> not? and yet they work. as we sneer, they're boring their way into our
> brains. and as those of us who are "in the know" and "above it all" spend
> time analyzing and critiquing them, we are still GIVING THEM ATTENTION.
I think people like us give them so much attention because for whatever
reason we feel it is important to wake people up out of the coma of their
lives so they can be genuine and passionate, thriving, acting human
beings. Or at the very least connect with like minded people who
understand on some level the choices you make. I don't know why we or what
kind of personality gets fixated on
this thing but it may have something to do with having to be subject to
being an awake person in a dream.
I think the important thing is to keep the issues alive and keep the darn
thing talked about. Yes, I know, we end up talking to the converted, or
even the people who are the native mystics of cultural arcana, but you
figure, at some point, I found people, established people, who are
concerned about the things I am concerned about and use art as a way to
show people the ingenuinous or folly of consumerism, the stranglehold
materiality has on our psychological or spiritual
well being or even our sense of connectedness to the BIG THEMES like
nature or humanity.
Its obvious on an environmental level that consumerism has given rise to
the destruction of the ecosytem but its pernicious impact does not stop
there. All these systems feed into each other, enabled the wealthy to use
impersonal entities to exert undue influence on government and culture and
created this culture where everyone and their center are split. That
schizophrenia is caused by the doublespeak of commercial media that both
placates with heart rending stories of all the terrible things in the
world but never ever implicates the consumer or the producer or even a
culture of consumerism or even *Gasp* american capitalism, as sources of
those social or environmental problems.
Save the whales, but buy Pampers. Have babies, but don't take any
responsibility for the world. Elect someone to do the job. Big Oil Spill!
Quelle horreur - and all the schoolchildren write a letter to Exxon and
the parents say "yes, its so awful what THEY do ...Buy new cars. Cars are
America"
Its just that kind of ignorance and hypocrisy that gets to me.
So if I tend to focus on the small things I can use as examples to help
people along in their perception of the world, and their lives as
participants... co-creators ... of that world, that I also have to live
in, then its the least I can do without feeling totally complicit.
Yes, we see it happening ... but we don't say anything about it.
I saw the Fight Club recently, which is really a travesty in so many ways
because the principals of anarchism or the radical autonomous zone or
criticism of consumer culture was taken by the horns and steered off a
cliff. But at the same time it did bring up some ideas, however impotent
the following discourse was. It was the closest thing that I've seen from
the mainstream that even acknowledged that people feel empty and
directionless and tied to consumption as the source of meaning in their
life. And it was terribly dissapointing to see them chicken out with that
whole "what people really want is to get out debt". And even though they
did show the followers of Tyler as just adopting the costume of dissension
without really embracing the principals of liberty, that fact was never
adequately pointed out for an audience that mostly just saw a bunch of
cool fight scenes.
It was a perfect waste of a stage to show ideology in action and explore
some of the logic of action in a simplified, idealized and romanticized
world view.
-Thom
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