FINDING A DIFFERENT WAY

Television misinforms everyday. It is part of the corporate mission to keep the customers (i.e. consumers) in a constant state of agitation. Agitation works. Being dissatisfied is a perfect state to foist upon you new products, or sometimes simply new concepts, that you did not know about until you found that you must have them, no matter what. Movies. I-Phones. Drugs for conditions that you were unaware existed. Restless Consumer Syndrome. Ask your doctor if RCS is right for you.
Sadly, the corporate huckster approach is applied to nearly everything. Politics, militarism, you name it, becomes a package that often has to be repackaged. Media consultants, bloggers, pundits, and celebrities become an essential part of the mix, creating illusions within delusions. Mission Accomplished. Doing a heck of a job. Victory with honor, dead or alive.
Unfortunately, reality has a way of exposing its fangs. There is an energy crisis. It is exacerbated by the Iraq occupation, along with the other missions, as they are called, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The agitated customers become even more restless when they discover it now costs real money to run their automobiles.
But the corporate state is not interested in any kind of national response. If there was such a thing, you would have the President of The United States declaring a national emergency. Saving and reducing fossil fuel use would be job 1. Natural gas would be nationalized. Extravagant indulgences such as stock car racing would be banned. Other recreational indulgences, such as all terrain vehicles and boats, would have to pay an extra tax for their waste. The automobile as consumer fetish would be seen for what it truly is: an unnecessary marketing gimmick. The use of lawnmowers would be reviewed.
Of course none of this is going to happen. Especially in the "you are going to feel some pressure" form I speak of here. American culture is simply too fond of corporate branding and the way of life it implies. The capitalist cornucopia promised, is what President Bush called "our way of life" that they (the evil ones) hate us for. The freedom to shop till you drop. But even that has become more difficult recently. The rising price of food is partially blowback for the increased use of Biofuels. As Geoffrey Lean of The Independent pointed out: "Just one fill-up of a 4x4's tank with ethanol uses enough grain to feed one person for a year."
The squeeze is on in one form or another, for everyone accept those of the ownership class. The political response to this situation, has so far, been incredibly lame. The so-called economic Darwinism that free marketeers wax poetic about, what the late Hunter Thompson called "the punishment ethic" embraced so readily by the Republican party, has become in fact, a security threat to the stability of this nation. How this country is more secure by a having a substantial segment of the citizenry squeezed to the point of monetary oblivion, is truly incomprehensible.
The same can be said for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. If this was about oil, then the amount of money wasted on this war, could have purchased all the oil needed, without all the loss of life. But if that wasn't the point, then the neocon abstraction of "coercive democracy" as Scott McClellan put it, becomes the cruelest reason of all. Outrage at this stage, is a moot point.
If the United States, which spends more on weapons than nearly the rest of the world combined, would redirect all that energy to constructive purposes, the economic outlook would change, and certainly for the better. The need for infrastructural improvements is like a house literally screaming to be painted. The expansion of intelligent technologies brought about by the mass production of optical components and the improvements wrought from digital measurement... these areas of development are still in their infancy.
Strangely, despite all the information that is easily available, both current and historic, there is an astonishing number of people who are misinformed. Calculated misinformation has been perpetrated by those seeking to further their false agendas. As a result, we have people who believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, and that the Muslim faith is out to destroy America. The internet, and especially Google, is what you make use of it for. Obviously it can be a tool for education, probably the greatest in human history. Or, it can be used for games, social netweorking and of course, porn.
When it comes to open source applications for the internet, the majority of American desktop computer users are just not that interested. I once mentioned that most of the problems with electronic voting is caused by using proprietary software. The puzzled response to this was like I had arrived from another planet. Come to think of it, maybe I have.
If the goal is, not only for this country, but the entire planet, a prosperous survival, then finding a different way is not only necessary, it is vital. The old time dishonored responses of ideological violence have become as useless as they are dangerous. This is difficult for some to grasp how many easily accepted notions, were nothing more than unconscious myths. We are certainly in unfamiliar territory. The road maps of the twentieth century are obsolete.

DRAGGING THE SHIP OVER THE MOUNTAIN

Recent national political events have reminded me of something I have not considered for awhile. Watching Barack Obama going through the paces of his standard stump speech reminds me of the audacity of repetition. To find out you are genealogically related to someone, you hope that someone is cool. To be more seasoned means that all that hope is boiled out of you... I think you get the idea.
As a lifelong research student I am sometimes enthralled by the political process. A systems that enables avarice and naked ambition to be disguised as altruism and public service. This, it has been said, is par for the course. The political professionals, sometimes known as insiders, are hip to this gag. But what about the voters?
Maybe it is just blowback for being a political junkie, but I swear I recently thought I saw Barack Obama looking somewhat like Klaus Kinski. Klaus Kinski? Yes, the late actor who portrayed a vampire in Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. But that is not the movie I am reminded of. Rather, it is the epic movie Fitzcarraldo.
Fitzcarraldo, if you have never seen it, is a movie about a man dragging a 200 ton steam ship over a mountain, as part of a commercial enterprise to build an opera house in a South American jungle town. Kinski's magnificent portrayal of Fitzcarraldo is that of a man with a dream obsession, and an indomitable will to make that vision a reality.
What is also quite remarkable about Fitzcarraldo is that the film itself is a record of visual truth. There are no special digital effects. Thus, the movie was indeed shot in the jungle, and that really is a full size ship being dragged over the mountain, and subsequently, bouncing down river rapids. There are no miniatures involved! Which strangely, reminds me of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign. His vision obsession, with his background as a community organizer, is to change the discourse of American politics so that real problems can be addressed. But one of the biggest obstacles in realizing this vision is the Democratic party itself. That is the ship he is trying to drag over the mountain.
Consider this: look at the state of this country, as created by the politics-as-usual crowd. Hillary Clinton still boasts of the good times the country enjoyed when her husband was President, taking exaggerated credit for economic expansion (the dot com bubble) but not the retraction (when the dot com bubble burst) right after team Clinton left the White House. The same can be said about Bill Clinton's cheerleading and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. A policy that enabled businesses to exploit labor south of the border (Yes you can in Yucatan!), eliminating thousands of living wage jobs in the United States, simultaneously, causing thousands of undocumented workers to risk life and limb to cross into the U.S., after multi-national agribusiness reaped havoc on local Mexican agriculture. Family farmers found themselves beneath the shadow of the Jolly Green Giant. This would be laughable if it was not so tragic.
Empty rhetoric or not, part of the appeal of Barack Obama's speech is that it invokes the idea of a more civilized world. Where free enterprise is not allowed to become the tyrant known as monopolized capitalism, and that human labor with dignity matters.
That may seem vague and unrealistic to some, but considering the delusional mind set in place now, this ship of state is about to head down the rapids, and could very easily smash up against the impending rocks.
The movie Fitzcarraldo has a bittersweet ending. Although his commercial enterprise fails, Fitzcarraldo sells his ship and uses the money to bring an opera company to the jungle. His dream was realized, just not the way he imagined.