Tuesday Ruminations

So Dewayne asked me my thoughts on our current political situation and this triggered a review of a few ideas and meditations in the stew pot.

To start with, why are there so few comments on the postings on the Greater Democracy blog? We get 1,000s of visitors and essentially zero comments. And just a few track backs.

Is it because the posting are antithetical to a culture of consumption, celebrity, and entertainment? There appears to be too little room in such a culture for reflection, introspection, doubt, or self criticism, much less ambiguity and contradiction. Since our posts are mostly the latter, perhaps that is why we get so few comments? Our posts are uncomfortable? They simply do not fit into the seamless marketing integration of consumption, celebrity and entrainment. We appear to be "friction", a foreign body, in the cultural organism. Are we to be attacked by the larger culture's immune system's anti-bodies and ejected as rapidly as possible?

Then take the case of the two wealthy Eastern patricians with elite Eastern private school educations who are running for president. Why is the ersatz wanna be cowboy, jet jockey, war president able to sell his fakery?

Why does his slight of hand and mumbo jumbo work all too well? Why is his deep contempt for the public, as evidenced by his willingness to flim flam them for his own personal agenda and advantage, not exposed? How is it that the wanna be comes off as "authentic"? I suggest it is because he plays well to the demands of a content free surface required by consumption, celebrity and entertainment. Bush is proof positive that "reality TV" is more real to well conditioned consumers than reality. Given over 100 years of monologue marketing, is this evidence of some sort of self medication at work?

Or take the case of the other patrician candidate who can not sell himself as an authentic politician, veteran nor common man. Kerry seems congenitally incapable of contorting himself into the positions and habits demanded by our culture's decent into the seamless miasma of consumption, celebrity and entertainment. How is it that Kerry, who is a genuine politician, battle veteran, and intellectually both capable and curious, comes across as an inauthentic wannabe, when, in fact ,he is "the real deal".

Which Eastern patrician, however, would most likely get voted off the "reality island" soonest?

The hard question is this: how long before the "reality Island" is pulled apart by the immense forces of the actual thing itself - the unalterable and inconveniently unavoidable huricane of reality? The problem for us is that, of course, the smoke and mirrors, the entertainment, of "reality TV" is always in the end revealed to be a fraud and a pox upon us all.

Compare and contrast the "reality TV" version of Iraq as put forward by the neocons with the hard truth on the ground. The reality that Fox TV and its cohorts so desperately do not want us to see, but which peskily leaks through on the internet, the foreign press, intelligence briefings and the occasional domestic report. Liberators welcomed by insurrection and rebellion.

It seems as if we are addicts hooked on our own self medications of choice. Addicts who are in complete denial of their addiction to the fantasy island of consumption, celebrity and entertainment. It is, after all, marketed to us brilliantly every day in every way in every medium. We know we are going to crash hard, but there is nothing we can do until we hurt so bad we finally reach out and ask for help.

So the last question: What are we so afraid of that we have to self medicate our selves into an alternative reality to escape? Is it a sense of meaninglessness?

Or is this possibly the logical end state, internally self consistent, if unintended, of a society that rises to power on a capital intensive, centralized, mass production, industrial model driving a market economy? Is such a model, in fact, a Ponzi scheme? Does it's incessant demands for consolidations and expansions lead to a death spiral akin to a star growing ever larger until it collapses into some other radically different form?

Can either patrician candidate avert such a collapse? Or perhaps there is no collapse in our future and it is all a delusion. Perhaps we should take Bush's advice: leave the worrying to him and let the good times roll. What? Me worry?

Just wondering.

Please share your comments?

Alfred E. Neuman

Posted by Jock Gill at September 28, 2004 6:26 PM | TrackBack