I applied for a PHD years ago thinking it funny that people still laugh at Geoffrey Chaucer an English author from the 14th Century. I was intrigued by the fact that when he was young, every third person in England died from the plague. For perspective, imagine laughing after 2 billion 300 million people died while you were in middle school, and you not only laugh at the tragedy, but tell stories about it in such a way that people, if we still exist, will be laughing at your stories 600 years from now. Humor tends not to stay fresh, to paraphrase Dr. Victor Comerchero “humor has a short ‘shelf life’, but tragedy lives forever.” This paradox holds true today - few will recognize the name Studs Terkel (1912-2008), but many will read or know of Ann Frank’s Diary (1929-1945) - neither contemporary figures. Consider the ironic absurdity in which the state of Israel bombs a captive Palestine into the stone age while Palestine is to Israel, as the Roadrunner is to Wily Coyote. Worldwide outrage over this depraved act of cowardice has done nothing to staunch bloodletting, maybe laughing at these neofascist bureaucratic knaves will make a difference.
If our civilization is no longer capable of instructing it’s intellectuals how to improve the lives of the species, for what do we train our scholars? Let’s just skip the ivory towers and storm the citadels of commerce. There is a handful of 1,467 persons worldwide - each possessing a billion dollars or more. This cluster of uber-rich has hijacked unimaginable wealth, and enthralled 7 billion other human beings with the charade that 1,467 persons are actually worth 90% of the planet’s financial output; not only that, but as valuable as these nouveau rich are, the other 7 billion humans are not. This makes no sense to me. I often find it difficult to explain myself - not so funny. How can we extract, not only humor from the macabre, but reason from the paroxysms of chronic violence which describe leadership in our current form of governance. Those dualities in a narrowing field of options mean at this juncture in history the odds that what you do will contribute to the success or failure of our entire species are better than ever - and that’s kind of funny. The bad news is that in a world spilling over with superheroes, we got none.
There is a cruel irony that at that precise moment in history when we are in dire need of the greatest humanity can provide, every channel and method of training and indoctrination is demanding the least, propagating the cheapest and convincing the greatest number that they are the least powerful - i find that odd. Capitalist stormtroopers are branding “cheap” as the new manna with blessings from he who art in heaven. Today’s zealots claim great faith, enough to keep the world at war forever; not vastly different from the clergy during the bubonic plague - a mixture of venal and craven acts as with all walks of life during cataclysmic events. Unfortunately we’ve neutered the social frameworks which previous generations relied on - sewing bees, volunteer fireman, conversations. Ours is the internet generation which means human hubris which has clouded the thinking and interactions of humans besotted with love, death, greed etc. has an additional buffer between the world and human heart - the internet. Vaunted as the “information age” savior for a world losing meaning this lean-forward, time-sucking apparatus now more closely resembles that stack of magazines at your doctors office - expired and picked over.
It is the learning loss for which no one has yet answered. There is much ballyhoo about standards and money; few willing to concede they have consigned the human baby to a corporate maw from birth. I have no doubt of that enterprising father who has his child’s birth on a phone. . be mindful this apparatus is barely an infant as far as the public knows, yet as master Stephan Hawking has said, “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive.” That the ISP masters of the universe want to charge a lord’s ransom for what is virtually the cost of 5v current traveling in Plato’s Aether. This ransom for a communication channel is perverse and will ultimately be brought down by its own evil - witness glyphosate and monsatan, or the Walton House of Harkonnen about to topple from its adventures in aristocracy. These are monolithic monetary sinkholes that reflect a narrow ambition for which they are rewarded with narrow rewards. We must stop the erosion of our collective skill as a species, and remember we are capable of turning a bicycle into an airplane. Know that without this “fineness” in what you do - you’ll remain no more than scribble on a street corner posing as art
knowledge: the locus of today’s techno-wizards virtuosity is metadata, as though having an algorithm capable of processing photos of a bag of potato chips into an audio signal describes the world’s “mystery” anymore clearly is as vacuous as the potato chips are nutritional. The internet’s more insidious contribution to humanity is the ham-fisted conceit that such manipulation will yield anything but social carnage; consider brain surgery using a shovel. The real guide to what is in the interest of humanity will come from a careful awareness of the people and their behavior - learn, “read, rather than write to their disc” so to speak. The telescopic/magnifying lens that is the computer age has greatly distorted assumptions which leaders have been making from time immemorial about the mind of the people. Using a purloined conversation or a text message, social seers now feel that they understand - understand so well they have mortgaged the mandate for consent of the governed for that “feathered nest” FDR warned us about. Today’s terrified leaders are swamped by images and calculations which describe the onrushing annihilation - they are shitting their pants, and as anyone who’s ever worked knows “shit rolls down hill.” So like the old French adage “Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes”, (the more things change, the more they remain the same), we may want to learn from the earliest of human civilizers and move the latrine out of our camp or vice versa . .
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jts 8 August 2o14
http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
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