by Ralph E. Melcher

I told myself after the election that I would try to avoid writing about politics. In spite of all of the passions expended trying to get one or another candidate elected as president the actual impact of politics on the things that effect the way we live our lives is secondary at best to the way we chose to approach the world. I certainly feel better, along with most other people, that the United States is now represented by a forward thinking black man who is a fan of jazz and Stevie Wonder, instead of by a honky mo'fo from the Texas Gulag. And yet, fundamental changes go much deeper, and rarely if ever come from the top. When I look around me at the way Americans view the world and themselves in it I don't see a lot that's encouraging, but there may be some hope if the artists and prophets find ways to speak above the general chorus of mediocrity. 

If you don't know what I'm talking about just scan the television dial. I just found out that the most original network television program to come along since the last one that was cancelled (Firefly) is headed for the trash heap, where all of the best programs go before their time (except for a brief Golden Age on HBO that ended with the cancellation of Deadwood). The thing is that great art is meant to provoke, while television viewers in America generally want things to meet their expectations, with only minor surprises. We just want to settle down away from our stupid robotic lives of indentured servitude and be lightly entertained, with 15 minutes of commercials for every 44 minutes of show. We get endless cop shows with cops that look like they walked right out of modeling agencies, with the same old plot gimmicks endlessly rehashed with increasingly graphic mayhem and more and more autopsy scenes. We get totally derivative crap like Fringe and quirky but endearing character studies, or programs about people with ridiculous lives who live in the suburbs and actually make it look interesting. Never anything that falls too far outside of the usual marketing genres and NEVER anything that challenges us to look at ourselves critically or in new ways. Television, with all of its hundreds of channels has actually gotten steadily WORSE in the past 30 years in terms of facing real life with any intelligence, and as the television audience ages and the young turn to other media the decline continues with no end in sight.

I'm pissed, but not surprised that NBC is canceling Kings, since it couldn't beat the ratings of whatever moronic programming Americans flock to on Sunday nights. When I think of the great mass of the American public, it summons to mind the descriptive name by which Ian McShane's character of Al Swearingen, the bar owner in Deadwood, refers to the public as he fleeces their gold and provides their entertainment, Hoople Heads.  I honestly don't know why anyone with any artistic integrity even tries to make an impact on the networks. The moral amputees of late capitalism are only interested, after all, in selling cars.  

After many false starts, I'm ready to wade in once more. I've been reading a lot, mostly philosophy, and watching a lot of video and movies. I loved Watchmen. Actually saw the movie three times. Reread the comic book. Gotta say that I think the movie is at least as good as the comic, and probably better in appropriating the images of our particular historical moment. The movie has something a comic book doesn't, and that's actors who embody the characters. The original story after all is centered around the essential nature of six characters that embody the range of moral and philosophical responses to a a civilizations threatened demise.  I recognized these characters, Rorshach, The Comedian, Ozymandius, Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre as parts of myself that respond in various ways to an increasingly bleak human landscape, wearing masks of archetypal splendor and squalor, hope or despair. Here these Olympian masks are reshaped for the postmodern world in a movie that challenges the conventions of the super hero genre as much as Blade Runner challenged our expectations for filmed science fiction in the early 80's. That film received similar mixed critical and audience response and has since been recognized as a classic.

Watchmen, with its consideration of questions of power and morality led me to readings in philosophy and psychology. Along the way I picked up a book called The Ten Cent Plague by David Hajdu, that delves into historical circumstances around the great comic book purge of the early 50's that put hundreds of artists and writers out of work and practically destroyed an entire popular industry. One has to be fascinated with the rise of the super hero from comic book culture appealing mostly to kids leading to a fearful and hysterical reaction by adults in the 50's, to become the most popular mass movie genre of the present decade. Is it merely a matter of those 50's kids growing up and never getting over childish things, or is it that these figures in masks have risen to show us something about ourselves in a fragmenting culture that skirts on the edges of chaos? A little of both I think, but it's the return of the archetypal gods wearing latex that interests me more. 

The other conversation I've been having with myself has to do with the effect of the media on our relationships with each other, particularly the effects of the Internet. This concern intensified after a lecture given by the film director Geoffrey Reggio at the Santa Fe Art Institute a few weeks ago. He was being both provocative and somewhat scatological, but the overall message of his talk, as can be said of his films (the Qatsi Trilogy), was that technology is not necessarily our friend, and in fact is an entity with which we are engaged in deep mortal conflict. There was in the audience a certain amount of resistance to the idea, and several walked out even before Reggio showed his short film called Evidence, offering a disturbing frontal panorama of the slackened and entranced faces of a group of little children watching television.

The most prominent theme in modern screen sci-fi is the battle between humans and their machines. Films like The Matrix, War of the Worlds and Terminator, television shows like Battlestar Galactica and Sarah Connors Chronicles and popular novels like the ongoing Dune cycle all dramatize a similar nightmare scenario where human life is in the balance in direct competition with Artificial Intelligence. Meanwhile Americans who aren't trying to replicate some version of an Apocalypse are creating whole religions based on merging our essence with immortal machines.  

I'm not any kind of a Luddite. My own resistance to merging with the machines is in fact rather ironic, as I was one of the first people I know to become a participant on the Internet, way back in 1987 just after I'd purchased one of the earliest Mac computers with its 512K external disk memory and a 300 baud modem. This is unbelievably slow and inadequate by today's standards, but back then there were no pictures, virtually none of the activity on the net was overtly commercial, and the act of connecting to other people's computers was roughly equivalent to the experience of taking part in a global network of short wave radio operators. I was a member of the early prototype of online communities, The WELL in its early years, and one of the first subscribers to WIRED magazine. I was an early web booster. I dreamed, as many of us did, that this was the dawn of a new age where information was no longer the province of the powerful and community was no longer restricted by distance. 

The first commercial mass mailing was sent out late in 1992 and was met by widespread condemnation from those of us who considered ourselves pioneers in the medium. Around that time the HTML protocols were established that enabled hypertext linking and then graphic browsers to dominate what became known as the Web, and from there the technology exploded exponentially. Nowadays we are linked to the Internet almost everywhere we go by an array of devices, and rather than just collecting or sharing information, a major daily task is filtering out the useless or unwanted information with which we are constantly bombarded.

The question of communication turns upon quality. When we spend more and more of our lives staring into screens are we in fact communicating as human beings? When we relate more and more to one another through the intermediary of machinery are we serving ourselves and our communities more than we serve the commercial structures that brought the machines into our lives? Is the very thing we thought would bring us closer together actually a way to keep others at a distance? 

Marshall Mcluhan said that when we take on a new technology it tends to numb us in the area where we and the machinery interface. At first we are overwhelmed and unable to take in the new information flows with any sense of conscious discrimination. We are unable to separate fantasy from reality for example, or to distinguish real life from the lives portrayed to us on television. We simply take it all in as real and relevant and for a time we are totally in thrall to the source of the inputs.

The new digital environment is the most intense sensory experience to which humanity has ever been subjected. We don't merely watch movies and television, we put them on like clothing and take them into the world of our everyday actions. There is in fact less and less that separates our abilities to distinguish reality from fantasy. When we take a picture we translate a moment or an event into an iconic image in which truth and fiction are intermingled. When we look at the photograph or digital image we enter a perceptual realm where conscious and unconscious meet, as in a mirror. In the world of the photograph, the digital image, and the text that makes up the visual environment of the Web, we all are forced to wear masks that filter our real selves through the medium of the machine. 

An underlying reason for the rise in popularity of super heroes may be that we all relate to the character who hides his secret identity behind a mask. In the digital world we've become like pirates, taking bits and pieces of our identity from the images that fill the world around us. In time we ourselves can no longer distinguish who we are from the masks that we wear. If we are fortunate the images we choose are functional in the context of a society where alienation and individual fragmentation is both normal and in fact the lifeblood of capitalist culture. If less fortunate we're overwhelmed by the machineries of mass entertainment, and we choose to opt out, to loose ourselves in a dreamworld that beckons from our television screens, computers and gaming devices.

As we proceed along this path the collateral mayhem increases. As dissonance grows between the world presented as real on our screens and the one that we face in the realm of the body, one involving actual contact with actual people, more and more frequently the sense of disorientation causes people to go over the edge. In the so-called 'information age' we are witnessing an epidemic of violence against the self and others. Diseases of the image, like anorexia and bulimia proliferate in suburbia while more and more incidents of violence spill out of the fantasy realms and into the streets in the form of mass murder and indiscriminate killing. 

As we furiously blog to one another over the Web and create networks of friends and 'followers' on Facebook and Twitter, there is more and more of an aching need to engage in genuine human contact away from the machines that penetrate so much of our lives. It's as if people woke up one morning to find that behind the diversionary curtain we've wandered into a cage, and the only way out is through a body that breathes and sings and grows gardens and dances barefoot over the grass. 

I just finished reading Against the Machine, by Internet iconoclast Lee Siegal, a New Republic editor who got himself caught in the blogging wars and decided to fight back by attacking the medium itself. HIs contention is that out of the progressive rhetoric of its beginnings the Internet has evolved into a mechanism that subjects even the most intimate parts of our lives to the world of commerce, and that 'communities' on the Internet resemble nothing so much as high school cliques that breed conformity of opinion and style and become further vehicles for commerce. On the Internet, facing our screens and typing our text we are, he contends, really only talking to ourselves, and being charged for the privilege. Here are a couple of his summary quotes: 

"Internet users generally, however, and bloggers especially inhabit an absolutely solitary space in which other people exist as stick figures filled out by the user's or blogger's conception of them. It is a personal space disguised as a social space. In the blogosphere, the ego operates unobstructed by other egos. That's why virulent hatred comes so easily, and why any response to it comes as a shock, and an outrage. Stick figures are not supposed to answer back. Not when they exist mostly in your head."

...and further,

"There is only one person in the world who connects with us entirely, antiseptically, and without fear of judgement or rejection. He is at the very heart of our desire for convenience. he is at the other end of our wrist and finger. The less he needs the actual presence of other people, the more he will depend on goods and services to keep him company and populate his isolation. the more distracted and busy his isolation, the more he will measure people by their capacity to please him, or to gratify him without 'getting in his face." For the only face he can bear will be his own." 

I've also read many of the reactions to this provocative point of view. To some degree Siegal is reacting to a specific situation in the blogosphere to which he contributed by acting unethically and being called on it. Most of the criticism focuses on this series of incidents and, in my opinion, fails to address many of the valid arguments that Seigal offers. 

My own experience of the so-called 'blogosphere' serves to validate for me at least some of his contentions. The past election cycle as it played itself out on political blogs like DailyKOS certainly fit the subtitle of Seigal's book, which addresses the "Age of the Electronic Mob." It certainly felt like a mob to anyone who disagreed with the general drift of group think that quickly overturned anything resembling reasonable discourse. Fortunately the winning strategy realized that elections are won on the  ground and door to door and not over the Internet, or else the election would have had a different outcome. Nowadays, as the near hysteria of an election is replaced by the day to day reality of governance, the effectiveness of the Internet in supporting actual policy decisions has been called into serious question. Mobs have a notoriously short attention span. Meanwhile, I doubt that the discourse on blog sites has gotten any less rancorous or has served to sway anyone from their preconceived positions. 

My own criticism of the Web would not be as severe as Seigals, although I share some of his concerns. The Internet is a useful tool for community when it isn't relied upon as the only tool. It's great to hear from old friends or from people with which I've actually had contact in the world of the flesh. I enjoy and benefit from discussion and disagreement, although I've found that expressing oneself in depth via text on a screen is a real art that few have mastered, and it can easily lead to misunderstandings if not done with some deliberation. Text based communication in general appears to degenerate in quality in direct relationship to its off-the-cuff brevity. 

Writing and posting these screeds over the Internet is a valuable way I've found to, in effect, think out loud in front of an audience. That audience is largely imagined, as I don't often get feedback (I love feedback). Since about midway through the last election I don't personally get involved in blogosphere debates, as I've never experienced them going anywhere useful. My brief experience in a chat room confirmed that they are the worst form of non-communication available. The idea of being confined to 140 characters puts Twittering almost completely out of my realm of interest (I can see it as a potential vehicle for Haiku.) As the main concept on their website is one of 'following' I don't see how this goes against the grain of the electronic 'mob.' The question, "What am I doing?" can be answered simply; writing, thinking, working. Why do you need to know the minute-by-minute particulars unless it feeds the need for some obsessive ego fulfillment on my part or yours, or unless I'm running for office and need to rally the troops quickly. I set up a page on Facebook but have reserved judgement as to its usefulness, outside of establishing contact with old friends that will hopefully be followed up with direct communication of some sort. 

Communities are made partly of words, definitions and common understandings packaged and abbreviated into codes that are commonly understood to define the boundaries of who is inside, who belongs, and who doesn't. From the time I was 23 until the time I was 37 my life was literally defined by a set of codes that certified my membership in a spiritual community. Once I felt too confined by that set of codes I left that life seeking new freedom in a world less bound by words that I felt where stifling.

What I found was the world of New Age publishing and another set of codes, this one defined largely by the personal quest for fame and popularity. I've found that I don't last long in a world confined by codes. I always end up looking for ways to break through to a free flow of language and creative thought that isn't hemmed in by abbreviations or conventions. 

Life is ideally lived as art and not in conformity. When it is great art, it provokes and disturbs us, because it breaks through our codes, shattering the commonly held understandings that hold us back from seeing the world in a new way, even if only for an instant. 

All true artists and mystics are code breakers. The artist is always crashing against walls that we build around ourselves to hold in our lives. The function of art is to carve out moments of freedom. The artist as prophet carries the burden of the future. By virtue of giving free reign to his own imagination he lives in a kind of purgatory that lies between what is possible and what is real, pushing always at the boundaries of both.

Like some complicated computer game, the world as mediated by machines is confined to certain rules determined by an underlying code and the limitations of a programmer's thoughts. In this context the only way to ever really 'beat' the game is by breaking out of it, or at least by turning one's attention elsewhere.