Enter Lady Gaga. As Nancy Bauer writes in her NYTime philosophy blog post, Lady Power,

“Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, ‘Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.’ Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.”

This is a symptom of something I’ve written quite a bit about: postirony, a toxic byproduct of a peculiar American brand of pessimism that gets its sea-legs in Film Noir, but finds full expression in the commercial exploitation of Gen X cynicism. Postirony is a little hard to define, but is essentially irony turned in on itself: such as selling T-shirts that say “Your rebellion is my marketing strategy.” Thus we get to the perennial debate explored in Bauer’s piece: is the self-conscious exploitation of sexuality by female pop stars an act of empowerment? This discussion began in earnest with Madonna, and in particular her celebration by media critic Camille Paglia, but threads through Tila Tequila’s claim to DIY fame to Lady Gaga’s faux-performance art schtick. Bottom line: the music sucks and we’re venting far too much hot air about the subject (this post guilty as charged).

(You might be interested in Mark Dery’s take on whether or not Lady Gaga is stupid.)

But I have a larger project in mind, one that is tangentially related. After reviewing some of the comments at BoingBoing regarding Xeni Jardin’s post of a videotaped interview with a Gulf boat captain’s exposé of turtles getting fried by BP’s controlled burns, I was particularly saddened by the tone of respondents whose only (written) response to the horror was to joke about the futility of compassion for nature. I’m sure this can be psychoanalyzed to reveal that these cynical posts are actually masking a great deal of pain, but there is too much ironic disposition in the cultural atmosphere to even broach the subject. This may be specific to the kinds of readers at Boing Boing, whose writers are probably a bit dismayed by the pessimistic responses to their generally sincere concern for social justice.

Boing Boing’s writers are cut from the same cloth as punk. Mark Frauenfelder is a veteran zine publisher, and his maker ethic is true to the spirit of DIY. The openness of Boing Boing, and more broadly speaking libertarian Net culture, includes creating space for media freedom fighters like Douglas Rushkoff. But I was utterly dismayed by the overly cynical responses of Boing Boing’s readers to Rushkoff’s call for DIY participatory media democracy (I couldn’t find the link in their archive). I’m horrified by the thought of ever living up to the expectations of such a nasty bunch of readers who are more concerned with cleverness than dialog. Alas, trying to stick out from the fray through tricky turns of phrasing laced with cool bits of humor is what counts in the neoliberal economy that celebrates individual achievement above social cohesion.

Which brings me back to Lady Gaga. I’ve tried my best to ignore her, but every other TV and radio ad has her music in the background, and not a day goes by when my favorite news sites don’t feature a picture of her on their front pages. I’m forced to ask the perennial question of “why?????” But the answer is deceptively simple, and can be reduced to economic discourse: the bottom line is that it makes money. We can argue all we want about the celebration of fan and pop culture, and pooh-pooh the elitist critics for pointing out that we are arguing over the quality of dog crap. So be it. But I’ll go back to something I read when Lady Gaga was just first getting attention. Her big artistic epiphany happened while performing in college. Everyone one was ignoring her until she stripped to her undies. Suddenly the audience took notice and the idea stuck, albeit its expression has been elaborated to the extreme.

Now, I don’t get why someone like millennial it girl Kate Perry–another student of Madonna who learned that it earns interest to kiss a girl and show a lot of cleavage–can get away with calling Lady Gaga’s latest video, Alejandro, “obscene” (OK, I do read Huffingtonpost’s gossip page), when she can do a video with porn-maker Snoop Dogg while simultaneously giving head to a lollypop and sporting a Jesus tattoo on her arm. Honestly, when I began writing this, I didn’t mean to end with Kate Perry. I didn’t even know who she was until last month when suddenly I saw her image everywhere. Initially I thought perhaps her fame was due to some hidden song-writing talent, but discovered after a few quick views on YouTube that there was no there there. Sugary pop is as old as Coca-Cola advertising, and there is nothing to report here of any particular interest other than to reiterate the point that this whole philosophical exploration began with an inquiry into why it is we care to talk so much about the marketing of mammary glands under the pretension of writing about culture.

I suppose I’m engaging in another American tradition, the flipside of all this, iconoclasm, which puts me on the side of fundamentalists and their ilk who hate all images because they are somehow bodily and inherently sexual. Indeed, the lone commenter on my Tila Tequila post was a rabid Christian who obsessively tracked Tila and Suicide Girls in the name of god. Given that Kate Perry is a good Christian, I wonder how this will play out among the true believers who may have not realized that Christ can also be sold with a pair of bosoms. Madonna, who loved the play the Catholic card, got some good milage out of that one. In this sense, we could say there is nothing more rich in pop culture discourse than the mixing of sex and religion. Indeed, at the source this whole discussion is religion. After all, who speeketh? The priests of our age: marketers. And we have gotten on our knees to pray, once again, to their holy discourse. Such is the life of blogging.

After hearing so much about Hurt Locker and its Best Picture award (I’ve always been intrigued by war movies), I thought I’d give it a whirl. For starters, this ain’t Apocalypse Now! or Full Metal Jacket, let alone even close to some of the better, more complex war films that delve into the distorted and demented politics of its leaders. In particular I’m thinking of Major Dundee by Sam Peckinpah, which is set during the so-called Indian Wars. Hurt Locker also lacks the psychological nuance of something like Terrence Malick’s brilliant The Thin Red Line.

Hurt Locker is neither adventurous nor cutting edge, and not much better stylistically than a TV show like CSI. Ultimately it’s a really boring movie with bad dialogue that poorly fleshes out a series of tension and release sequences that draw on music video and video game aesthetics. It is full of cliches about poor American soldiers who cannot make sense of a chaotic environment not of their choosing as they enter the labyrinth of a surreal war landscape populated by an alien Other. Framed as an “American tragedy,” once again an invaded country becomes a purification drama for Hollywood’s liberal consciousness.

So I hope no one thinks Hurt Locker is a serious anti-war movie, because if this is what passes these days as war criticism, then the depoliticization of Iraq has truly succeeded to permeate the pop culture landscape.

Just compare, for example, the Americans–self-identified as “USA friendlies”– versus the zero-dimensional Iraqis who seem to have no history or personality beyond the usual tropes and stereotypes (see my list below). The only insight into how the other side thinks comes from an Iraqi professor who is allowed three lines of dialogue, one being that he is pleased to have the CIA in his home. Moreover, the film forces you to sympathize with the military every time they kill Iraqis. Army recruiters most love that.

The only hint of the film’s consciousness comes at the end of the movie. We transition from a closing shot in Iraq with kids throwing stones at the Americans to the returning soldier’s existential crisis at home when he faces a wall of cereal in a market– recalling the clash’s prescient protest song, “Lost in the Supermarket.” In the end, cleaning rain gutters is not as thrilling as war, so this middle class soldier–a cypher for our system– has to go back to Iraq because now he is addicted to the adrenaline of war–like our consumer economy. The last shot has him transformed as a technologically shielded man who lurches suicidally towards another bomb. Like our militarized system, he has lost his humanity.

Though the last shot is a pretty strong image, compare it to some of the dialog when two soldiers complain about the war. Soldier 1: “How do you deal with it?” Soldier 2: “I just don’t think about it.” Wow, heavy shit.

If “I fucking hate this place” and “Let’s get out of this fucking desert” are the strongest statements the film’s characters can make, then Hollywood is as spineless and addicted to the military as the Democrats. Because in the end, though Hollywood cast a guilt vote to make this their best picture, in the film industry the war machine will continue to march unabated as a primary partner in the development of animation and other block-buster special effects technology to be prototyped for war training VR.

Ultimately I concur with Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (a much better and more introspective book/picture than Hurt Locker), who wrote that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie:

“There is talk that many films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam War films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended… [soldiers] watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrate the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real first fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar—the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.” (pp. 6-7)

It seems to me that the film’s Best Picture award is driven by a sense of shame about the war– a need to feel and say something about it, but even in the Obama years no one (that is, anyone in a position of power) is willing to stand up and call the Iraq war for what it is: a crime against humanity. So when a dramatic film can make this case, then it will certainly get my vote. But I’m not holding out hope. At least not for it to be made by Hollywood.

Here is a quick an dirty laundry list of unoriginal war film tropes from Hurt Locker:

• Inane dialogue as indication that somewhat will die (also used in horror films).
• Kid Iraqi (“Beckham”–yawn) who learns American black slang (and sells DVDs) as symbol of the hybridized, Utopian future of Iraq.
• Zero-dimensional Iraqis except as The Horrible Evil Enemy Without Any Consciousness (unlike the technocratic warriors of America who kill with high technology but also have feelings of guilt).
• A cameo of the sadistic yahoo commander (we only get a momentary glimpse of him).
• War-stressed, PTSD soldier who doesn’t have the capacity (or stomach) to “hold it in,” and of course is the one character who gets wounded right before he is supposed to finish his tour.
• Veteran perverted by horrors of war harbors an idiosyncratic secret obsession.
• Strange and creepy intellectual analyst whose healing powers are over-shadowed by his naivety and lack of warrior purification (and of course is killed).
• Depersonalized death/massacre of the other/enemy.
• Spectacularized violence as cleansing ritual for do-gooder Americans.

I want to preface my comments by saying that I support the work of Doctors without Borders, and they were the first organization I donated to after the earthquake in Haiti. With that said, I was struck by the above poster I received in my email. It advertises a documentary about their work that will screen worldwide (click her for locations and more information). At first I thought it was just cheeky sales pitch for donations, framing the work of the organization within the narrative structure of an action film. The image reminded me a little of the Constant Gardener, in which Africa becomes the backdrop for purification of the white man’s soul (as is the case of the Western genre of film).

Now, I haven’t seen Living in Emergency, nor do I intend to demean the humanitarian work of Doctor’s Without Borders, but it’s also interesting to explore this kind of image politics played out by NGOs. This was tackled in Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens, a video that explores the commodification of poverty. He contrasts the amount of money paid to professional non-African photographers for documenting violence and suffering versus village photographers who document weddings and family events. He trains the local photographers to sell their images to press, but as you would expect, they are locked out of the market. There is one telling scene in which he brings the photographers to a Doctors Without Borders compound and informs the physicians that they want to photograph starving children so they can makes some money in the international media market. The doctors are outraged, but fail to see that when the press are invited for photo ops, this is what happens. The distinction between news and PR is contested through this intervention.

The Doctors Without Borders movie poster adds an additional dimension, which is the evolution of “pop politics.” In Italy this phenomena is more pronounced, though certainly not absent in other technological democracies. The central idea is that the line between politics and entertainment is erased so that the public sphere is transferred entirely to the realm of television. For example, Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi becomes the host of the political variety show that mirrors television, and visa-versa. His ministers become show girls (literally several are former models and entertainers), and the two systems intertwine. Like the US, news programs become infotainment. Meanwhile, I have also recently seen car ads that are made to look like movie trailers. With the proliferation of reality TV shows and the tabloidization of the democratic sphere, the aesthetics of participation are blurred so that for anything to penetrate the general consciousness it is necessary to imitate a more familiar form of communication, such as TV. Even the Left plays this game. A leading critic is a comedian whose platform is monologs (likewise in the US Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert play the role of court jester), and a former leftist parliamentarian is on the gamedoc equivalent of Survivor.

This is where the Living in Emergence poster comes in. I can’t help but feel that it draws too strongly on pop politics by invoking the thrills and exoticism that you’d find in an action movie. The determined gaze of the (white) hero dominates the vulnerable and quasi-silhouetted figures of “dark” Africa. There’a a trend in film to depict the southern Other through an amber haze, using lens filters to position these places as if they exist in perpetual setting sunlight– in other words, as transition zones between the light of everyday life and the dark night of the soul (see Traffic, in particular). In Western discourse, usually Europe or the US serves as the stable (green) homeworld, whereas these distant colonial lands become the sites of psychological tests where the hero must find himself.

The flipside is Doctors Without Borders is trying to reach out to new audiences that are unfamiliar with difficult work of NGOs. By putting their work within the context of a familiar narrative structure it may be possible to attract younger people into a world they otherwise would dismiss as irrelevant or unexciting. Such is the state of mediated politics.

Case study number one is the “Green Police” ads by Audio, which couches its anti-PC message in ironic humor, thereby softening the seriousness of its subtext. It confirms the fears that environmental regulation will result in a police state, and turns anyone who cares about the environment into a potential fascist. While we may laugh at such cartoony fears (it’s only a joke, right?), the Rush Limbaugh crowd takes them very seriously.

(It’s not an illegitimate protest. From an eco-justice point of view, the threat of global regulations forced upon local populations is real, but in the latter case the concern is that corporate interests will hijack environmental rhetoric in the service of obliterating local autonomy in the same way that trade liberalization promoted by the WTO has done.)

Here Audi defends the rich white male’s perceived loss of autonomy and his right to be a jerk. My particular peeve against Audi is based on personal experience in Europe where Audi drivers across the board are the most arrogant and dangerous exemplars of the tragedy of commons (for example, watch this ad). On highways one must be in constant alert of Audis rushing at jet fighter speed, lest your leisurely Sunday afternoon drive through the Tuscan countryside ends in a pile of crushed steel, bones and shattered glass.

The paranoia exhibited by Audi plays into the general meme that government regulation of corporate abuses will translate into socialist totalitarianism. Say “Green Police” ten times fast and you may end up with “Greenpeace.”

Call this a backlash shot across the bough of environmental activism. Green consciousness becomes the work of thought police.

You can see more “Green Police” ads and PSAs here.

Case study number two comes from Bud Lite, which (yawn) sticks to its failsafe storyline. In it Bud Lite’s primary target audience (those possessed by an inner 13-year-old “mook“) must retreat to their boys-only (stripper exception clause allowed) playhouse to take cover from moralistic authorities (women) who condemn their innocent behavior. But now the right to secrecy, addiction and misogyny is threatened by ecological activism. In this ad, rather than a house being built of recycled beer cans (which excites a young female foil), its owners have constructed a living refrigerator, without realizing, however, that symbolically it’s also a morgue.

Case Study number three is the Budweiser bridge. The only thing surprising about this ad is how it blatantly demeans humans as mere slaves to their corporate overlord. In this case, people are willing to let the truck (a symbolic container of the Budweiser corporate brand) drive over their backs. So while the previous ads play into people’s fears of losing individual freedom to ethical constraints, here people voluntarily become the servomechanism of corporate power and control. How’s that for ironic Super Bowl humor!

Bonus footage: Go here to see a hilarious Daily Show deconstruction of Super Bowl ads from 2004.

Photo by me

As we watched the events unfold at Copenhagen, many of us felt powerless to infuse wisdom into the process. It seems as if the globe’s political leaders cannot transcend their own momentum, and remain stuck in a reality that defines everything in the context of numbers. One thing that Jacques Ellus points out in The Technological Society is that a consequence of the technological mindset is establishing a set of perimeters on how to think about and categorize the world, and to make taboo human scaled relationships that result from organic processes.

Consequently, this year the theme that keeps knocking me over is to scale down. In my work and professional/activist ambitions I have felt the need, like many of us, to change the world as quickly as possible. The task often feels existential and too massive to contain– our system seems like giant robots trouncing the earth and often I feel like a Lilliputan trying to pin it down.

As a colleague reminds me, complexity theory shows that all system change happens at a local level. Perhaps in our desire to see a massive global political shift many of us have disregarded another option, which is to scale down our thoughts to the local level, and to work within the means that we have available to us. For me that translates to living a certain kind of low impact lifestyle, and also re-dedicating my work in the classroom where I have a lot of one-on-one contact with the next prototype of human, our youth. And of course spending more time with my family.

My sustainability education mentor, Pramod Prajoli, has the following guidelines for moving into the next phase of transformation:

1) critique to regeneration

2) ideologies to ideas

3) discourse to design

4) global thinking to local thinking

Some ideas I have for the coming year include editing a textbook for media educators that incorporates a sustainable framework, and to develop a green curriculum that can be used as part of media literacy work.

Meanwhile, I want to rededicate myself to eating well, relaxing more, taking it a bit slower and remembering to breath. Now is not the time to panic, but to become grounded and rooted again in our life work.

I’ll close with these thoughts from Tricycle Magazine:

Caring for Each Other

The Buddha has suggested that we are without a mother and father to take care of things for us. Mother Earth, once thought to be all-forgiving and capable of absorbing any abuse we could heap upon her, is not the infinitely benevolent resource we thought she was. As we learn of our own mothers at a certain point of maturity, Mother Earth can and does get worn down by giving and forgiving in the face of our persistent demands. And our Father who is in heaven, though perhaps immensely old and lord over a host of devas (as the Buddhists view him), is nevertheless subject to the laws of karma and is not sufficiently omnipotent to make it all work out for us in the end.

If we do not care for one another, who else will care for us? Who among us has the right to say of another, “He is of no use to us?” For better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Learning how to care for one another is a central part of the path and of the practice.

- Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., “Medicine for the World,” from the Summer 2008 Tricycle. Read the complete article.

Former Vikings, contemporary Danish are better known now for windmills, bicycles and excellent rain gear. Like many of the social democracies of Europe’s northern frontier, to some the Danes are actually Europe’s modern hippies, which they hoped to leverage with the “Hopenhagen” brand. History, it was hoped, would show that Copenhagen and its COP-15 UN Climate Change conference had saved Earth. But just as the witch is the shadow of our abandoned body, the transnational police state that now follows global leaders around the planet is the shadow of our abandoned democracy. When it comes to the global family, would we tolerate thugs at the Thanksgiving table clobbering the kids whenever they protest eating factory farmed turkey? Even a feel good slogan like Hopenhagen can’t shake off the reality of global climate negotiators and their roving police state, because a real solution ultimately means the dismantling of the current imperial system of carbon-based economics.

Ostensibly led by the United States, it appears that “Hopenhegan“– like Obama’s “hope” campaign–was a smiley-faced rouse to rebrand neoliberalism. For the conference organizers it’s apparent that the initial plan would be photo ops outside, while inside the only legally binding climate agreement in existence– Kyoto– would be dismantled, and the air would be subdivided into commodities that can be bought and sold on a global cap and trade market exchange. Whoever dreamed up the idea that pollution should be commodified was on the same genius page as those who thought up private prisons and subcontracted war, thereby creating new business opportunities that can only be fueled by more pollution, criminalization and violent conflict. You have to hand it to these guys for the brilliant ways they have figured out how to capitalize on misery.

Case in point. One of Hopenhegan’s “partners” is DuPont, who claims on the Hopenhegan official Website that they have always been good ecologists (“DuPont has long been a leader in the area of climate change, calling for policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that’s both environmentally effective and economically sustainable.”). Of course they have, in particular the kind of sustainability of the Agent Orange and napalm variety. And then there is “water neutral” CocaCola, whose Indian production facilities have fouled and devastated community water sources all over the subcontinent. Or take the branding of climate change news by Chevron (see screen grab above) through its strategic ad placement on Website news linking economic development with carbon reduction. I could go on.

I’ve never been a fan of hope anyways. In my spiritual work I learned long ago that visualizing change and a brighter future is not facilitated by hope. Hope is a desire that can never be fulfilled; it is a kind of cosmic panhandling. It is far better to intend, to place a specific goal into the future and to work for it, rather than expect a handout from the overlords of destiny. You can be sure that Goldman Sachs and the military industrial complex do not hope for anything. They strategize, organize and seize opportunities. How is it that, for example, the hidden agenda of the Copenhagen talks is that 20% of the global population gets to control 60% of the atmosphere, as Lumumba Di-Aping Chair of G-77 has pointed out? This is what global capital is planning for. As Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, stated, “The bottom line is we have global economic apartheid and essentially what we are seeing here is a sort of climate apartheid.”

Meanwhile, the rest of us can either just hope that the Empire decides deescalate, as Copenhagen police finally did during one protest, or to organize as many are now doing. Small island nations, indebted countries and citizen groups have disrupted and stopped what would have been a global disaster of an agreement (what was announced yesterday is not bindiing). We have to hand it to civil society for frustrating the World System’s bogus consensus– for now. I suspect it is a bit of what Paul Hawken talks about in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming– disparate and diverse groups working locally, but collectively form the greatest movement in human history. It may be getting its sea legs now, as the contradictions of Copenhagen are too stark to bear.

The US media, unfortunately, continues to provide a disservice to the public by not covering the issue from an egalitarian point of view. But that is to be expected. Any student of political economy would predict this kind of coverage. Not surprisingly, in my international culture and media courses, it is only the Americans who are clueless about climate change. PR has certainly earned its top dollar for confusing the issue. So it is a legitimate concern that Obama’s hands are tied back at home. No doubt, if Congress can’t pass a decent, even totally watered down, health care bill, it will surely fail at supporting any meaningful climate treaty.

Paying for carbon reduction is not charity. It’s a moral obligation. We (that is, those of us born in the global economic “core”) have produced 60% of the historical CO2 in the air right now. Whatever treaty the rich countries of the world want to push is going to kill millions of people because by settling on a 2 degree increase in global temperatures it is surely signing a death warrant for the colonized world. The word from African activists is that $10 billion a year is only enough to buy coffins. Never before have the contradictions of the system been so open and transparent. Whereas in the past we could justify the abstraction of land ownership and property because it was fixed and concrete, air is ephemeral and obviously belongs to all equally. The concept of owning and selling it should be too absurd to past muster. But then again, we also take a lot of absurdities for granted.

This is our endgame. Either we are a global family with real democracy, or illegitimate Empire that will continue to treat the world as a chess set. We already know the agenda of one set of players, what is ours?

* * *

There are many great posts out there processing the situation. I suggest starting with Adrian J. Ivakhiv’s blog post at Indications. It will lead you do many other excellent links, too many for my tattered mind to grapple with right now.

Now, I don’t mean to be flip or to denigrate the great tragedy of this incident. But I see in media coverage some persistent tropes and larger issues that warrant investigation. First, Americans are particularly fascinated with abductions. My Italian partner was horrified and fascinated by the number of abduction posters around the US, in particular when you enter Wal-Mart. Obviously it’s a huge and significant phenomena, and a sign of our collective madness.

Beyond the countless sad stories of ruined life, abductions are also part of a larger cultural mythology. From the earliest days of cinema to the X-Files, it has been a constant theme. For example, the myth of the baby stealing gypsies repeats itself throughout the history of film. But even before that there was the 19th century genre of Native abduction tales in which young white women were taken from civilization, but safely return after an ordeal with “savages.” Yet the homecoming is always tainted with a bonding and changement resulting from the time of capture. Recent alien abduction stories update and maintain a continuum from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Somehow through out the pantheon of abductors, civilization remains the stabilizing and normal reference point to cope with the horror of removal and displacement.

Yet, Western civilization is a removal and displacement machine. To quote Andy Warhol, “Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.” This is the story of the past 5,000 years. We have been kidnapped from Earth, but fail to recognize the aberration. Is it fair to say that as hostages to abstract principles that we suffer from collective Stockholm Syndrome, in which we have bonded with an abusing overlord?

Clearly the experience of Jaycee Dugard’s family is quite real, so I don’t want to relegate it to the status of myth. However, is not the story also a model for the history of Western civilization? According to ecopsychologists, and particular Paul Shepard’s book Nature and Madness, we took a turn from a sustainable neolithic culture that did well for hundreds of thousands of years to one dominated by a murdering, misogynistic God. Shepard’s claim is that as a civilization we have been essentially abducted from a nurturing “ontogenesis” with nature– a coming into being through bonding with Mother Earth. Meanwhile the abductor(s)–priests, scientists, teachers, politicians– claim their right to do so because of commands from a monotheistic (and literate!) Lord talking through boxes (books, TVs, radios, computers).

Perhaps the Dugard story has such resonance because deep down inside we all feel like her: our culture, dominated by an abstract forcefield called God/Capitalism, forces us into schools and institutions that separate us from a profound and loving connection with the world. It breeds us to become robotic slaves to an international, abstract monetary system and demands that we never leave the compound, lest the world “out there” derange and make us insane. We’re kept locked up and domesticated through punishment and rewards, entangling us in a violent domestic partnership based on the rule of an abusive patriarch and the threat of human sacrifice.

Don’t believe me? If you are male, recall how as a child that in school if you ever left the black box of acceptable male behavior (patriarcal culture) you were beaten back into the box by your fellow classmates. The culture literally uses violence to keep you from being a whole person. And when violence doesn’t work, then a shitty diet, deformed curriculum and dehumanizing life of corporate enslavement finishes the job, all the while you are promised that at the end of the line is Heaven. Meanwhile we perform human sacrifice through rituals of war that send the future to die in the trenches for the Lords of Freedom, Democracy and the Market. Criminals are electrocuted or injected with poison to reaffirm the authority of our abstract, disembodied Lord of Justice.

So, lifting a page from Orwell’s 1984, we engage in a collective ritual of hate aimed at Phillip Garrido who is called an abhorrent deviant, yet our media system and culture turns a blind eye to the very reality in front of us: that the globalized economy is raping and pillaging the earth in the name of our ever punishing deity and its free market, creating a world that has more slavery than when it was legal. We are pressured to serve the system as serfs at the command of disembodied voices coming from a box, and take as normal the rants of insane men who claim to be authorities of these abstractions.

Again, just to be clear, Garrido is a sick, dangerous man who has destroyed many lives. He deserves his future confinement and punishment. My goal is to simply to look at this case as a teachable moment to reflect upon madness, civilization and media.

Apologies for feeling a bit cynical today. I still love the world.

Devo has their take: “De-evolution is real”

Life in the Universe by Prof. Stephen Hawking | Rational Vedanta:

There is no time, to wait for Darwinian evolution, to make us more intelligent, and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase, of what might be called, self designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA.

In “progressive” circles (I use the term progress cautiously because it’s often uncritically deployed in the service of environmental destruction), it’s taken as a given that humanity must evolve in order to survive an impending ecological disaster. Yet, havne’t we had enough progress and evolution to deal with the crisis? After all, humans did quite well for tens of thousands of years but started to slip with the invention of various technologies that we equate with human “progress”: agriculture, writing, electricity, combustion engines, microwave ovens, etc. You look at any book and you see these inventions going along a straight line as if increased information means we are smarter or better and that we are along a linear path of evolution. But is this really the case?

Part of the problem can be found in the extended Stephen Hawing talk quoted above. He equates DNA’s nucleic acids with words in books, as if to say that writing (alphabetic in particular) mirrors nature, or visa versa. But this is contrary to what many scholars have documented (interesting literate metaphor), which is that the phonetic alphabet (our form of writing) actually biases the left brain, and hence is very much out of step with ecological intelligence. Leonard Shlain in the Alphabet and the Goddess suggests that writing supplanted our brain’s evolutionary tools for hunting and killing, while pushing aside the right brain’s capacity for gathering and nurturing. This is a contrarian view of evolution which argues, to paraphrase the great band Devo, we have “devolved” into a particular cognitive bias that is responsible for global chaos.

Hawking says we need external evolution– this would be a similar argument for the “global brain” that so many “evolutionaries” would advocate. But just because we build a brain, does it mean it’s a sane one? I would argue– along with practically any yogi in the world–that we are particularly out of balance with our perfectly adequate biological heritage. What we need is revolvelution– a re-awakening of what is already our evolutionary and natural gift. We don’t need any more gizmos or additional DNA strands to do the trick. We just need ourselves to wake up to what is already there.

I bring this up because of a reader’s response to Douglas Rushkoff‘s video in the previous post, which I didn’t properly set-up (due to the fact that I have been grading finals and research papers and am in blog-lite mode at the moment). Life, Inc. is Rushkoff’s response to a situation he found himself in a while back (this site has more details on the book project). He was mugged on Christmas Eve, and when he posted the information for the crime’s exact location and time to a neighborhood email list, several people responded angrily that making such info public would lower their property values. This is the ultimate triumph of capitalism, which culminates in its most devious form as neo-liberalism– the complete conversion of community value into monetary value. The video goes on to describe a basic premise of the book, which is that banking and finance was deliberately created to disempower and de-democratize our lives. It has worked well, up to now. But things have changed.

So, Mediacology reader Ken asks, what to do? He recalls how reading Mother Jones at a military super market in Germany opened his eyes to see the Matrix. But once armed with this knowledge, what can we do about it? Where is the Whole Earth Catalog of our times that offers us alternative solutions, such as local currencies or life without banks?

This leads back to my opening story. I had an email conversation with Rushkoff a while back, and in it I mentioned a desire to create some kind “freakipedia” of forbidden knowledge, a place where you could read about an alternate history of banks or forward thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson (RAW). The inspiration for creating such a space was spurred by a discussion I had had with a college student I randomly met at the Bonnaroo festival a few years ago. We happened to be eating at the same picnic bench and ended up having a conversation which turned into a mini-deconstruction/lecture on the commodification of music and culture. This young man from Arkansas was shocked to learn about demographics, cool hunting and how much of culture production was contrived for profit. He didn’t like the idea that he was a target market. But I was more shocked because such knowledge is commonplace among my peers, and I naively assume that most people understand how the system “really” works. But what brought me to the point of my own awareness was no accident: I was involved with a self-educated knowledge community (punk), and I had countercultural mentors who helped me learn about subcultural art and protest movements like Dada and Situationism.

I told Rushkoff that I wanted to help kids like the one I met at Bonnaroo discover the secret history of the world, and that a collectively produced Website could do the trick. To paraphrase, he responded by stating that this kind of information comes organically, and perhaps shouldn’t be forced upon anyone or centralized as a Website. That is, we discover and learn things when it is appropriate and when we are ready. This helped me realize that the network that possesses this knowledge avails itself to us as part of our process of learning and growing. This kind of deep life knowledge is designed as a great puzzle and journey of discovery, a mystery school, so-to-speak, that has no certified degrees, but lots of teachers and students who don’t necessarily know each other. Sometimes I think I’m actually playing an intergalactic virtual reality arcade game and I keep wondering when the “deposit another quarter” screen is going to pop up in front of my face.

Given the nature of our current crisis– economic, ecological, educational, societal, spiritual and so on– maybe it’s time for the mystery school to be less mysterious. It seems to me that the opportunity calls for everyone’s collective wisdom, but in what form I don’t know. I certainly believe the Internet has the potential to coordinate all our efforts, not because it is a technological innovation, but because it’s a human creation, and it’s a human trait to come together to solve problems and to design solutions. After all, consider the miracle that we have evolved to the point we are at now. Every time a baby is born I’m dumbstruck about how amazing it is we haven’t died as a species, considering how hazardous birth is. But we know how to successfully bring kids into the world and educate them to build cities and world economic systems. Surely there is a way to tap this capacity for sustainability and deep democracy.

Just knowing you are not alone is a start. To quote one my favorite sayings from RAW,

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.

Bless the freakatoni!

What I was expressing, and I think others were too, was a shift in energy and an opening for new possibility. All of us are responsible for co-creating democracy, even if it has been reduced to glorified public relations. I believe it’s important to remain critical while committed to making change within our own communities (and selves). What troubles me is how many on the left are so unwilling to feel good about anything. We now have someone who speaks in complete sentences and takes global warming seriously, who believes in net neutrality and in the rapid deployment alternative energy. These are things that cannot be delayed even for one minute. We no longer have time to screw around on these points. So for that I have some gratitude and find it remarkable that some would rather see Palin and McCain punt these critical issues for four more years.

I agree that on the surface many of Obama’s appointments look like the same-old, same-old, but I would like to offer just a few tidbits. These are not ordinary times; everyone has the potential to change and alter his or her views. That is the amazing thing about this moment. We don’t know how people will react. Also, the US government is a massive, complex machine based on social networks, personal relationships and connections. It’s important to keep your enemies close to you and to have good operatives who can get things done. It’s very logical that there are so many “players” coming into the transition team. How else can you run a government? I mention these things not because I’m an apologist for US imperialism or the government, but I do believe whole-heartedly there are people in the military, government and corporations who want to change their relationship with the world and the environment, and some of these people will be coming in from the periphery. Not everyone in the system is an evil, selfish conspirator. I believe we’ll inhibit growth and change if we do not participate in co-creating the emergent reality with all parties, even ones that we do not like. Real change comes from dialog, and I hope that we will not shut if off from those who hold “power” because of our own prejudices of how we think people should behave according to their position in society.

My argument is for taking advantage of this opening and to push it open wider. The physicist David Bohm argues that every seed is like an aperture to a potential reality, but that the environment in which it is planted conditions its reality. I hope that we can contribute to a space that nurtures greater possibility and change rather than succumb to cynicism and despair. Thanks for listening.