Cultural products

When cultural products are valued according to how many units they sell they can only become products designed for the mob. The culture, after a number of iterations, each requiring ever greater sales, can only become driven by ever greater collective mood swings, as is the case with mobs. Neither creator nor consumer able any longer to have an individual experience. Neither to have an individual identity. Each subsumed in the mob.

A mob can never see any difference between what it wants and what is right. 

Words don’t mean much anymore: "Content Creator".

Young women with millions of “followers” who post videos to teach young girls how to apply nail polish are now called “content creators”. The brand name of their sponsor’s nail polish products are carefully kept turned toward the camera. At the end of the ten minute video there runs an advertisement from the sponsor. Words don’t mean much anymore.

To have no past is to have no present.

To have no past is to have no present. To manufacture the past is to have a manufactured present. It might be asserted that it is not possible to have anything but a manufactured past. Should this be the definition of history from which we must manufacture the past then the only way to have a rich, nuanced, highly functional, non-partisan present is to manufacture a rich, nuanced, highly functional, independent history. To re-contextualize history in order to make it serve partisan purposes can only arrive at a de-contextualized, unstable present with no other reality than what can be imposed via  power.

To fail to accomplish perfect certitude about all events and contexts of the past is the unfortunate and insuperable fate of all legitimate attempts at history. For this reason, the manufacture of history is a demanding pursuit requiring each subsequent practitioner to improve upon the previous attempts at disinterested improvement of the record in order to bring it closer and closer to the truth.  The victors do, indeed, write the histories, and, over time, the historians rewrite them. 

DARKNESS.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came, and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation ; and all hearts

Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:

And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,

The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons ; cities were consumed,

And men were gathered round their blazing homes

To look once more into each other's face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye

Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:

A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them ; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept ; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world ; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash'd their teeth and howfd: the wild birds shriek'd,

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And .flap their useless wings ; the wildest brutes

Came tame and tremulous ; and vipers crawl'd

And twined themselves anions the multitude,

Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food:

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again; — a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

All earth was but one thought—and that was death,

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails — men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devoured,

Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,

And he was faithful to a corse, and kept

The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,

Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead

Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,

But with a piteous and perpetual moan

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand

Which answered not with a caress—he died.

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies; they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they raked up,

And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects — saw, and shriek'd, and died —

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless —

A lump of death — a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirred within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped

They slept on the abyss without a surge —

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon their mistress had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them — She was the universe.

 

“Darkness” by George Gordon, the Lord Byron.

from The Prisoner of Chillon (1816).

 

 

Reality as construct.

Reality and Truth are mere constructs we have discovered.  All these millennia we have been trapped by elites in an illusion created to oppress us.

Now we will put the insidious illusion aside and embrace the… um…  The what?  The Truth?  The real Truth?  Derived from what?  The real Reality?  The right Illusion?

Facts do not scale.

A fact that has been focus grouped is no longer a fact, it is an opinion.  The only fact that can be determined by a poll is which among several prepackaged opinions a test population prefers.  Facts (to use the popular marketing terminology of the present moment) “do not scale”.  They do not fail to be facts if they are unpopular.  They do not become greater or more factual inasmuch as opinion proves to favor them.  Because they do not, the tools of marketing can neither produce nor arrive at truths.  In fact, a Democracy of polling and focus groups begins to believe that truths are an undemocratic illusion.  We have entered a market driven age in which vast resources are available (for a price), and, except for a tiny minority of specially trained persons, only opinions can possibly result from their use.  Those opinions can only compete for market share in the fashion of all other products.  A Democracy based upon marketing methods can only arrive at dysfunction or empty ritual… or, as is the case at the moment, a struggle to determine which of the two will prevail.  The only question is which will win out in the end.

A life without reflection...

A life without reflection is an animal's life.  Prevailing social constructs become the functional equivalent of instinctive behavior in the animal.  The person who lives such a life values it as an animal values its life.

The Trump Economy

It is not fashionable on the Left or in the mainstream media to speak as if President Trump were anything more than mentally and behaviorally challenged.  While there are arguments for both claims, matters have long since gone beyond the niceties of rational assessment.

Among the dysfunctional dynamics this has created, each day is filled with Trump personally and crassly laying claim to every positive outcome in the country that occurs during his Administration.  More than likely, he will trumpet that his outcomes — real or confabulated — put the “failures” of Barack Obama to shame.

He lives to punish his predecessor, President Obama, as revenge for a public drubbing delivered during the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner.  Donald has a rule.  If you ridicule him he will do everything in his power to make you pay with your reputation and all you value in life.  If he can do you still worse he will.

Just as certainly, his opponents publicly assign any undeniable success to the groundwork President Obama laid for those who came after him.  President Obama brought an honor, dignity and overall competence to the office that Donald Trump cannot begin to match.

Donald Trump has learned to enhance his chances of success in life through the constant manipulation of the niceties of social mores, and of laws that cannot survive litigation, in order to undercut his competition.  The lesson is so thoroughly ingrained that he will never change.  He did not succeed through business acumen but by using the wealth he has always had reduce every competition to its Least Common Denominator.  It is his skill and we would do ourselves a collective favor to recognize that he is by no means alone.  He is merely one of the very best at it.

Where we don’t do ourselves any favors is by blindly lashing back.  By buying into the dynamic that favors him, with knee-jerk responses, we are failing to understand what is happening under his presidency.

For one example, we reply that the financial markets are going up and unemployment down at historical rates because President Obama laid a powerful groundwork for future success.  But this is far more The Trump Economy.  It is The Trump Economy because President Trump does actually have an economic philosophy that he is implementing with success.

Among the first actions of the Trump presidency, he ended U.S. commitments to mitigate climate change.  This reduced the future commitments of this country’s major corporations by tens of billions of dollars.  This was followed by ending regulations with a stroke of the presidential pen that collectively reduced the production cost of large corporations and corporate farms by billions of dollars, as well.  The departments of the government announced that they were ceasing enforcement actions against environmental and labor infractions that could not be written out of law by presidential order, again reducing expenses to the same corporations.

While all of this was going on, Trump was proving even more incompetent at the legislative process than his handlers expected.  As the result, Obama’s signature health care program survived to limp along providing insurance to those on the low end of the income scale.  The huge tax cut that he promised did not materialize.

Through flattery and misdirection, his handlers (including the Republican Congressional leadership) learned how to work the president like an erratic marionette long enough to pass the tax cuts in 2017.  For all he demanded to be the fêted hero of the show, the bill had been entirely designed by that Republican leadership.  Their paymasters repatriated over a trillion dollars previously held overseas to avoid paying the taxes that could have reduced deficits, rebuilt crumbling infrastructure, paid for sufficient Legal Services lawyers, improved schools and accomplished all the other things government is called upon to do.

All of these acts betray a conscious philosophy: sacrifice the future of politically weak minorities and the lower economic classes for every present gain that can be managed, by far the lion’s share of those gains going to the wealthy.  By removing regulations or enforcement, install an environmental, safety and labor regime much more satisfied to let the chips fall where they may, negative outcomes just being the way life works out sometimes for those who cannot afford to lawyer up.

So then, this is indeed The Trump Economy.  He knows full well that legislating money into the coffers of the wealthy and large corporations (and small) to the tune of many trillions of dollars, at the cost of exploding national deficits as far as the eye can see, and abandoning politically vulnerable populations, creates a far better present economy than responsible presidents could possibly manage.  He is depending on it to get him re-elected and there’s more than a small chance that he will succeed.

And Donald Trump knows very well the earliest date on which the future can be permitted to begin.  He is reputed to have said it more than once.  The final day of his second term, when results of all of it will be someone else’s problem.

Also from the Virtual Vanaprastha:

• Did the Democrats Win 2018 at the Cost of Losing 2020?  January 3, 2019.  “But aware now of importance of the restraint they showed, surely the various other groups expect, as the result, to see their agendas more fully realized in the Democratic party.”

Click here to visit my "Edward de Vere, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Subjects  Information Exchange" Facebook Group.

Did the Democrats Win 2018 at the Cost of Losing 2020?

In October of 2018, Elizabeth Warren took the first step to put Donald Trump in his place.  For years Trump had been calling her “Pocahontas” for having declared Native-American heritage on a standard questionnaire disseminated by the Association of American Law Schools.  In 1989 her ethnic status where she taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School was listed as “Native American or Alaskan Native”. 

DNA technology having since improved to the point where she could verify her family’s cherished story, she quietly checked her heritage earlier in the year.  The testing verified her claim.  She carefully planned a public roll out of the results sensitive to Native Americans and families.  Her own personal history, apart from the minor relationship to Native American issues, formed the greater part of the presentation.  She had lived the life and struggled the struggles of a lower middle class white woman breaking free through hard work to become a highly respected law professor.

Donald Trump’s reaction was predictably dismissive.  The million dollars he had promised to give to a charity of Warren’s choice if she proved her heritage was decidedly not going to be honored.  Warren had wisely chosen the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) such that Native-American women would be the ultimate beneficiaries of Trump’s misguided use of the name “Pocahontas” and perceptibly the victims of his lies.

And then it happened.  Chuck Hoskin Jr., Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation, blasted Warren for her presumption in a brief official letter.  “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong.”  Other leaders from the tribe lauded her for trying to be supportive while they supported Hoskin.  It was very important that the tribe and only the tribe, and based upon only the criteria that the tribe chose, declare anyone to be Cherokee.  DNA results alone were not sufficient.  That Warren had not laid claim to being a member of the tribe was to no point.

Of more recent vintage, Bernie Sanders has been declared the front runner for the 2020 Democratic primary.  As he has been honing his newest talking points for the agenda so popular with Bernie-ites, suddenly a number of unidentified members of his 2016 campaign have issued a statement condemning the campaign for sexual harassment and failure to give equal pay to females staffers.  They demand a face-to-face meeting at which they make clear that they will present further demands for actions and policies that must be adopted by the 2020 campaign.  They clearly realize the damage the headlines have done and that they can do further and more severe damage if they are not satisfied.

While the latest Bernie saga was unfolding, news broke that the January 19^th Women’s March would not take place in Eureka, in Humboldt County, California, due to the all white composition of the chapter’s leadership.  They will hope to correct their lack of diversity and hold the march at a later date.  After a year of trying to resolve issues of anti-Semitism and anti-LBGTQIA bias, and close ties among its leadership to Louis Farrakhan, the Chicago chapter also cancelled its 2018 march.  Feeling that the National Women’s March Organization has permitted anti-Semitic and anti-LBGTQIA bias in its own handling of the matter the Washington State Chapter has dissolved itself in protest and the Rhode Island State Chapter has disassociated itself from the national group.

Did the historical Democratic 2018 election landslide victory come at a price that threatens the party’s success in 2020?  The #MeToo movement held its fire when Republicans all too predictably began accusing various Democratic candidates of physically and sexually abusing women and others of covering up abuse.  Still, New York Attorney general Eric Schneiderman resigned in the face of accusations.  That senior Democratic Senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown, had been accused of abuse by his ex-wife was seized upon by his opponent during the 2018 midterms, and Congressman Keith Ellison was elected Attorney General of Minnesota in spite of his opponent’s constant cries of horror at allegations of domestic violence by an ex-girlfriend.

But aware now of importance of the restraint they showed, surely the various other groups expect, as the result, to see their agendas more fully realized in the Democratic party.  Any one of them can pretty much torpedo any Democratic candidate.  Not just because they don’t feel they have a seat at the table but because their sense of historical wrongs overpowers their ability to compromise among the vast number of identity and issue groups the party needs to cobble together in order to win elections.

At the very least, like the Cherokee Nation, any of them can choose to chastise any Democratic candidate publicly by way of advancing their causes any time an opportunity for national media coverage might come available.  Like the Bernie Sanders campaign workers, they can take over control of the ship and take it where they will at least for periods of time.

Click here to visit my "Edward de Vere, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Subjects  Information Exchange" Facebook Group.

Thoreau on Tying His Shoelaces - July 25, 1853

I have for years had a great deal of trouble with my shoe-strings, because they get untied continually.  They are leather, rolled and tied in a hard knot. But some days I could hardly go twenty rods before I was obliged to stop and stoop to tie my shoes. My companion and I speculated on the distance to which one tying would carry you, —the length of a shoe-tie,— and we thought it nearly as appreciable and certainly a more simple and natural measure of distance than a stadium, or league, or mile. Ever and anon we raised our feet on whatever fence or wall or rock or stump we chanced to be passing, and drew the strings once more, pulling as hard as we could. It was very vexatious, when passing through low scrubby bushes, to become conscious that the strings were already getting loose again before we had fairly started. What should we have done if pursued by a tribe of Indians? My companion sometimes went without strings altogether, but that loose way of proceeding was not [to] be thought of by me. One shoemaker sold us shoe strings made of the hide of a South American jackass, which he recommended; or rather he gave them to us and added their price to that of the shoes we bought of him. But I could not see that these were any better than the old. I wondered if anybody had exhibited a better article at the World’s Fair, and whether England did not bear the palm from America in this respect. I thought of strings with recurved prickles and various other remedies myself. At last the other day it occurred to me that I would try an experiment, and, instead of tying two simple knots one over the other the same way, putting the end which fell to the right over each time, that I would reverse the process, and put it under the other. Greatly to my satisfaction, the experiment was perfectly successful, and from that time my shoe-strings have given me no trouble, except sometimes in untying them at night.

On telling this to others I learned that I had been all the while tying what is called a granny’s knot, for I had never been taught to tie any other, as sailors’ children are; but now I had blundered into a square knot, I think they called it, or two running slip-nooses. Should not all children be taught this accomplishment, and an hour, perchance, of their childhood be devoted to instruction in tying knots?

Also from The Virtual Vanaprastha:

• Thoreau Celebrates the "Philosophia Botanica". I have learned in a shorter time and more accurately the meaning of the scientific terms used in botany from a few plates of figures at the end of the "Philosophia Botanica," with the names annexed, than a volume of explanations or glossaries could teach.
• Henry David Thoreau on Lichens and the Universe. I find myself inspecting little granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia spring from a thallus, such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens.

Thoreau Celebrates the "Philosophia Botanica".

It is surprising how few readers of Thoreau go far enough afield to meet the man we find here, delighted with his botany manual, eagerly memorizing the Latin scientific names for plants, poring over illustrations for clues.  He was asked to collect scientific samples for Louis Agassiz's laboratory at Harvard. He even wrote a scientific paper that continues to be consulted today.

'I have learned in a shorter time and more accurately the meaning of the scientific terms used in botany from a few plates of figures at the end of the "Philosophia Botanica," with the names annexed, than a volume of explanations or glossaries could teach. And, that the alternate pages to the plates may not be left blank, he has given on them very concise and important instruction to students of botany. This lawgiver of science, this systematizer, this methodist, carries his system into his studies in the field. On one of these little pages he gives some instruction concerning herbatio, or what the French called herborisations, — we say botanizing. Into this he introduces law and order and system, and describes with the greatest economy of words what some would have required a small volume to tell, all on a small page; tells what dress you shall wear, what instruments you shall carry, what season and hour you shall observe, — viz. "from the leafing of the trees, Sirius excepted, to the fall of the leaf, twice a week in summer, once in spring, from seven in the morning till seven at night," — when you shall dine and take your rest, etc., in a crowd or dispersed, etc., how far you shall go, — two miles and a half at most, — what you shall collect and what kind of observations make, etc., etc.'

Henry David Thoreau on Lichens and the Universe

Thoreau's journals of March 1852 seem to me a revelation.  There is a romanticism toward life, mixed with his growing scientific interests, that may prove to be part of an essay that is presently in the works.  This from the 5th of the month:

"I find myself inspecting little granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia spring from a thallus, such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens. That is merely the prospect which is afforded me. It is short commons and innutritious. Surely I might take wider views. The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk. Would it not be noble to study the shield of the sun on the thallus of the sky, cerulean, which scatters its infinite sporules of light through the universe ? To the lichenist is not the shield (or rather the apothecium) of a lichen disproportionately large compared with the universe? The minute apothecium of the pertusaria, which the woodchopper never detected,  occupies so large a space in my eye at present as to shut out a great part of the world."

Related items:

• Sidney Lanier on the Fate of the Seminoles. Here, in an 1875 Florida guide book Sidney Lanier deals rather perfunctorily with the fate of the Seminole Indians.
• A Visit to a Pottawatomie Medicine Dance (1842). Catherine Stewart took the opportunity, while residing on a Pottawatomie reservation, in the early 1840s, to attend a number of activities including a Medicine Dance.
• The Struggle of the Green Sea Turtle Mother and Infant. J. M. Murphy gives a nice description of the egg-laying habits of the female Green Sea Turtle [Chelonia mydas] and the subsequent scramble to the sea when the young hatch.
• Bartram Seeks News of the Creeks and Seminoles. About to ascend the St. John's River, in April of 1774, Wiliam Bartram seeks information about a recent incident between the local settlers and Indians.
• Audubon Observes Florida Sea-Turtles. During an 1832 trip to Florida and the Tortugas, the naturalist James Audubon had the opportunity to study the region's large Turtles...
• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.