The Future is Now: Back to the Future
Jan. 11th, 2004 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistHowever, we make rockets
And tame the Enisey River
And also in the area of ballet,
We are ahead of the whole planet.
The lyrics are from an old Soviet song. I think the musical genre en masse in the former USSR was affected the most by the normative aesthetic of social realism. When I am a crazy old lady, I am going to be the crazy old lady that sings songs from the Soviet Regime, because like every Soviet schoolgirl, in addition to learning the piano and how to ice-skate, I had to sing in the school choir. By the mid-80s, when I was a first-grader, the cult-of-personality ouvre was phased out, and we did not have to sing about some everyman shepherd goat-herder in a random annexed Central Asian republic, who wakes up real early to tend to his flock of sheep, or goats, or whatever, but upon seeing a little smoke ring, apparently deployed all the way from the Kremlin by Comrade Stalin, he realizes that Comrade Stalin had gotten up and got started on a blunt, or whatever, before, he, the sheepgoatherder blew his herding horn. We did have to sing the song that started "We were born to make the fairy tale a reality," which was an oldie, and which my parents' generation rewrote as "we were born to make Kafka a reality" which is much more phonetically punny in Russian, as well as, like, every single WWII song. And there were lots of them. It's obvious that BushCo don't really know their memetics, otherwise they would conscript Willie Nelson, a la Wag The Dog, to write The Ballad of Jessica Lynch or whatever. Or, like, write an opera, like Prokofiev's Story of a Real Man, which I had to see every year with the aforementioned grade school choir, and I always wanted to cry (not from sadness but because my brain was about to explode) during the protagonis Meresyev's aria mainly consisting of imploring the doctors: "Do not, do not cut Meresyev's legs off," while the doctors circled around like voulchers, baritoning that "We will cut, we will cut Meresyev's legs off." The point is, music as a medium, as a form, is how the Soviet Regime's begeisterung was manifested. It's also a prime object for historical hindsight, because while official narratives are always tailored to history books, and the worst they can be called is "Orwellian," which is still a reified category, the ineffable, abject whatthefuckness of the geist can be found on the margins or in the illustrations, in music, in anekdoti, etc.
But that is a tangent. What I really wanted to talk about was the Sovietization of the BushCo administration. The signs have been there for a while, the atavism, the retro-ness of the realpolitik PNAC approach, this article, which illustrates both the obliteration of "free speech" and the accompanying implosion of the categories of "metaphorical" and "literal," Bush's fake plastic turkey, bred on a fake plastic turkey farm in the Potemkin Village region, which, although a phenomenon predating the Soviet Regime, was nevertheless implemented by them enthusiastically and in every perverted way possible, with the apex (or the nadir, I suppose) being the Bukharin trial, where subversuve Bukharin, through Aesopean language and all kinds of inspired rhetorical devices, taught everyone about the contraption of "political responsibility," a more subtle j'accuse than the old Communist who recites an obviously rehearsed confession to trumped-up charges and drops his pants in the middle, in The Confession, a Czech film based on the Slansky show trials.
The thing about the Soviet system was that any sort of sustained productivity was completely impossible, but the modus operandi was evolutionary catastrophism, where sudden huge leaps would transpire, enough for The Soviet Union to maintain its street cred in its ongoing "race" with the United States, a "race" that permeated every discourse well into the end of the 1980s. In the USSR, that is. I don't think my American peers knew we were "racing." I dunno, did y'all know we were racing? But we grew up with plackards and banners saying "We will catch up with and surpass the United States: the nest of capitalism." We carried these banners when we ran marathons for the veterans, and my mom and dad had them in their workplaces. We were totally racing 110% of the time. Naturally, it was a Sisyphian enterprise, exemplified by an old joke about a beautiful American car smoothly speeding down a paved road, sunroof down, Beach Boys playing; and along the side of the road, a feral bull, with one horn broken off, and covered in blood and foam, is crashing through thorny shrubbery and screaming "And we will take a different road." But one area in which we totally caught up and surpassed was, of course, space exploration. The USSR totally sent Gagarin into space, and no amount of fake moon landings on the part of the United States could steal their thunder. In a way, since space is the ultimate imaginary, the final frontier of all final frontiers, it is the perfect medium for pure Empire, without pesky land claims or colonized subjects. And now, in the ultimate un-50s maneuver, Bush Plans to Send Americans to Moon, on to Mars. Of course, Dick Cheney ribbeted something to the effect that the administration was said to see the initiative as an important national security measure (oh, man, space terrorism! An Al-Qaedaroid Belt Threat!) and experts said it could lead to new technologies and potential new sources of energy. But really, the trillion dollars that's going to drive the final nail in the coffin of social security are going to be spent on this production because Big Projects are a way of artificially maintaining the level of patriotism. Space Exploration is like insulin to a diabetic. Mars is totally going to be on the map much more so than Afghanistan, which will totally be under Taliban control again after all the humanitarian agencies split. But launching a rocket is really like fireworks. Nationally televized, phallic fireworks. I take it back. It's Soviet in propaganda, and it's gonna be Soviet in execution with The Shrub in a NASA suite, but it goes much further back in public consciousness control ethos: Panem et circenses. Nero played the fiddle, while Rome burned. I highly doubt The Shrub could string two notes together, because notes are kind of like syllables, but if he could, he would strike me as a percussion man. Bang bang and choo-choo into space.
And tame the Enisey River
And also in the area of ballet,
We are ahead of the whole planet.
The lyrics are from an old Soviet song. I think the musical genre en masse in the former USSR was affected the most by the normative aesthetic of social realism. When I am a crazy old lady, I am going to be the crazy old lady that sings songs from the Soviet Regime, because like every Soviet schoolgirl, in addition to learning the piano and how to ice-skate, I had to sing in the school choir. By the mid-80s, when I was a first-grader, the cult-of-personality ouvre was phased out, and we did not have to sing about some everyman shepherd goat-herder in a random annexed Central Asian republic, who wakes up real early to tend to his flock of sheep, or goats, or whatever, but upon seeing a little smoke ring, apparently deployed all the way from the Kremlin by Comrade Stalin, he realizes that Comrade Stalin had gotten up and got started on a blunt, or whatever, before, he, the sheepgoatherder blew his herding horn. We did have to sing the song that started "We were born to make the fairy tale a reality," which was an oldie, and which my parents' generation rewrote as "we were born to make Kafka a reality" which is much more phonetically punny in Russian, as well as, like, every single WWII song. And there were lots of them. It's obvious that BushCo don't really know their memetics, otherwise they would conscript Willie Nelson, a la Wag The Dog, to write The Ballad of Jessica Lynch or whatever. Or, like, write an opera, like Prokofiev's Story of a Real Man, which I had to see every year with the aforementioned grade school choir, and I always wanted to cry (not from sadness but because my brain was about to explode) during the protagonis Meresyev's aria mainly consisting of imploring the doctors: "Do not, do not cut Meresyev's legs off," while the doctors circled around like voulchers, baritoning that "We will cut, we will cut Meresyev's legs off." The point is, music as a medium, as a form, is how the Soviet Regime's begeisterung was manifested. It's also a prime object for historical hindsight, because while official narratives are always tailored to history books, and the worst they can be called is "Orwellian," which is still a reified category, the ineffable, abject whatthefuckness of the geist can be found on the margins or in the illustrations, in music, in anekdoti, etc.
But that is a tangent. What I really wanted to talk about was the Sovietization of the BushCo administration. The signs have been there for a while, the atavism, the retro-ness of the realpolitik PNAC approach, this article, which illustrates both the obliteration of "free speech" and the accompanying implosion of the categories of "metaphorical" and "literal," Bush's fake plastic turkey, bred on a fake plastic turkey farm in the Potemkin Village region, which, although a phenomenon predating the Soviet Regime, was nevertheless implemented by them enthusiastically and in every perverted way possible, with the apex (or the nadir, I suppose) being the Bukharin trial, where subversuve Bukharin, through Aesopean language and all kinds of inspired rhetorical devices, taught everyone about the contraption of "political responsibility," a more subtle j'accuse than the old Communist who recites an obviously rehearsed confession to trumped-up charges and drops his pants in the middle, in The Confession, a Czech film based on the Slansky show trials.
The thing about the Soviet system was that any sort of sustained productivity was completely impossible, but the modus operandi was evolutionary catastrophism, where sudden huge leaps would transpire, enough for The Soviet Union to maintain its street cred in its ongoing "race" with the United States, a "race" that permeated every discourse well into the end of the 1980s. In the USSR, that is. I don't think my American peers knew we were "racing." I dunno, did y'all know we were racing? But we grew up with plackards and banners saying "We will catch up with and surpass the United States: the nest of capitalism." We carried these banners when we ran marathons for the veterans, and my mom and dad had them in their workplaces. We were totally racing 110% of the time. Naturally, it was a Sisyphian enterprise, exemplified by an old joke about a beautiful American car smoothly speeding down a paved road, sunroof down, Beach Boys playing; and along the side of the road, a feral bull, with one horn broken off, and covered in blood and foam, is crashing through thorny shrubbery and screaming "And we will take a different road." But one area in which we totally caught up and surpassed was, of course, space exploration. The USSR totally sent Gagarin into space, and no amount of fake moon landings on the part of the United States could steal their thunder. In a way, since space is the ultimate imaginary, the final frontier of all final frontiers, it is the perfect medium for pure Empire, without pesky land claims or colonized subjects. And now, in the ultimate un-50s maneuver, Bush Plans to Send Americans to Moon, on to Mars. Of course, Dick Cheney ribbeted something to the effect that the administration was said to see the initiative as an important national security measure (oh, man, space terrorism! An Al-Qaedaroid Belt Threat!) and experts said it could lead to new technologies and potential new sources of energy. But really, the trillion dollars that's going to drive the final nail in the coffin of social security are going to be spent on this production because Big Projects are a way of artificially maintaining the level of patriotism. Space Exploration is like insulin to a diabetic. Mars is totally going to be on the map much more so than Afghanistan, which will totally be under Taliban control again after all the humanitarian agencies split. But launching a rocket is really like fireworks. Nationally televized, phallic fireworks. I take it back. It's Soviet in propaganda, and it's gonna be Soviet in execution with The Shrub in a NASA suite, but it goes much further back in public consciousness control ethos: Panem et circenses. Nero played the fiddle, while Rome burned. I highly doubt The Shrub could string two notes together, because notes are kind of like syllables, but if he could, he would strike me as a percussion man. Bang bang and choo-choo into space.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-11 12:54 pm (UTC)an array of balloons to crash in full force, bouncing bouncing across a frozen desert
to open up like a flower or a cocoon or an egg, leaving the shreds just there; just where they landed
a thing to crawl out, slowly slowly slowly
to extend its angular and round instruments
none of them matching each other
to do its job the best it can
for an array of nerds in a war room light-hours away
a digital picture of a tiny patch of desert of nothing
bravo
Gender? Sex? Humanity? Any Thing you try to find will be found. And yet there is a Thing motivating its heart, horrifying. It lives by photosynthesis, our sad Frankenstein. Eat your heart out, Yuri. But where are you now? Now that we need you? Whatthefuckness indeed.
NELOGOSIMS FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
no subject
Date: 2004-01-11 04:02 pm (UTC)http://truthout.org/docs_04/010904A.shtmlhttp://truthout.org/docs_04/010904A.shtml
-mjm
no subject
Date: 2005-03-08 12:25 am (UTC)Definitely, at least for a while. The official term actually was "The Space Race" and it began in October 1957 with the launch of the Soviet satellite known here as Sputnik. I heard some high Eisenhower Administration official echo the phrase "overtake and surpass" and the whole tone of the 60's space program here was to regain and keep an edge on the USSR; the military implications were usually kept in the background, but we all knew what they were.
A great post, [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com]. It's nice to know someone else remembers the name of Rudolf Slansky and that grotesque trial as depicted in The Confession (never released on video, I'm sorry to say.) Do you think that defendant who lost his trousers was mooning the court, in the sense that Bukharin was sending up the proceedings in his statement? Or had he simply lost weight on prison rations, and/or was he trying to ingratiate himself by playing the fool? One defendant in that series of trials, Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, actually did defy the Court and denounce the whole trumped-up business in open court; he was hustled off to loud sneers and obloquies from the judges and, of course, executed anyway.
And Story of a Real Man... Boris Polevoi, right? Oh dear, oh dear.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-15 10:57 pm (UTC)Oh, and Bush can't conscript Willie Nelson, because the Red-Headed Stranger is a leftie, like most American musicians. For the most part the small crop of pro-Bush musicians are not generally accepted as serious talent.