CULTure

I got into a discussion last night about TV shows. Specifically ones representing law enforcement. Part of these shows is clearly, and classically the Mohawk Valley Formula. Part of it is how that has been reshaped by postmodern expectations of degree and variation, creating a lifelike texture to the simulacra, at least lifelike in what is generalized to be the imagination of the self selected/participating audience.
In the Mohawk Valley Formula aspect, we see people represented typically of a very high degree of intelligence, representing the implementation of the psychological warfare model (think Law and Order, when they tear down the perps) or the implementation of an omniscient police technocracy(as in CSI or Fringe). Almost always they are morally superior than the people they handle(and prosecute) and often let them know this in some way, stratifying themselves into a vanguard of society ostensibly, but in the real world these same forces are brought to bear on us the body politic with the same crass mediocrity to be found throughout the middle class, only strong as the routine , the resources, and the discipline to utilize both, with a penchant to bend rules no one else knows about to make things look nice. This is true everywhere, it is unavoidable and no technology can fix it because, in the end there is just way to much we have no way of truly knowing. All too often at the upper end of this class, it happens again and again to make some one above you look good, to serve the hierarchy, to score political points. When the call comes down, that’s what the big money is really all about: capitalist/hierarchical ordering of society. Sometimes the efficiency of the machine is just back room agreements that if we look tough it gets us or our superiors re-elected or promoted. If we arbitrarily draw a line and hope it acts as a net to catch all of those qualities in society we randomly associated with that which we can't outright outlaw, like rap music, pierced , tattoed freaks and baggy pants, then so much the better for us. That is how we as non resisting or otherwise colluding members of society are creating problems, playing with peoples lives, and is the most malicious form of the make-work of civil service. Look at the financial crisis and the scope of who wasn't doing their due diligence for examples as to the scope of mediocrity. My guess is there is more fun in planning vacations, buying nice things for yourself or sexual conquests, than there is doing boring old work .
Flipping back to the post modern, now the shows do not uniformly represent a morally superior class, there are inevitably characters who are crooked, self serving, serving the interests aforementioned in a repugnant way. This is another game they play with your mind. Back room dealings are by nature unseen. The people executing these reactions often look more like a lead character than a supporting character playing this sort of heel. Often there is no internal resistance to these sorts of issues, and in public reality there they are at the buffet table where we can all get to see them take a slice of the moral capital deposited into the public by these images and sounds. Thanks Hollywood! In the modern era, there was very little of that, because there was little tolerance for straying from the baseline message, of law enforcement being everywhere, all the time, knowing all that is wrong, and brutally responding in kind. Now, much like public opinion it too is shaded, but shaded still as the ruling class masters need us to believe. Not that they shield robber barons, destroying your grandmothers pension while evicting her for the same lack of ability to keep up on her obligations, god forbid her rent or mortgage. Not for picking on the easy prey, the underclass of those already chewed up and spit out because there was no place for them or their type in this miserable phony existence. We need to believe everyone in Law enforcement is working on a sinister murder, or possibly a rape, something scary that invokes fear that makes us fear the same forces at work within law enforcement that can arbitrarily ruin a good persons life, because it has the means to do so and occasionally, in some places more than others a mechanism for it as well.
But, you might think, those are the bad apples. The bad apples always get brought out when a problem shows up in the system. The point is to detach the frankentree that birthed them from the defective product they have made, by painting the system in the public imagination as always tending toward ever greater efficiency and morality, but here it failed after the fact, and the basic root of where it came from is decent. Unfortunate reality seems to be that this tree makes rotten apples from the start, for most of us, and we’re dying from the paint and preservatives we never before needed , but which exist to give us the inferior "apples" while they savor the best of the original intention, in their self fulfilling god prophecy, called the distribution and disparity of wealth. They didn’t sell off the future for your sake now did they? Beware of the bad apple comparison. The whole fucking orchard is rotted and they are shaping and painting something akin to soilent green for us to swallow as apples.
These are just a few small examples of the grandiose mindfucking you are subjected to if not by your own choice, then by being forced to share a world with others misguided enough not only to buy into the images, but to wholeheartedly believe in the logic, with both faith, inspiring religious comparisons, and venom recalling the polemics, inquisitions, and other excuses for torture. People otherwise over-convinced have used such occurrences to justify their disgusting instincts to be cruel to those who have lost their rights, probably as someone was cruel to them or frightened them when they were small and weak by being cruel to others, and they hopped on the bandwagon to avoid being next, only to become later apprenticed in the ways of this lonely member of what we still consider depravity. Normalcy of this sort will breed these worst qualities.
Normalcy being the key word of my next topic: culture.
Culture isn’t a holiday, a ritual dance or a national costume. Culture is everything you take for granted in your life. Sure it includes holidays, music, dancing, and attire, but the stuff you actually do everyday without thinking, and can believe that these are things similar to what people everywhere experience. Then, when we run into a culture that doesn’t know of these elements and we see them as naïve, strange, ignorant, or dangerous, we see what culture really is. How these seemingly insignificant narratives like cop tv shows fit into our life, are there for much more important than we might expect because they lend to the aggregate experience by which we both frame the world and explain it to ourselves, and how we allow ourselves to problem solve based on the intentions we assume are going on around us.
Everything preyed upon by the corporate professional mass communications sector to get you to believe the story you are watching is real, that it could be happening somewhere, is not merely a product of dialog and acting ability, it’s a product of knowing first, although this is always a guess, what the people want to see reality as. What comforts them to believe the world isn’t what it all too often acts like, and that your one way false empathy, or even infatuation is worthwhile as far as illusions go, because it is validating to your desires. Analyze your desires. Where did they come from? Where do they lead to? Analyze your life: What have you done? What are you going to do? Who does you labor support? You and who else, doing what else? Look at what you believe: Why do you believe it? What does it do for you? Could you be wrong? Thinking is a gift we’ve been allowed to keep so far by the force of evolution, but it has made some serious mistakes as all of us have. If we can’t start using our minds to think through our problems even ones with ugly answers, but no real alternative, it will be a gift that will be taken back by our extinction. Earthquakes, 4 Ollin. How will we be remembered, we’d fuck anything for a dollar? We liked to try and make ourselves feel better when the ugly truth got too close by validating our desires?
On to overaccumulation. Speaking of failures , the failure of capitalism is exactly because it worked so well and so fast at increasing the disparity of wealth, it fatally fucked itself. Hopefully. The recent asset bubbles, dot com, real-estate and more recently oil and gold , were driven up because too few people have too much money to spend. Perhaps its all of the individuals who win the lottery, sell their business to a corporation, downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring, union busting, corporate CEOs with huge bonuses to spend or wealthy investors. The last three invariably got rich destroying the middle class in some way shape or form, participating in normal corporate behavior which looks monstrous to people on the outside, because it usually is if they actually deal with the entity in some way other than as a shareholder. They have demanded top returns from their top flight money managers. That has forced them into hunting down what essentially amounts to the next Ponzi scheme before it gets into it's late bloated stages, and to get out before it collapses. But when you are making returns at 10% and up you don't go anywhere else. Think, how hard must it be for someone so intrinsically greedy to make this their life's work and stab their way into some authority, only to leave it behind for the next schmo. It's like leaving your trophy bride drunk and horny at a bar full of sex offenders. In their minds, all they imagine is the thrilling and forbidden pleasures that will go on while they are wanking off in their measly 3-5% return investment accounts. Why should those troglodytes enjoy the easy work with the beauty queen? To imagine these are the types of personalities we entrust with all of our major decisions!!! I'm not the nihilist, believe me, they are. Maybe we need a TV show about a serious intelligent investor who makes life better for the world because he or she is smart and moral. Or is that that Fox show where the millionaires give away money to "strangers" they deem worthy, Fuck you so very much fox!
So how do we keep a credit driven, debt driven market expansion going when we don't make hardly anything useful or efficient here? Answer: we don't, or rather, we can't. Yes we can't! Options: print money when foreign debt buyers, give up on our great American debt Ponzi scheme, the greatest of all time. We will be remembered as the greatest, the greatest fuck-over the world has ever known. Printing money will at some point need to happen because the markets have failed. Then we will need wheelbarrows because the undercapitalized banks will fail and money will be worthless. They have failed because no one has money or credit or for those with credit, need for a third and fourth car, so they become debt stressed enough as the system will require to "right' itself, when it has been wrong like this from the beginning. No one on cable news will tell you that this is the righted market, the right free market operating exactly as designed. The old market was false, but this is exactly what was asked for, delivered by the person who was asked for by those same people doing the asking. Now they asked for the new guy, and this poor guy really couldn't have inherited a much worse scenario unless he overtook command of a nation of corpses and cockroaches from a radioactive mountain base in Virginia, or on a space station. Yet regardless of the voting part of democracy, he loads his plate full of same old, same old. It's like an old episode of Batman, where you never fully understand why the same three super villains keep coming back again and again and keep getting shipped off to the county jail in the same cell. Maybe that was the Mohawk Valley Formula preparing us for the politics of the future....
Solidarity with the people of Gaza, I acknowledge your injustice! Also with the people of Israel resisting what their state is doing.