Thursday, June 22, 2017

Reenactment Auxiliary

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President., 25th amendment, sec.1

Running the air a little in the heat of the day before I go to lie down, daring, when I do, to shut the air conditioning off, in sooty urban ninety degree weather, little changed since oh, let's say, 1918, before the technology of Freon was widely available so that toady peasants could live past sixty. I've heard twice now that "hate", whether as an entity, a thing, which only exists as an advanced internal motivation in primates, or a modal verb, is a strong word. The ambulatory world uses it as a moral teaching tool, like in Kung Fu, David Carradine went up against an old monk controlling the warrior who appeared to have superhuman strength, until Caine journeyed to the monk's residence, and the Shaolin broke the corroded man's will through focused meditation, and viewers then saw little more than emaciated bark and dust, the supporting actor impossibly shriveled.




 It isn't quite so allegorical in real world terms, when the tsunami strikes with as much steady consistency as it does with surge and currents. For developmental damage, it is simply part and parcel of our vocabulary, not extraordinary in the least. If we had extraordinary, we'd be running the Phineas Priests better than they run themselves. Richard Spencer, in his carefully plotted alt.right facade, his pretense toward being a reasonable think tank, probably knows quite a few of these anarchists a la mode, in their conflicted ballet with local and federal law enforcement. I write this in speculation only, and do not claim his ethno romantic views on white privilege serve as a front for domestic paramilitary enthusiasts. They can believe anything they please, except when it comes to insurrection. Authority looks askance at sedition against a purportedly constitutional republic, one thing it shares with otherwise discredited regimes where governance is a wink and a nod. They only way extremism ever comes out victorious is in numbers, sympathizers, converts. This is one way the status quo moves. Innovation is another, like the technology surrounding television. We very rarely dwell on how complex the components of video are. We grasp the basic concepts of how electricity is harnessed, controlled, but our numbers are fewer in the expertise of audio, or radio waves, satellite technology. Count me in as useless when it comes to these applications, how magnetism carries voice, how antenna captures signals, how transistors convert this so that pixels can create exactly what cameras film. Control these mediums and then you control the dissemination of the facts to be distorted in one variation or another, but how to lust for power and keep it in the dynastic sense is increasingly difficult to do, despite Chancellor Merkel, and it cannot be done by terrorizing Spokane with pipe bombs and strategic bank heists. Take Silicon Valley and its oligarchy: Tim Cook, Peter Thiel, Chris Hughes in New York, Zuckerberg, Jack, even Ev Williams, and their enablers. They may not all share the characteristics of a regressive, if occasionally patriarchal, homosexuality, but they all have, to some degree, a coastal, dandyish elitism-- even Thiel, who seems, at least superficially, to be a boy he-man who doesn't grow up, but we've been co-opted by them, augmenting, as they have, the Defense Department technology which is now the digital age, and whether intentional or not, unless the Internet is destroyed, (unlikely), freedom is dead.
This may seem like I give the saying nothing environment of social media too much importance. Toomey, to pick a conventional establishment example, doesn't live on it. He is a legislator, a man of great privilege, juxtaposed against the hordes, but nothing, and no one is free, in this age of computer science, cameras, facial recognition software, quarantines Apple, Google, and their heirs knowing everything. Minority Report  will seem like a piss in the bucket, compared to where we're headed. Along the way, hate will flare, and for those whom justice has never lifted a finger, it's comprehensible. Libertarians may see the dowager's hostility to homosexual culture as a violation of liberty and privacy. On one level, it is. But what political aspirants like Austin Petersen do not see in their paramount individualism, is, gay men and lesbians generate victims too, as did my mother's once best friend, even in the closet. Kmac's eventual happiness with one of her husband's relatives had repercussions, and created estrangements. Don't Semitic moralists also have the right to believe sexual sodomy is sinful, as well? Liberty for all is not quite the utilitarian striving that it seems, in this context. Not that I am forsaking libertarian beliefs. They've helped me a good deal, but freedom is exceedingly fragile against a collective which automation has made so banal it's difficult to see how aesthetic transcendence will find space to flourish in future world.

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