Almost the First of May

I'm going to approach the following topoi as a multifaceted dome as is

my wish and perogative in as much as I do not have an editor or some other person of authority looking over my shoulder and directing me otherwise.

We speak often of context but as well there's the subtext. Joseph Stiglitz , Naomi Klein, Paul Krugman and others have in recent years brought to our attention the notion that for reasons undetermined, officially at least, the American society has left the road it once traveled and now ventures forth upon rocky terrain.

Perhaps unfortunately, or perhaps not the slots allocated for intelligent observation by the system, of the system are filled and so I must add my bit in some other fashion. I suppose I have made too much, in recent years of my humble origins which would justify my taking more extreme measures but I do think that both now and in the future a singularly useful ability will be that of being able to determine when the pronouncements of the system will hurt us and when not.

We must do our best to avoid believing the self serving lies we are too often told. These lies have been so successful because they are now part of information systems, propagandic paradigms which seem to have the virtue of provability when in fact they do not.

Secondly we have to learn to inject into the information state such formulae as will paralyze said state should it embark on procedures that will be to the detriment of our lives and happiness.

To do otherwise, to stand by and do nothing, is to relinquish our birthrights as human beings.

PROLOGUE;

                  You know you’re venturing into academia when you start asking about the state of your subject. Eg “Is the theatre really dead?” or is “Psychoanalysis relevant to the online community?”

                 Unfortunately the study of myth has reached the point where every one from Noam Chomsky to Guns&Roses claims expertise in the necessity of illusions and that can’t be good. Me I start to freak out when I start sounding like John Stewart Mill to myself. Long ago I strove for that sort of elaboration to mask my ‘umble beginnings but It’s no good if it does it’s job too well.

                     Blame it on Indiana Jones. There are rings of power but they are only used to change color in the presence of poison. Mostly myth is fiction at any given point. Much current academic study laments “the absence of myth”. I suppose it’s transmutation into advertising has not bode well.

                           It’s a little creepy but one may suggest that the emphasis on using mental leverages to sway weak minded individuals is in reaction to the awareness, or near awareness of the fact that society has nothing else to do with it’s time. Great art tends to appear a little past a societies high point.

                               In the following I wind up stressing the fact that metaphysics notwithstanding, life is about who gets laid and who doesn’t. Words don’t count. Less conclusively most illusions are created for a purpose and some even go by the far less flattering names of “That which is not true”.

And we ought not mistake the volume of the song for the tone. It’s an age old problem that I trust you will bear in mind.

Panic/ don't panic/ alright relax

                  Before strolling off to our usual obscurities I’d like to make an observation about the scope of subject here at the Tamlinmediaco.

           Many times in our earlier incarnations I jested about being the world’s most important website. This was an obvious reference to the idea that anyone can call anything anything they like. It was an homage’ of sorts to the show biz tradition of hyperbole as in the case of The Rolling Stones, whom apparently someone decided were “the worlds greatest rock and roll band.” In the modern parlance it was a brand imprint, albeit clumsy.

                           It was meant to be clumsy as opposed to facebook which brands you in a far more sophisticated and profitable way. As a rule if one company has exclusive control of one field they own your ass.

                       But I’ve never intended these writings to be concerned with the immediate present. I learned from when I reviewed software that such writings are quickly out of date. Even now it doesn’t bother me so much you don’t read me in 2012, as long as what I am saying still has merit in 2020 (When presumably I will *really* need the money)

                        Entertainment is like this. Mariah Carey’s first single debuted at number one. That’s not usual and the tune was forgettable but she benefited from the fact that her fiancé, Tommy Mottola, was the president of the record company. A similar thing happened with Obama and Romney.

In systems as complex as the Technostate persons who will have influence and access to the levers of information are not so much elected as anointed. Otherwise there’s too much at risk and suffice to say the allegiance of these voices is to those who put them into power. For awhile at least. Poor Mariah – such heartbreak.

If you keep struggling and fail constantly it destroys the soul. People havr at times said to me the don’t understand how I keep going in light of continued non recognition and it’s difficult to answer other then I’ve had an unusual and varied life and don’t know what else to ask for.

                  What this comes down to in in an election time the attempt is nearly always made to stampede the voters – to make them respond not as thinking individuals but as an emotional mob. Plus, it stands to reason that the worse you portray the current situation, once, if you get elected the greater the “Improvement” will be when you get to put your policies into place.

              A comparatively small amount of disinformation, if correctly placed distorts results far beyond it's merit and we must guard against that.

            So if you care to do so, currently you can find material about the coming economic disaster of 2011 which of course never happened but was useful in getting people to invest in gold. It helps to look at the numbers and consider as well the US has a lot of things going for it not the least the size of it’s internal market and the degree of social and intellectual interconnectedness of the society.

              We cannot and ought not pass laws forbidding panic and part an parcel of where I sit is the prohibition against being overly judgmental but when panic appears it pays to ask yourself if there is not someone benefiting from it.

Where da Indians?

Incidently, one might surmise that all things considered I’d have a few well thought out opinions about the copyright actions PIPA and SOPA. Actually I do and I don’t . Being as a content creator in the heart of the issue I cannot take a simplistic all good or all bad position. By the same criteria however we have to take into consideration the questions of what will work and what won’t. Unless you want to turn the
US into a totalitarian, isolated state, consideration has got to be given to the legal structures in the rest of the world. As a practical matter the magic word is jurisdiction and with some firms shopping for favorable judges and jurisdictions is something of a high art that they are going to be loathe to relinquish.

American Congressional legislation also has not exactly been the gold standard since 1980 – in fact it’s been pretty terrible and noted both for hypocrisy in titles and double dealing in result. What is worse then being morally despicable however is it hasn’t worked. Many of the cockamamie schemes have done nothing but encourage crime on a scale hitherto unimaginable- beginning of course with the 800 billion dollar savings and loan scheme in the Reagan days, which seems tiny in comparison to the damage by latter administrations.

To be fair the Clinton people can say that without corruption they could not have survived, but this argument is not very persuasive. Obama’s taking a lot of flak and much of it seems deserved but the really chilling thing is after thirty years of decimation there many not be that many people in Washington with clean records. They played the game as they knew it.

There’s a side of the social collapse that gets very little play. Bad guys are promoted until they are caught – and that makes the news. The underprivileged give us heartwarming tales of success against all odds and that makes the news. But a truly tragic thing develops when the conflicts take on the more serious aspects of warfare.

A real tyrant, one who’s is intent on success knows that the corrupt people are everywhere. The number of people who would sell their mothers for a dime can’t be counted. So one doesn’t have to bother looking for them, they will make themselves noticed. It is the uncorrupt persons that have to be sought out and systematically destroyed. And guess what ? That doesn’t make the news.

Plus there’s the issue of whether good intentioned, or not, the scheme will work. Remember
I want to be paid and I want to work in an environment where everyone else is paid and I’d prefer to be engaged in projects of substantial budgetary demands. Call me simpleminded for instance but I do not see how assigning the rights to my songs to a corporation fifty years after I am dead is doing me any good.

And yet another aspect that as an American peeves me, is the law is only as good as it’s enforcement and what we seem to be heading for is a situation where the punishments fall disproportionately on those regions and peoples who happen to live in proximity to American cops and lawyers - In which American essentially subsidizes the rest of the world.

I mean we already in effect subsidize the rest of the world’s military by being the world’s police – do we really have to add to that the case of opening the doors to our retail stores and giving the stuff away for free as well? Because that’s what happening. The Feds have not succeeded in closing down the file sharing sites – what they have done is succeeded in blocking the access of Americans to those sites many of which have material posted by Americans.

They are turning us into the Soviet Union, where if you want forbidden products you have to go though illegal channels which are available legally to the rest of the world. It is in creating revenue streams from the rest of the world that my interest is drawn to. You know the joke, the system has bled the citizens dry in America and now it’s time to give the rest of the world the benefits of democracy.

It works for me.

                              Just like we did to the American Indians.

  `````````````````````````````````````````````11111111111111111111111111111111111Other then that – another joke I resort to when I encounter a particularly wacko mentality is “As a trained psychoanalyst I get three hundred an hour but in your case I can sit and listen to your problems for only a hundred more.”

                 I was speaking the other day with someone, a lawyer, about how living in an academic mileau, which is almost overbearingly liberal I’ve come to realize how that draws a certain type of overbearing personality, often from people’s otherwise oppressed, to express domination.

People who would otherwise be the victims of racial or religious profiling take out their hostility on the meek and mild neighbors who in sympathy for their afflicted compadres grin and bear it.

                         Which is to say, please understand I am not from the favored class and hence am not prone to accepting guilt that is laid on them. AL Jesson, a friend, used to tell a joke about two monks , drunk, in a basement and one says “I can out forgive any monk in this monastery.”

                    `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` ````````What the two things have in common is typical of a bully. When you can’t beat up on the people that really are making your life miserable because they will kill you, you beat up on whoever you can.

When I consider the level of discourse about business in America I want to go to sleep! It is infantile. The rest of the world is waking up and that’s that.
Jesus Christ, they should put me on a board of directors for a quarter mill a year and how much you want to bet I’m not the smartest person in the room?

Yes, I know it sounds like and is hubris and yes, I admit there may be , scattered here and there others – but they are either sucking their thumbs or their thumbs are stuck up other orifices.

I don’t pity them because in many cases they are getting paid and I am not, but they think to themselves. “Gee it would be nice to have an educated workforce. It would be nice to live in a nice environment.”

But, rather then delude ourselves and search for Quakenbushes Magical Elixir say this. America is going off the rails. I speak here in mythological, epistemological and even economic terms.

It’s possible there will be some sort of Progressive resurgence. I live in the northern northeast corridor from whence came abolitionists, Witch burners and transcendentalists; so I have no idea how enlightened the rest of you are. Maybe we’re too intellectual.

Todays Mythic Cowboy Movie of the Week is

“The Man who shot Liberty Valence”

First off let’s clear up the difference between myth and fantasy. Myth is a permutation of truth. It is truth to which some extra element, often uncomfortable, is tagged on.

Fantasy, as in the case of describing defense mechanisms, is the unsubstantiated belief that something, often beneficial, will happen. Fantasies of persecution, for instance, are both similar and dissimilar to the more common fantasies of some great boon. A fantasy can be described as a shallow experience, a wish of a afternoon, whereas myths, as we speak of them are handed down through generations in some cases for thousands of years.

The Man who shot Liberty Valence is one of the last movies made by the great director , John Ford. In the wild west of a territory two men vie for a woman. One of the men, John Wayne, represents the common morality which is that justice and only be had by the use of the gun. The other, James Stewart is a lawyer who believes in the use of courts and written laws.

The movie opens with a Stagecoach being held up by Liberty Valence and his gang of robbers. Jimmy Stewart talks back to the thief and for his efforts is soundly beaten, pistol whipped and kicked. They make it to town where it becomes apparent that Liberty has been terrorizing the vicinity for years but no one is willing to stand up to him.

This is a classic western mythical element. In a certain sense all cowboy stories are creation myths in that they detail what it’s like to go where there’s no rules and bring order to the scene. Also the Western movie genre is something of a sanctified ground where film makers can say things about society that would be rejected in a more immediate approach.

A good example of this is “High Noon” made at the height of the McCarthy/Nixon black list and red scare the town’s law man, once again is being threatened by a gang of outlaws. He goes from person to person in the town seeking aid against the bad guys, but everyone else is too afraid. Finally he has to face the bad guys alone. He wins but leaves town in disgust.

Hollywood was not that naïve about what High Noon was about. Ronald Reagan had changed from a Democrat to a Republican and President of the screen actors guild presided over the purge alleged red sympathizers though out the industry.

The same story was told fifteen years later in the Clint Eastward movie, I believe it was “Hang ‘em High” Only in this instance the townspeople agree to join the stranger in the poncho to defend the town.

Joseph Schillinger in describing the rules of sequential melodic and harmonic development takes pains to say that even though music of created in many societies and times, all music follows some elementary rules, which the composers are largely ignorant of.

The same holds true with myth. The central and ny far strongest taboo in the human species is incest with the mother. That is nearly always expanded to a prohibition on incest with siblings and close cousins. In primitive tribal customs quite often the hero figure is from another totemic group. One might even suggest it adds a little dramatic interest to have main character from monkey totem rather then Anteater.

This also makes things a little easier to explain. The stranger shows up in town. The stranger guns down the bad guy. The stranger leaves. That is basically the whole plot of the movie “Shane” (There’s one other thing. Shane is idolized by a little boy who we may presume will grow up to carry on the tradition)

In The Man who killed Liberty Valence the stranger is Jimmy Stewart – the bringer of the law. Valence .in it’s older usage meant power and strength. Liberty is just that; strength unchecked by any sense of right or wrong. There’s also a minor subplot when the question of statehood arises. Liberty is in the pay of the large landowners “up north” who want to retain the region as a territory

But the townspeople want schools and highways and most of all laws. It is the same issues we face today. Those who holler against government really are upset with law. They don’t like like it. Most of these free marketers are criminals anyway so they hate the law.

The problem is if you stop then by shooting them then you are no better then them.

The story comes up with an elegant solution and itcomes about when the “ good” Gunslinger realizes that essentially Liberty Valence has got to go.

But Ford shifts the movie into overdrive when he introduces an element that breaks the chain of cause and effect. In other words in the rational world, or so called rational world , we do things in the expectation that other things will occur. Sometimes they don’t but mostly they do . But that’s the easy part to explain.

The difficult part to explain is when we do things that do not directly benefit us just because something in us can’t stand it being any other way. The word for this is sacrifice.”

There’s a scen in “Sawdust and tinsel where the ringleader is humiliated by the strong man in front of the woman he loves. We half expect him to shoot himself but instead he goes to the cage of his beloved bear and shoots the bear. Ingmar explained it as “Well he had to shoot something.”

The “The MAN” theres a shootout between jimmy Stewart and the bad guy and unbeknownst to anyone john wayne, standing off to the side shoots the bad guy making it look like Jimmy Stewart did it and giving the Stewart character the credit as “The Man who shot Liberty Valence.”

Ordinarily the movie would end here. But instead we follow Wayne back to his ranch house. John drinks a bottle of whisky and then burns his house down, beginning with the extra room that was going to be the nursery for the children he would have with the woman – thewoman he had loved all his life.

If he had done nothing Valence would have killed Stewart and John Wayne would have gotten the girl, and the family and his rival would be taken care of. From any logical viewpoint then John Wayne did the wrong thing. He did not advance even his genetic line. So if you’re going to understand this myth, just like in understanding many legends properly you have to see that then ending is not simple. It is ambiguous.

We the coffin of the Wayne character and it is obvious he never married, never went anywhere – the only one from the old days was his colored friend and Jimmiy Stewart and the woman who married him.

You know. It seems I’m surrounded by cheap hustlers – back in the day – when I was on politics I used to remark that it was not surprising that people would sell out their intergrity- what was surprising was how cheaply they’d do it.

When poverty comes down you’ll see what I mean. The scales become meaningless in light of survival. People will lie without a second thought because that is what they must do. They won’t look you straight in the eye but I’ll tell you something – comes a time, sooner then you think, when you don’t want or need for them to do so. You wanna let them keep that one lost bit of self respect.

What kind of sick person is he who would force a starving old lady to confess nicking a few coins?

Yeah, The train is off the rails and we shall see what we shall see.

               Next  I’m going to move to one of the more powerful question/difference/realities in the universe. First,  a little context.

                       Many if not most people speak of that which they refer to as “Truth” but in the field of psychology, meaning the unconscious or dreamstate, such a term is liable to get you into trouble.

                          Staring in to an open coffin and seeing myself lying there does not necessarily mean I have premonitions of my immediate demise. One of the primarily alchemical axioms after all is “all things are their opposites” which is good to remember when one is dreaming.

                            As well, as far as logic goes, my training is western but my predilections have always been zen and by this it is held that one must hold always in the mind the thing and the not thing. It is not an exclusively zen premise but it is with zen that I tend to associate the idea since it was in that school that I first noticed it.

Specifically, “Kiechu, master wheel maker of ancient China makes a wheel with no huh or spokes. Is he still the master wheel maker?”

                                                   Myth does not, to my mind, lend itself well to the case study method although I suppose it could be done. I’m not sure where in the conceptual food chain myth lies. Behaviors become customs and customs become laws , but where do myths come in? They are almost, conceptually, without (outside) the immediate dimensions of law.

                  For instance raping and killing women is, in most cultures, barring extraordinary factors, considered wrong; customarily and legally it is so, but also, beyond the bounds of specific societies it is considered so. Of course in times of war the strictures are suspended and myth, being a far more subtle instrument then law also understands that there is little difference between rape on the battlefront and rape in the boardroom.

Correspondingly to continue this specific analogy justice, as a concept falls dead at the feet of myth – meaning that if you enslave or falsely imprison someone for years there is no actual way of making that up. Youth once gone is gone. Much of justice is a poor substitute and that may be why so many of us are criminals.

Myth is not about what should be, but what is. So when Persephone is abducted by Hades to be made Queen of the underworld the earth suffers until she is released. This is ordinarily considered an “eternal return” myth since by eating food of the underworld Persephone must return every year but as well one may note that the result of her abduction is a diminution of the quality of life.

This is a major myth of course. Other women, spurned or assaulted resort to simply maiming or assaulting their attackers.

In any case, for me at least, it seems easier to study the various inquisitor theories rather then the cases. Like music, different regions seem to create different breeds of researchers.

Claude Levi-Strauss made his name in the study of south American Indian tribes and specifically into the ways they categorized their foodstuffs. The South American rain forest is perhaps the biologically most diverse place on Earth and so methods of categorization could well be needed to separate that which can be eaten and that which cannot.

So the Indians divided food into that eaten raw and that eaten cooked. Then they took it further into that which was salty and that which was sweet. The tropical jungle does not allow for the survival of large animals other then the relatively scarce tigers of India. Sunlight does not penetrate the canopy to provide grazing material. This lowers the caloric intake and created a situation in the past where the people are very small and tend towards cannibalism.

Head hunting which is the appropriation of the Mana, or spirit, of one’s neighbor was the primarily myth as in the case of many primitive societies and as in most cases. It served both a religious and practical purpose. Indeed I am often surprised at those who refuse to see religious,or national characterization, either as victim or oppressor in other then moral terms.

It is almost like when we engage in ethnic cleansing we save the best, which is taking the property of the cleansed for last.

Argumentative minds may be upset at my bringing this into the paper but I do so to focus the readers mind on an essential fact. Myth, what ever else it is, is a weapon, a tool, a device by which one person, or group my dominate and control others.

To return to what I said in the beginning of this post about one of the most difficult and potentially powerful questions it is “How do you measure the soft with the hard?” or again “How do you measure the qualitative with the quantitative?” And again “How do you measure the real world of continuous existence and action with the man made mathematical tools comprised of monads?”

It’s the old digital verses analogue issue on a cosmic scale.

Answers can be generated that cannot be disproven yet are not the answers we want and what is more they are not more provable then others. It’s like the container of Gödel’s Theorem

There are brutal essential realities involved her. If Asia would fall to the man who unravels the Gordian knot then why not slice it? By the container of Godel’s theorem, (which has application in other fields and specifically language) I mean that while it says essentially nothing can be proven the other side, in agreement says, you can disprove anything.

This is true as more then a rhetorical boast and unfortunately it comes down to the notion that, temporarily at least, the winners write history.

I had a associate in the 1990’s who was a big fan of John Stewart and pointed out that Mr Stewarts audience included many Harvard students. While I agree that John is funny the humor doesn’t strike me as funny because while for them the scene is a mad hatters tea party, or aggressive debating society I look back and I see the youthful friends who could not handle the new economics. Perhaps they weren’t prepared but ours was a society that did not forgive weakness. It trumpeted strength power and wealth and saw all others as roadkill. Again, myth is a weapon and it killed many of those I grew up with who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

First you kill the soul and then the body dies easily.

I may be paranoid and lonely and poor but I am still alive and my thoughts are more valuable then others.

Consider this thought experiment. We will take a hard question and place it in a soft environment.

Google the words “Liberal economic theory” and the first half dozen replies you get will replicate the conservative hierarchy, as created by the economic order and they will inform you of the flaws of Liberal economic theory.

Next Google the words “Conservative economic theory” and the first half dozen replies will replicate the conservative hierarchy, as created by the economic order and they will inform you of the merits of conservative economic theory.

What is wrong with this picture?

Actually nothing. Google works on the number of hits, etc. It delivers apparently paradoxical results – because that’s the way real math is. Real math is not single dimensional and once you add dimensions things happen.

Do this mean the world is coming to an end?

You betcha!

Actually to skew a system like googles is not that difficult. It’s like pump priming. Once you point the system in a certain direction, something that can be easily accomplished with a remarkably small amount of money the rest follows.

It’s like disease. Each meme has an infection quota, which in an of itself is not necessarily tied to actuality, but the winner of the race to infect the largest population is that which is introduced first and by the widest margin.

The quality of the meme, eg what we conventionally call “truth” is secondary which is why we laugh up own sleeves at reactionary clowns but for some reason they don’t go away.

Ordinarily I do not take these exegeses to conclusions. I prefer the “tune in next week” style but this time we are going to go to checkmate. That way if I get hit by a bus at least something of value can be recovered.

In modern science is is not considered good form to resort to the age old dialectic ways of referring to systems. We don’t use the mind/body question or the nature/nurture question because we have discovered the two ends of the continuum are so intertwined as to make them for intents and purposes indistinguishable. (This also holds true with racial issues but don’t tell anyone in asmuch as money can still be made kicking that old dead horse.)

In the study of myths these dialectics could be called form and content, or in the terms of Marshal McLuhan “Medium and Message”. And again even here McLuhan’s discovery was that the two weren’t really so separate.

The disciple that I was subjected to thereby asserted that in syllogistic terms.

“Form is form Content is content

Form is not form Content is not content

Form is form Content is content”

Duh, referencing this is both over and under your head so let’s bring it back to the comprehendable.

We can understand how, for instance the conclusion of the Second World war with it’s rockets, radios and thermonuclear bombs brought an almosy unbearable fear to the population and tjoseven by the movies of the era. War of the Worlds, Earth Invaders! Battle in Space, were typical titles and themes. The form is scientific menace and the content is little green men, or whatever the specific enemy was.

Fifty years on once again the enemy is at the gate but this time it is not science per se – but other people - aliens. A cursory look at the visual media of te day reveals an entirely white, Christian, northern European America – a unanimity that was about to be exploded in the sixties.

Treating the issue anthropologically we know that the totemic groups must intermingle – this is the basic taboo. Biologically even genetically the more wide the gene pool the better off we are and yet it is considered morally wrong to break the beautific models and ideals of the pedigree. I am speaking in a roundabout way of what is essentially racism - but it goes beyond that. We would cling to an idealized golden childhood even in cases where rascism never entered the picture.

Nobody wants to grow up. Nobody wants to die.

Here’s the kicker - the checkmate

Were man essentially a good creature there would be no need for God. Were we born in perfect self awareness there would be no myths. Ah, but such is not possible. However let us waken momentarily from our common sleep. Where a full awareness of reality is denied to all men we must make do with half an awareness, which in the present case is the knowledge that when one removes the content the form collapses. They are in fact separate aspects of the same thing. Dissolve form and content can no longer retain separateness from it’s surroundings.

What this means in practical terms is we must not forget that the ostensive great philosophical revolution can at the same time be a major criminal enterprise. This is the lesson we learned so painfully from Reaganomics. Combined with the difficulties that arise when one side has the ability to control “truth”- as demonstrated by the google experiment then the possibility is strong that resolution, evenness and harmony will not be restored until the next myth cycle.

“But untune one string”

And hark what discord follows”

Shakespear

Glenn Schaefer

New Paltz NY

April 2012