Illogical Thoughts/things that make perfect sense # 7: French Cheese and Automatic Guns (1)

Europe will always be 100 years ahead of America in culture , feeling, and knowledge.

~ Charles Bukowski

Europe and America

There are many ties that link Europe and America together. But I would like to talk about one interesting difference and the ramifications of which affect us to this day. The many people who came and made America their home were daring people. It takes serious testicular fortitude to leave everything behind in order to start new. This requires a real sense of adventure, a daring, and an idealism (though sometimes skewered) that is so ingrained in american culture. I like to imagine Europe being a place representative of stagnation. Everyone who wasn’t daring who would rather play it say and not leave behind comfort and the known. In this sort of reverie, I like to think that those not brave enough to leap without looking, not brave enough to make a gamble cling on to vestiges of past glory like an over indulgence in social distinctions and rules of etiquette. Of course this reverie is not 100% accurate, but it touches on something real I feel. Look at these words from Jean Baudrillard:

“We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

The Reality

Reverie and re-imagining history is good for Sunday nights and those five minutes of lubricated bliss in the shower before the world comes crashing in. America thought initially an extension in many ways of European culture, has become something unique. Its a place of extremes: On the one had it is self-evident that all men are created equal and on the other hand there was institutionalized slavery and exploitation of minorities, genocide of the Native Americans and there is this something illogical that some how makes sense:

What you didn’t know

You see young raw-milk cheeses are illegal in the United States because they are pleonastically laced with bacteria that can make you sick or even kill you. Some of the cheeses from France are unpasteurized and age for 30 days. FDA requires cheese to age for at least 60 days. I really love cheese they go great with alcohol, cured meats, pizza, dried fruit, and are a precursor to the boring lifeless sex married couple continue to torture each other with when they should really stop and give up.

You may not have known as well that fully automatic weapons aren’t illegal. Rather they are highly regulated. Fully automatic firearms must be taxed and regulated, cannot be imported from outside the United States, and some other nonsense. Basically you can buy a weapon engineered and used to kill others though the paperwork can be laborious, but you cannot under any circumstances have raw-milk cheese that hasn’t been aged for 60 days. Some smuggle it like a alter boy after mass, into the country.

But wait there’s more
But you’ll have to wait for the part two coming soon