The End of the World or Just the End as We Know It?: Turn, Turn, Turn…

“I would never have imagined that things could turn out so bad!” This is something one might have said, heard said, or said many times during the last few years. Since “9-11” we have gone through economic downturn, banking industry bail-outs, world-wide economic and social chaos, the war against terror, Gulf oil gushers and natural disasters such as plagues, hurricanes, and typhoons which are promised to recur and intensify in the coming years.

One might ask, “Where is this all going?”

One might wonder whether it even matters. It may be that it is just anther turn on the cycle. Perhaps we will face the challenges that loom ahead of us as a steward species and raise ourselves up once again. Perhaps such an ‘old world’ idea as ‘dominance over all other rival nations’ is patently unsustainable nowadays. Perhaps we cannot fix what we have already started.

There are probably many possible scenarios that we might imagine as the way this will all turn out. The scenario that you pick as your personal favorite will probably have a lot to do with what you think or imagine to have at stake and what you think or imagine you stand to lose when/if everything crumbles (which, by some accounts, would be a blessing!).

America rose to the status of world super-power through slavery, industrialism, trade, military force, global surveillance, a policing force of technical capabilities, and social/cultural imperialism. This has been facilitated in the last century by America’s ‘dictator’s rights’ to prominence on the world’s stage through the development, deployment, and flourishing of communication and military technologies under the rubric of ‘Manifest Destiny.’

The world social system (as it is conceived of and acted upon from the ‘American’ perspective) has become not only ‘The Carcerial Society’, but also ‘The Culture of Fear’ as well as the ‘Panoptic Society.’

In Bentham’s panoptic prison (go and Google ‘Panopticon’), as described by Foucault in ‘Discipline and Punish,’ the attendants in charge could easily monitor the inmate’s activities by virtue of a centralized ‘optical’ position. The guards could ‘see’ everything everywhere. With today’s technologies, we are all being monitored from a centralized position in cyberspace/time no less effectively for the purposes of the dominant regime of bankers and promoters of mass consumerism.

The United States probably has incarcerated more people for minor ‘drug’ offenses like ‘Marijuana possession’ than any other industrialized nation, while at the same time allowing murderers and serial rapists to walk. Yet, workers in this society are and have always been held hostage by a system that routinely and consistently extorts labor power in exchange for allowing families to exist and proliferate. Many now feel ‘incarcerated’ in their homes by illness, crime, disenfranchisement, poverty, silence and pessimism.

The way that all of this is foisted upon the common person in the streets is through the very sophisticated multiple systems of propaganda, opinion management, and media exploitation that generally serve to keep the country informed, instructed, imperiled, and primed. All are kept at the ready for reactionary social, economic, political, intellectual and cultural responses to any crisis or perceived threat to the status quo. We are trained to fear all of the things that authority tells us to fear, the most fearful of which is the authority that tells us what to fear most.

The ‘public image’ that ‘America’ (and Western Europe) has to maintain is managed through the various arms and legs of the international ‘culture industry’ that also coincide with a vast array of ‘ideological state apparatuses.’ These institutions create, disseminate, distribute, and control the ‘public images’ that ‘the people’ require in order to ‘get behind’ the programs and projects of the prevailing capitalist commercial regime.

The prevailing commercial regime consists of the transnational merchants and brokers who create and manage the perceptions of the citizens of the world. Citizens of the world are instructed and trained according to the needs of the masters. The citizens are ritually impressed with the necessity of doing things the way the masters of the coincident economies need them to be done, having the things the masters need them to have, and thinking and saying the things the masters need them to think and say.

The entire system is implemented to produce and reproduce unending unlimited profits that can be turned to the task of producing and reproducing unending unlimited profits for the same group of people at the top of the prevailing regime forever. (This is why most municipalities have a ‘Chamber of Commerce’ and a local chapter of ‘The Freemasons, secret brother-hoodz that agree to operate the local economy according to the membership’s profit-making designs and make sure that profits properly flow to the properly ‘predestined’ pockets.)

The ‘world system’ as we know it is developed and managed by those who wish to exploit and extract labor and profit from all the rest of us. The rest of us do not ‘own’ any real property nor do we ‘own’ any part of the means of producing on such large scales such as to be able to compete across the lines of class and privilege.

These very same lines of class and privilege have been in existence and painstakingly maintained, through whatever social, economic, cultural, military, and rhetorical devices, strategies, and tactics as are available since the time of the Ancient Greeks.

The Ancient Greeks are responsible for creating the notions we in the West have of ‘democracy’ ( demos = ‘the people’, -cracy = ‘rule of or by’). Access to ‘democracy’ in ancient Greece was contingent upon one being able to a) own land, b) avoid being enslaved, and c) having a penis. One could not be a ‘citizen’ who did not meet at least these three prerequisites. Sorry, ladies!

American ‘democracy’ has also always been tied to the economic interests of the ruling classes. The masters are those who ‘own’ access to the materials and resources that are given to all by nature but that they have managed to cordon-off for themselves against the rest of us being able to freely utilize her bounties.

The masters ‘own’ privileged access, which comes at the price of violence and crimes against the rest of us. This is where some folks have arrived at the notions that ‘private property is theft’ or ‘…is a crime against humanity.’ It may be that it is even more criminally heinous and disgusting than that, when we stop to consider the environmental impacts of the current economic system.

This brings up the question as to why we, each one of us, ‘individually’ must justify and maintain our personal existence daily, and ONLY according to the designs that have been set forth by our masters. Our masters, through the communication media they ‘own,’ act and want us to act as if ‘the way things are’ is the only way things could have turned out and is the only justifiable world system that we could have or could, in the future, create.

How do they know? Says who? Whoever owns the media, that’s who!!!

I am not required by nature to anything more than my survival and the survival of my family, am I? It is my non-familial and familial fellow species member that requires anything more of me, as I do of him. Humans are a social animal. We depend on each other. Yet the despotic capitalist has found a way to get an unfair portion of nature’s bounty out of the current arrangement than I do. He has created and maintained dominance by way of violence, threat of violence, and ‘good-old-boy’ networks of privilege and control of privilege through a set of discursive crimes against humanity that we know as ‘The Law.’

The current system of ‘law’ (which, in its philosophies as well as its most criminal and heinous outcomes, is an apt representation of our general morality) is primarily motivated and designed by the need to protect the property rights of the privileged and the wealthy.

The system of law works for and according to the private ambitions and private profits of the wealthy.

The ‘law’ is designed and implemented by the agents of the wealthy we know as legislatures, courts, and police. Every other subsequent law that a dominant group/state creates merely deepens and widens the control of the flow of pirated public property into the pre-determined coffers.

The ‘pre-determined flows’ of capital into ‘pre-determined coffers’ are determined by the lines of class and privilege that are no less criminal (though they are maintained by ‘the law’) than those which they emulate from and whose general sexist, racist, classist, age-ist, attitudes they tellingly continue to emulate, those of the Ancient Greeks.

We have not changed all that much in roughly 3000 years.

The time to change has come. The time is NOW!

We have a vast multiplicity and diversity of choices, problems, and policies that we will have to destroy, create, re-create, and modify if we are to survive as a civilization. Yet, the most wealthy and capable of setting such advancement of humanity into motion are the ones who will lose dominance if they do so. They are in a ‘catch 22.’

If we fail to develop a proper set of attitudes, beliefs and practices for the coming Aeon we will disappear as a civilization and a ‘new order’ will take its place. This is probably inevitable as well, but some of us would rather be part of the solution that survives than part of the problem, which will be solved by its own extinction.

The ‘new order’ will be either generally better for more people more of the time or generally worse for more people more of the time.

Those who are included and privileged may be few or may be many, but, in either case, this will be determined by how we agree to talk and how we agree to think and how we agree to act during the coming transformation. We are currently transitioning from our view of ourselves as ‘human’ (which some might have reason to be not so impressed with, thus far) to becoming whatever we are to become when we are done being what we have defined as ‘human.’

In short, we will either change what it means to be ‘human’ or we will become that which is a break from all that history and baggage, i.e., the ‘post-human’ which might be something unrecognizable to us.

Will the post-human be more compassionate, sophisticated, and pragmatically appreciative of those fellow time travelers that he coexists with or even more deeply and widely cruel, greedy, and pathological than ever before?

Will ‘America’ lead, follow, fall behind, or perish in the coming global transformations?

In any case, the world has become smaller due to communication technologies, commerce and to the environmental, social, economic, and political stresses of increasing total population; capitalism is becoming more unsustainable as the preferred economic system; nature is growing more unpredictable and temperamental. People are becoming more or less human as a result.

Becoming more human and more [something else] in that direction is as frightening as becoming less human and more [something else] in the other, whatever that turns out to be.

Destruction of old definitions, re-definitions, and re-visions are inevitable. This is my own attempt to understand my role and responsibility in that which is inevitable and ultimately unavoidable.

It is time to start talking about consciously directed evolution and survival as much as we talk about the inevitability of happenstance and ultimate extinction. Which ever you believe to be the ultimate outcome, even if total annihilation through nuclear war or super nova, Right Here, Right Now is a very interesting and pivotal era in our human being on Earth. We are approaching the New Aeon. We are being reborn, again.

Or we can be content that we can drive to the store in an assault vehicle and over-consume, dining and dancing while Rome burns, while the ship sinks further and further into a future that doesn’t contain us in it, anymore. Most of us are probably in this category of unwitting consumers content with the satisfaction of our own infantile and petty imagined needs and desires as cultivated by the advertisers.

Some of us, myself included, are not content to go down without a fight.

We are awakening. We are beginning to talk. We are beginning to hear. We are beginning to walk. We are beginning to see.

We are re-visioning. We are starting over.

Are we ready?

Irony? What Irony?

A big problem with so-called 'conservatives' is that they completely lack a sense of irony, like the fact that although they are working people like you and me, they imagine that they are capitalists who are better than the rest of us, think they are on the inside, and they continually vote for their own slavery... now that's irony!! Someone needs to buy a sense of humor... oh, wait...you can't buy one of those? Dammit!

They end up having to keep looking serious while doing the same stupid shit simply and ONLY because they are too narrow and dull to be able to back-off, laugh at themselves, and try something new! That's what 'conservative' means, not willing to try something new. This is not a very adaptive stance for any animal who wants to survive to hold on to.

Most of the time I've got my tongue in my cheek, enjoying watching them knee-jerk into a spasm anytime someone suggests that they might not be getting their instructions directly from GOD, but rather from GOD, inc. while they're walking on the right side o' jeezits, chanting "the children, the children" as they murder little brown people on the other side of the globe, spending 6.7 billion dollars of our money every month on a bullshit war to clear the way for big capital instead of spending that money on renewable energy development, job creation, and education..... Ironic, yet, completely lost on the neo-nazi tea-baggers... I loathe stupidity of this sort, but gotta admit, I'm also entertained and get a real good belly-laugh out of the stupid human tricks they try to use to 'wiggle out' every time one of these 'perfect' assholes gets caught with a gay lover in their pocket or their foot in their mouth.

If there's one thing we can say that I think the rest of the world would agree with, it's that American politics is STUPID. The discourse does everything but deal with the things we should really be working on... California's starting to get it... renewable energy, product and job development, self-sufficiency, and renewed purpose in bringing the wonders of the tree of life into the 21st century and out of the dark 'prohibition' ages... dig? or have you, too, lost your sense of irony? I hope not.

It keeps me alive! :) Keep laughing, it gets better!

For the "well-adjusted" in all of us

I think it was Krishnamurti, a hindu guru-guy that wrote lots of books for the new-agey crowd, who said something like "it is no great accomplishment to be 'well-adjusted' to a profoundly sick society." What did he mean?

We have all heard it said, usually when we are talking about children or adolescents, that a particular person 'seems well-adjusted.' This means that we are assessing the person's ability to operate in society, to make a living, and to get along with all the other 'well-adjusted' folk.

We tend to take this as a positive thing, that one is 'well-adjusted.' Yet Krishnamurti says that this well-adjusted state is nothing to really brag or be all that proud about. Why would a so-called 'enlightened being' say such a thing? What does it mean to be 'well-adjusted' to the society that we are living in now? What kind of a society am I 'well-adjusted' to? For what purposes must I be 'well-adjusted' and for whose benefit am I 'well-adjusted' to procure? Is being 'well-adjusted' to this society really good for me or not?

Some would say that to be 'well-adjusted' means that I am doing what is for my own good in climbing up the ladder of doled privileges that the society stands ready to hand out to good boys and girls who are well-behaved and who clearly are not a challenge or a threat to the status quo. When mommy and daddy reward other brother for being a suck-up, not standing up for himself, and not challenging authority, other other brother learns that sucking-up to power is 'well-adjusted' and will be rewarded.

When mommy and daddy punish other brother for 'mouthing-off' or 'talking back' to or laughing at power, other other brother learns to shut up, sit down, and be quiet. This is what a 'well-adjusted' person does, sits down, shuts up, stays quiet, obeys, performs, and applauds, no matter what 'authority' or 'tradition' or 'convention' does.

The well-adjusted child, adult, wife, husband, citizen, etc., goes along with whatever daddy/mommy/congregation/city/state/profession, etc. does or wants to do without question EVEN IF what mommydaddy wants to do is clearly wrong. This 'well-adjusted' response is really no response at all, but rather a 'buying into' whatever line of shit authority wants you to buy into to get the things done that 'authority' wants to get done.

We all kind of 'go along' with lots of crap we wouldn't otherwise 'go along' with if we weren't so 'well-adjusted.'

'Well-adjusted' citizens go along with things like mass-murder and genocide of innocents, systematic impoverishment of particular segments of society, like those who are poor, sick, female, or 'colored.'

'Well-adjusted' folk go along with notions of racial supremacy, environmental negligence, military and secret operations designed to topple democracies and erect totalitarian dictators in their place.

'Well adjusted' folk join up to go kill little brown people, who might be women, children, sick or old, over in some far-away place so that transnational oil companies can gain an unfair advantage to natural resources.

The 'well-adjusted' Republican really believes that it is ok to make sure that 'me' and 'mine' are taken care of while letting the rest go die, "..for all I care, because it is not my responsibility to help create a society were people do not fear growing old or becoming ill." This 'well-adjusted' person believes that LGBTQs should not be allowed to have families, estates, medical rights, public status, or anything and probably wishes they would all go die as well.

A 'well-adjusted' worker, in our society, is robotic, obedient, quiet, hard-working-for-nothing-beyond making rich people richer, works his ass off all his life only to be bilked out of his retirement funds by Wall Street bankers and Defense Industry contractors who build roads on the side with Mexican slave-labor. This 'well-adjusted' worker lives in a world that is run by capitalists who exploit him, all the while actually believing that we all will be capitalists, by mere virtue of the fact that we live in a 'capitalist' society, doesn't know that he is NOT a capitalist and pretends to be one and votes for his oppressors and his oppressor's agenda every time he agrees to sell his labor-power to the capitalist for less than it is worth, even though food is taken from the mouths of his own children when he does so. He does this because he knows that it is in his best interests (lest he be punished) because all the other 'well-adjusted' people around him agree to be systematically exploited as well.

The 'well-adjusted' 'Christian' is the one who is not very Christian at all. This 'well-adjusted' person hates everyone who is not like himself, sees himself as better than everyone who is not the same kind of 'Christian' that he is, thinks it is ok to go kill people for Jesus and petroleum, or for whatever reason his 'Christian' authorities tell him to go murder the "unbelieving scum over there."

It is no great accomplishment to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society... it is the norm, fortunately or not.

"Ordinary people do f*cked-up things when f*cked-up things become ordinary" -Propaghandi

Negative Dialectics

For those who might mistake clear-headed critical thinking for mal-contented negativism:

In a society that produces negative effects on the lives of human and other species that nonetheless, in its arrogance and hubris, ignorantly mistakes its mores and values as positive, the only positive reaction is to take the negative position to the false-positive status quo. An informed pessimism, in regard to the realized as well as the potential outcomes of a decaying civilization, can therefore be interpreted as the only possible logical positive position in standing against the degenerate norm....i.e., a negative dialectics..... (for more on this and on the culture industry 'google' Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer)

Bear this in mind the next time you find your disdain boiling up inside of you upon encountering one who you might normally knee-jerk into judging as "so negative" or "always bitching about society" or "just unhappy about the way they have failed in the system" .....consider first the reasons, the evidence, the experiences, and the motives of those who you would hastily and ignorantly mis-judge.........however, it could very well be that you are way too far gone.....lost in the dream....asleep at the wheel....swept away by your imagination of your self and your illusions of security and suck-cess...lost in a dream that is a lie that you have been fooled into so whole-heartedly believing in such that you are a more fitting perpetual victim of the powers for whom you function as mere 'livestock' for the harvest.

No matter who we are or the importance that we imagine ourselves to possess, we are, every last one of us, very disposable and easily replaced by a new power-suckling piglet.

Who and what do you support by your participation, compliance, ignorance, silence, apathy, and fear? What do your prejudice and condemnation tell about your ideological investments? Are you willing to shovel society's 'misfits' 'dissenters' 'revolutionaries' and 'undesirables' into the ovens in order to keep a low profile and subsist within a system of unfair advantage and exploitation of human bodies, hoping that your number doesn't come up and believing that it couldn't possibly happen to you?

Do you realize that without the 'deviance' of an Edison, an Einstein, a Pasteur, a Jesus, a Buddha, or a Marx that we would still be huddled atop a festering heap of our own shit and piss at the back of some stinking cave somewhere, stupidly and ignorantly freezing to death and rotting away through physical, emotional, and spiritual diseases we cannot possibly begin to imagine because we had killed off any and all 'mal-content' 'negative-minded' 'assholes' who dared suggest we might go outside to defecate and that we might build a fire upon our return?

"Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control." (Bill Hicks)

Wait a minute... Who owns The World, anyway??

Who owns the material substance of world?

By what means does the world, or pieces of it, become the property of certain individuals to the exclusion of others?

For whom does nature intend her many gifts?

By what so-called ‘right’ does one person grab a piece of nature’s bounty and exclude others from the benefits that a particular piece of nature produces?

Who is it that grants this ‘right’ of ownership and privileged access to nature?

What are the ethical limits to ‘ownership?’

What are the ethical limits to authority?

At what point in the development of society does the ‘right’ to ownership of the affluent become a detriment to particular other members of society who are less affluent, less fortunate, less privileged, or perhaps less greedy?

The pacification of the struggle to survive (for the few here in the ‘developed’ world) has been secured through technological means collectively created over the epochs, advancing to a state where scarcity and environmental decline become real threats to humanity, to environment and to life in general. At what point in advanced capitalist society that claims to be a democracy does the mass of common folk have a right to demand equal share in the benefits and responsibilities in regard to social material economy?

Under such conditions, at what point does exclusion from participation (of less affluent members of humanity) and hoarding (on the part of the more affluent) of the benefits of human social and material development (including but not limited to, for example, access to medical treatment) become an essentially criminal act?

Under such circumstances, what appropriate measures or actions can the less privileged ethically adopt in a democracy?

And finally, especially for the self-proclaimed “Christian” societies, What would Jesus do?

Coming from a humanist/environmentalist perspective on the contemporary challenges of advanced capitalism-going-global, the attempt here is to formulate at least some preliminary responses to these questions, and others that may arise during our investigation. My explicit aim is to start to create an opening-up of the discourse toward a minimum engagement with the most pressing contemporary social, economic, political, environmental, and ethical human challenges.

The moral crisis that humanity now faces and chooses to ignore in favor of an overarching (if not explicit) commitment to maintaining an increasingly unsustainable status quo is one that brings us face to face with our brutality and selfishness. This same situation and circumstance presents also the unprecedented opportunity for a greater depth of human compassion and understanding.

The contemporary moral crisis is one that requires us to re-examine our social, cultural, ideological, and spiritual commitments. Our investments on all levels, from the material to the ideological to the ethical and the spiritual, now come under question. The current crisis is one that requires the leveling-out of privileged access to the benefits of human labor such that all members of the species (at least, not to mention all other species) can come to enjoy the fruits of an enlightened global social cultural civil experience. We are on the brink of building a possible world that is a ‘good place for kids to come to,’ as late comedian and social critic Bill Hicks once envisioned.

On the other hand, we may be entering an era of unrivaled systematic social cultural brutality. This will be the general social condition should the most privileged class continue to defend a chronically unfair, unearned, criminal privileged access to and exclusive self-proclaimed entitlement to an unfair share of the bounties of the earth.

When private ownership reaches a level of personal gluttony that threatens the survival of the rest of the social group, it is at this very point (if not sooner) that the people in a democracy must take the democratic process into their own hands. Those who would threaten the stability of the whole, through an extreme greediness and supra-natural drive to the fulfillment of a characteristic imbalance of infant-like impetuous desires, must be brought to stand for their crimes against humanity and put in their proper standing as members of the whole.

It may be argued that rightful reparations must be made to compensate for the unfair privilege and over-blown entitlements already stolen from the mass of humanity. The super-wealthy are super-wealthy as a result of chattel-slavery or wage-slavery, take your pick. A slave is a slave by any other name. The wealth of nations has always been secured by way of the exploitation of the less fortunate classes of persons for the exclusive enrichment of those most willing and able to impose, enforce, and maintain conditions of slavery on subordinate others as the means to the ends of power and privilege. This is the same today as it ever was. Violence, murder, deceit, and betrayal are commonplace amongst a certain class for who access to and maintenance of a position of unfair power and privilege are the primary concerns (Of course these self-entitled individuals have no need to dirty their own hands directly with the logistics and particulars of a system of human slavery, as there are plenty of traitors to humanity who can be hired to manage unwitting others to do the dirty work necessary for the maintenance of Empire).

This American Empire is currently in a state of decline that gives many of us fits of anxiety over our future and the future security of our children. Michael Parenti, in his book Against Empire, points out that all empires do the same thing as precursor and adjunct to their decline. As the demands of the requirements for domination become more and more costly, all empires rally their resources (human, material, financial, communicative, military, intelligence, ideological state apparatuses) in order to bolster and reinforce the perimeters and boundaries of the empire. The American Empire (that would never have been if it were not for slavery, by the way) is in the process of doing what Parenti predicts.

In order to maintain global dominance the United States government has systematically sucked the resource out of the core of American society to bolster the perimeter. Thus, the social, economic, political, cultural, spiritual, and material center of the Empire withers and rots simultaneously as the Empire expands its influence across the globe. This ‘spreading-thin’ of the Empire and its resources is the crucial element in the moral decline that signals the end of the American empire, just as it did the Roman empire, just as it does for all empires previous.

In a world where nature and all of her bounty is grabbed up by the most aggressive, violent, and greedy the inevitable result is a feeding frenzy in which the biggest, strongest, meanest, and most violent grab up the majority of resources and then sit back and enjoy watching the rest fight over the crumbs. This is the nature and the end result of private ownership and, as we are witnessing, the nature and end result of capitalism at its limit.

Our way of life as we have known it, here in the privileged world, is coming to an end faster than we can shit a brick. Yet, we are doing nothing (but give them more money to mismanage) to correct those who have taken us to the brink or to correct the conditions that they set up, with our tacit approval, that allow them (transnational corporatists) to steal our heritage and our right to the freedoms and liberties we thought we were building, right out from under our noses.

We are complicit in our own descent to an existence as service industry wage-slaves for the new Chinese capitalist epoch which, if it expects to proceed along the same path as the American epoch, will certainly plunge the world into a dark, polluted, collapsing environment, an inevitable dystopia that looks like an episode of Mad Max or a Voivod album cover.

Bankers, businessmen, bought-and-paid-for politicians, transnational corporatist thieves, and their pundits and supporters are all guilty of treason against the American people who they have not only betrayed, but sold down the river into dept slavery and moral ineptitude. This is the future you secure for your children every time you vote for them or any one of their representatives. We, “the people” who have done all the labor and created all the wealth and privilege that the transnational corporatist enjoys, do not have representation. We, “the people” are being phased out and replaced by a negative value place-holder that is a mere ineffectual token in a despotic regime that has gone so far beyond us without our consultation that we do not even enter into its concerns.

I wonder when we will get the nerve to start taking back our government, our democracy, our future.

The time is now or never.

It may already be too late.

…sorry 

Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes: Redemption Songs in the Culture of Second Chances?

What to do with a dying democracy? What to do with a declining stagnation of chronic social outcomes?

Answer: Redeem the social values that have made us a great nation in word and re-make those that have made America a despot in practice and praxis. Become the walk that we talk, the people of a land of freedom, understanding, liberty, dignity, justice and compassion for all.

Tiger Woods is returning to golf to play the 2010 Master’s Tournament! This is a historic moment for the world of golf. This moment is set within another larger moment in American culture. Not only is it historic for the world of golf, but also for the world as a whole. The culture that has come to evolve in the contemporary moment is what I call, a culture of ‘second chances.’ It is part of a culture-wide existential moment in which those who deserve a second ‘go at it' will get their chance at redemption.

On the level of the nation state, this juncture is where America, Americans, and all that we really stand for will be put to the test. We will be acquitted or convicted, acknowledged or denied, standing at the entrance into the impending era of our evolutionary success or failure in the great democratic experiment.

In the culture as a whole there is a sort of revival afoot. Cultural elements and products are collectively re-circulating. Cultural elements of style, investments on the ideological and social level, and the characteristic circulation of local and global symbols are pulling forward into the future the vast collection of all such past events in the cycle of the retro-cultural unfolding of contemporary reality.

As just one example of a manifestation of re-circulating culture of second chances, ‘classic rock’ bands like Motley Crue, and Poison are back on the road. We are at the beginning of what looks like another renaissance in American music. The music industry, the economy of music production and sale, the importance of music ‘up from the ground,’ and the impositions and dispositions of the socio-economic-politico cultural atmosphere have all evolved in ways that are echoing the late 1980’s, a cultural milieu that spawned the ‘underground’ music scene of that era.

Many artists who never achieved the level of success they know they deserved, for example the heavy metal group Anvil, are back in the game, bigger than ever, recording and touring. People who have been around the course many times with or without recognition are emerging, and re-emerging, having another go at what they feel is rightfully theirs.

Tiger's return from personal moral crisis to play professional Golf’s “Master’s Tournament” (the first Major Championship of four for the year) is just such another moment in the culture of second chances. “Being John Daly” is a program being presented by The Golf Channel that is documenting this winner of several major tournaments’ return to playing at the top level in recovering from his own personal issues which caused him to fall from a ‘top tier’ golf career.

All of these, and many other stories like them are emerging as a culture-phenomenal reaction to the failing of the American culture. It is a cultural failing that is evidently unfolding as a lack of confidence in the American future, brought on by a series of moral, social, and economic upsets to the equilibrium of the current civilization. The subconscious super-structure of the cultural imagination, the collective unconscious as genius of practical survival technology, in the rush and panic of managing the declining imperial structure and its re-constitution, re-invents itself according to what it knows of its own past and according to what it hopes for its future. The totality of all previously constituted cultural symbols and elementals spring into action to make ready the way for the next necessary evolutionary step on the road to forestalling inevitable extinction, on the road calling forth our inevitable demise.

The ghost of culture, though it knows not its very self, intuitively knows its role in the hive and puts into action competing adaptive and mal-adaptive cultural attenuations that must then ‘fight it out’ between themselves on a slippery path between the depths of brutality and the heights of compassion.

We brutally murder our saviors when they fall, only to have them re-emerge from the obscure depths of moral depravity, to be finally redeemed in our name, in our place, for our pleasure, for our pain, thus are we too, subjectively collectively redeemed, as well. On some collective level the human being as an ideal existence is going through the macro-scale experience that each of us is individually and vicariously experiencing as the micro-analytic subject.

There are many stories of redemption in the face of despair that are unfolding in the strangest of ways right before our eyes, when not in the well-worn patterns we all immediately recognize. This is the challenge that the ghost of culture is responding to, manifestations of which are materializing as the redemption of all the symbols, symbolic structures, discourses, narratives, ideological social cultural investments, and flows of competing expressions. From all directions competing cultural flows re-invent, re-align, re-signify and square-off, ultimately vying against all others for cultural dominance on the road to redemption, on the road back to Rome...

Reedemshun sonnz!

What the hell is wrong with me?

What the hell is wrong with me?

“What is wrong with you?” is a phrase that I heard come from my father on many occasions, not only in reference to myself but also in reference to my brothers, of whom I am the eldest of four. I’m probably the meanest of the four. This is what my brothers would tell you. It is probably what all brothers would say about their oldest brother. I was the one who asked unpopular questions in church meetings, like, “Why was Jesus a hippie?” When I was 7 or 8, I asked a Sunday school teacher why couldn’t I just live happily ever after with my buddies, Scott, Lee, and Mick (since all us boys “hated” “stinky” girls, who all have “cooties,” ya know). I used to wonder why everybody in Jesus’ time, except for the evil Roman soldiers, ran around in pajamas and bath robes all the time. I wondered why a creepy old man would want to know if a 16 year old boy was masturbating (so I had heard through the grapevine) and promptly withdrew my candidacy from the interview pool for the advancement to the class of Priest in the Aaronic order of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was also the one who would verbally stand up to my dad. I;m not proud of it, but, I would even bald-faced lie to him when he asked me questions that I decided the answers to where none of his business. Undeniably, I was the proverbial “Black Sheep” of my nuclear birth coincidence.

What the hell is wrong with me and where did I learn that?

When I was 13, I wanted to take a guitar class at school. I had a friend named Robert Sorensen. We had a common fascination and satiric glee in association with the weekly showing of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It aired every Monday night around 10pm or so. We had also been listening to music like Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, and stuff like that. We had also discovered Marijuana and had become regular consumers of this fine product of the earth sent to reveal and destroy….ooops, sorry, wrong meeting……. Robert and I had decided that we would learn to play the guitar so we could get all the chicks, since we weren’t on the football team and it seemed like the reasonable thing to do, under the circumstances. We were intelligent young lads… Freethinkers.

I had been awakened to my destiny a few years earlier. I used to think, when I was very young, that I wanted to grow up to be a cowboy, a national park ranger, and later maybe even a truck driver. This all changed for me one evening when I accidentally stayed awake all the way through Nightmare Theater on a local Salt Lake TV station, long enough to catch KISS on The Midnight Special with Wolfman Jack!!! This single event was the turning point toward the Kthuhluh’s call that was sounding in the distant future of my then young 10 year old life. There was fire. There was blood. There was power and death in the explosive delivery I was witnessing in this strange, brave new world that had suddenly sprung before my eyes!

“That’s what I want to do!” I shouted for the entire universe to hear, waving and pointing to the television screen to the astonishment of my bleary-eyed brothers, who were startled and awakened by my most visceral reaction to what I was witnessing for the very first time!!!

I knew at that instant that I was destined to play the guitar (for better or worse)! This was, it turns out, the determining factor in everything else that I have become. I took the class and got an “A.” But I had discovered so much more about myself that I am even now unraveling, at the age of 47.

My father, to his credit, bought me my first guitar. It was a Spanish nylon-string (or “classical”) guitar worth about $100. That is about where his encouragement and support began and ended with regard to my vocation as a guitarist. He did show up at a gig once to take some pictures of the band I was in and never ever went back to another gig again. He said his ears were ringing for a week after that. He also made it very clear to me from the beginning that I had better plan on doing something else for a living, have some kind of “back-up plan.” While this may seem like very sound advice to most of us, it was the seed of doubt that, at that time in my life, was the last thing I needed. His unbelief in my ability to be who and what I want to be was and is a severe emotional handicap, an injury. I took offense and vowed to make him wrong.

The problem with being an artist is that the artist no longer lives in the same world as everybody else. He is not among “the living” in the same collective sense anymore. The artist is driven by the pain and utter boredom, and stupidly retarded futility of “this world” and creates anew a world of his own making. What people sometimes don’t understand is that this is not something that one does by choice. I did not choose to be more talented than I am at anything else at a worthless skill that wasn’t appreciated by the people closest to me. This guitar “thing,” this “phase” is not either a “thing” or a “phase.” It is who I am. This is something that I must do in order to survive.

I did not choose it.

It chose me.

The other thing that we sometimes forget, that I have come to realize, is that this is something that everyone does according to individual temperament and idiom. If we knew, in the starkest and most un-colored way, the true nature of our existence, it would surely make us mad with awe and despair. That is, everyone has their own particular and specific “positive illusion” that makes it possible to continue living in at least what appears to be a functional capacity for the everyday. You could call it a functional though illusory art of living that amounts to a sort of collective “Occupational Psychosis” that necessarily ‘blinds’ us to the possible alternatives. Without positive though concocted ideas/fantasies about the future, at the end of which surely and unavoidably death itself awaits all of us (except for Vampires, Christians, and Mormons) we would just collapse under the sheer weight of the overwhelming futility we confront, and then probably die on the spot!

...We would also never have gotten out of the cave to take a shit or build a fire upon our return to sit and tell stories about the possibilities of our existence around. Stories, fantasies, religions, musical performances, pictures, images, all representations of possibilities, are all the stuff that the world is made of before we go out and make that world we have been talking about imagining…..

…See?

I am an artist. My vision is my own and nobody else’s. I may be able to find those who will help me acquire the worldly fruition of my visions, but I cannot ever fool myself into thinking that there is anyone who shares the exact, particular, and specifically-‘mine’ version of the same vision that I possess. Yet, we are all driven by the same motive. The motive for all of us is merely and only…… simply….. Freedom. I had already consciously recognized this fact by the time I saw KISS on TV when I was 10: Art is the only possible road to Freedom from all this... profound hysteria. Art is the only place where on can say and do what one wants to do without appeal to a higher “authority.”

To paraphrase Krishnamurti, it is no great accomplishment to be “well-adjusted” to a profoundly sick society. All of my difficulties stem from the fact that I am tainted by the knowledge that this thing we call “reality” is something that is artificial, manmade, and thus imperfect and a work in progress. While this is a positive in that it opens the future to progressive humanity, it is a curse to me in that I cannot “un-know” it. I cannot un-know that all this is based on the fact that someone, or group of some-ones, made this all up in order to benefit a particular class of “owners.”

The ultimate warrant to authority is either that it is biased toward whatever is good and fair for everybody (in the true humane spirit of democracy) or it is biased toward what is better for some more than it is for others. Materially, culturally, socially, economically, spiritually, and empirically whether we know/admit it or not, what we now live in is clearly the latter.

I don’t like it and I can tell you exactly why...

It is wrong.

You, America, do not want to know this because it is more fun to just keep shopping around for more and more personal illusion of comfort… more and more positive illusion on the road to slaughter.

My version of the positive illusion is that people can actually live democratically without privileging certain personal private interests over others and that the elimination of this one key feature in our incomplete progress toward democracy can and will happen, or not. Democracy, a word that is thrown around in the vernacular arena to mean very many things that are not democratic, is nothing if it is not explicitly socialistic. We, “the people,” have lost this notion of democracy in favor of one that favors capitalist dictatorship.

Democracy, if it means anything, must therefore progress as a collective social good rather than as a regressive private privilege of the very wealthy.

This will never happen until “the people” reclaim their right to participate in their own democracy without being shoved aside by particular private material, social, economic, and cultural interests that elevate some while shit-canning other lives.

That’s exactly what is wrong with me.

When there's love at home

“…When There’s Love at Home…”

We live in a chronic state of economic terror, that is, those of us who do not enjoy the privileges of the financially secure or who are not in line for the dole (or the ‘bail-out’). We have always lived this way and we are always the ones who are required to pay the bills for the rest of society, including those who are on the dole. We live in a system of doled-out privileges that masquerades as a meritocracy.

We run around talking and acting as if we will be rewarded for our efforts and believe that we all can become millionaires if we just work hard enough. The fact is that most of us will probably have to work at McDammit’s to supplement our retirement, if we aren’t already doing so in order to survive.

As Michael Harrington pointed out 30 years ago in his book “The Twilight of Capitalism” we have a system that consistently privatizes profits while it simultaneously socializes the costs. We have been feeding the parasitic auto, petroleum, pharmaceutical, and banking and investment institutions with corporate welfare forever, in the form of tax-breaks, tax shelters, subsidies, and bailouts. This is nothing new. This is redistribution of wealth. It is ‘socialism’ for the rich that re-distributes wealth in the wrong direction!

I have over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans that I will probably never pay back, a useless masters degree, and a job teaching college that is nearly costing me more to get to than it is paying me. Who is going to bail me out? Other modern societies, which understand that an educated populace equals a better society, send their citizens to school and pay for it. This makes me wonder if ‘a better society' is really what our rulers want for us. In fact, I have a suspicion that there is something else, quite to the contrary, that is really happening.

We, the people, have become fat, sated, lazy, complacent, life support systems for the wealthy. We do not care anymore about the ‘brand new’ that is always more and more of the same that capital keeps selling back to us. All of us have the sneaking suspicion that this cannot go on forever (I’ve had it all of my 48 year-old life) and we are correct. It cannot last forever and it won’t.

We, the people of the United States of America, are a marketplace that has been over-saturated.

The corporation (the collection of ‘good old boys’ around the table at the country club) that has fed off of our labor, our lives, our blood and the blood of our ancestors are getting ready to turn us in for a new stock of willing victims. We are no longer of use to the ruling class (which is why their representatives in Washington aren’t too keen to give us even the most basic health care and care even less about educating us or putting us to work). We have been bled dry. We are being deleted. America is over. Tomorrow’s world belongs to the Chinese and transnational corporatists.

Parasites move to a new host when the old host is depleted and useless. Once we hand money over to corporations it becomes ‘transnational capital.’ Transnational corporate wealth is ‘transnational’ wealth that has already been moved to holding tanks in Switzerland. Transnational wealth doesn’t live here anymore. Transnational wealth doesn’t give a damn what we’re going to do to survive. We, the depleted host, are being phased out. The majority of the Chinese population has never even seen a McDammit’s carcinogen-laden BigDam Styrofoam Container. The huge pool of un-sated, hungry Chinese wage-slave/consumers is being phased in, in our place.

America and Americans are being primed for their new role as the world police force and the service industry for all of the institutional record-keeping, bill-collecting, administrative redundancy, and other maid-services that will be required to keep the new Chinese regime (with it’s transnational corporate handlers) afloat.

While this may come as a surprise to some folks, we really should have known better than to suck up to our corporate masters while they were planning and leading us to our slaughter. We, the people, probably should have put certain measures in place to keep them from being able to take all our wealth to Switzerland for Chinese investments and run off to the Bahamas to enjoy our retirement vacations for us. We, the people, as any sane tribe does, probably should have placed limits on individual wealth and privilege for the good of the entire society. However, our loving masters’ representatives (the Republicans/Democrats/one party masquerading as a two-party system) told us to let them go on raping and pillaging in the name of ‘personal freedom.’

What amazes me is that we aren’t pissed-off and rallying in the streets to drag these criminals out to the hangin’ tree. If you put a frog in luke-warm water and gradually turn-up the heat he won’t even notice as he slowly cooks to death in a seemingly warm comfy bath… get the picture? We, The American People have been slow-boiled and nickle-and-dimed to death.

Echoing Bill Maher, Obama should get off his ass and do what he promised to do… does anyone remember the big ‘change’ platform he campaigned on? The pre-packaged cellophane corporate economy sucks. There are no jobs for people who do not build roads. Folks with college degrees cannot get jobs. They have to go become servers at Chili’s.

The time for change is NOW, Obama-Rama! Sign an executive order! Forgive our crippling student loan debt so we can go out and do something creative with our education that actually moves society forward rather than keeping the uselessly educated slaving away at mindless jobs that won’t even begin to pay student loans. Legalize hemp production so that family farms can again flourish, an alternative to the burned-out corporate economy can arise in its place, and normal everyday people can go into business for themselves rather than selling themselves into corporate slavery. We could very easily accomplish all this, all while developing millions of jobs and new green industries to at least begin to replace oil-dependency and synthetic pharmaceuticals… and what’s so wrong about universal health care? What would Jesus do? At the very least, stop giving money to people who don’t know the value of a dollar and think they are worth more and entitled to more than they are, who have mismanaged the economy, and who have committed numerous and untold treasons and crimes against humanity for generations upon generations.

Bailing-out the banking industry is like reminding the thief who is robbing us blind to check under the floorboards!

We, the people, deserve so much more. It’s time to fight back ...a long time ago. I hope it’s not too late. We need a real leader with real changes in mind. Obama, so far, is just more of the ‘brand new’ ‘change’ that is really just more of the same old poop.

We, the people, are either part of the problem or part of the solution… which will it be, then? Maybe we should get off our asses and do some real democracy for a change?

Sincerely,

Still waiting for the big change… Not holding my breath…