Editor’s Note: Marlow shipped this one to me a couple days ago, admonishing me to use it when the times were right, or something crazy happened. It happened to me last night. I try to stay awake for the Tucker Carlson Show. His commentary is interesting, and I remember enjoying his career from the days when he was funny about the events of the day. His humor got hard edged after the mob came to his house while he was on the air, scaring his wife and kids. He got my attention yesterday, talking about the Director of DIA’s reading list, which included a popular book to help us through this difficult time. I have written about some of the elements of the information operations campaign to ensure the election of one of the candidates. This is part of it. Last night, I went through some of the background noise that is rising in volume. Some allegedly intellectual people are all over it, predicting trouble if there is anything aside from a Biden landslide. I am going to be prepared for anything, but the old America I knew hasn’t put up with anything like this since 1861. I am going to watch with interest and humor. Here is the Director’s book recommendation:

This was Marlow’s reaction to things in general:
😱
– Vic

What lies Beyond

Author’s Note: As one of your last pieces pulled the drapes back from the window to the parlor of pals who see our “now” in totally different ways, I sense American culture crossing some serious frontier boundaries. What lies beyond may be seriously painful.

Here are some ravings about our lonely webbed civilization.

-Marlow



I missed a very dull TV show about some historical abomination last night. More gruesome film clips and more puzzled academics declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. “How could it possibly happen?” is the wrong question. The correct question is “Why doesn’t it happen more often?”

Just changing channels to find something no longer works now that W and I binged our way through the 267 half-hour episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

The present has gone. Fantasy is a part of reality, but we take the breaks off. We’re thinking clearly, yet not thinking at all. This feels right. When we stop trying to control things, a warm rush of chemicals through us. Is this brain damage? Maybe.

If we’re lucky, we forget all the hurt and pain in life. We wanna go somewhere else and the web makes it possible. We’re not threatened by actual people anymore. All our insecurities just evaporate.

We’re in the cloud now — wide open, like spacemen, orbiting the earth. Life and the world look beautiful from up here. We’ve attained the unattainable. We risk our very sanity for moments of temporary but meaningless clarity. Our last thoughts forever killed by anticipation of the next.

What the fuck were we thinking?

Well, what goes up, must come down, and down, and down. Everyone will look rather ill in the end, being forced to read, hear, and then watch the magical stories of the genesis of fourth “Star Wars” film.

The Force is like dead, man.

—–

Americans now live in a culture entirely perceived through old broadcast and cable TV but mostly new social media images, stories, and illusions. We all live in a Yellow Submarine of self-referential bullshit that purports to show us an America that has, in reality, not existed for quite some time now. Fading, smudged carbon copies. Low def, grainy reruns.

The well-off middle class with our upscale consumer values live inside distant Disneyland communities with uninhabited front porches representing homey notions of America’s past neighborhoods and families. The working-class, aka the deplorables, is a spectator of, not a participant in, these imagistic parades of progress and process. Our American republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers, and heroic first responders is just marketing imagery. America’s citizenry has been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by our own consumer goods and culture producing machinery.

This hollow electronic and digital shell of a nation called the United States is now animated by manipulation of its various units’ needs-hierarchies for goods and information. Sure, there is flesh inside this machine, but there is a real rage against this machine while it sells us refrigerators and them color tee-vees.

We are forever hard-sold Hollywood myths, imperial myths, melting pot myths, and saluting the flag myths. They keep the machine and those of us inside it happily humming.

As it was with broadcast and cable TV, America now spends about one third of its waking life inside social media. The neuro implications of this are beyond profound. They create our reality, regulate our perceptions and our BS dreams and schemes regarding what America is — THE best and only important tribe on the planet.

American culture, if it can be said to exist in any cohesive way, is based upon two things, social media and cheap-assed crap made in Asian sweat shops and delivered to your door free of charge with a $140/year membership fee. Whether you are a laborer or the President, your world depends upon an unbroken connection to both feeds.

Old and new media demand for “newsmakers” or “breaking news” is relentless as their corporate machinery weaves the warp of consumer illusions that make up their understanding of what their sponsors need now and may want in the future. The wellness of our democracy and its mythology is not within their ken.

Human civilization has seen national level projects that now serve as benchmarks of mankind’s cultural progress — pyramid-building in Egypt, cathedral-building in medieval Europe, and nearly two centuries of privately and publicly financed transportation networks of railway, roadway and airway building in America . To this string we are about to add on a global scale the production of political martyrs, fallen heroes and concept outlaws. The essence of this new “news” is the modern version of the Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats with daily ritual bloodletting through streamed wars and domestic murders, with studio ensconced talking head detectives finding the corpses on the hour and half hour 24/7. This is interspersed with rage panels declaring who is at fault and who should be praised and compensated.

This is why we rarely find anything much resembling the facts let alone the truth in U.S. newspapers, magazines, documentaries, and new media. Yet we revere our own “truths” and “facts” in these parallel realities. Science and technology have been declared our new national religion, while we are told to ignore the underlying funding source for this new project — tech-infused corporate world whose function is to sell us commodities. There is no way out of this machine where we need cars, smartphones, and great connection speeds to function, to participate, and to succeed.

Is American culture, as it was, nearly over? Maybe. Is it sustainable? Probably not. Reformable? Definitely not to the standards of the rising class. Gotta tear it down. Start over.

We are witnessing the replacement of all previous forms of knowledge and ancient wisdom and are letting ourselves be colonized by this new media like a virus. The natural world is boring. We are mesmerized and comfortably numb in a hypnotic medium as it perfectly programs stimuli-response loops in our reactions to our own feelings which have been cookie analyzed and doled back out to us, and we pay them money to do so.

Freaking Brilliant! They have commodified our consciousness. Perhaps the most astounding accomplishment of any human culture to date.

Thanks, America.

Welcome to the New Dominion.

Where do we render our tribute?

Visa, Master Card, Paypal? Tap only no more swiping or touch screening allowed.

The only other alternative for the unprivileged and unarmed is to sleep under a bridge. Freedom is still possible.

Copyright © 2020 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com