Ralph Melcher's Open Salon Blog

A Precipice

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:11:47 -0500

"It's not just a question of worrying or of hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons."

   - Guy Deleuze "Postscript on Control Societies"

I purchased my first personal computer in 1984, the year that the first Apple MacIntosh hit the market and changed everything about the way we related to the world behind the screen. There were only two programs that ran on the machine, MacWrite and MacDraw, but you could plug into a modem and then to your telephone jack and using a code called you could reach people on the other side of the world almost instantaneously. It was all very mysterious and underground and science fictiony at first. There was no capitalism involved. You could only transmit and receive text so the only limit to your vision was your imagination. We were just a bunch of geeks, mostly researchers and college professors and students full of dreams of future possibilities based on some rhapsodic sense of technological utopia.

The first time someone tried to make money on the net, a couple of lawyers I think sent out a mass mailing soliciting clients. They were viciously trashed for their audacity from one end of the internet to the other. Soon after, the first graphical interface came out of Switzerland accompanied by a rapid rise in the use of personal computers, and with the ensuing graphics explosion the net overnight switched from a whispering revolutionary underground to the grande epicenter for every kind of marketing. Nowadays internet addictions like web browsing and fantasy gameplay have emerged as ever new permutations of the act of obsessive shopping. We now have thousands of novel ways to become consumers, not even of real goods, but of their images.

So much for technological solutions to human problems.

We all stand on a precipice. Our technological future has gone awry and there appears to be no way to stop or turn or slow it down. We are asked only to keep up. As a culture Americans are slaves to innovation, so that every new gadget or bit of software is embraced, although neither generally improves the quality of our lives, only alters it. Every time I'm invited to join a new social network site I feel the cords and bindings of the digital prison enfolding and tightening.

So much for the engines of commerce that Americans appear to equate with freedom.

I've taken to canceling almost all online participation outside of emails. I ignore most requests for political involvement via the net. The email lists I can't cancel I'm diverting to the junk box. An exception is lists that do not in any way require me to respond. I will not Twitter. I will only reluctantly Facebook. I haven't attended to my web site in more than two years. I accept all emails addressed to me by actual people. I will answer all such emails.

My choice is to narrowcast.

Americans have essentially converted the near infinite mazes of the subconscious into an electronic shopping mall. I learned early on never to go 'out there' in the imaginary world without either a clear objective or a clear trail of corn to mark the way back home. That said, there's everything to be discovered, both good and bad, although the majority of what's valuable is still in the form of text, mostly crowded between columns of advertising.

"Reality is so flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless distinction."

   -   Richard K. Morgan Altered Carbon

"Put it up on the viewscreen." - Captain Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise

Star Trek marked our full entry as a culture into the realm where reality is not apprehended directly, but through an intermediate electronic interface. There are no windows on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The control room duplicates the reality of the television viewer. As we sit in our living rooms and switch the channels on various monitors displaying representations of a world beyond our particular location in space and time we are absorbed by the culture of simulacra.

Here are two pieces that further illuminate these observations. The first is a short story by George Saunders who writes frequent fiction for the New Yorker. I was recently turned on to this guy and, instantly addicted, have begun exploring his archives on the The New Yorker website.

"Jon" by George Saunders

The second is an essay by artist Chad Scoville that was narrowcast recently over the ctheory.net mailing list. It's a little bit crazy but hits many essential points.

Media Dopplers by Chad Scoville

))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

"(The Pirate ship is) a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea; and from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens...In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."

- Michel Foucalt

"The pirate ship's very excess of closure detaches it from its initial context, and gives it an unlimited freedom to wander and explore."

- Doom Patrols 1995-1997 Steven Shaviro

Enormous thunderheads hover slowly above the high plain. Standing at the boundary, leaning on a fence that skirts the edges of this old ranch property I gaze across the eroding border between the developed outskirts of the city and the open spaces of desert and pinon. Soon, I know, these long rolling ridges that meet the horizon under threatening clouds will be covered with human habitations and newly paved asphalt streets. I look forward to catch a glimpse of the future world my son will inherit. I can't adequately guide him on his path through that world, any more than my parents could guide me through the one I faced growing up. In the words of Stephen King in his Dark Tower cycle, the world has "moved on." What my parents, coming out of the Great Depression and World War Two, wanted for me was a path though high school and then to college and on to a better paying job as a professional something or other. My generation was raised by the GI Bill and taught lessons from the Great Depression and the Great Conflict; how to struggle and climb out of a life that always threatens scarcity, to find and take whatever advantage one can aquire, to succeed, to win the race, to be the victor in an eternal battle against chaos. These are the lessons imprinted on my genes, no matter where I find myself or how much I strive to change the rules.

In the context of a world where technological revolutions arrive with relentless frequency, every generation is transitional. Each successive generation struggles to hold the line at what is familiar while the next generation is forced to integrate entirely new modes of discourse and forms of organization. Our parents learned of the larger world from books and newspapers and the radio. My generation learned from television. My son is plugged into a network of independent nodes of information and discourse based not on the religious, national or ideological interests that have driven civilizations for centuries, but on the unique exercise of individual expression distributed across networks that transcend spacial and temporal boundaries

"They're coming at us." - Al Swarengin in Deadwood

The rules, nevertheless, keep changing. The excesses of World War Two left a generation stunned into a strange balance between hope and cynicism, entrepreneurial zeal and deep fearful distrust of the world "out there." At the same time the technological advances of the war kicked the world into the age of electronic media. The cultural centerpiece of family and society, portrayed nostalgically in all of those Norman Rockwell paintings of small town gatherings and boy scouts and people who radiate a physical sense of place, was replaced by the virtual world of radio, television, and the World Wide Web.

Prophets and visionaries like Tielhard de Chardin with his evolutionary spirituality and Buckminster Fuller with his Spaceship Earth predicted the benign effects of this inevitable advance. They didn't predict the level of chaos through which the old world would have to pass in order to arrive at the new.

What images drive my son's world? Star Trek went on to become the perfect metaphor for the board room and the collective as a corporate military cooperative. My generation entertained the utopian notion of attaining a better world through technological superiority, but in the end it was 9/11 that pulled the final curtain on the Trekkie universe as remotely attainable in our lifetimes. The final franchise of that long running series devolved into warfare and paranoia and finally, cancellation.

We now live in an age of pirates.

We are past the point where we forge our primary identity out of affiliation with nation, state, social class or religion. We are like wanderers on the seas of fate, liberating the artifacts of identity, persona, profile, personal history, assembling all of these fragments as we travel between stations and information nodes on the grid. We live mostly in our imaginations, telling and retelling the narratives of our pirate journey until it approximates more or less the myth we've manufactured and chosen to inhabit. Personal identity is fluid, another form of commodity, trapped in the cage of a collapsing civilization always seeking a way out beyond the boundaries of commerce. Yet, the only way out appears to be forward, to move more quickly than the machine, so we move faster, breaking the rules or using the rules against the mechanism, until the machine finds a way to incorporate our audacity into new forms of business.

When I was very young my friends and I watched the interstate highways built through our neighborhoods. Thousands of households were displaced. Huge swaths of the city resembled war zones. We wandered through the wastelands, exploring abandoned blocks of buildings, empty factories and warehouses, watching the meandering urban parkland creeks of our childhood explorations converted into straightened concrete ditches, and whole blocks full of houses pushed by bulldozers into enormous bonfires. Like soldiers in some guerilla war we stalked the enormous mechanical monstrosities that roared back and forth, scraping flat the woods and valleys of our playground. At night we sabotaged construction equipment and dodged the bright headlights of lumbering earth movers. Thus the artifacts of apocalypse were at the center of our childhood play. Our parents worshipped progress while the things that gave us a sense of place were run over by it.

Many grew up to be outcasts, having no particular allegiance to place or time, living in a world of constant flux and altered currents, disrespectful of borders, traditions, restrictions, continually at odds with those who took the lesson of fear and made it truth. We wandered among the sacred symbols, stealing whatever we wished and making it the fuel for our adventures.

Once upon a time society was a widely dispersed network of communities, tenuously connected by roads and trade routes. Each node in the network defined itself apart from all other nodes and every node had a distinct center and a periphery that ended at the boundary of what was sometimes called 'wilderness'.

With the rise of electronic culture the world became one enormous city, without circumference or center, strung like a net through the electronic ethers and extending far out into space. The world of tribal media culture transcends the boundaries of nation states and so the long slow dissolution of nationality begins in the cauldron of globalization. The world becomes a city and the city becomes an ocean.

Oppression has a new face, captured most accurately by the Wachowski's in their films depicting The Matrix, an environment composed entirely of simulacra, that is, simulations of life generated for the sole purpose of providing fuel for the machineries of consumption. What had been a network of geographical centers is in electronic space just one continuous membrane, one enormous urban environment in which identity is derived through the interaction of images, as in a mirror.

"As a child I believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was nothing more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change."

   - Robert Morgan, "Altered Carbon"

My friends and I had an abandoned city to wander in and to play out our fantasies. Today's children have whole evolving universes in which to roam and interact. Electronic culture is a constantly cycling feedback mechanism, where commerce fosters the creation of imaginary worlds and these worlds in turn effect the way individuals regard themselves and society. Mythical landscapes expand and intersect, spawning connections as people wander between realms exploring the geometry of imagination and fabricating relationships across vast distances compressed instantaneously in time. Fantasy mirrors politics, philosophy morphs into code, and the separation of human thought and machine language is erased in an instant of choice and decision inside of virtual space. We approach identity like liquid sculpture, ephemeral and permeable, evolving in a constant dance within the data stream.

Technology both unites and isolates. The nervous system we've thrown over the world brings us instantaneously into each other's presence while the overwhelming power of visual imagery separates us from sensual contact with other bodies in space. Individually and collectively, when we gaze into screens and through lenses, the world recedes into a perception of unreality and distance. The precipice at which we find ourselves is one of choice and discretion. The only way to wrest control from the machine is to find a way to see our real face reflected in the faces of real people. Freedom is a direct function of our ability to unplug.

A Precipice

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:11:23 -0500

"It's not just a question of worrying or of hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons."

- Guy Deleuze "Postscript on Control Societies"

I purchased my first personal computer in 1984, the year that the first Apple MacIntosh hit the market and changed everything about the way we related to the world behind the screen. There were only two programs that ran on the machine, MacWrite and MacDraw, but you could plug into a modem and then to your telephone jack and using a code called <telnet> you could reach people on the other side of the world almost instantaneously. It was all very mysterious and underground and science fictiony at first. There was no capitalism involved. You could only transmit and receive text so the only limit to your vision was your imagination. We were just a bunch of geeks, mostly researchers and college professors and students full of dreams of future possibilities based on some rhapsodic sense of technological utopia.

The first time someone tried to make money on the net, a couple of lawyers I think sent out a mass mailing soliciting clients. They were viciously trashed for their audacity from one end of the internet to the other. Soon after, the first graphical interface came out of Switzerland accompanied by a rapid rise in the use of personal computers, and with the ensuing graphics explosion the net overnight switched from a whispering revolutionary underground to the grande epicenter for every kind of marketing. Nowadays internet addictions like web browsing and fantasy gameplay have emerged as ever new permutations of the act of obsessive shopping. We now have thousands of novel ways to become consumers, not even of real goods, but of their images.

So much for technological solutions to human problems.

We all stand on a precipice. Our technological future has gone awry and there appears to be no way to stop or turn or slow it down. We are asked only to keep up. As a culture Americans are slaves to innovation, so that every new gadget or bit of software is embraced, although neither generally improves the quality of our lives, only alters it. Every time I'm invited to join a new social network site I feel the cords and bindings of the digital prison enfolding and tightening.

So much for the engines of commerce that Americans appear to equate with freedom.

I've taken to canceling almost all online participation outside of emails. I ignore most requests for political involvement via the net. The email lists I can't cancel I'm diverting to the junk box. An exception is lists that do not in any way require me to respond. I will not Twitter. I will only reluctantly Facebook. I haven't attended to my web site in more than two years. I accept all emails addressed to me by actual people. I will answer all such emails.

My choice is to narrowcast.

Americans have essentially converted the near infinite mazes of the subconscious into an electronic shopping mall. I learned early on never to go 'out there' in the imaginary world without either a clear objective or a clear trail of corn to mark the way back home. That said, there's everything to be discovered, both good and bad, although the majority of what's valuable is still in the form of text, mostly crowded between columns of advertising.

"Reality is so flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless distinction."

- Richard K. Morgan Altered Carbon

"Put it up on the viewscreen." - Captain Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise

Star Trek marked our full entry as a culture into the realm where reality is not apprehended directly, but through an intermediate electronic interface. There are no windows on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The control room duplicates the reality of the television viewer. As we sit in our living rooms and switch the channels on various monitors displaying representations of a world beyond our particular location in space and time we are absorbed by the culture of simulacra.

Here are two pieces that further illuminate these observations. The first is a short story by George Saunders who writes frequent fiction for the New Yorker. I was recently turned on to this guy and, instantly addicted, have begun exploring his archives on the The New Yorker website.

"Jon" by George Saunders

The second is an essay by artist Chad Scoville that was narrowcast recently over the ctheory.net mailing list. It's a little bit crazy but hits many essential points.

Media Dopplers by Chad Scoville

))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

"(The Pirate ship is) a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea; and from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens...In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."

- Michel Foucalt

"The pirate ship's very excess of closure detaches it from its initial context, and gives it an unlimited freedom to wander and explore."

- Doom Patrols 1995-1997 Steven Shaviro

Enormous thunderheads hover slowly above the high plain. Standing at the boundary, leaning on a fence that skirts the edges of this old ranch property I gaze across the eroding border between the developed outskirts of the city and the open spaces of desert and pinon. Soon, I know, these long rolling ridges that meet the horizon under threatening clouds will be covered with human habitations and newly paved asphalt streets. I look forward to catch a glimpse of the future world my son will inherit. I can't adequately guide him on his path through that world, any more than my parents could guide me through the one I faced growing up. In the words of Stephen King in his Dark Tower cycle, the world has "moved on." What my parents, coming out of the Great Depression and World War Two, wanted for me was a path though high school and then to college and on to a better paying job as a professional something or other. My generation was raised by the GI Bill and taught lessons from the Great Depression and the Great Conflict; how to struggle and climb out of a life that always threatens scarcity, to find and take whatever advantage one can aquire, to succeed, to win the race, to be the victor in an eternal battle against chaos. These are the lessons imprinted on my genes, no matter where I find myself or how much I strive to change the rules.

In the context of a world where technological revolutions arrive with relentless frequency, every generation is transitional. Each successive generation struggles to hold the line at what is familiar while the next generation is forced to integrate entirely new modes of discourse and forms of organization. Our parents learned of the larger world from books and newspapers and the radio. My generation learned from television. My son is plugged into a network of independent nodes of information and discourse based not on the religious, national or ideological interests that have driven civilizations for centuries, but on the unique exercise of individual expression distributed across networks that transcend spacial and temporal boundaries

"They're coming at us." - Al Swarengin in Deadwood

The rules, nevertheless, keep changing. The excesses of World War Two left a generation stunned into a strange balance between hope and cynicism, entrepreneurial zeal and deep fearful distrust of the world "out there." At the same time the technological advances of the war kicked the world into the age of electronic media. The cultural centerpiece of family and society, portrayed nostalgically in all of those Norman Rockwell paintings of small town gatherings and boy scouts and people who radiate a physical sense of place, was replaced by the virtual world of radio, television, and the World Wide Web.

Prophets and visionaries like Tielhard de Chardin with his evolutionary spirituality and Buckminster Fuller with his Spaceship Earth predicted the benign effects of this inevitable advance. They didn't predict the level of chaos through which the old world would have to pass in order to arrive at the new.

What images drive my son's world? Star Trek went on to become the perfect metaphor for the board room and the collective as a corporate military cooperative. My generation entertained the utopian notion of attaining a better world through technological superiority, but in the end it was 9/11 that pulled the final curtain on the Trekkie universe as remotely attainable in our lifetimes. The final franchise of that long running series devolved into warfare and paranoia and finally, cancellation.

We now live in an age of pirates.

We are past the point where we forge our primary identity out of affiliation with nation, state, social class or religion. We are like wanderers on the seas of fate, liberating the artifacts of identity, persona, profile, personal history, assembling all of these fragments as we travel between stations and information nodes on the grid. We live mostly in our imaginations, telling and retelling the narratives of our pirate journey until it approximates more or less the myth we've manufactured and chosen to inhabit. Personal identity is fluid, another form of commodity, trapped in the cage of a collapsing civilization always seeking a way out beyond the boundaries of commerce. Yet, the only way out appears to be forward, to move more quickly than the machine, so we move faster, breaking the rules or using the rules against the mechanism, until the machine finds a way to incorporate our audacity into new forms of business.

When I was very young my friends and I watched the interstate highways built through our neighborhoods. Thousands of households were displaced. Huge swaths of the city resembled war zones. We wandered through the wastelands, exploring abandoned blocks of buildings, empty factories and warehouses, watching the meandering urban parkland creeks of our childhood explorations converted into straightened concrete ditches, and whole blocks full of houses pushed by bulldozers into enormous bonfires. Like soldiers in some guerilla war we stalked the enormous mechanical monstrosities that roared back and forth, scraping flat the woods and valleys of our playground. At night we sabotaged construction equipment and dodged the bright headlights of lumbering earth movers. Thus the artifacts of apocalypse were at the center of our childhood play. Our parents worshipped progress while the things that gave us a sense of place were run over by it.

Many grew up to be outcasts, having no particular allegiance to place or time, living in a world of constant flux and altered currents, disrespectful of borders, traditions, restrictions, continually at odds with those who took the lesson of fear and made it truth. We wandered among the sacred symbols, stealing whatever we wished and making it the fuel for our adventures.

Once upon a time society was a widely dispersed network of communities, tenuously connected by roads and trade routes. Each node in the network defined itself apart from all other nodes and every node had a distinct center and a periphery that ended at the boundary of what was sometimes called 'wilderness'.

With the rise of electronic culture the world became one enormous city, without circumference or center, strung like a net through the electronic ethers and extending far out into space. The world of tribal media culture transcends the boundaries of nation states and so the long slow dissolution of nationality begins in the cauldron of globalization. The world becomes a city and the city becomes an ocean.

Oppression has a new face, captured most accurately by the Wachowski's in their films depicting The Matrix, an environment composed entirely of simulacra, that is, simulations of life generated for the sole purpose of providing fuel for the machineries of consumption. What had been a network of geographical centers is in electronic space just one continuous membrane, one enormous urban environment in which identity is derived through the interaction of images, as in a mirror.

"As a child I believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was nothing more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change."

- Robert Morgan, "Altered Carbon"

My friends and I had an abandoned city to wander in and to play out our fantasies. Today's children have whole evolving universes in which to roam and interact. Electronic culture is a constantly cycling feedback mechanism, where commerce fosters the creation of imaginary worlds and these worlds in turn effect the way individuals regard themselves and society. Mythical landscapes expand and intersect, spawning connections as people wander between realms exploring the geometry of imagination and fabricating relationships across vast distances compressed instantaneously in time. Fantasy mirrors politics, philosophy morphs into code, and the separation of human thought and machine language is erased in an instant of choice and decision inside of virtual space. We approach identity like liquid sculpture, ephemeral and permeable, evolving in a constant dance within the data stream.

Technology both unites and isolates. The nervous system we've thrown over the world brings us instantaneously into each other's presence while the overwhelming power of visual imagery separates us from sensual contact with other bodies in space. Individually and collectively, when we gaze into screens and through lenses, the world recedes into a perception of unreality and distance. The precipice at which we find ourselves is one of choice and discretion. The only way to wrest control from the machine is to find a way to see our real face reflected in the faces of real people. Freedom is a direct function of our ability to unplug.

The Facts

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:10:20 -0400

The child is given a puzzle as a preparation for life. We go through life surrounded by puzzle pieces that we call 'facts.' We assemble these facts into shapes and narratives in order to make sense of it all. We are given maps by our elders that we either accept or reject, and we form from this the world we call 'our' world, out of our own preconceptions.

Facts are like angular molecules with different faces, like those geometric blocks where every face is made to fit a corresponding face on another molecule. Every 'fact' has at least one face that is not attached to anything, forming an open structure always subject to change or revision. This is the face of uncertainty. Our preconceptions are the operating instructions about which facts are to be joined with which and in what order. Our convictions are the DNA and the glue that holds the world together. We move forward in life through a cloud of anonymous facts and we proceed to assemble the world like an infinitely variable puzzle. What we believe is what we see.

If we think we are ill then all the facts will point to illness. If we believe in a god then the facts will point us toward god. If we believe in angels or UFO's then our lives will be full of visitations. If we think that the CIA murdered Kennedy then the facts will build a perfect picture of that case. If we are convinced that 9/11 was planned by the government, we will build a picture in which that also appears to be true, as it appears to 'fit the facts.'

When we meet another person and get to know them the arrangement of all of our 'facts' is altered and revised as our perception of the universe changes. True and deep friendship thus leads us to profound alterations in our consciousness. True love reshapes our whole world.

All facts breed their opposites. An 'enlightened' Christian civilization breeds zombies and vampires and apocalypse. Science breeds superstition along with all kinds of unforeseen consequences. Order breeds chaos. An empire built on shallow agreements comes apart like old glue.

Where do we find the truth in all of this?

We're suffering a plague of paranoia these days. On one extreme we have believers in cosmic planetary shifts that will snuff out civilization as we know it virtually overnight. This will be the effect of a wayward planet that fast approaches the outer limits of our solar system. Tidal waves will cover the coasts, whirlwinds will devastate cities, sea levels will rise over 100 feet and the safest place to be o this continent is be the Missouri-Arkansas Ozark mountains. The governments of the world know all about this and are moving to preserve their intelligence and military infrastructures by covertly moving them above the approaching tide. We should prepare ourselves by forming groups of at least six well-armed, well provisioned adults (so someone will always be awake), and move to higher ground as far away from major population centers as possible.

The local cultural rag for Halloween this week printed a feature called "Apocalypse Soon" that explores various end of life-as-we-know-it scenarios from global weather changes to overpopulation to nuclear disruptions and societal collapse. The article basically employs the device of using our dystopian fears to address the political and social issues facing the nation. The hook is our fascination with horror stories and disaster epics, particularly in a season when we are celebrating our nightmares. Hell, I plan to go see the upcoming 2012 movie by the director of Independence Day because, well, I just like to see big things get blown up. There's something about worse-case scenarios that make for an unparalleled Hollywood roller coaster ride. I'm as fascinated as anyone with all of that Revelations imagery about the end times. Like many of us I grew up with it, and then incorporated it with few revisions into New Age prophecies, from Harmonic Convergence, to Y2K, to the return of the Mother Ship.

There's now a whole industry on the Internet, and in VFW halls in Bumfuck, Texas devoted to proving that President Obama is planning to disband the Constitution and that the whole Global Warming thing is part of the Oligarchy's plan to distract us and force us into a New World Order of One World Government. This of course, is a scenario partly outlined in the hallucinatory text of the Book of Revelations and illuminated for modern readers by LaHaye and Jenkins in their best selling "Left Behind" books. All of this would be an amusing glimpse at an underlying tendency infecting Christian cultures, except that it's been taken up by the far right as fuel for the fires of prejudice and cultural disruption. Echoes and reflections of this hysterical rhetoric have now become major drivers in the political manipulations of those who feel their power threatened by any serious change.

Somebody sent me a link to a sprawling documentary called The Fall of the Republic by slick right wing media operator Alex Jones that's an all purpose paranoid summing up of every half-cocked conspiracy theory on the planet. He paints a picture that tells us essentially that any action taken by any government anywhere for any purpose whatever is part of a plot by the shadowy "Oligarchs" to take away our freedoms and destroy the Bill of Rights. "We've got to recapture control of the power centers of society," says an interviewee, and I have to ask, who is this 'we'? Everyone in the film appears to be a Protestant white guy. The 'facts' I'm seeing here are white guys in a panic. A black man is president, the economy is crashing and the government is taking control of large sections of the economy away from the petty thieves that have driven it into the ground. On top of all this, the people who assume cultural superiority and their right to be first in a somewhat segregated line-up will soon be in the voting minority. To the people who see their power fading it appears to be the oligarchs on the Council of Foreign Relations who are plotting to take the power from white folks and spread it around to foreigners.

Why is all of this surfacing in a tsunami of dread right now? Symptoms of some underlying lunacy appear to be surfacing almost everyday in our arts, politics, the media, religious dogmas and most pervasively on the Internet.

There appears to be a desperate need to find some simplified map or guidebook in an increasingly complex world, one that shows how all of the puzzle pieces fit together. I can appreciate the attraction of scenarios that feature other dimensions, angels and UFO's, to explain the synchronicity and wonder that offers us guideposts and markers in our lives. The idea of more evolved beings looking on our efforts can be positive, as it may lead us to some improved behavior. Personally, I draw the line at conspiracy theories. I've never met one that I thought worth dwelling on for more than an instant. They all seem ultimately to lead nowhere and those who obsess on this stuff tend to do absolutely nothing constructive with it. Conspiracy buffs are like addicts and their obsession leads them only deeper into endless rabbit holes.

The darkest side of all this craziness is driven by the engine of apocalyptic thinking. In our belief in the 'end times' lurks both an obsession with, and a fear and denial of death. The crucifixion and the apocalypse are two brackets around christian thought. While the crucifixion dramatizes the suffering of Christ in the incarnate world, the apocalypse promises ultimately an end to all of our suffering as we, the chosen, spend eternity in God's country club. The subsequent determination of who is chosen and who isn't offers endless opportunity for the cynical manipulation of people's most virulent fears and prejudices.

Christian cultures have been awaiting the end times for 2,000 years, and before that the Jews waited and before that were the Sumerians, and all of this waiting filters down into the undercurrent of civilization so in some sense we are all anticipating that frightening and magical moment when the skies will open. My own sense is that we will keep on waiting endlessly, until by some magical or scientific means we have learned how to overcome death. I'm not counting the years.

Meanwhile, I will remain a skeptic, and those of you who would try and convince me that some outside force or secret cabal is controlling our world are not likely to get much of my serious attention. My approach to systems of belief has always been, "Know them by their works," and you will have to inspire something much more positive than either 'fear thy neighbor' or 'fear the government' if you want to be taken seriously. If you want me to join your cause or endorse your set of agreements, you better have a vision that promises more than being on the 'right' side, or you are not likely to get beyond my front door.

Happy Halloween.

* * * * * * * * * *

You can't stop the signal.

To subscribe to the Arclist send a message to melcher@nets.com

Hat's off to Michael

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:10:44 -0400

Something has changed in these past few weeks. My own life has turned a corner and I feel like I’m coming out of a long dark tunnel. Still the world of battle calls to me as it always has. I look at those who fan the confusion and desperation in the world into explosions of rage and fear and the temptation is to fire back with ruthless precision in some vain attempt to shame them into retreat. The election showed us, however, that something in the national psyche has also turned a corner, and there are forces in motion that won’t be stopped by those who offer commentaries based on the past.

I just watched the new Michael Moore movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story” for the second time and I would like to take my hat off to brother Michael, as someone who has pursued a relentless vision through the seasons of both praise and ridicule without ever surrendering to the expedient. Moore is both a political cartoonist and a dramatist, He weaves political themes into a narrative about the common man by casting himself as the central character in a style that evokes the depression era comedies of Charlie Chaplin. His art is the ability to summon both laughter and outrage simultaneously.

The current film is Moore’s most ambitious and his best so far. It’s also the most personal, as he takes us back to his roots in Flint, Michigan, interviewing his father, showing us movies of his youth, and playing clips from his first feature “Roger and Me”, the movie that put him on the map and forged his unique style. He shows us as clearly as he can the elements that have influenced his own personal ideology and point of view. “Capitalism is an evil, and evil can’t be regulated, it must be eliminated”, is the central thesis of this film, and it’s a statement backed most forcefully by the religious leaders, priests and bishops, who encouraged the development of a social consciousness in Moore as a child.

At both showings that I’ve attended the audience has been a mix of young and old and there has been both applause at the end and a considerable number of people staying on through all of the credits (which feature an outrageous and original version of the socialist anthem, “The Internationale”, sung in big band Sinatra, Las Vegas style), both significant signs of appreciation.

I’ll say no more. Let Michael make his case.

Lastly, I’d like to comment on the Barack Obama Nobel Peace Prize thing. I find it bewildering that so many Americans, particularly those in the media, appear so taken aback by the giving of this award to our very own former hero and now embattled president. Who cares what a bunch of “Norwegian leftists” (in the words of David Brooks) think about Obama? “What has he accomplished,” echoes the disgruntled chorus.

What all of this illustrates, as if we needed another illustration, is the disconnect of many if not most Americans, between our own internal concerns and squabbles and both the influence and the responsibility we have to the rest of the world. Truly the record of awards given to Americans has been checkered and at times bizarre, when you consider that Henry Kissinger was a recipient, but the consistent factor is that at a given moment in history the Nobel committee appears to reflect an internationally felt political sentiment, and the award is a commentary delivered on a much larger stage than that of internal American politics.

Barack Obama, just by being elected, and in both actions and words spoken since, has radically altered the image of America and it’s foreign policy more than any president since John F. Kennedy. The ongoing effects of this on the international mood are incalculable, but undeniable. We are a long way from world peace, but that goal can never be approached in an atmosphere of belligerence. Can you imagine any starker contrast than between the image of America projected by George Bush and that of Barack Obama? I doubt that we can conceive the sense of relief that Obama’s image has carried across the globe, even in the midst of all the ongoing and terrible wars and traumas that inflict us. If little that is concrete has been achieved and completed since Obama’s election, at least the air we all breathe carries less of a feeling of constriction and paranoia than it did.

Republicans, of course will say that this new image is one of weakness in the face of the ongoing threat, but that worry doesn’t play with much authority outside of the arena of our own domestic politics. The real battle lines are now drawn not between Americans and all of the nasty foreign threats from outside, but between the international defenders of an obsolete system that serves no one but the wealthy and the machineries of greed, and the re-emergence of a true Democracy, not in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in the United States. Republicans have clearly chosen their sides in that struggle.

Big Creek - 1981

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 08:09:24 -0400

Next week I head toward Cleveland by car and toward a reunion with my oldest friends. I was sorting through my papers and came up with this poem from 1981 (slightly edited). It tells of our adventures together (even before we went to Woodstock and witnessed that barbarian dream of another nation rising.)

Big Creek

The curved stream in winter,

couched quietly in snow shadows

where three boys wander

(smell the cold and slipping clay).

Their frigid breath clouding the air,

Their trail of footprints

coming through the brush,

down cliffs, out of wood paths

where ice drips from dark limbs.

The leader carries a stick.

All three are zipped in coats and hoods,

frozen feet curling inside boots

on this coldest day of winter.

Woods and creek almost silent.

Under the thick ice of the creek

a gurgling sound where warm sewer water

issues from city conduits,

releasing wet steaming odors into the barren air.

In the summer

a hole is made in the fence

where woods vibrate down a steep hill

into the zoo.

There's an empty swimming pool,

a railroad trestle,

manholes into long tunnels,

tracks and gullies,

cement bridges and hillsides of dandelions,

the violent thistles and the City all around.

The creek is alive and rushing in wide brown churning,

the muddy waters where we are wanderers,

soldiers,

our sticks swinging against the thistles

in a motion like swords.

In the fall

we pick a careful path across the silent earth

that hides our place of loss.

We are the mercenaries of a lost city.

We are the voices of the bulldozed ground,

vandals that stalk the machines

and set the discarded brush afire,

then follow our pre-planned escape

to the top of a concrete bridge

that overlooks the spoiled park.

For the shortest time we feel the chill of ecstasy

that these defiant hands and feet ignite,

as we watch the fire engines gather below.

A moment of resistance against the Road,

the noise of bulldozers, the crawling lights,

all of these powers that rip the soul out of summer nights.

Now there is an Interchange

where trees and rivers were.

My memories are all that remains of these neighborhoods,

these woods, that winding creek between shale cliffs,

now buried in asphalt, confined in culverts.

Only the road remains to take me to other places

of life and water, to other cities, to plains and mountains

where children explore and speculate on their trails of fantasy.