Uncommon Sense

                   

     Abstract                       What follows is a fairly standard textbook sociology analysis of recreational patterns  in the  US as they have been effected by the coming of the class divergence - since most of you  find this stuff a little boring I did the reading  for you-  Besides which you have been systematically taught that sociology is for  academics and smart people are bad because  they want to lead you down the road to sin.

                 You want to believe that go right a head.  I'm not getting paid for this stuff you know and no one has listened to me for thirty years so your disapproval  won't bother me in the least.

                    I chanced on a small article in the (NY) Times today and it triggered a response. It was an obscure mention to the effect that Dreamworks is thinking of building a theme park in the Meadowlands in New Jersey.

                            n a way it is indicative of a good trend, brought about by a bad trend. As poverty accelerates the amusement centers will be placed closer to the centers of population - someday it may even be possible to visit a place like Coney Island for the price of a subway ride. The growth of theme parks is itself indicative of the mentality that only the rich count. Someday they are going to look at the 80's and 90's like the ancient regime and will ask themselves how we could be so stupid.

                        The answer is we are not stupid – we are powerless. I will suggest that this leads to a conundrum for the ruling aristocracy which is that the longer they hold onto power for themselves the more violent will be the retribution when it comes. They are gambling with their lives and the lives of their children – they are betting that when the shit hits the fan they will be on a boat to New Zealand with a swiss bank account. It's not a bad bet actually. It's certainly a feasible hypothesis and in fact it is the very practicality of this idea of squeezing the peasants for every dime that I find so amusing. 

                       To succeed we have to learn to think indirectly. In other words consider England where they were constantly being invaded and that enhanced the minstrel tradition because the local singers had to say what was happening while the Kings or warlords remained ignorant. (It was used very successfully for instance to gather together a force to repel the Vikings.) They had to create what we ,might call a meta-language, one that will communicate one thing to the initiates and something else to the overlords.

                          The same held true in the case of the underground railroad in the pre civil war United States. If every individual understands what they are doing and why it certainly simplifies things. We’ve discussed this previously in the form of educated individuals forming self organizing monads.

Conversely the ruling elite has to be able to send different messages to different populations. They promise compassion and understanding to the subject populations whilst assuring their supporters that dissent will be dealt with swiftly and surely before it has an opportunity to catch on.

                         As the Tao says to confront evil directly is only to allow evil to sharpen it’s knives.” Or to give a military example, if you spot a weak point in the enemies defenses keep your mouth shut until you can throw everything you have at it. Other wise you are simply helping the bad guys by in effect doing their jobs for them.

                    I’ll always think of this in relation to Life Magazine, which along with many others, ran story after story about the summer of love and the hippies and in doing so effectively killed the movement even as they allegedly praised it.

                      And again when John Phillips wrote “San Francisco, Wear some flowers in your hair,” actually he lived in LA and the Frisco scene was much worse off for is because the onslaught of junkies, winos and various other predators began.

                                   We can say the evil we face today comes in two forms, the systemic, which is to say monopolies, trusts, combinations and the specific which is Clear Channels and TW/AOL. There’s two things to say about such monopolies. 

                     Someone was saying the other day about beach music in South Carolina – and my guess is that it was associated with radio stations and night clubs and just place to hang out.
I am in favor of this. Surf music started with a few thousand people every weekend going to listen to Dick Dale, right. And Motown, which always had major crossover appeal, nevertheless got it’s start in Detroit , in a mostly black working class scene. I could go on. California always had “Cool” jazz. KC was jumpin’ etc

But since that awful day when Reagan and his took over all that came to an end. It is the obligation and duty therefore of anyone who cares for the American popular song to fight the monopolies. The other day I drove from Woodstock to the Hamptons and it was big beat dance music all the way. This is because each station wants to maximize it’s revenue – but they don’t seem to realize that fifty percent of a hundred dollars is better then ten per cent of two hundred dollars. 

           I’m hip to cw and that’s not bad stuff, it keeps absorbing more influences but it aint the sound of the south Bronx the way sugar Hill was.  To have an hear one's own music is a great privilege. It's in the bible. Sad are the songs we listened to by the rivers of Babylon.   Of course now the over lords with the whips are called Clear Channels and we are forced to hear playlists of the monopolies as decided by  the bigots in some small town in Florida. 

                       The other thing to say about monopolies is that you can play nice with them. They want to be your friend   - why the is that?   Duh?   Mr AOL will say “Gee how can we help you by changing our style? Would you like a call in show? “ The truth is we’re the audience are not going away, and the producers of the music are not going away – but as the case may be the most impermanent, ephemeral err, transient , part of the equation is the middleman.

                  It’s critical to understand that you can’t have different rules for different people in the same game. You can’t bring machine guns to a knife fight. Time Warner cannot be neutered or handicapped or tamed. Since we don’t want to use disturbing terms let’s say they have to be “retired.”

I deal with lawyers occasionally and it’s a given that the simpler you can state things often the stronger your case is. ( A good lawyer, although not too ethical will purposely simplify his case as in the Case of Johnny Cochrans “If it does not fit you must acquit”. It’s nonsense but often effective)

                          Really what I have to say come’s down to one point. There’s no Elvis, no beatles, no Sinatra, no Crosby – in essence there is no major musical artist to come to the fore since the clampdown in 1980. Along with that there’s no genre music. Here you have to understand the markets. Iggy Pop for instance will only sell to one percent of any particular market but he sells to one percent of a very wide market – because he so well known and because he’s associated with white rebel junkie music. In the past for instance Mitch Ryder would sell 30 percent in his home area of the industrial northeast and basically nothing in the south or far west.

                          I mean I gotta laugh. Twenty years ago when the notion of being online was first mentioned people would say – It’s gonna decentralize power and information. I didn’t believe it because what computers do is they centralize information. One of the challenges of technology is that we have to drive the car and not let the car drive us. So, I mean computers tend to empower the few and create central command driven economies. It’s almost like computers and communism were made for each other and we ought to keep an eye on that notion.

                             As I said the  article that caught my attention was Dreamworks thinking of  building  a theme park at Meadowlands.  EG instead of Vail or Aspen. Colorado. Obviously the wealthy in  America don't vacation here - who wants to see all that misery? Then there's the theme parts for the upper ten percent or so - then if you have any money you can go to casinos - notice we can't afford World's Fairs any more but we can afford Casino gambling - some which for some reason used to be considered the realm of the devil.

As the myth goes, "Vampire can't enter your house lest you invite it in."

                     Suffice to say it’s not a very sexy announcement – but if you understand contextually it become relevant to the task at hand. The fact is one must take their allies where they find them. If Winston Churchill can make cause with Joe Stalin, we can accept the continuation of Dreamworks.

                    They seem to have good initial impulses and then pull back once the facts are read to them, because of the rule number one which is if you don’t survive you can’t fight.

                          Basically I’m pissed off because there’s no more world’s Fairs . Reagan told me it was morning again but all I saw was a post apocalyptic junkyard. Coney Island was once the wonder of the world. The giant movie theaters of the 1920’s were the cathedrals of the common man. This was before the bad people took over.

                           It was once a point of pride that the large theatres could entertain people of all classes – in part because they were not that different. In the sixties and seventies though Disney land suffered because the courts said they had to admit black people and long hairs. When the new regime started up they solved that problem by moving the amusement parks to distant locations, like Florida, and Delaware and making the cost prohibitive to all but the upper class.

                        This is the standard thing because whereas the segregation in America used to be primarily racial and religious, now it is almost entirely economic. They have talked about rebuilding Coney for the past forty years and nothing has come of it and nothing will come of it because it means that people from Bed Sty will go to coney island for the price of a subway ride and rub shoulders with their betters.

It is , of course, de facto segregation. It’s the concept I am trying to help you understand. A few years back I was talking to a wealthy guy – maybe not a billionaire – his father had been a billionaire but is an erratic investor- but this fellow was in the several hundred million category – and he worked every day - in the market, of course – doing transnational funding agreements. When he relaxed and speculated on retirement he wasn’t interested in buying a few hundred acres in Colorado, or for that matter a mountain side in Chile. As far as he was concerned the place to go was New Zealand.

                       If you think about it it has a lot of natural defenses and there’s no direct land bridge to highly populated areas. Of course this was somewhat in the nature of contingency planning for ten or twenty years out. I mention it however to bring to mind two final things;  One is that all the major criminal work in terms of actual dollars transferred since 1980 is the same format – basically you borrow a lot of money from the Feds, then squirrel as much as possible away and then declare bankruptcy. Whether savings and loan, or the crash of 2008 it’s the same pattern – because the government is no longer the pre-eminent economic or legal force it once was.

                     What will happen in the big picture I don’t know. I’m mostly concerned with the smaller world of rock and roll. Maybe things will balance out. For now it seems there’s no Teddy Roosevelt on the horizon and there’s a few storms out there as well.

                        Here’s an interesting thing about the knock on effects of poverty. The less money people have to spend on entertainment the closer to home the entertainment will be. That’s why, good intentions not withstanding, the Dreamworks Amusement center may be located in the Meadowlands of New Jersey rather then in Vail Colorado.

I mean there is a class of people, and their servants who commute from the Hamptons in the summer to the Rockies in the winter. Their money is clean, bright, newly minted, refreshing, enjoyable and oh such a thrill to the touch.

Poor peoples money is dirty, oily greasy, old, worn , torn and who knows what else - but I’ll take it anyway.

Meet the new boss

                     The next section is more in line with our norms. It's a perusal of the way primitive traditions still exist and must exist as societies respond to tragedies.  Like people, societies under strain often revert to simple answers that worked once upon a time. No one is immune.  Believe me I've been there. I've been to the place were all that remains is the ritual.  In other words when all else fails take action.

         One of the most ancient and solemn examples of what we are speaking about is the parade, be it a funeral parade, a veneration parade or what have the purpose is to move the spirits in the world beyond.

There are no words spoken  in the parade. It's message is conveyed silently.

                 There's a Jewish saying that everytime a person forgets they are a Jew some Gentile comes along to remind them. So too everytime we forget to keep a little something sacred in our understanding of life reality comes along to kick us upside the head

                In nineteen ninety five there was a conference to determine the direction of the internet. Then Vice President Gore took the floor and said, “One of the things we are here to do today is to determine the role of the federal government in the ongoing evolution of the internet.”

At that point he was interrupted by the then president of AT&T, (a representative of where the real power resides) and told that the federal government was to have *no* role in the internet.

“None?” replied Gore.

“None” said the President of AT&T

                And Gore. Like an ass whupped puppy backed down and shut up which considering he was working with Clinton the betrayer was all he could do, maybe. It was a classic McCarthy moment seen in many a court room where a guy stands up and says “ I have in my hand evidence of horrible facts, names and incidents that prove my position correct beyond any doubt.”

                           At which point, if you have any balls you say, “What you have in your hand is a piece of paper.” It remains to be seen if the evidence corroborates the accusations. Otherwise the fellow is bluffing, they’s bullshitters.

                     When I watch the rich and powerful terrorize the weak and defenseless it’s difficult to avoid thinking that throwing bullshit is their main weapon - that and fear.

Now, years down the line, private enterprise has found a use for their servants in the government – to enforce laws that hitherto did not exist – for the sole purpose of denying an education to the poor. There is no substantive difference between forms of information.

                   So here’s a long overdue suggestion. Why don’t we find the best public library in America and make all it’s contents available online - so that a child or adult in Bed Sty may get the same opportunity to learn as one in Grosse Point

                        Maybe I should try to sell this recent series of essays as part of a how to collection -
“Mythology for Dummies”. But of course in academia the softer the science the more weight is given to official titles and accreditations, which is a tad silly. Imagine if you will someone getting a Phd in Anthropology with a special emphasis on cats. That said it’s important to remember that anthropology like most historical sciences is particularly subject to fads.

                     In the mid nineteenth century for instance England was enraptured with the middle ages. The neo Raphaelites, Tennyson, and others all sought evidence of a form of manifest destiny, which not surprisingly they often found. That lasted right up to the first world war, which, if nothing else, toned down British Jingoism – “Good bye to all that”, as Robert Graves would say.

To review the twentieth century – it began with something like sympathetic magic, or in Jungs case a parallel narrative of the life experience. That doesn’t totally satisfy because it’s basically metaphor and you can only go so far with it. For a science, or superstition, to justify it’s existence it has to at least promise some result, some causal action that will yield something the practitioner wants.

For the record, increasingly I go with Elliade as being the most perceptive thinker on myth in the past century. My long standing hesitancy to “submit to his authority” was based on the fact that he not only studied many of the mystical traditions , but practiced them as well, primarily yoga. There remains a shadow of the white man’s burden in all this. Richard Burton dressing as an arab and studying the more obscure sects. One must confess, I think. Even, or especially in the case of the German orientalists, like Schopenhauer, you sometimes get the sense that they are intrigued by the different and distant as one who would study insects in a jar.

That said I’m not *that* guilty of dilettantism. For extended periods of my life I practiced long periods of meditation.

                          Continuing Elliede is noted for his discovery of the rapid transmutation of actual events into myth, of the use of myth to propriate the spirits of animals one has to kill both for food and in self defence, and of the tendency of societies under stress to (like individuals) revert to earlier successful life strategies. I stress that he is not along by any means in these realizations. The correlation between bodily functions and psychic awareness he knew certainly as well as others ( eg Campbell) but I mention the three above ideas for their uniqueness and also because they can be seen as outgrowths of the individual unconscious as described by Freud.

Will Rodgers, a newspaper columnist once said he believed that there were fellows that were smarter, richer and probably would make a better husband for his wife but somehow, he just didn’t feel like giving her up. I say this because at some point we have to admit the presence of the un nameable – call it what you like. Ironically this seems to go along with the admittance of the notion of death. In other words truth, beauty and the words of poets immortal lose their luster and the noble gestures seem ever more foolish and futile.

So I’d like to conclude this series of essays speaking not of myth, per se, but of irrational behavior. The emotive power of symbols cannot easily be over stated, the flag, thelove song, the wedding ring all border on the mystical. But there is some behavior which we insist on continuing because A ) we are used to it and B) it may be that our bodies have been so long conditioned that although the action is artificial it is nearly natural.

The words artificial and natural themselves are problematic. William Blake in one of his always ambiguous utterances stated that “There is no Natural Religion”. It is mostly understood to mean that the experience of the sacred, or the divine, can come in different forms – all are valid – but it also can mean that no religion is natural to man.

There is a Japanese saying to the effect that when one is ill they ought eat the food of their homeland. Certainly making suggestions as to human evolution on the basis of food is even less reliable then those made on the basis of climate, but in the animal kingdom, at least, diet is one of the prerequisites of both evolution, or in it many cases, extinction.

Mr Rodgers and his wife may not have had much status in the wife swapping clubs of suburbia, but they managed to reproduce - the sine qua non of life. This is true even if for most of human existence the females were either at the mercy of the dominant male or able to choose among a revolving series of sexual partners. Of course in speaking of sex we’re talking about behavior whereas when we speak about food we are speaking, at least to some degree , of physical makeup.

                       Quite often the physiological and psychological aspects of motivation to do something become fused. I was made aware of this when I saw a film about the Japanese dolphin harvesting industry.

I’m not here to wax eloquent about the intelligence of these sea mammals – but it is firstly needful to mention that as a foodstuff they are decidedly second rate – largely because they are loaded with Mercury, which cases all sorts of birth defects. They have such a high mercury content because they eat comparatively large fish – In deed the fish they eat are much the same that humans eat.

                      The Japanese however like fish. Sushi is their notion of a “Fun food.” They have liked fish for a long time: millennia. To digress a little, it may be that the Japanese economy, which has been essentially stalled for a decade or more, has reached an end point that awaits everyother Capitalist economy. It is not that they are doing anything wrong it is that the economic system is functioning at it’s limits and can go no further. This may await other societies , such as the US, as well.

But part of the Japanese economy, along with MITI and Tokyo University, is the continued existence of the the family rice farm. These exist in contradiction to the otherwise iron clad laws of commerce. In other words the rice can be imported cheaper but the Japanese government doesn’t wish to let them go. One can say it’s a strategic move, but considering that such farms could be started up almost overnight that is hardly a strong justification.

                uffice to say rice plays a large emotive role in the culture. It is the staple food. Japanese students here in the US would not think of removing rice from their daily diet, although few Americans eat it constantly. So too the Dolphin is not hated – it is loved – it’s is even “Kawaii” – or cute – so one wonders why the Japanese insist on killing them.

                        The most interesting answer one receives is that it is part of the cultural inheritance and no outsider has the right to tell the Japanese otherwise. It recalls the fierceness with which the Welsh preserve their language, having believed, from ancient times, that if they lose their language they will lose their nationhood.

                          What is more the proposition was given to the fishermen that they would be paid to compensate for whatever losses they incurred by stopping the trade. Not good enough – the fishermen insist that Dolphins are scavengers and must be killed to control the fish populations. This sort of rationalization is not uncommon in justifying an action as in the case of outlawing drugs because negros would otherwise go wild on raping and killing sprees.

                  It gets stranger. The vast majority of the Japanese population has no idea that they are in fact subsidizing the Dolphin industry in part because nearly all the dolphin meat sold in the stores is mislabeled as something else. This all dovetails curiously with what we said last week about how societies in extremis will revert to more primitive patterns because it suggests that societies will retain primitive patterns purely from the fear of breaking faith with the Gods.

                     As I said many parades are exorcism rituals, and many customs that seem locked in custom hood – that is to say unable to present a viable case to become actual laws as vestigial behaviors as well.

It is in other words a ritual sacrifice to the Gods of the sea.     In previous writings I’ve spoken of the unusual way that there seems to be both a western and eastern alchemy – the same yet different. Likewise, like a long dead king stirring in his grave, when Japan needed a natural force to lead her from the humiliation of the second world war she called on the water lizard – known in the west as the dragon= Gojira!

Such creatures predate written history and there are certain consistencies. They are nearly always born in water. They nearly always spew fire. Often they fly. When their seemingly purposeless destruction has been completed they return to secret lairs underground.

                      And one of the points that we are considering is that myth is a form of collective unconscious – not in the Jungian sense of of an independent quasi- supernatural set of beliefs but in the sense of the unconscious of the individual, “writ large”. To clarify, the Jungian sense is to suppose there is a sort of universal paradigm which individuals eventually resort to where as the Freudian sense (and I use these terms loosely) is to suggest belief systems tied to specific locales and as changeable as a persons dreams from day to day.

                       And, as such. It was necessary to “discover” the individual’s unconscious prior to a systematic study of myth if only to establish, as it were, the monads that are the building blocks of the collective beliefs. Note I no longer use the word fantasies or delusions – certainly they are acceptable but for our purposes whether something is “the truth”, “a fantasy” “or that which we believe” –it doesn’t matter as long as the thoughts that obsess us provoke us to noticeable action.

                       To give this idea another “spin” when I first began to be sensitive to the delusional patterns that swept the United States in the nineteen eighties, like many other people I was angry, and convinced that “wicked people” sitting off in darkened rooms were conspiring to do themselves good and the nation harm. Even then I realized that there was a problem in that the opposition had the same ability to delude the public but for whatever reason seemed unable to.

                        I even came up with several powerful explanations as to the sudden shift to policies that seemed irrational. One was that in the same way radio allowed fascism to control information and centralize it so too the consolidation of all media” TV, radio and newspapers into the hands of large corporate interests had yielded the predictable result of their interests being though paramount.

                           Even today one may bet safely on this hypothesis, but it is just the widespread acceptance of t of the idea that troubles me. What happened to the opposing forces? Were they entirely corrupted? I don’t think so because there’s a tradition of what one may call aristocratic liberalism that holds essentially that what is good for the poorest of the poor is good for all. They, of course, are markets and to throw them from the lifeboat to commit the economic suicide that Reaganomics promised us.

                             One thing that most of the myths we are concerned with is interaction with the Gods. One of the Gods primary attributes is it is not always caring and good. We see this more easily in polytheism where most often a separate God exists as either a Trickster or simply an outright death god.

It is almost as if we worship those forces which are about to destroy us. I recall the British Script writer who named his fatal cancer (Rupert) and would on occasion converse with it.

What I am about to suggest mixes the practical and the near mystical. It is that the retention of dolphin killing is done not despite it’s irrationality, but because of it. Like Godzilla the appearance of the monster has no purpose other then to express it’s displeasure at being disturbed.

                       I will conclude with the mention of some of the humane societies observations in regards to Japanese intransience regarding killing both dolphins and whales. They found themselves thinking that such slaughter was primarily religious in nature and what is more, specific to a nation like Japan with it’s attraction to imperialism, it was a prerogative ultimately of the throne to make decisions regarding such behavior.

The issue abounds in inconsistencies. The people seem genuinely fond of dolphins yet they are the worlds largest killers of the, The emperor himself, if I recall. Is a marine biologist, yet has said nothing.