It seems like Shelleys dome of many faceted and colored radiance or Lesh’s Box of Rain. Many people in their childhood create collections of things, baseball cards, model toys, butterflies, stamps, and for a while think that collection the most beautiful thing – something that brings the far flung world, by representation in our small lives.
Then other things come along a grab our attention so that when (and if) we ever do return to the early locus of fascinations we find ourselves wondering how we could have ever been so interested in the subject in the first place.
If there is any consolation I offer myself, and those like me is that we represent the first generation that no longer shall find new worlds to gain in the physical realms, but rather we will create our own worlds, our own living spaces out of the information that we choose to access.
It was quite a while back I mentioned that the Jews, irregardless of morality or even metaphysical truth, represented a way of living that was millennia ahead of the norms. They carried their heaven on their backs and in their hearts. In other words it was a religion separated from sacred graves, or mountains or places. Those places had, once upon a time, existed as they do in all religions, but for some reason, the covenant, I suppose, the physical possession of land was not needed to keep the nation together.
To do this requires a masterstroke, to endure always the suffering of paradox. The primary paradox being that these are the children of God or of the word, and nobody has the slightest idea what either actually is.
Recent discoveries indicate the Kelts had a somewhat similar history of travel but they have no single history.
People have drawn analogies from the present era to life on multigenerational spacecraft.
I can recall in what context I read it but there is culture out there who always view the dream in a communal sense. This is, of course, totally different from the way we have historically viewed dreams. They were up to now viewed as individual messages from the metaphysical realm to the dreamer who then tried to see what it meant in the context of their own life and success or failure.
I do not look forward without fear. The Hive, the nest, the cloud; these are all forms of collective consciousness and humanity cannot withstand the loss of individuals with losing it’s soul.
In some regards the phrase “losing one’s soul” is quite appropriate although it may soften the blow to suggest that one “exchanges” their soul for something more in tune with the good of the group.
But then again, loathe as we are to admit it, what is good for my group may not be good for your group.
So let us return to triviality.
About eight years ago, just around the time I was loosing interest in being a conventional; media reporter of any sort I coined a phrase that caught on with some fellows who I admire greatly. A little praise can help sometimes – although the writers went down in the crash of Newsday which in some regards was inevitable and if anything was , like a boat in a hurricane, delayed as long as possible before the actual sinking.
A basic idea is that Prime Time Television has always been a very concise indicator of, if not what the nation believes then what they want to believe – and unlike news it is not usually deemed important enough to apply rigorous censorship to.
The eighties brought us a slew of programs that we essentially “Dallas” in different locations. Entertainment tends to do that- it takes us to fantasy worlds where everyone wears suits and goes to nightclubs.
In the rougher, more vulgar world of drinking and dancing music the sardonic, sarcastic voices are louder.
Now , of course, if Danton and the French Revolution were upon us we’d expect all those aging film never having made it’s to fill the guillotines and streets to run red with blood- such was not the case.
We were however entering a world of new mythical dimensions. The single characteristic that the early Romans granted themselves was their practicality and their stoic natures. This was in part the case because they had been at war both with the locals and the Carthaginians for several hundred years.
I’ve touched briefly upon the compensatory aspect of myth eg it arises when illusions must be propagated in order for select groups to advantage themselves.
I think I put it a little better however, and we are aided in this by looking at the eighties. Myth comes into play when we elevate the trivial and that in turn is primarily required when we seek to banish what is important from consciousness.
In other words the myth, or genesis of myth, is a secondary function. Among other things part of the beauty of myths is that like the species itself. While events are fast, the growth of myths is slow.
By the nineteen nineties the long run of wealth fantasies had run it’s course. My personal opinion is that it was not that those who would benefit from the myth and it’s subsequent illusion (primarily that America had regained global hegemony) had lost interest in keeping the myth going; rather it was impossible to maintain the fiction in the face of actual events.
As something of an intermediarial fiction we then experienced in prime time, several nights a week the myth of competency. This assured us that though were not as well off as we’d like the doctors in the hospitals, the lawyers in the courts and all other professional people were doing their jobs and there was no need to hurry or change.
Interestingly, or perhaps predicatively, even as the two political parties moved in almost identical lockstep similarity the tone of discourse became increasingly shrill. Each side distrusted the other and the public trusted no one.
One got the strong impression that all anyone wanted was to remain employed. In political terms the seeds planted in the nineteen eighties blossomed, in particular among Democrats.
The impression the public got of the Democratic party is that then it was a matter or doing right or getting elected they had no qualms about jettisoning doing right. Plus both parties could virtually guarantee huge increases in personal wealth for those to whom it mattered. That continued on with a vengeance under the Clinton Administration.
It was very much like watch a patient with a major illness that as of yet shows few symptoms. I, like most of us , could not bring myself to wish for a catastrophe.
One other aspect is for instance, Chuck D, grew up a few miles from where I did in the suburbs and for black people by and large the nineties weren’t that bad. The people that took it on the jaw were the unionized industrial workers, like my dad a and virtually everyone else’s parents I knew.
We were hit with downward mobility whereas the black population could really robbed of that which they did not have. While white wanna be yuppies were complaining about the lack of income growth the black population was happy to finally, after the civil rights revolution have a job at all.
As I conclude this essay, or series of essays I have more less in mind what I want to say. So let me get that out of the way. Incidentally I have not arrived at any conclusions viz where things are going or ought to go.
After the myth of competency had run its course, by chance the internet placed commercial TV in dire straights. One of the wilder aspects the modern economic paradigms is how soon, after the bug fish eat the little fish, and even bigger fish comes along.
It is major league cautionary stuff to beware apparent opportunities. The tale I told often was when VHS tape came along a lot store fronts owned by individuals sprang up and many of them were owned by specialists who knew their stuff and could bring a great variety to the market.
One it reach a sustainable level though someone went to Wall Street , started Blockbuster and the quality and price aspects suffered tremendously. The same effect comes into play with restaurants, retail stores and any other business you can think off. But, of course now Blockbuster is going broke.
Sears Roebuck has been struggling for decades and now we see that the big box buyers centers are also beginning to struggle due to the internet.
It’s also nice to bear in mind that commerce, the selling of goods from one to another, is not nor ever was meant to be the primary factor in the enterprise.
So let me move on.
Consider sci fi, Most Sci-Fi shows are episodic. They are like comic books or novellas, each half hour story has a beginning a middle and an end. The StarGate Franchise began to move away from that and began having background scenarios running over multiple shows.
Josh Whedon with his Buffy the Vampire series did this as well, but he is a vehement ethical humanist, to the point of making speeches and accepting awards.
Many people in media have a less then honest attitude towards the people they sell their product too.
For instance in terms of admitted belief in the existence of a devil the United States is very fundamental . It’s hard to believe the people that make media feel the same way and the shame is that they don’t make their own beliefs more obvious.
In any case the myth of competency shows have now been replaced by what we can consider ordinary mystery or crime stories. If you spend time in libraries you realize that outside of genres the number of people capable of writing novels about the real world is minuscule.
And the oft quoted phrase that the fantasy genre is now the mainstream media can’t be brushed aside.
As a fan of old time cowboy movies the first thing you notice is that while corporate malfeasance is still admitted as a part of life the notion that such sins are the result of individual predilections is not so commonly accepted.
We keep thinking that if we just give Ken Lay another chance he’s going to overcome his wicked ways and see the light. The notion that people could possibly enjoy being bad is not that common.
Humanity is fascinating. If we present it with enough absurdity it will always defend it’s cognitive cohesion by counter absurdity. This is one of the truths of humor. It is why humor flourishes not among they who have everything but they who have nothing.
So two new formats came into widespread usage in the past decade. One is the post apocalyptic survivalist; Such as Jericho, Joshua and Dark Angel.
The others are shows about hunters of evil, who do this, seeming whilst devoid of association with conventional religions. So they get to hunt bad guys and still drink and have girl friends.
Buffy was a radical step forward in that they simply wrote off large segments of the viewing population, but Warners made something of a cottage industry creating shows about “Pretty White Kids with Problems.”
The spin off from Buffy, called Angel, is quite absurd, featuring a vampire that seeks to do good as a private detective.
As an aside one might mention that long ago a show called “Friday the 13th- the series” was years ahead of it’s time in that it involved the retrieval of cursed objects. I may be “reaching” on this but for the most part in this sort of analysis it is often better to go too far then not far enough.
So here goes, John Lee Hooker, the great blues singer and composer once described the blues as “a broken, a broken home, a broken family.” In other words he was not talking about teenage heartbreak or whether Johnny is asking Jane to the Prom – he’s talking about that live their entire life under conditions that would destroy many of us.
What he means is knowing you’re never going to have a decent job. It means figuratively to live one’s life in the fields being chased by mad dogs. These elements, as I said will kill you.
We speak, as is right, to the high rate of black on black murder in the ghettos and there are continuums between poverty and violence. People who don’t have to steal, won’t. I remember once being described by a senior writer as a pit bull, because he had not seen such hatred come ever from the suburbs.
It just happens that I saw a lot of young men, my friends, fall into despair and one way or another die. So when I speak of information war this is not a rhetorical conceit.
I’ve faced decades of shouting in the wilderness and that is why I am convinced that it must never happen again – and as far as they who maintain the fiction that it didn’t - that our lives were not washed in a flood of illusion and fecal information – they can believe what they wish – they have demonstrated long that they have no use for us and we shall see how proud they are when we have no use for them.
Do you understand what this means?
It means in some sense we are beyond occupy wall street because the occupy crowd wants to get the attention of Washington and the economic system in the hope of effecting positive change.
I ask why do we have to go hat in hand to beg for that which is ours in the first place?
If they can straighten themselves out – great – but to suggest that it is our job to do so is not reasonable.
Returning to the subject at hand I have two suggestions. One is that myth, the modern myths which can be ascertained simply by looking at what people are interested in, is , in market analysis terms , a leading indicator. True it takes time to get the products before the public but information trends, believes, styles, fashions, even, move in waves.
The other is that why we have not seen the apotheosis of gangster such as in the early thirties we do see many more flannel shirts on prime time then we ever did before. More importantly one of things that a lot these shows have in common is the lack of a father figure.
“Supernatural” combines several of these factors. Two brothers travel the lost highways hunting demons and often expressing great affection for each other.
It tells us something about our society that many on both sides of the issue do not want to hear. The patriarchal society of “guys named Joe” who fought the just war has been replaced by a allegedly egalitarian, multi ethnic one.
Unfortunately the multi ethnic, multi racial, multi religious society has been tearing at it’s own throat, obsessed with the notion that the spics, or the women, or whoever are getting more then they deserve.
Are they? Probably not. There are elements in the economic picture that are difficult to reconcile with a simplistic class warfare scenario- and I say this from the vantage of one ready to wage that conflict .
One reality is that much of the money in the neq uber class is earned and not inherited – it is contradicted however by the reality that the means to earn such income is more and more restricted to those not hobbled by poverty in the first place. To understand what I’m saying keep thinking game theory where a small highly organized unit is the predator and the masses are the prey.
Hence the current popularity of the Vampire scenarios. As in the case of sexuality or dominance/submission the unconscious doesn’t give a damn about social niceties. It creates images to place in order what it knows. There for it believes that there is a large segment of humanity that is in effect comprised of virtual vampires.
We can be assured those perceived as blood suckers, except in cases like bankers, are not aware of their new roles.
In a way this is a sympathetic approach, too sympathetic for my taste. The idea that vampires are victims themselves, innocents who against their will are forced to feed upon living flesh is .
They are after all is said and done – bad guys who refuse to accept the world as it is.
We on the other hand are constantly reminded that it is not our place to judge.
Reagan was hated by his own kids and he set the mold. Could anyone in their right minds imagine Bill Clinton as their father? A nice guy? Sure, but he was sleazebag anyway.
That we are shaped by our parents is something I believe. I’ve seen many cases where specific behaviors wee emulated by children but there ought to be better ways to work out ones issues then by being President.
Ultimately this means one can’t blame Reagan for being a wacko but what of those who got on the bandwagon? Worse; what of the next bandwagon?
Without getting too deep here, one of the essential qualities of myth is that it messes with the time-space continuum.
In a haunted house time has stopped. Charmed objects are similar with the difference that they carry their “mojo” or supernatural effect wherever they go.
I’ve spoke in the past, (and it’s something of an ongoing topic with me) about the congruence between the effects of modern technology and so called magical items. So too, an EMP or electromagnetic pulse weapon can vaporize all electronic circuits at a distance – something identical to casting a spell.
There are other qualities to be aware of. Classically we are told to be unafraid of technology because it is value neutral. Well, yes, and no.
You don’t give a gun to a child. Furthermore as people all over the world will tell you neoliberal economic theory is ostensibly value neutral, but it often doesn’t seem to behave that way, preferring to bestow it’s benefits on the few and it’s burdens on the many.
As I leave you then. Recall, if you will, that I am not receiving any direct or indirect compensation for these writings and you can keep your wallet closed.
The benefit for me is to clarify and identify the landscape of the new world.
We live and exist amidst many dimensions and our joys and fullness will in part be contingent on our ability to know them. Sarah McGlauglin has a tune where she in no uncertain terms takes a man to task for building a mystery. I tend to agree with her in that I prefer people saying things out in the open and not sending coded messages.
Very often building a mystery and developing a brand awareness are difficult to tell apart.
I’m not sure how the sacred comes about – whether it always is or it comes into being with time but if there is one thing we can take with us into the vast universe it is this.
Gs
Thankyou for having read this I certainly have spared no effort telling you what I think and if you wish to tell me what you think in reply I can be reached at
kwitzatchhaderatch @ gmail.com (eliminate blanks which are there to confuse the robots and spiders)
It's a pretty good guess that the essay writing will wind itself down somewhat in that I have been working, behind the scenes, to get some sort of musical production system going and if that happens we will, as ALF says “shift Dimensions”
"Sam, do you have correlation with parent DNA?
We have very change with preview year
Correlation factor nineteen oh three
Dirt Factor seven Oh
Inverse conclusion rain factor one
We know where you live
All your base
ALL Your base
belong to us
oh renderella cinderella
so far away from home
oh renderella cinderella
How long must you roam?
so far away from home
so far away from home
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