One has to wonder whatever happened to the Legion of Doom. A couple of years ago a lot of people got all het up over the decline and fall of LD—this was in the darkest hours of the pomo and CT influences—and banded together to attempt to cure the ills. Some of those ills were endemic problems that, needless to say, remain, but the Legion of Doom has, if not necessarily evaporated, at least disappeared from view. Despite my own agreement with their main themes of how LD should be operated, I always had to sort of wonder if we weren’t just going through the inevitable progress of the activity through the fashions of the day, given that I had previously seen other deadly fashions that we had managed to survive. My guess is that something new comes along, it takes over like mental weeds for a while, but then it goes away, leaving only a little of its genetic material behind, hopefully making for a better activity overall. (And I’m sorry for the confused metaphor, but you get my drift.) So back in the day pre-Legion, for instance, this decidedly philosophical activity got overwhelmed by practical evidence, and for a while it was a trend, and eventually it just became an improvement in LD overall, where people began backing their claims with, sometimes, meaningful warrants from reputable sources rather than their own imaginings. By the same token, the love affair with incomprehensible cultural studies types like the Old Baudleroo and Derrida has cooled, but the embracing of, say, Foucault remains, and that’s not a terrible thing at all, because MF’s view of things is applicable to a lot of situations, and worth considering. We may never shake the occasional Nietzschean fling, though, I’m afraid. Nietzsche is like this sly seducer who will say anything to anyone in order the make a score, and then the poor seduced (and quickly abandoned) soul has nothing left but a handful of aphorisms on which to base the entire promise of a future life, but that doesn’t keep that steady stream of left-at-the-altars from continuing to try. In a way, good old Freddie has become the Ayn Rand of 21st century LD, that one horrible voice destroying our youth by falsely empowering them. Oh, well. At least Freddie didn’t write any pulp novels (or at least any that I know about). Don’t get me wrong. I love Nietzsche. Where else can you find a writer who, sooner or later, contradicted literally everything he ever wrote? They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
Anyhow, for a while, the LDEP was out there proselytizing a fundamentalist approach to LD as a cure to all its evils (which went far beyond the pomo material), and now you never hear from them anymore. Hell, I think I’m on the board, and if I’m not hearing from them, I guess no one is. That’s not terrible, though. The creation of the rules of LD by the NFL provided the core material from which to work, and from a source much less peccable than the Legion of Doom. I mean, it’s pretty hard to dismiss the warrant of the core organization, as compared to dismissing a bunch of dinosaur sore sports like the Legion. So as I continue to proselytize for commitment to the NFL’s LD rules, I feel a little more secure than when I was speaking in aid of Legion ideas. This is nothing against the Legion, mind you, but maybe the NFL’s updated rules rendered the Legionnaires unnecessary. But we still have a problem. Despite the fact that LD has clear and specific rules, from its governing body, there is a vast population who believe that these rules carry no weight. We’ve already discussed how silly this is, and how you don’t get a comparable flouting of regulation in, say, table tennis (or any other competitive activity of which I am aware), but that doesn’t stop the flouters. The question becomes, how do you stop the flouters, then? If you believe in LD as described by the NFL, what are you supposed to do about it?
I guess that’s going to be my theme for a while. We’ve got rules. What do we do about them? And, I guess, why do we have to do anything about them at all? Chances are, most of what I’m going to be writing will either annoy the hell out of you or make you feel even more self-satisfied than usual, depending on your position on the whole business. But that’s what we do here a CL HQ. We either piss you off or pat you on the back. Occasionally we do both at once, if we’re really clicking on all burners and have a lot of extra arms to work with. By the way, this just happens to be post number 999. Which means two things. If you’re reading this upside down, it’s the Apocalypse, and if you’re reading it right side up, tomorrow will be our 1000th entry. Imagine that. Do you have any idea how much time you’ve wasted reading this blog? Couldn’t you have found anything better to do with your time? What’s wrong with you anyhow, you spalpeen! Jeesh. Get a life.
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