much, fatigued, grouchy; hit my inbox, and just kinda freaked over the
# of posts and well, beyond the naturally occurring typos and what
not, it really does make it harder for me to get to someone's message
when there are a lot of errors. And I see them shouted out everywhere.
I nevr yoozed hokd on foniks <grin>, and some things go beyond the
(mis)use of a homophone.
>
> Don't know what led me to hit that send button . . . usually I'll
hold rants as drafts, and usually when I get back to checking them,
it's too late to post, and they're usually super tame compared to that
one : ) . . . apologies to all.
>
Apologies? My God why apologize. Those flourishes are the kind of
thing that ... well if men were really men... would launch a thousand
ships full of fools. Who would be off to go to some really bad things
to some other fools behind a wall.
I am not scared that somehow we are dumbing down. to be honest I think
stupidity reigns supreme anywhere on the time line. Nor am I concerned
that America will cease to be, because eventually it will and it will
go down to thunderous applause. The final vestiges of it brought down
by the descendent's of those who think it will last forever (a number
of which think "Proud to be an American" is actually the national
anthem). I just feel sorry for the guy or gal that will be playing
Louis XVI.
I can say that occasionally in life there is a small gift that makes
me smile. The article made me smile. It does cut a path. Thank you for
the great read.
> I did come across an article today that kinda sums up a lot of what
I felt the need to rant over, at least I know I have some company.
Kinda long, but worth a read, imonsho. Maybe I need to hit some of
those parties mentioned at the start? ; ):
>
> This quote, among others, in the article is a bit on point, too:
>
> "A new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new
kinds of poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion by media,
immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul. Massified,
standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly re-enact the
actual control program of modernity. Capitalism did not create our
world; the machine did."
> -- Jean-François Lyotard
>
>
> http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/04/the-audacity-of.html
>
> The Audacity of Depression Rage fatigue, plastic dirt and
happy hour in techno-totalitarian America
> By Joe Bageant
> One of the best things about the hundred or so book festivals in
America is that, with luck, a writer can manage to get drunk with some
of his or her readers. And with more luck, the readers pick up the
tab. Bear in mind that 90% of all real writers, people for whom
writing is their sole income, spend much of their time counting their
change in the rest room of the hotels where they are being put up
while on tour. Believe me, there are better rackets than writing.
> So here I am at the Virginia Festival of the Book copping a smoke
on the back dining patio of the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville with one
of my readers -- a somewhat elegant sixty-plus blonde who runs a small
public library financial support group down in ancient marshy
Northumberland County, Virginia. Created in 1648, it is the area James
A. Michener wrote about in Chesapeake, and a place where, she tells
me, periwinkles planted three hundred years ago on the graves of
slaves still bloom. My wife, a historical librarian doing colonial
African-American research, tells me these periwinkle marked slave
graves can be found throughout Virginia.
>
> Immensely energetic and a lifelong activist for
literacy and informed thought, this cigarette voiced Northumberland
librarian has built the county's new little library, and even managed
to coax enough money out of the local government for two employees. In
a county with a population of 12,000, that's no small political feat.
> At the moment though, politically speaking, the Obama-Hillary dirt
fight is in full fury, so I asked the obligatory question of the week,
"Who will you vote for?"
> "Oh, Obama, I guess. It's so hard to get excited over the
elections. Lately I've been just plain depressed," she said.
> "About what?"
> "Oh just everything. It seems to have become so pointless in
America, as if we are entering a Dark Age. I've come to wonder why I
do anything at all."
> On that melancholy note, we return to the lounge to join my wife
for that last drink. The next one always of course being the "last
one," in the early stages of these situations, before all pretense is
dropped and people start taking off their clothes or falling off those
infernal high stools that replaced good old fashioned chairs -- the
kind where your feet reach the floor at all times and with arms you
could grip if the room starts spinning.
> Over the past couple of years I've had hundreds of encounters with
reading Americans -- and by encounters I mean conversations, not
falling off chairs -- which is to say book loving, thinking people
like the Northumberland librarian, people of every stripe. They have
ranged from the good ole boy Texas electrician who took me to a real
smoke choked pool-table-and-concrete-floor joint to professors of
literature and Washington policy wonks who actually use the little red
cocktail napkin that accompanies their martinis.
> During this period I have noticed a change in the nature of
discussion with these previously unmet readers. Four years ago, much
of it centered on the outrageousness of the Bush administration, the
stomach turning criminality of the Iraq War, Cheney The Fanged Man of
Wax, with a little rage at our planetary ecocide thrown into the mix.
In other words, about what you might expect from a baby roasting alien
commie readership such as mine, made up of such folks as school
teachers, union members, sociology profs and other congenital
malcontents, the sort of people who resent things like student strip
searches in public high schools (HR 5295, The Student Teacher Safety
Act of 2006, which, to its credit, at least bans cavity searches by
faculty. You gotta be a cop to do that in our public schools) and
other subversive types.
> Lately though, I don't hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers
seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called "rage fatigue."
Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out.
And it's true.
> I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into
an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country
has, but then I'm no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims
can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling
themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than
nothing. Obama may yet be borne through the White House portico by a
Democratic host of seraphim, but he cannot do much without the consent
of a bought and paid for Congress. Only George Bush can do that, and
we can only hope God broke the mold after he made George. And like
whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any
significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being
just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the
greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the
"American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect
political truth, but rather entertainment
> in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the
entertainment branch of industry."
> Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a
meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there
was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions
of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these
days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course -- that murky,
undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will
reverse the national condition -- will deliver us from what every bit
of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then
economically and ecologically: Collapse.
> Compounding everything is the fact that it is quite human and even
pragmatic to passively accept reality as it is. Until it's too late to
do anything. As my late friend Virgil the philosophical backhoe
operator summed it up: "If we fucked everything up so bad tryin' to do
our best, maybe we oughtta just leave'er be for a while. Quit thinking
about it so much."
> More Band-Aids for the trained chickens, please!
> Virgil may be popping open a Keystone Light lager somewhere in
heaven, or in maybe a much warmer venue. I dunno. But people are
thinking about it more than ever. Among sentient people everywhere
there is a deep, visceral unease, and among those most aware there is
genuinely acute suffering. I hear this expressed quite articulately
not only in places such as this Omni Hotel "writers' lounge," but in
working and middle class living rooms and in emails from Americans and
around the world.
> Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still
oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate
and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going
very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex
scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be
made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people
just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint,
Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting
media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to
afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they
write their campaign "plans for change."
> All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would
entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and
extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as
modern civilization and mass society -- halting, then reversing the
momentum this monolith has achieved.
> We now live as the technoculture's subjects, not its masters and
will from here on out as viral technology mediates, homogenizes and
monetizes human experience worldwide, in ever more remote corners. I
watch it regularly in the Third World, where the power of gadgets such
as cell phones is wiping out the core foundations of indigenous or
longstanding cultures within a decade or two. The global machine's
technological nervous system and production musculature, the techno
grid now embedded in the world, grows in quantum fashion to control
every aspect of our lives deeper and more thoroughly than is
imaginable by the folks living those lives. It's so pervasive we don't
feel it at all.
> For instance, I just hit the ATM machine in this hotel for forty
bucks. And in doing so I joined the Manhattan book editor, the black
Carib village fisherman in Dangriga, Central America and the taxi
driver in Capetown, South Africa in performing the same activity. We
all stand submissively before the global ATM machine network like
trained chickens pecking the correct colored buttons to release our
grains of corn. Freedom, and to a large extent joy, as we understand
it in our common technoculture, is mostly just the grid's monetized
consumer offerings, each with its own type of packaging, its own
technologically produced overlay of commercial skin. These choices, by
the way, do not include the non-uniform products or experience,
unauthorized products or joys such as hashish or deviant sex. Not
officially at least, but perhaps when technoculture solves the uniform
packaging and delivery problem …
> If anybody solves that problem, it will be the Japanese. There
seem to be no bigger suckers for technoculture than the people who
have given the world plastic dirt ("half as dense as and a thousand
times cleaner than real dirt") the UFO-detecting keychain, the online
lie-detector and the hydroelectric toilet, which "assesses what
variety of waste you've just put into it." Technoculture is stressful
enough, but obsessing over how clean or dense dirt is, and assessing
the varieties of you bodily waste (last time I looked there were only
two) well, there may be a certain justice in the Japanese suffering
the highest levels of anxiety, stress, and depression. It's so bad
that according to Dr. Kunio Kitamura, director of the Japan Family
Planning Association,
> "Japanese people simply aren't having sex, and the suicide rate
has been rising rapidly."
> Personally, I am not having much sex either, but that has not yet
pushed me to toward suicidalism and probably never will. After age
sixty sex became perhaps my fifth highest priority, just below the
availability of cheap beer or maybe even a double bourbon after six
PM, which of course has a helluva lot to do with that fifth priority
and its likelihood. All of which is more than you cared to know, I am
sure.
> Sucking the cuff in Totoland
> "Eventually the system will reach a point -- where the social cue is
'integration' -- where the universal dependence of all moments on all
other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to
search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society."
> -- Theodor Adorno
> In other words, Teddy boy, a totalitarian society. Not a nice word,
according to our Western Civ instructors. An ironic one too,
considering that Americans and Europeans sowed so much of its original
seed. But the reality is that totalitarian society (dubbed "Totoland"
in my household in a grim effort toward mockery: Dear Dorothy, fuck
you and your little dog too! Signed, Bill Gates) is already here. And
most of the planet accepts that as long as nobody next door is getting
beheaded and at least some grains of corn keep dropping out of that
ATM machine. Such is the belief in technology's supposed production
efficiency in dealing with the supply and demand problems of this
world's six billion.
> That belief will remain because the technology will remain. Until
it collapses along with the corporate aristocracy that make and own
it. Otherwise, it cannot be dismantled without dismantling the world
as we have made it and we cannot undo our own evolutionary species
trajectory. Regardless of what the New Agers and Earth worshipping
goddess cultists believe, we cannot haul six billion people back into
pre-technology or support them in any natural sustainable fashion.
Most of the world's common people accept this, however unconsciously,
thus the lack of protests and counter efforts on any meaningful scale.
The new totalitarianism is its own justification, and nobody in
America or Europe is going to kick up much sand so long as the Darfurs
and Haitis remain on the goddamned TV screen where they belong.
> At the same time, those empowered to do what little can be done,
the world's aristocrats, do what they have always done: surf the crest
of power and wealth with their dicks pointed into the sunset of their
civilization and their heads up their asses. A delighted nation cheers
as a brunette corporate aspirant sucks on Donald Trump's pant leg on
the Donald Trump Show. ("Ya gotta really want it baby!") As a hobby,
the guy owns The Miss Universe Organization, Miss USA and Miss Teen
USA pageants. He'll never want for pants suckers.
> Meanwhile, I've got forty ATM bucks that have to last me two days
at this book bash.
> A new Dark Age? Hell, why not?
> "A new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new
kinds of poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion by media,
immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul. Massified,
standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly re-enact the
actual control program of modernity. Capitalism did not create our
world; the machine did."
> -- Jean-François Lyotard
> I've painted a grim picture for sure, made worse by claiming that
hope is a sucker's game, even a religion for millions of "people of
faith" who believe hope and faith are the same thing. Ah hope! That
fuzzy hearted Hallmark world of mass produced sentiment and emotions,
even about "bereavement," a world where thinking is regarded as a rat
in the larder of bourgeois smugness. Thinking gnaws away at everything
so relentlessly, until it finally breaks a tooth on one truth or
another. And one of those truths is that the technology enabling those
digital greeting cards that play "Happy Birthday" is systematically
destroying nature and toxifying and maiming the millions of drudgery
filled souls whose sole purpose for existence is industrial.
> I'm convinced we are watching Lyotard's illiteracy and
impoverishment of language and merciless remodeling of opinion by
media and "massified" standardizing in action. I could be wrong -- my
wife and kids assure me I am wrong about most things. But I have at
least one scholarly author type on my side, Dr. Morris Berman, who
argues that we are indeed seeing the approach of a new Dark Age. I'm
willing to bet that the tens of millions living on less than a dollar
a day or any of the women and children sold into the world's
multibillion-dollar sex-slave trafficking (including those under
American auspices of Dyncorp and Halliburton subsidiaries like KBR)
feel that it's here already. Not that anyone is asking them or anyone
else in the Third World.
> Living as I do much of the year in a Third World village, watching
daily the cost of the American lifestyle on the village's people, the
technocultural cheapening of their lives, physical hunger, I feel
guilty even being in such a posh hotel as the Omni. I should be back
in Central America finishing up the water and sanitation project I
recently started there (and probably would be if I were not out of
money). Yet, through the patio's glass door I can see the people round
my table, the Northumberland librarian, the writer Tom Miller whose
moving testimonies of Latino immigrants open up worlds unseen by white
Americans, my own good wife who brings to life the truth of slavery by
excavating memories in an amnesiac America … These are people who
understand that human life is short and history is long, and that
their humanly elegant efforts will not only go unheralded by that
history, but mostly go unacknowledged in their own darkening time, and
be all but eradicated by the
> sheer impoverishment of language and literacy in their native
country during a New American Dark Age that comes cloaked in
glittering technology instead of a coarse woolen cowl. Such unassuming
and dedicated people are among our best.
> This sordid American drama, the one I am calling a Dark Age, will
in all likelihood not be completed until well into this century or the
next, with a slew of increasingly nasty episodes along the way.
Everyone here in the hotel lounge will say goodbye to this world long
before America says the Big Goodbye.
> Until then, we are left to play out the game day by day. That
being the case, we should elect to play it out with the best among us,
the ones on humanity's side, that hidden and unheralded aristocracy --
those quiet lamp lighters making their way through the deepening dusk
of American civilization.
> E. M. Forster described them as,
> "Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive,
considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations
and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they
meet. ... Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to
utilize them. ... But they slip through the net and are gone; when the
door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the
Holiness of the Heart's Imagination, and their kingdom, though they
never possess it, is the wide open world."
> In this they are deathless.
> Like periwinkles.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of
Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.
>
------------------------------------
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