The Merits of TVlessness.

In addition to despising car use, I avoid TV like a plague as the web makes it even more worthless than it was before.

I'm literally crosseyed from watching it too closely as a toddler in a reversal of the Mimirs well myth regarding Odin. He gave up an eye to drink from the wisdom well. I half wrecked sight to imbibe imbecility.

And it is mildly galling to see how much time my beloved lefty blogosphere devotes to TV drivel from hacks like Billious O'Biley as it is a reactive posture rather than leapfrogging ahead to excite yearning supporters of a progressive future on how to actually build it.

There is so much education to share on sustainability, clearing house options on how to disengage corporate encroachment and how to finish off the flailing, self destructive GOP with real exciting ideas on how to get off the ratrace oil consumer debt treadmill in a way that allows people to thrive and prosper.

If we generate excitement about a better future with resources at hand people will be thrilled with the empowerment. It is what Liddle Hart would call the indirect method.

Reading Sign.

Donald Stokes wrote a wonderful guide to reading the living world as if it were a book. "Animal Tracking and Behavior" reconnects a half blinded modern denizen with skills that were once common.

You learn to make sense of subtle deer antler rubs on branches, evidence of porcupine lunches or the more striking bear claw marks on beech trees bears use to demonstrate tallness.

I've had hours of fun hiking around New England green spaces and the regions National Forests applying this learning.

Over time I came to conclude it is really an exercise in honing perception, in seeing that is applicable in nearly every facet of living skillfully.

For example, you land in a new city and wonder about job prospects or housing. Craigslist becomes a wealth of statistical data on both with the number totals posted at the top of main category fields such as "jobs" or "housing".

Having landed a job, you become alert to the nuances of inevitable office politics and begin to fathom the decision basis as well as the employers role in the broader economy sector it belongs to.

As you move toward added learning about the human condition and current affairs you read sign some more and gain a potential to see ahead of the curve and foresee outcomes.

The basic sign reading skill can be further enhanced by developing some capacity to evaluate likelihoods and statistical distribution.

Of course, it is essential to have an urge to seek truth, however dissonant, rather than merely seeking reinforcement of what you want to believe.

We now live in a time where our cognitive capacities are continuously disturbed by imposed media static primarily bent on selling us something.

It reduces our once great human capacities to the level of bored crib bound infants fascinated by the shiny Mylar mobile twisting in the breeze overhead.

An essential precondition to regaining this majestic capability would be to unplug the media drivel stream to the greatest extent practible and resume the far more satisfying and challenging trajectory of maturation and understanding, one of our odd species' primary strengths.

Precarious Vicariousness. Part 2. Cartoon Nation.

I have long pondered this Vicariousness problem. In the prior post, I covered the 'what' of it. And so now I'll try to cover the 'why'.

Once upon a time people had a compass, some inner direction to shape their destinies and navigate life for better or worse. The arrival of generic mass market trappings ushered in a time of shift to the 'radar' or a focus on what 'other's ' think as conformity extended its influence.

David Riesman covered this more skillfully than I can in his masterful work, 'The Lonely Crowd'.

But I'm beginning to wonder if the radar is falling into disrepair to give way to a dismaying abandonment of social development as it was formerly known.

It would appear that we now have an embrace of the vicarious to an extent of entire subcultures descending into little more than stylized cartoons called 'lifestyles' that resemble injection molded personalities entirely crafted of received media imposition with the distinct humanness of many becoming a thing at the margins.

On the broadest level, many women and men have become stylized cartoons of what they assume their roles to be based on cues from TV. And from there, the cartoonishness is further shaped by lifestyle affiliations from Goth to Hip Hop Gangsta to Neo Con, Fundamentalist Christian, White Supremacist and so on.

And many are soaked in a vicarious marinade of moviedom whereby a most telling outcome of 9/11 was how it seemed like a movie. Leisure activity is increasingly given to conspicuous waste at bizarre Theme Parks, wholly artificial simulacra rather than participation in the actual world.

Cues for daily conduct emanate from exhibitionist spectacles of kangaroo court Jerry Springer messes or the oddly named Reality Shows. A numbness sets in to desensitize the hapless from the consequences of many powerful hazards bearing down from eco catastrophe to Orwellian ascendancy of pitiless corporate oligarchy.

And those of us who greet the imposition of manufactured personality often find ourselves wondering what sort of tumult will finally break the spell and will it be survivable?

Bateson Learning Theory and Metalogs.

Gregory Bateson was one of the 20th centuries' great thinkers and his specialty was learning theory. He was married for a time to another great thinker, Margaret Mead, and they had a daughter who may well still teach at Harvard.

A basic explanation of learning theory turns on levels of learning. The most basic level of learning might be the way a planeria 'learns' to sense levels of heat and light and moves to the zones most useful to survival.

The next level is one we are familiar with whereby one begins to make conclusions about basic information. There are new elements such as play or pretend versions of contingent real circumstances. Squirrels do this as do we.

Level three is where we begin to derive conclusions about level two like those great 'everything I know is wrong' epiphanies that sometimes visit a life in some great break through that leads to a more dynamic participation in ones life, a shedding of baggage.

This, of course, can also be hazardous and lead to madness.

Those of you who wonder about all this are encouraged to find a copy of his "Steps Toward an Ecology of the Mind", a classic.

Now, in the winter of 2002, I ended up having a lively e mail correspondence with a brilliant Englishwoman I met through here semi scabrous naughty erotic literature web site. She is a math teacher somewhere in the midlands, an old radical who loved Gang of Four shows when she went to college in Leeds.

We became great pen pals for a time but never discussed dirty stuff. I'd explain my weird Seattle existence and share ideas so one time I told her about Bateson's meta dialogs and here is here wonderful reply. Best to you"Emily" wherever you are, (spellings are in her Brit English).

"So I was reading the Metadialogue about meta messages, and then I got it, the progression from baby to adult understanding of messaging,(and the annoying way many knuckleheaded blokes are still stuck at a child level of development)."

"1. You start off, as a child, having to be sent explicit messages - metamessages - about what your messages are going to be about:

- this is play; this is serious; this is instruction."

"2.But soon you get so reading the metamessages, that you start to play with them.

- you use teasing, irony, sarcasm, taking things literally, exaggeration, to pretend you mistook one metamessage for another."

"3. Then you get better, and you blend the message and the metamessage together,

-weaving sense and nonsense, blurring reality and fiction - is a documentary recreation documentary, or fiction?"

"4. You end up withdrawing from metamessages altogether,

-leaving just the message and letting you decide what metamessage you'd like to impose on it."

"5. Till one day you realise you don't have to impose,

- you can just let the message be and admire it from all metamessage angles."

"Soooo, what annoys me about the people who email me with that aged question, is this all real, is they haven't moved off the childish level one and I'm at level five."

"Thanks Chris, that helped a lot to answer that bug-bear."

Damn, I miss her.

Precarious Vicariousness. Part 1.

“Shakespearean fish swim the sea far away from land. Romantic fish swim in nets coming to the hand. What are all these fish that lie gasping on the strand?” W.B. Yeats.

Two thirds of America’s GDP is tied to convincing consumers to buy some good or service. All other output shrinks by comparison. Astonishing effort is directed to corral these creatures into a purchase pen. Since very little beyond food and shelter is actually needed, much of the effort goes toward manipulating wants and whims.

In the critical ‘holiday’ quarter, desperately earnest cheerleading begins in tandem with Halloween and continues right up to Christmas Eve. This is the height of the great upstream spawning rush as predators leap to reap rewards.

The main focus of want manipulation is to create dissatisfaction with status to be solved by the possession of something. The implied premise is that target’s life is only valid when avid purchasing is steady and prodigious.

It is essential to instill a drive to emulate. In emulation there is salvation.

What is exhibited for emulation? Our time has seen a ceaseless refinement and expansion of projected postures with an attached gamut of purchase options for posture embellishment in the quest for ‘lifestyle’.

“Lord of the Manner” is a popular patrician affluence beloved by the country club neocon crowd and their imitators. This one is a classic dating back here to southern plantation owners and northern merchant princes. It had a spectacular run in the robber baron era among resource hogs of every description and showed up again in the 1920’s, 1950’s and ever since the 1980’s.

It is wildly popular and expresses widespread distaste for an actual republic and yearning for some return to feudalism.

“Rugged Pioneer” dates back to Davey Crockett myths and hit its stride when Andrew Jackson was president. It works like a charm with rurals or anti-social malcontents who imagine themselves as ‘mavericks’.

“Gold Digger/Technocrat” goes back to the forty-niners and 19^th century Mechanics Societies. It is a callow thing beloved by yuppies and the cohort of feminists who strive to be as awful as men at their worst.

“Youth and Beauty” is a classic and is applied to prey on the narcissism of the young or most women up to menopause.

“Playboy” is the fun seeking toy loving hedonist peacock counterpart to the court fops of feudal times and now has an entertaining version in the ‘Metro-Sexual’.

Pitches are often combined to make odd hybrids like Rugged Pioneer and Playboy or Technocrat with Youth and Beauty, geek chic.

I just dreamed these stereotypes with help from a few glasses of wine but later saw a PBS special on marketing manipulations that actually provided some of the real terms in circulation.

“Urban Achievers” is the euphemism for Technocrats, “Shotgun and Pickup Truck” is applied to the Rugged Individualists. The predators find cages for the prey.

The stalking really revs up when it’s time to snare the hapless and financially inept young.

First they break the kids down by gender so guys become ‘Mooks” while the women become “Midriffs”. Then this base group gets sliced and diced into “Young Influentials”, the trend setters, and “Early Adopters”, or the kids most likely to jump on these trendwagons.

This is just a short summary of how affiliation with vicarious impulses can be used to cheat people of their uniqueness by making a Haven’t-A-Heart chump trap to transform the prey into a jacklit profit center.

I wonder what Carl Jung would make of this vile co-optation of his great gift of archetype theory?

It is essentially an engineered alchemy of transform a human into a cipher part of a crowd.

Elias Cannetti describes crowd symbols in his magnificent work, “Crowds and Power”.

For example, he cited the waves of the ocean for England to reflect it’s maritime heritage or Oak forests for the Teutonic mystique embraced by Germany.

He neglected to suggest one for the USA but two good candidates might be the Treasure Trove to emphasize the hegemony of money grubbing in the collective overmind or maybe a Hall of Mirrors to cover the amplified narcissism that grips the nation.

Most anxieties attending American life have long issued from greed wrestles or the false compensations of excessive self love. Consider John Smith’s early tales of abundance in his boosterish reports back to England or the rise of Hollywood to drive droves toward dreams of being the next movie star.

The Revolution here was a Greed Argument over dry goods tariffs and the Civil war was a variant over the allowable rules regarding labor compensation. Those crazy southerners figured labor should be free as long as you could find a way to utterly dehumanize the laborers.

Most of America’s manic mass settlement waves rolled from reports of easy money from gold strikes, land grabs or stock manias in a churning cycle of boom and bust.

According to Baudrillard, a notable difference between the new world and the old is our relation to the land. Their world is rooted in an ancient given they struggle to fathom. Ours is a recent take.

We superimpose the contents of our imaginations on its obstinate surface and reshape it weirdly in our own ever changing image in a haphazard heedless rush without much thought beyond an eye to the ledger or whether it’ll make us look good.

Thus, much of our human landscape is a jumbled hodge podge of imported simulacra cast away from context. It started out as quaint folk art features and has increasingly become a corporate contraption bent on erasing distinctness of place to favor brand expedience to a point where an auto mile strip mall zone in Seattle is identical to one in Boston. Yes, the ‘there’ has lost its there with a diminishing sense of an outside.

And the contrivance is near lethal in its stupefying, numbing banality.