1-26-03

Americans are a strange breed. Perhaps my senses are a bit skewed from watching the Superbowl Halftime a few minutes ago, but I think we really are doomed. In fact, our culture is so vapid, so mediocre, so tightly controlled by the mega-corporations which suck the marrow from the bio-mass, I can only hope we're doomed. No culture this strange should be allowed to survive.

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess I've always felt that way. The first thing I remember seeing on TV, other than Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers was Reagan being shot. They played the footage over and over. My generation grew up knowing that the air is dirty, the water is bad to drink, the nukes could start falling any minute, and you can't make love without additional equipment, or it might rot off. Growing up in The Church added an extra layer, with plenty of Armageddon-End Times-Anti-Christ-prophetic ranting translated into conspiracy theory propaganda shoved down my throat at a tender age. I think a lot of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop since 1945, when World War Three started, or since 1991, when it ended, or during all the unsung Third World Wars between. Now, with the Lone Super Power-Protective empire-Pre-emptive Strike credo, the wealthiest nation in the world (although considerably less wealthy than in 1945, being now on the other side of the bell curve and dropping like a lead balloon) seems to be in a formative state. The populace grows increasingly stratified into the oblivious, the compliant, and the marginalized.

I know now that no one in America is paying enough attention to prevent the emergence of a police state undreamed of in history. When asked if they are aware that we have a a shadow government of unelected high ranking executive officals whose identities are a secret, many just shrug thier shoulders blankly, like they're waiting for the punchline.

Sometimes I think certain elements in the government are trying to fuck with the conspiracy theorists. Like an inside joke around the water cooler in Washington D.C. Take for instance the new Office of Information Awareness. Orwell's jaw would drop if he could see us now. The OIA's job is Total Information Awareness. They have computers that "mine" information about the actions of Americans into huge databases, looking for patterns. The office is run by John Poindexter, a man convicted of conspiracy. I'll say that again. Convicted of conspiracy. He also has a PhD in Nuclear physics, and has commanded missile destroyers. Oh, and there was that Iran-Contra thingie, "the buck stops here". If you go to the website of the OIA, you will see thier seal, which depicts a pyramid, atop which the all-seeing eye hovers, shooting out of it a beam which encompasses the planet Earth. Beneath this scene is a line of text which reads, "scientia est potentia", which means "knowledge is power".

After spending a good deal of time interacting with the American public (I should mention that I live in California, perhaps not necessarily a cross section of America, more like a cross section of the world), I often come away with the impression of a nation of people obsessed with themselves. Like giant hungry vacuums, sucking away at everything in sight. Feed me. Look at me. ME. The lower classes stuff their overfed gullets with attractively packaged fat and preservatives, guffawing mindlessly at the cathode rays penetrating thier eye-sphincters, while the upper classes meticuously engineer thier image. In America, the distance between the haves and the have-nots is image. The clothes, the hair, the car, the walk, the handshake, the body language, the confident smile all representations of an ideal, atavistic nobility, power hungry but very polite through strained smiles and well practiced tones of voice. More money goes into the physical appearance of an upper class American in one week than goes into the mouth of a village in the Third World in one year.

If I had a nickel for every spoiled little girl I've seen with a "princess" t-shirt, I could play games in the nickel arcade until the end of time. This is a nation of princesses. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the idea of princesses. In days of yore, most European countries had monarchies. The king was in charge. He was ostensibly appointed by God. Of course, he wasn't appointed by God at all, because there were carefully appointed and monitored man-made rules which are really left over from early tribal and even proto-human culture, which stipulate that power in the alpha clan be inherited by the eldest male. Daughters in this system were much like the daughters in the lower classes, which is to say property. The difference is that the King's daughters were the most valuable female property in the economic system of the time. They were the pick of the litter. A man who could successfully woo her (or rather her father), would have unparalleled access to the throne, and riches galore. Because they were so valuable, princesses were lavishly adorned and cherished. Princesses were persons of extreme priviledge. But thier priviledge was not a character trait. They had not earned or acquired it, it was handed to them. Those riches were the culmination of tribute taken from the peasants. Princesses wore the sweat and blood and hunger of teeming masses of peasants, working thier backs off so that hers could be more opulently adorned. Princesses were mostly unaware of this. They had been taught that they were better, nobler, purer than the lesser people, and ruled by divine right.

Caricatures of the historical persons have trickled down through the collective psyche over the years, through fairy tales, which are things that we tell our children in order to insulate them for a few years from the harshness of reality, which we bring them gradually to, if at all. We tell them stories of a child who lived in a beautiful castle with servants and animals. A child with the whole kingdom at her disposal. If the peasants are mentioned, they're usually saying helpful things, like "you can do it, princess so and so". The child listening to the story lives in the richest, most powerful nation in history, a land in which there are many, many princesses. This land is so wealthy, that a whole land exists inside of it to entertain the princesses, called Disneyland. It is a magical Kingdom in which princesses whose parents fork over hundreds of "dollars" (which are a green paper records of accumulated labor value) for the privledge of entering the place where reality has been carefully and painstakingly manipulated into fantasy to amuse the whims of the princess. A place that cost so much money to make that if you placed all of the dollars end to end, they could wrap around every hungry person on Earth ten times. The princess wanders about in a stupor, stuffing her face with high priced preservatives and sugar, buying expensive shiny worthless things made by poor people on the other side of the planet. People who will never see the magical land, or a school, for that matter.

Men in our culture, on the other hand, are not interested in being princes. Mostly, they seem to identify with animals, specifically predators. I see this a lot on t-shirts with pictures of wolves or bears or tigers and logos like "big dog" and "lone wolf", which is confusing because wolves are pack animals, but I digress. Men, when they congregate together, often have body language that resembles apes, more than anything. It's all posturing for rank. They may speak english, but what they are actually communicating is quite primal.

Next