Monday, October 21, 2013

Value


Cogito ergo sum . spirits with parents - parents which odds say cannot provide more than food and shelter for a violent childhood , if that . So how does value emerge as a fiction in a world drawn in such bold relief by poverty, despair and violence, or put more simply - how do you constantly fool 7 billion human beings into believing what they see on the screen is more real than what they experience in their lives . ? when the maintenance for the car that was supposed to be parked by valets bankrupts the single father; the tropical cruise to find the right husband costs half as much as a semester of school, or the evening of Reality TV becomes 24/7 for which the cable costs more than preschool much less the time away from family . ? We are now facing a " turnkey tyranny " which requires little from you more than brand name loyalty paid for with your freedom, health or possibly even the future of our species .
The people yoked to this media screen of unrelenting corporate marketing are not stupid per se, but we live in a world where the consolidation of data into the hands of a tiny number of people renders a massive disconnect between the real world and market concepts based on nothing more than Return On Investment ( ROI ) - The game of " Money Ball " writ large . Unfortunately for the human race and commerce in general these corporate products assume the infinite growth paradigm which commandeers everything in service of " The Economy " and in turn guts eons of human craftsmanship ; rules of conduct ; even that minuscule shard of personal time dislodged from the shackles of our former royalty by that spark of Free Humanity we'd been . The hitch and the irony for our new masters is we are their consumer fodder . People - a beast crafty enough to climb out of the crib; avoid the chains of pit bulls or pissed-off camels on their way to and from school to dodge bullies' knives; a teacher's cant or war and then find work enough to pay for that time it takes to memorize all the playa's data oblivious to the fact that as humans they will spend the largest part of their lives floating the elite on a film of pearlesque opulence only dreamed of by early pharaohs. Old people are then rendered into a steady state of decay medically preserving enough flesh for the morticians' final insult .
How is it possible that so many of the intelligent, feeling, decent humans I've met and will meet are effectively prevented from achieving a better life . ? Not only prevented but effectively diverted into a spiral of increasing pitch and agitation blunted by fatigue, entertainment and inebriation. At what point did the vision quest become a trailer in the movie theater, and our rites of passage the nightmare of cyber bullying . ? We are sickened by our own desires - The inclination for belonging and relatedness is tuned to coercion and exclusion because we are so much more easily managed apart than together . Of our instincts is the reflexive search for good - beer, sex, music - the multitude of ancient modalities for touching and being touched are lit up today like digital Bacchanals out of Dante's lowest rings . Food and family are now defined in the aisles of our "Supermarkets" which didn't exist 75 years ago - the same thing a Walmartarian will be saying about today's Supermarkets 18.75 years from now as she shifts her colostomy belt to make sure there's enough intravenous antibiotic to quiet the bacterial lesions pulsing close to the surface of her bare midriff .
Those who have "awakened" are little better off living on the fringes of a deteriorating culture and casting about for venues of approval marked by dress and orthodoxy of an often more strident tone than the insidious hum of the empire apparatus. But still the thread of value seems lost like a door whose key has broken off in the lock. Our knowledge is pinched and caught on the fly - snippets of sense; out of context and cast out like so much confetti or scribbled on a gutter with paint bought from the worlds wealthiest chemists. We search for what has always been the human instinct - love, but our tools are no longer born of loving application and lack the quality necessary to build loving things , or even defend us from naked hatred . That we have forsaken the wonders of understanding from each other for the silicon siren out of the ether illusion may harken to the inscription for our species' headstone on the radioactive satellite thrice removed from the G2V star at the center of the Solar System:
"Here lie the remains of a promising sentient life form born from the wavelengths of their G2V fireball - able to stride upon their closest satellite using buckets of fire and air to propel and protect their delicate corpuscles , yet this brief intercommunicating animation drowned in oceans of radiation of their own ignition - oceans believed to have once been their original nest . Rest In Peace ." 
Many voices are now raised against harm to the world Bob Dylan envisioned in his song to Woody: "seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn, It looks likes it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born." We humans are what define value not some statistical stratagem penciled on the cocktail napkin of a drunken industrialist whose only edifice is the systemic neutering of the remarkable human capacity for growth - the universe may or may not care whether our damp blue ball becomes a dank dead slab sizzling in orbit around a dying sun , but as certain as hate is weak , we are doomed if we do not stand on our hind legs now and do as we've always done - climb out of the crib; shake off the mad dogs; dodge bullies and take their weapons; lovingly build things and find heroes to love - hopefully heroes looking more like each of us than those pasty-faced cranks floating on nothing more than oceans of pearlesque opulence .