not be the most ethical thing for a well known figure to have an affair or have money stolen from them. But that really isn’t our business. That is a personal matter for them and those it involves. But a vote by a politician does affect us all! This is what should be in the news. We should be getting informed about what is changing and transpiring in the legal and political world around us. We need to know what kind of job a politician is doing to know if we want them continuing that line of work. What we don’t need to know about is who they take their clothes off with. I know who cares and why its news, but this should be the last part of their lives that we know about. Who they choose to fuck, no matter the ethical connotation, really does not affect what laws are put into place in any level of normal practice. So, let’s hold these people responsible in areas that actually matter!

Simone de Beauvoir & me.

Of late I have been reading the works of Simone de Beauvoir and can not help but almost feel as if I am in love. To give you a little bit of her back ground, if you are unfamiliar with her, she was the woman that spent much of her life being Jean-Paul Sartre's main love. Each of them had many lovers other than each other but found that they spent most of their time and works with each other. They would have been married but Sartre belived that that was much too bourgeois and they never did.

I have been reading one volume of her autobiography entitled Force of Circumstance II. In it she speaks out against the country around her. They are engaged in a war with Algeria and the French army is torturing, raping, and slaughtering people of a poor and underindustrialized nation. She speaks out very venhemently against these atrocities and is found to be Un-French by her fellow countrymen. She goes as far as to denounce her home counrty and leaves it all the while doing her journalism for her and Sartre's paper fueled with articles about the horrors taking place in the hands of the French military.

I could not help feeling just what she is writing about in connection with the current war in Iraq. Our soldiers are doing just what we were told we would be liberating the Iraqi people from. We are only liberating them from their lives; if they are lucky. And one should know that I feel that life in the only thing that should never be sacrificed. It only comes about one time and living it is everything that you ever do.

Simone also speaks of an account she had with her brother-in-law who was trying the rationalize what was being done durring this war. He tried to say that the torture was only in issolated instances and that the military was only acting in ways that it needs to to combat a savage land and equally savage people. I heard these same things told to me durring my political ravings of administrations past and wars current. When she descibes what she was feeling physically durring, and right after, those conversations with her brother-in-law I could not help but know in absolute detail exactly what she was feeling.

I would suggest her writings to any one with any sort of leftist inclinations, even a slight acknowlegment of woman's equal rights, enjoys great women writers, or is one who takes interest in existentialistc philosophy and its application to real life situations. She is an amazing writer and to know that she wrote these works long before it was en vouge to do so by a woman makes these writings that much more powerful and impressive.