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lapsedmodernistWhat the fuck was up with all the helicopter action in the sky today? I was walking to the gym and all that was missing was Die Walkure blasting from the heavens. The helicopters were in such abundance that my fellow New Yorkers, conditioned by the last three years to the daily minutia of the New World Order to not blink an eye at the soldiers with machine guns at Union Square, were stopping and looking skyward. Two girls ran out of a Polish beauty salon and pointed up, chirping in Polish. An old man on the street cackled something about "that damn show shooting over on Diamond Street. You know, CSI. Maybe it's the other show, though." Uh, I don't know if he was pulling it out of his ass, or if the next episode of Criminal Scene of Investigation or Threat Matrix (popularizing Homeland Security for your household) is doing a shout-out to Coppola, but really, is it necessary to have, like, 20 helicopters fly over the East River?
After I worked out and did some covert shooting at the Greenpoint branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, sublimating my guilt over owing them like $80 from three years ago, I rented The Atomic Cafe which has to be added to my previously composed Movies for the Zeitgeist Soul. The film lets the archival material speak for itself; its creativity is in the edits and juxtapositions of bits and pieces of 1940s and 1950s army training movies, civilian defense PSA, field documentations on the sites of atomic and hydrogen bomb tests. Incidentally, the film is quite informative about what transpired at the Bikini Atoll, (which I feel is one of those locations that vaguely resonate with the American public's geographically challenged map "troubled spots" of ranging from "uh...something bad happenning there? Something with the A-Bomb? Or was it whale suicides?" to "Atoll? Isn't that the ruler of Iran?") but its format pretty much precluded providing information about the long-term impact on the Atoll and on the displaced indigenous Bikinis.
The film highlighted the kind of paranoia, on one hand, and blind deferral to what now, in hindsight 20-20, sounds like bafoon science disseminated through the brand new mouthpiece of the American Authority--the television box. It also confirmed my thesis about the un-50s. The "duck & cover" has been resurrected as "duct & cover"; In place of single-entity atomic threat we now have fluid, random terror; the trifecta of blast, heat and radiation has been replaced by dirty boms and bioterror, and the general Durkheimian tension is about to owe its parameters to peak oil* and climate change; and in fifty years, the reassurances of Bush's scientists will sound as campy as the earnest, bespectacaled assertions five decades ago that people living 12 miles from the point of impact would be just peachy.
Pnts and I were talking on the phone last night about whether the world is uniquely, spectacularly, unprecedently screwed at this moment in history, or if people felt this way in previous decades. We agreed that the only decades valid for this kind of comparison would be the ones that came after the technology boom and media proliferation. I said that I thought the people who put the dots together in the 50s and early 60s were probably as scared as we are now. They had the paradigm of global nuclear annihiliation feeding their tinfoil hats. And I think it's accurate to say that that "moment of danger" was possibly equivalent in its coefficient of potential disaster. But what constituted the episto-elite then, versus now? Now we have the internet, which is 99% responsible for my personal education in the last three years. It provided maps for deuterolearning; how to learn about things, in what order, how history is linked within itself, like hypertext. Without it, I wouldn't have known how to start. It probably helped that my default perspective is a critical one, but without the vast available knoledge, it would have either been wasted on red herrings, or defaulted into "conspiracy theories" in the old sense of the word, meaning they were circumstantially speculative, even if in theory they could have been factually true. The impossibiliy of confirming or disproving relegated the entire discourse to the brackets of insanity--not because of the reasonable or far-fetched facts that it may have included, but because of applying logical and epistemological methods of inquiry to something that could never be checked, with the mantra of "history will redeem us" as the only bitter respite.
I can be judgemental; I can say that with information available at one's fingertips, today's everyman is more complicit in his own blissful ignorance. to some extent I buy the false consciousness, the Marcuse argument, the closing of the American mind. But still, if we are going to be post-Marxist for a second here, the internet is the material base that can transform the superstructure, the Matrix, for anyone willing to go down the rabbit hole. At the same time I am aware of the mojo done to the American reader/viewer by the media; more insiduous than the content of propaganda is the format that promotes accelerated memory loss, diachronic discontinuity, false retroactive prolepsis, etcetera. But that's what I meant by deuterolearning: learning how to learn, or how to unlearn in this case. While the Administration hijacks history for its Project, dressing it up in the garb of uniformitarianism when it's convenient (i.e. history has ALWAYS been a struggle between Go(o)d and (D)evil, from the Crusades to Infinite Justice) to historical relativism (you can't apply the bitter lessons of the distant, or the recent past to the present because this is a New Situation, and we will not have Palestine Version 2.0 in Iraq), history, synchronic and diachronic is available to us in greater quantity and scope than it ever has been before the informational frontier that is cyberspace.
My parents, who lived in the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis said they had no idea until years later how close the world came to a nuclear war. They were just not told what was going on, and their "forbidden" sources of information had an inevitable lag--they had forbidden copies of books by Nietzsche, Adam Smith and Bakunin, printed on cigarette rolling paper, bound up in covers that said "Advanced Algebra" and "History of the Communist Party" on them, but any information allopathic to the system had to be produced in a format that could be transpored into and circulated within Soviet Russia. And that took time. In America everyone knew the haps, because it was part of the cultural discourse, and because JFK sent the Khrushev fleet home with its tail between its legs. The Soviet Union, like the Papal Authority, could not be wrong, and, like Caesar's wife, had to be above suspicion, so the information was stonewalled on a national level. Also, atomic paranoia did not exist in the USSR in the same way--it could not! We were Winning all the arms/space/ballet competitions with the Western Imperialist Hydra. The atomic age was a distinctly capitalist phenomenon, at least in the way it was manifested in America. That may sound tautological, but perhaps it's just overdetermined. In America, it was incarnated among the suburban subdivisions and strip malls as a brilliant lever of consumption, an axis of an industry of TV dinners, canned goods, fallout shelters in every backyard. Consumerism wasn't on the plate (so to speak) in Soviet Russia; there, it was all about periodic spurts of national motivation to accomplishment, which had to be sustained through a dialectic of a reified enemy to compete with, and a nipping-at-the-heels feeling that we were always barely winning. Barely, but winning. Winning, but barely. Also, the metahelmet of paranoia as the official discourse was slightly, residually non grata, after all the post-Stalin thaw had just commencted. Unoficially, of course it prevailed, and it its diluted form, together with cynicism it could prove to be paralyzing more than motivating. General Fear, however, (not the same thing as paranoia, and less incapacitating, in the same way that shock is less incapacitating the ennui), was deployed in spades. Fear of failure, combined with a cultuvated cultural identity of a communist ubermensch, whose only worth and true cadre nature can only be proven by accomplishments--thus went the bizarre update of the Calvinist logical fallacy. It was kind of like the ideological equivalent of the fear of emasculation. Only substitute "comrade" for "man" as the primary category for the proto-identity politics of the lumpen proletatiat. The point is, the the 1950s/60s USSR, with its unholy spawned hybrid of Machiavellianism and Tony Robbins, it was better to assure the hoi polloi that everything was just dandy, and the Cuban Missile Wha...?
This would backfire in 1985, after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, when the governement, in true form, downplayed the catastrophe to nil, did not evacuate anyone for three days, and children that would later die of leukemia played in rain puddles filled with radioactive fallout. They denied that anything was wrong until urgent communiques came in from Sweden asking why the level of radiation was off the scale on the Geiger counters.
The point is, the Soviet infrastructure was never "pacification through consumption," it was "complacency through ignorace," in more literal form than that same idea is implied in the consumption model.
*Haven't heard this term? I suggest you click on the link, or google it so that you can scare your coworkers by the water cooler with it before it will be all over Faux news in the not-too-distant future. Don't you love the classically dystopian ring of that chronotope: the not-too-distant future?
After I worked out and did some covert shooting at the Greenpoint branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, sublimating my guilt over owing them like $80 from three years ago, I rented The Atomic Cafe which has to be added to my previously composed Movies for the Zeitgeist Soul. The film lets the archival material speak for itself; its creativity is in the edits and juxtapositions of bits and pieces of 1940s and 1950s army training movies, civilian defense PSA, field documentations on the sites of atomic and hydrogen bomb tests. Incidentally, the film is quite informative about what transpired at the Bikini Atoll, (which I feel is one of those locations that vaguely resonate with the American public's geographically challenged map "troubled spots" of ranging from "uh...something bad happenning there? Something with the A-Bomb? Or was it whale suicides?" to "Atoll? Isn't that the ruler of Iran?") but its format pretty much precluded providing information about the long-term impact on the Atoll and on the displaced indigenous Bikinis.
The film highlighted the kind of paranoia, on one hand, and blind deferral to what now, in hindsight 20-20, sounds like bafoon science disseminated through the brand new mouthpiece of the American Authority--the television box. It also confirmed my thesis about the un-50s. The "duck & cover" has been resurrected as "duct & cover"; In place of single-entity atomic threat we now have fluid, random terror; the trifecta of blast, heat and radiation has been replaced by dirty boms and bioterror, and the general Durkheimian tension is about to owe its parameters to peak oil* and climate change; and in fifty years, the reassurances of Bush's scientists will sound as campy as the earnest, bespectacaled assertions five decades ago that people living 12 miles from the point of impact would be just peachy.
Pnts and I were talking on the phone last night about whether the world is uniquely, spectacularly, unprecedently screwed at this moment in history, or if people felt this way in previous decades. We agreed that the only decades valid for this kind of comparison would be the ones that came after the technology boom and media proliferation. I said that I thought the people who put the dots together in the 50s and early 60s were probably as scared as we are now. They had the paradigm of global nuclear annihiliation feeding their tinfoil hats. And I think it's accurate to say that that "moment of danger" was possibly equivalent in its coefficient of potential disaster. But what constituted the episto-elite then, versus now? Now we have the internet, which is 99% responsible for my personal education in the last three years. It provided maps for deuterolearning; how to learn about things, in what order, how history is linked within itself, like hypertext. Without it, I wouldn't have known how to start. It probably helped that my default perspective is a critical one, but without the vast available knoledge, it would have either been wasted on red herrings, or defaulted into "conspiracy theories" in the old sense of the word, meaning they were circumstantially speculative, even if in theory they could have been factually true. The impossibiliy of confirming or disproving relegated the entire discourse to the brackets of insanity--not because of the reasonable or far-fetched facts that it may have included, but because of applying logical and epistemological methods of inquiry to something that could never be checked, with the mantra of "history will redeem us" as the only bitter respite.
I can be judgemental; I can say that with information available at one's fingertips, today's everyman is more complicit in his own blissful ignorance. to some extent I buy the false consciousness, the Marcuse argument, the closing of the American mind. But still, if we are going to be post-Marxist for a second here, the internet is the material base that can transform the superstructure, the Matrix, for anyone willing to go down the rabbit hole. At the same time I am aware of the mojo done to the American reader/viewer by the media; more insiduous than the content of propaganda is the format that promotes accelerated memory loss, diachronic discontinuity, false retroactive prolepsis, etcetera. But that's what I meant by deuterolearning: learning how to learn, or how to unlearn in this case. While the Administration hijacks history for its Project, dressing it up in the garb of uniformitarianism when it's convenient (i.e. history has ALWAYS been a struggle between Go(o)d and (D)evil, from the Crusades to Infinite Justice) to historical relativism (you can't apply the bitter lessons of the distant, or the recent past to the present because this is a New Situation, and we will not have Palestine Version 2.0 in Iraq), history, synchronic and diachronic is available to us in greater quantity and scope than it ever has been before the informational frontier that is cyberspace.
My parents, who lived in the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis said they had no idea until years later how close the world came to a nuclear war. They were just not told what was going on, and their "forbidden" sources of information had an inevitable lag--they had forbidden copies of books by Nietzsche, Adam Smith and Bakunin, printed on cigarette rolling paper, bound up in covers that said "Advanced Algebra" and "History of the Communist Party" on them, but any information allopathic to the system had to be produced in a format that could be transpored into and circulated within Soviet Russia. And that took time. In America everyone knew the haps, because it was part of the cultural discourse, and because JFK sent the Khrushev fleet home with its tail between its legs. The Soviet Union, like the Papal Authority, could not be wrong, and, like Caesar's wife, had to be above suspicion, so the information was stonewalled on a national level. Also, atomic paranoia did not exist in the USSR in the same way--it could not! We were Winning all the arms/space/ballet competitions with the Western Imperialist Hydra. The atomic age was a distinctly capitalist phenomenon, at least in the way it was manifested in America. That may sound tautological, but perhaps it's just overdetermined. In America, it was incarnated among the suburban subdivisions and strip malls as a brilliant lever of consumption, an axis of an industry of TV dinners, canned goods, fallout shelters in every backyard. Consumerism wasn't on the plate (so to speak) in Soviet Russia; there, it was all about periodic spurts of national motivation to accomplishment, which had to be sustained through a dialectic of a reified enemy to compete with, and a nipping-at-the-heels feeling that we were always barely winning. Barely, but winning. Winning, but barely. Also, the metahelmet of paranoia as the official discourse was slightly, residually non grata, after all the post-Stalin thaw had just commencted. Unoficially, of course it prevailed, and it its diluted form, together with cynicism it could prove to be paralyzing more than motivating. General Fear, however, (not the same thing as paranoia, and less incapacitating, in the same way that shock is less incapacitating the ennui), was deployed in spades. Fear of failure, combined with a cultuvated cultural identity of a communist ubermensch, whose only worth and true cadre nature can only be proven by accomplishments--thus went the bizarre update of the Calvinist logical fallacy. It was kind of like the ideological equivalent of the fear of emasculation. Only substitute "comrade" for "man" as the primary category for the proto-identity politics of the lumpen proletatiat. The point is, the the 1950s/60s USSR, with its unholy spawned hybrid of Machiavellianism and Tony Robbins, it was better to assure the hoi polloi that everything was just dandy, and the Cuban Missile Wha...?
This would backfire in 1985, after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, when the governement, in true form, downplayed the catastrophe to nil, did not evacuate anyone for three days, and children that would later die of leukemia played in rain puddles filled with radioactive fallout. They denied that anything was wrong until urgent communiques came in from Sweden asking why the level of radiation was off the scale on the Geiger counters.
The point is, the Soviet infrastructure was never "pacification through consumption," it was "complacency through ignorace," in more literal form than that same idea is implied in the consumption model.
*Haven't heard this term? I suggest you click on the link, or google it so that you can scare your coworkers by the water cooler with it before it will be all over Faux news in the not-too-distant future. Don't you love the classically dystopian ring of that chronotope: the not-too-distant future?
