Links to Remember

“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” Robert S. McElvaine https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/30/im-a-depression-historian-the-gop-tax-bill-is-straight-out-of-1929/?utm_term=.a7c11f7614bd

HyperNormalisation

HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex "real world" and built a simple "fake world" that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians. The film was released on 16 October 2016 on the BBC iPlayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

Really fascinating historical tidbits:
That when New York City had money problems in the 1970’s the Banks refused to pony up the dough for the usual bond packages until the politicians withdrew any restrictions and basically gave up their power to the financial world

Khomeini starting suicide bombers which Syria encouraged with Hezbollah in Lebanon. And finally Sunni’s took up the idea.

Vladislav Surkov managing Putin’s success by purposefully promoting not knowing what is real or fake and getting people to not care.

The manipulation of Qaddafi form villain to savior and back to villain by western interests. But of course Qaddafi purposely lied and played along for in own insane purposes. And the same with Saddam Hussein.

So yeah, this thing matches my worldview, or more generally my feeling that what somehow how the world is arranged is fundamentally wrong. I have my own reasons for thinking that and this Curtis fellow starts from a different point but ends up at a similar conclusion.

BUT, as much as I enjoy his trunk full of stories, sometimes he comes across like the Oliver Stone approach to JFK, where EVERYTHING including the kitchen sink ominously points to conspiracy and evil.

Some of it he backs up, but for large chunks of the movie he says something and then flashes up some images that implying a connection. And this dude has an obsession with 80’s workout videos which I guess he uses as a symbol of self centered superficiality as civilization is given way to the financiers. Or maybe I have bee bamboozled by the MAN to think we live a too sedentary life

Plus he makes some confident claims that are not filled out and seem flimsy to me. Like Cyberspace was prepared by LSD and that the predictions of Timothy Leary are implied to be quite wise (Leary’s prophecies stated in the movie seem woefully inaccurate, so what am I to make of that?)

Then there is other stuff that bothers me, like the absolute connection he makes with the Reagan administration deliberately promoting UFO conspiracies. I need more that some random guy saying it was all planned.

As he works his way into implying something bad about workout videos he makes some comment about socialist activists giving up and selling out. Then he has the Jane Fonda video clip. But for me the anomaly isn’t that an activist became a celebrity, but that a celebrity was ever involved with the anti war movement.

Oh there are other tiny bits that tic me off like talking about future needs while showing a download of Netscape. That is just lazy video work.

BUT, I stil think the gist is accurate, that politicians gave away their power to the financial system.

Art Critic and Living and Thinking

I watched The Mona Lisa Curse today about contemporary art collecting by Robert Hughes.

Fantastic stuff. Heavy stuff. Makes you think stuff.

Damn that guy had a way with words, and thinking.

From in The New Republic, 1987:

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining.

https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/the-quotable-robert-hughes/

Unfortunately it confirms my now generally dismal view of civilization. When Art is pointless...where does that leave humankind?

Found it one line for free

https://vimeo.com/62973616

The Consequences of Lies...

Under things to remember...

Or as Arendt told a French interviewer in 1974:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-from-an-interview/

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What is this book? I cannot describe it. Of course he writes about race and about white America, and about freedom, injustice, and pain. But how could I comment or add to that? It is a challenge for a slow witted middle aged white man to say anything much less come to any conclusions from this book by James Baldwin. But don’t worry, I have no conclusion, no pronouncements…but I am human and I will, with trepidation, offer some observations.

First off the obvious, almost too obvious, when I went to copy out parts I wanted to quote I could have just kept typing and retyped the whole book. And there is some flat out “heavy” thinking going on in here, really “deep” stuff. A

Behind what we think of the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white Americans do face when they regard a Negro: reality - the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide - indeed, to earn ones death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. Pg. 91

Like I said this is some deep stuff. His analysis from 1962 is sadly still pretty spot on.

It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by eyes of any Alabama sheriff...Pg. 83

...In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity- and in political terms anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top Pg. 87

Baldwin shakes you up, or at least he should, by not always ending up where you that he was leading you. Even if this short book I got worn out by the reminders of white oppression, but right when you feel like throwing in the towel on all of society he pulls out something close to optimism and says things like...

[talking about people overthrowing one dictator for another]...Perhaps this will always happen...But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover the burden is reality and arrive where reality is. Pg. 91

And to see something even more relevant to our nation today.

Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. Pg. 88

That pretty much describes our political state now. What we have really does reflect the “spiritual sate of the the nation”. It is in our faces, it is real and it is us, as a nation.

Degrees from Anarchy

A popular saying is that “every nation is about three/six/seven/nine meals away from anarchy/revolution.” That is, hungry people are desperate people who will topple any government. “It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had” was cited in print in 1896.

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” was said by writer Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914) in a March 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine. “It’s only nine meals between men and revolution” was cited in print in 1943.

Wikipedia: Alfred Henry Lewis: Alfred Henry Lewis (January 20, 1855 – December 23, 1914) was an American investigative journalist, lawyer, novelist, editor, and short story writer.

Life is only painted lines And there is no paint.

OK, this may take a while to flesh out…

Take 1:

Imagine a large parking lot with the spaces painted in the usual manner. Then on a day when nobody else is parked, do you drive from one end the other making sure not to cross any lines? Or to you drive directly from one side to the other by ignoring all the painted lines?

First off, this is just a metaphor for something else I am driving at so in a sense, what one might actually do is irrelevant. But to finish the thought, I assume most of us would drive across since the whole point of the painted spaces is to provide order when cars are everywhere. It is practical to observe the lines when other cars are around and practical to ignore the lines when the lot is empty.

And as I type the above my pragmatic solution seems to also point to my bigger point. The point of this blog...how should you live on this earth in your remaining days?

Pragmatic, yes, but I propose that for most, if not all, of our conscious life the lines we are following societal lines painted for pragmatic purpose. BUT the lines are there only because we believe in them so in fact there is no metaphorical paint in the metaphorical painted lines. The upshot is we all, everyone, is mentally free and unconstrained. Not only are the chains off...there never were any chains at all.

(here it comes)...BUT, we live in a physical world with other people so our freedom of action is severely restrained by other people, the physics of existence and maybe even something one could call Karma.

Take 2:

An example of belief’s bullying power… 1. Money: Look at paper money, why do people value one more than the other? They are the same size with just a different number of one versus another. Why does one get you more stuff than another? It is the same as the painted lines on a parking lot. Everybody voluntarily agrees the $20 bill will get you more that a $1 bill. And even it was Gold (for those gold standard blockheads), why should a light box of useless metal be exchanged for less than a heavy box?

It is only our beliefs that make any sort of money valuable and that allows this fantasy of commerce. If a counterfeit bill pass through your hand and gets in circulation, what is the harm? If it is never caught then nobody loses. And if you bring up inflation...where the folly of needing wheelbarrows of cash to pay for a loaf of bread, well that is just a lack of faith.

From here I want to move to slightly different territory. But the direction of my earlier proposal led to the notion that the only reason so much of living causes stress and strain is because we internalize the structures of the society around us and treat them with an authority they don’t deserve. When someone pisses you off on the highway or in a store, we follow the line and get angry.

Advertising is built on showing us the lines and making us believe we should follow them.

I don’t want to rebel, or tear down, or rage against the system. No, I want to simply take a breath and recognize there never were any rules or lines to rage against.

To reassure anybody, I am basing this cornerstone of my life on a phrase from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

Buckaroo Banzai: Hey, hey, hey, hey-now. Don't be mean; we don't have to be mean, ‘cuause, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

So my first step is much like the Hippocratic oath of “First do no harm”, even though the Internet tells me that is not an accurate translation. But regardless, it works well as a basis for how to finish out your life. I could go into how I arrived at this as my foundations, but just because I know that answer to something doesn’t mean I know the precise question. Maybe I’ll get to that at a later date.

But the gist is, when all is said in done in this world, you don't have to be mean.