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VV wrote:
Blimey!
Cor!
Ah yes, just another of the reasons why I'd like to move to some other Anglophonic country than Uhmerkuh; the interjections are far more colorful than, say, "Shit, motherfuckin' beeyatch." Zzzzz...
On the one hand, Oprah does seem (in the few of her programmes I've seen) to have some kind of interest in personal development which is kind of Horusian, BUT on the other hand I also find her programmes generally depressing and too accepting of things as they are.
I think the best way to look at Oprah while still being charitable is that she is a salve: much like Western medicine, she treats symptoms without paying too much attention to cause. This is not to say that she doesn't do good, as such treatment can work by merit of the placebo effect, much in the way that people can find spiritual enlightenment by the Judeo-Christian routes, but those occasions tend to be more random and supported by outside experiences.
it probably is a little bit lazy of me to just assume that bin Laden's guilty on the basis that he admitted such guilt on telly (which could, of course, merely have been a virtual OBL [hmm. Virtual OBL v. virtual RAW - the metafictional wrestling bout of the century?] &c)
Well, leaving aside for the moment conspiracy theory that the whole "slumber party" video shows someone other than OBL, he really *didn't* admit anything. Oh, he nodded and winked a lot and tried to associate himself with the act without coming right out and saying so, but that could just as easily have been a media manipulation on his part to glom onto the zeitgeist. And lest it go unsaid, while he was also linked to the first bombing of the WTC, so was the CIA by an uncomfortable paper trail. ("But the Pentagon was also attacked," you say. Isn't the most convincing murder one in which the murderer also seems to be the victim?) If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
branding continues to take over practically every possible area of life
Brutha, come to NYC and see how bad its gotten. There's an ad campaign by a startup bank called Washington Mutual which has plastered its image on EVERY FUCKING AVAILABLE SQUARE METER OF SPACE. Places in the subway which have been pristine of advertising for as long as anyone can remember are now wallpapered in these annoying ads. I mean they're EVERYWHERE: cielings, structural beams, stairwells, turnstile walls. And somehow what makes it worse is that this bank is trying to appeal to the 20-/30-something demographic, showing people being stereotypically "individual," ie wearing paper crowns, rollerblading in traffic, wearing funny glasses, doing yoga with uncharacteristically "extreme" expressions, making faces, and generally seeming cool and moronic at the same time. All all these billboards run off at the mouth about A REVOLUTION... in banking and LIBERATION... from checking fees. This is symptomatic of what I've noticed is a vicarious tendency in advertising: you'd like to be doing something that validates your existence, like snowboarding or exploring the world or telling your boss to fuck off or, hey, maybe throwing a revolution, buuuut such things are impossible in the "real" world, resign yourself to that, and here, this will serve as an acceptable substitute. The current subconscious zeitgeist IS about revolution, but institutions like banks stand to lose if that reaches the conscious zeitgeist, so they distract you by selling you precisely the opposite of what you want as some previously unrecognized form of what it is you really want. I've been so disgusted by these billboards I was considering making up stickers to slap onto every one I pass, but the rebellion has already begun: today I saw one with this written on it:
A CHECKING ACCOUNT IS NOT A REVOLUTION
It's beginning.
On a more domestic level, Vlad: these personality realignments are fun, aren't they?
I'm sure I'll have a much more upbeat take on the whole thing once I'm more than 50% reconstituted; right now I'm still too close to the catalytic events that begun the genetic download to be able to laugh them off as easily as I, as someone else, should. The baggage of my life in this period still weighs a bit too heavily on my shoulders. But yes, as far as I understand my true self to be, I will be the sexiest, most dangerous post-historical cat imaginable.
Cusm: You state very simply yet elegantly the fundamental truth of things. I think one of the signposts of the coming age is that the codes and allegories and metaphors are being stripped away, leaving merely language itself as the final obstacle between implicit understanding of what is. Which is not to say that these devices cannot serve that purpose, but we've seen that more often than not people become fixated on those devices as a technique of actually preventing themselves from acknowledging what is and instead use those devices as justification for how they, as the centers of their universes, feel most comfortable with things being. Part of the significance of the eschaton, if my read is correct, is that something will happen or become evident that will only be able to be disputed and discounted by the most ego-driven, who may have a short period of resurgence thereafter but will very shortly do themselves in, hopefully with a minimum of harm to the rest of us. Systems of governance, commerce, welfare and expression will be completely reorganized by this utter shift in perspective, and nations, ethnicities, languages and all other ways in which we distinguish all of them from ourselves will become far less relevant than the ways in which we are identical. Occurrences that by our expectations would be considered outrightly miraculous will become commonplace, yet no less miraculous. The consciousness that we feel comfortable referring to and anthropomorphasizing as "God" will make itself more evident right at the moment we stop looking for it outside of ourselves. The biggest disservice Judeo-Christian tradition ever did the species was to tell us that the Messiah was a person; it is people, all of us, rediscovering that each of us is a hologram of the infinite. Those traditions fear the day in which we figure this out, because they will lose all power over us, and they fear that we will turn on them; this latter fear is irrational once you understand what this shift means.
These are the images that my future self has delivered to me: edifices utterly covered in vegetation; minstrels and bards and artists of all stripes perform their crafts on street corners to tranquil groups in no rush to be anywhere urgent, since they live in no fear of homelessness or starvation for themselves or their loved ones; indeed, an upswing in such creative types to almost universality once the fear of deprivation is eliminated; sewer workers are rewarded almost as well as are heart surgeons, though the latter will become a rarity once we come to understand how to heal ourselves of naturally-occurring diseases, not to mention prevent most occurrences in the first place; the populations spreading out from the cities, replanting, reconnecting, relearning; the populations spreading out from the planet, rejoining our destiny.
Anyone who would tell me I have lost my mind hasn't ever found theirs in the first place. |
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