The #YOLO Society

I wonder if those younger than me are truly able to think inside themselves any more.  Well, that's not exactly true, I know they do, at least, I hope so. I've talked about this before, the idea that how we communicate effects how we think.  The increasing trend is to speak in fewer and fewer words, and in more images.  Again, this is a trend that started well before World War I with the invention of the camera and then the television, and I think this is all a planned reduction of thought by writing words.  I've felt it, too, even writing these blogs.  I could have gone on and on about the game Papo Y Yo for the Playstation, but after seeing the Youtube videos made about the game, I simply added these to the blog and called it a day.  The increase in emotionally driven images and shorter text-thoughts centers around today's youth.  There's no need for a detailed account of an adventurous day when taking a few camera shots on Instagram will take care of the ideas that words would communicate just as well.  Instead of describing the feeling of bunjee jumping off a tower, just take a picture of yourself prior to, type #YOLO, and that satisfies the people on the receiving end of that thought.  Those four letters describes a complex life philosophy, one that flies in the face of religion, certainly of safety and of self-control.  It promotes commercial activities that would not be done otherwise.  A 3000 calorie burger? #YOLO. Buying a jet ski?  #YOLO. Experimenting with street drugs? #YOLO.  You get my drift.  The value of life is lessened as the experience of living increases. This wouldn't be possible prior to the Internet because there would be no way of communicating such a lifestyle using as few characters as possible.

So everything is communicated in short, sometimes unintelligible letters and images that are supposed to trigger emotional, not rational, responses.  So if an emotion or a thought is unable to be communicated by contemporary social means, is the thought able to be contrived and cogitated upon? If a tree falls in the forest....  One could argue that this is a deliberate planned move toward the simplification of thought towards, well, #YOLO. What a government could do with a society of young citizens who find that instant gratification is the most important objective in life.  There would be no need to work hard and achieve a long term goal when instant happiness is the apex of existence. It's not a far leap to understand that a large strong central government that controls lives through giving people what they want, but not too much, and making them dependent upon those in control, would have the biggest advantage from a #YOLO society.   But since my main objective is not to talk about such things, I will leave the point there.
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Similarly, how does a #YOLO society deal with religion, with the existence of God?  If a world lives only for short term gratification, does eternal life mean anything to them? And this doesn't mean that these people would necessarily be bad people.  The desire to do good things for other people is just as strong a motivating factor as self-gratification.  They both end with the same positive brain-chemicals being raised and the same wonderful feelings swirling around in the brain and heart.  It might even be conceivable that the idea of God providing our every need, of forgiving our every sin, would appeal to a YOLO (the # sign is getting annoying) generation, but only if the message of Christ was given in methods that mirror how they communicate. Namely, emotional triggers caused by music, images, and few words.  It's obvious that contemporary Christian music has far fewer layers than the hymns of old.  Take Gloria Gaither's "I Then Shall Live" and compare it to any of the Christian Pop Chart toppers currently.  The depth of meaning in the words is vastly different.  They are communicating some of the same things, but to different audiences.  The latter needs rhythm, repetition, almost a hypnotic beat that drives the point home, while Gaither's hymns gear more toward a slower, more reasoning style, filled with symbolism, classic Christian motifs (the lighthouse, the fountain, etc...) which don't resonate with today's youth.  And while you communicate the message to different people using different methods, the classic methods of text, of symbolism through words, mean more to me than emotional hooks and memes.
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Actually, this isn't where I wanted to go with this idea at all, but it'll do for a start.  I've found it interesting of late, talking with my mom post-Aortic Aneurysm operation, about the idea that she was within minutes of dying.  How do you face death and how does that change you?  My dad had several heart attacks and open heart surgeries, and those surgeries changed his personality.  My mom has a theory that facing death in that manner, whether it be because of the heart surgery or not, does change the way you react to other people.  Take Dan Reeves, former coach of the Atlanta Falcons.  After his heart surgery, he was much more conservative in his play calling, and his win-loss record went down.  I would even go as far as say that John Fox probably had the same problem, and would have affected the Denver Broncos much more had Peyton Manning not been the Quarterback and running things.  I want to look at these subjects, as well as the works of artists when they face their own mortality, specifically, the rock 'n roll musicians that I listen to.

Death and Mass Production (A Book Review and Remembrance)

Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I must admit that when I saw this book in the stores, and picked it up, I realized it was the last thing I would want to read.  I mean, just another "kids dying with cancer story," depressing and melodramatic. My mind immediately leapt (the autocorrect doesn't have "leapt" as the past tense form of "leap.") to Death Be Not Proud, which most children have to read during high school at some point.  It's a matter of Pathos, I believe, to read these books where kids (or their pets) die, so that it says 1) "Quit Whining, it could be a whole lot worse. and 2) it prepares them for later traumatic experiences.  I swear I'm gonna rewrite Old Yeller , and make it actually have a happy ending.  Of course, you could always give it a sardonic twist, like authors are doing lately, and instead of a rabid fox biting the dog, you could have a mad werewolf biting the kid, so that the dog lives, but the boy dies.... anyhoo, I'm rambling now.  Back to the book.

But as I was saying, I didn't want to read another "Cancer" book.  My grandmother had just recently died of pancreatic cancer, and so why would I have to go through all that again in the pages of a book?  We want to escape reality, not live it over again.

Well, I was wrong.  Turns out that John Green actually realizes that, to twist a Bob Dylan line, "He busy dying goes through a lot of living." Because as I found out with my grandmother, dealing with death is best done as an affirmation, a recollection, of life.  There's no better way to surround the not-so-pleasant times of dealing with medical issues than to bring forth the humor that surrounds us daily.  My grandmother, as she was being prepared for her aneurysm surgery, was asked, "How do you feel?" She, in her wry humor, replied, "With my fingers."  It was the best thing she could have said.

So John Green picks up on this humorous thread and weaves it through the whole book.  He deals with the emotions of the teenage characters very honestly, with more depth than most Lifetime tearjerker movies.  Hazel, Augustus, and Isaac, (ironic that he's called Isaac, (eye-sic), since he's about to go blind) just roll their eyes at most of the attitudes of the adults in their lives.  They make fun of the "strong fighter kid who is always positive even while they lose his/her hair, limbs, etc....," even, when the time comes, they have to portray that image themselves.

Green picks up on the progression of cancer quite well, even talking about the "last good day" that seems to happen to terminally ill people.  I had one afternoon shortly before my grandmother died where she picked up her spirits and we sat there and laughed and she poked fun at me, before she went so far downhill we couldn't care for her at home.  He painted that scene so well in the book.  It was, to some extent, very cathartic for me.

That the title is based on a line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (with all the foreshadowing that it implies), or that the book is filled with references to Eliot's "Prufrock" poem, or Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay,"  are added bonuses for those teachers who will inevitably put down the tired Gunther tome and teach this book to their 10th grade English students instead.
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One part of the novel I found interesting, because it goes back to one of my other blog posts, was this fascination by Augustus about the Afterlife, be it a Christian based one or those suggested by any of the other religions, or nothing at all.  And it's fascinating because, if we are to believe that the philosophies of the 20th century and the secular material world have phased out the traditional Christian beliefs of Heaven and Hell, then this part of the book, and other references to the Afterlife (see Beetlejuice, or Paul Simon's song "The Afterlife,"  (go to my blog about the Afterlife for these examples.)
) is a desire to fill that void.  When reading this book and reflecting on it, I was pulled to  the band Death Cab for Cutie's song "I'll Follow You Into the Dark."


An amazing song that goes so well with the book, especially the line, "fear is the heart of love," something the singer rejects.  There's so many ways to incorporate songs, poems, TV shows....etc... into this book, it really would be a great teaching tool, if a little controversial.
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Since we're dealing with these subjects, I wanted to put here that a good friend I had in high school died this past week. Johnathan Ashley Nix passed away from a massive stroke.  I always loved his wry sense of humor, his unique way of looking at things, his refusal to let all the normal people of Heritage High to get to him all that much, even while I shrank inside myself from bullying.  It was perhaps this that kept me from really making friends with, well, anybody. He signed my yearbook, my senior year, with a long, rambling diatribe about anything, writing it upside-down and right to left.  It took me holding it up to a mirror to read the whole thing.  In the middle is his tune about "Mass Production," a Henry Ford-esque march anthem, much like you would hear in Brave New World.  I still remember the tune he used to sing it.  I only wish I could have been friends with him longer, from when we met in the 6th grade...  He took me to see a truly horrible version of Hamlet at an Atlanta Theatre for school credit (the professor was friends with someone there, I suspect), and so he brought over a ton of Fantasy books that he didn't want.  Among them was The Quest for the Faradawn by Richard Ford, a British author.  Truly a magnificent work, and one of the few I've read where most of the main characters were animals.  Anyway.... I'm just telling the few points in my life where his "thread" touched mine, and so hopefully it will be made fuller and more complete.  Outside of any afterlife or immortality that our souls go into, the memories that we have here are what keep Ashley living on here, inside our own hearts.  I scanned my yearbook page and have it below.

The Language of Sex, Part II : Sex and Music

When we talk about communication as it relates to sex, perhaps none is so obvious, nor understated, as the modern use of music in today's world to promote sexual feeling and the social revolutions that surround it.  I return once more to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and there find a treasure trail of information, opinion, insight, into the idea of music as an instrument to communicate sexual ideas, the feelings of pleasure, and on a directly related note, the siren call of the youth in America to use their massive spending power to satisfy that need for pleasure. There is no real way to work with Bloom's essay on Music except to paste it in almost its entirety, from pages 73-81. The first section of the essay shows the importance of music in the classical world, from the position that Plato gave it, to the treatment it received in the Renaissance. The important part of this is the relationship of music to the polar opposite symbols of reason and passion, Apollo and Dionysus. The pendulum, as I have talked about previously, has swung in both directions, from the Classical works of Bach, orderly, with predictability and stately timbre, to the more chaotic measures of Beethoven. But the assumption today is that passion and chaos sells, that the emotions that ride on each drum beat of Katy Perry's "Firework" with all the sexual imagery that that entails, is as appropriate for those listening to Kidz Bop as college age students making out in the dorm rooms.

Bloom's writing is sometimes complex, and I feel sometimes that in one sentence, I completely agree, while in others, I completely disagree. As Bloom's entire work is certainly polarizing, there is rational thought in all of it, While doing research for this blog, I found that the comments surrounding his ideas go from total agreement (see Mark Steyn's article written in 2007, 20 years after Bloom's book was published, to personal attacks that question the validity of his statements based on his Jewish roots or his sexuality. I have blockquoted Bloom's writings, while those with no indention are mine. Any formatting inside the blockquotes are also mine, if applicable.

This is the significance of rock music. I do not suggest that it has any high intellectual sources. But it has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions.

 See, that's what I was talking about... I have no problem with dipping into "raw passions" when it comes to music, or emotion, or whatever.  Just that there are times that music is meant to be experienced on a level where raw passions are brought out, and others, when economists and salesmen use music and it's effects to manipulate an emotional response, usually to purchase something.  And this, too, is not a problem.  That is what capitalism is supposed to do.  And as everyone knows, "Sex sells." Thus, music is used to this effect.

Modern-day rationalists, such as economists, are indifferent to it and what it represents. The irrationalists are all for it. There is no need to fear that "the blond beasts" are going to come forth from the bland souls of our adolescents. But rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire-not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children's emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

I recall a meeting that my mom once attended with the Mustang Valley Elementary PTA, in which they exposed parents to the lyrics in 80's rock songs. One I remember my mom telling me about was "Bad Boys," you know, the one that they play on Cops... They said it promoted criminality in the listeners.
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I read this passage and am reminded of the scene in Brave New World where the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning showed a group of students a garden where children were playing, naked, in various activities, including commercial-driven games and erotic experimentation.  In BNW the idea of sex was a government-approved activity.  Orgies took the place of religious rituals, merely the worship of one's own body. Specifically, the orgy aspect made it a worship of the body of the community, of society as a whole, a pleasure-driven life where the government gave happiness and controlled its citizens that way.  In today's world, it is obviously not the government doing this, but rather the stronger influence of consumerism, of spending money for pleasure, of spending credit for pleasure, all to the benefit of corporate entities.  A better way of life than government controlled citizens (a la 1984) because we do it of our own accord.
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If we think of music as being a medium in which we communicate, instead of an art form, then we must look at the lyrics as poetry, as essays, as messages that are being sent to today's children.  Music as a mode of communication is very overlooked in today's visual world.  We criticize the sex and violence in television programs, even in music videos (when they had such things), but dealing with music, I think we often overlook it.  I know I do, mostly because I don't understand it.  I do wonder if words that are said, even when you don't consciously understand them, are interpreted and processed by the brain. Subconsciously, if you will.  Anyway, because of the absolute inundation of music into our lives today, from grocery store Musak to Mp3 files on ipods and ipads and iphones, there is probably very few minutes that go by in silence. I recall the times at Borders when the overhead CD's ended, and, as much as we might not have liked the music, the thought of being in the store without it made us cringe.  Better to have music playing then to deal with our own thoughts.  But I digress again...

Neil Postman, in The Disappearance of Childhood looked at the sheer volume of information that children receive each day and have to process and deal with.  In earlier times, that amount of data was limited, as parents were able to restrict the amount of stimuli children were allowed to take in.  Television had only 3 or 4 channels, and was kept in the living room under observation of the parents.  Or even look before that, before radio and television, only through books were children allowed to have information given to them, usually in the form of children's books or the Bible. In this, parents were able to shelter children from the real world, and the innocence of those children was kept in tact.  Children were allowed to be just that.  And think that, when Postman wrote his book, it was the 1980's, before the Internet and the Mp3 revolution, before Youtube and digital cameras and all the things that allow instantaneous consumption of music, video, news, print, almost anything a child does (or does not) want to consume and process. Pornography is easily available via the internet, for free, sometimes without the child purposefully looking for it.  Music can be easily played via Pandora or Spotify, or Youtube, and the language and messages can be whatever the singer wants, without parental restrictions on what is learned.  A child, as long as they can understand the ideas behind the words used, can process as much information as a parent can.  In terms of data, there is no childhood anymore, past the ability to listen and understand.  Kids don't even have to read anymore to get information, they simply listen and watch. 

Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel's Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them. In alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites. Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.

Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music, the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. The words implicitly and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves. Voyeurism is for old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All they need is encouragement.

I found this last paragraph very interesting, as there are so many filter companies that block porn sites from children finding them.  But outside of just curiosity, porn in a visual medium is only accessed by people who aren't able to have sex themselves.  This would include those who are outside cultural aesthetic norms (i.e. ugly people), or those who are forbidden from sexual activities by religious beliefs, etc...  So for teenagers, for example, the thought of watching two adults having sex might actually be revolting.  Now, I'm sure a large part of teenagers (males, at least, I know nothing of the female population), have looked at porn online, but perhaps what makes this stimulating is the idea that it is forbidden by parents, or that it is religiously taboo.  This makes it even more influential.

Now, for that first sentence above. "Rock has the beat of sexual intercourse."  Imagine the percussion of thighs pounding together, or breasts bobbing up and down, of regular heavy breathing, of moans of "yes" and the like... It becomes the same tempo of most rock songs.  My stepdad commented whenever there were teenagers dancing on television, for instance, that they were practicing their "sexual moves." He was very correct on this, whether it is consciously done or not.

We could write a book looking at the lyrics of even the most innocent pop songs, but since I've referenced Kidz Bop 19 on here already, let's take their version of "Dynomite." These are songs deemed safe for children.  The lyrics are the same from the original version sung by Taio Cruz:

We gonna rock this club

We gonna go all night

We gonna light this up

Like it's dynamite.

Note the spelling and whatnot in the lyrics of the Youtube version, but that's another blog.

Even in this chorus, music and dance is equated with sex.  It takes very little imagination to see how most pop songs, even written for children, are filled with sexual innuendos.  Now, that is not to say that a 6 year old is going to understand that.  A 13 year old certainly would, even if it is subconsciously.  For another example, try Aaron Carter's "Bounce," off his second album.

The inevitable corollary of such sexual interest is rebellion against the parental authority that represses it. Selfishness thus becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality. The sexual revolution must overthrow all the forces of domination, the enemies of nature and happiness. From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform. A worldview is balanced on the sexual fulcrum. What were once unconscious or half-conscious childish resentments become the new Scripture. And then comes the longing for the classless, prejudice-free, conflictless, universal society that necessarily results from liberated consciousness-"We Are the World," a pubescent version of Alle Menschen werden Brueder, the fulfillment of which has been inhibited by the political equivalents of Mom and Dad. These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. A glance at the videos that project images on the wall of Plato's cave since MTV took it over suffices to prove this. Hitler's image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause. Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art, combined with a pervasiveness, importance and content beyond Tocqueville's wildest imagination. [Bold emphasis mine]

In my book, I have the bold sentence underline (among others), with the songs "Jeremy" and "Imitation of Life" written outside it.  "Jeremy" is a song that speaks more toward the violence in today's society, but it's applicable to the idea of Plato's cave allegory.  If only Pearl Jam knew how prophetic that video was.  "Imitation of Life," by R.E.M. also deals with Plato's cave, as we are looking at a snap shot of life, moving back and forth, as if on that cave wall.  Although they don't deal with sex and music, I'll put them here, too.

                     

One other thought about this paragraph. Could the 1960's, the protests against the Vietnam War, Woodstock, the whole thing, have been able without the music stimuli that children were able to absorb during that era?  One can argue that it originated from the radios in cars, where kids were able to hear the music that their parents wouldn't let them listen to at home.  Course, this goes back to the beginnings of Rock N' Roll.  Freedom, which comes from the resistance of parental guidance, which transforms into indignation, and into a movement of sometimes vague destinations.  In the end, a movement with numbers such as those in the 1960's, or those, similarly, near Wall Street today, are ultimately helping the corporate and government structures they are fighting against.

 Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.

Yup. 

This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such. The continuing exposure to rock music is a reality, not one confined to a particular class or type of child. One need only ask first-year university students what music they listen to, how much of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and continues through the college years. It is the youth culture and, as I have so often insisted, there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the spirit. Some of this culture's power comes from the fact that it is so loud. It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friendship and the only true common ground. With rock, illusions of shared feelings, bodily contact and grunted formulas, which are supposed to contain so much meaning beyond speech, are the basis of association. None of this contradicts going about the business of life, attending classes and doing the assignments for them. But the meaningful inner life is with the music.

I think if I were to get a medical degree, the direction I would go in would be to provide hearing aide devices to future 60 year olds.  How many times have I seen kids walking behind their parents with either their faces stuck inside a Nintendo DS or with earplugs stuck in their ears, connected to an ipod or other such devices.  There is no communication anymore between parents and their children, and one could probably say the same between peers and even friends.  Why bother when your ears are stuffed with rock music? I loved it when customer came up, asked me for a book, with the earplugs still inserted, as if they were listening to their music and expected me just to take them to their book.  And without communication, where is the bonding going to occur? Where are the feelings of love or passion going to grow from, but from the rhythms of music going through their brains? Relationships become only about the percussive messages, and not about actual communication.  It's as if people talked to each other as Bumblebee did in the recent Transformers movies.  Only though radio songs and messages.  A relationship based solely on music, and not through actual communication, is bound to fail, as the people watching the images in the cave can never be friends as they are too busy watching the wall to notice each other.

This phenomenon is both astounding and indigestible, and is hardly noticed, routine and habitual. But it is of historic proportions that a society's best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats. It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself.

 To re-insert the scene from the Monkee's movie Head: "Pleasure, the inevitable by-product of our civilization (cut scene of a butcher pounding meat)...A new world, whose only preoccupation will be, how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want."

The child I described has parents who have sacrificed to provide him with a good life and who have a great stake in his future happiness. They cannot believe that the musical vocation will contribute very much to that happiness. But there is nothing they can do about it. The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music, and they cannot possibly forbid their children to listen-to it. It is everywhere; all children listen to it; forbidding it would simply cause them to lose their children's affection and obedience.

This is the psychological result of allowing children to have all the luxuries that the parents never got as they grew up during the Great Depression.  This also prevents the parents from restricting the amount of information that comes to the child, and therefore, opens up children's minds to sex, drugs... see below...Bloom argues that the rise of psychology in the 20th century, especially of Freud, and the philosophy of Nietzche, has eradicated much of the spiritual beliefs being taught to children, especially now.  The idea of Cultural Relativism, which says that very little is wrong or right in this world, which is everywhere in television episodes (which is one reason why I won't watch the new Transformer animated series on television, they've taken the moral absolutes out of everyone.), makes it so that what music children listen to is okay with the parents because they listened to the same as children, and because they can't define any message short of worshiping Satan as evil or wrong.  Parents tend to underestimate the power of music in their children's lives. 

When they turn on the television, they will see President Reagan warmly grasping the daintily proffered gloved hand of Michael Jackson and praising him enthusiastically. Better to set the faculty of denial in motion-avoid noticing what the words say, assume the kid will get over it. If he has early sex, that won't get in the way of his having stable relationships later. His drug use will certainly stop at pot. School is providing real values. And popular historicism provides the final salvation: there are new life-styles for new situations, and the older generation is there not to impose its values but to help the younger one to find its own. TV, which compared to music plays a comparatively small role in the formation of young people's character and taste, is a consensus monster-the Right monitors its content for sex, the Left for violence, and many other interested sects for many other things. But the music has hardly been touched, and what efforts have been made are both ineffectual and misguided about the nature and extent of the problem.

The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance between the strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob's emergent wishes - our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates' rhetorical adversary - and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock. They discovered a few years back that children are one of the few groups in the country with considerable disposable income, in the form of allowances. Their parents spend all they have providing for the kids. Appealing to them over their parents' heads, creating a world of delight or them, constitutes one of the richest markets in the postwar world. The rock business is perfect capitalism, supplying to demand and helping to create it. It has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking, but it was so totally new and unexpected that nobody thought to control it, and now it is too late. Progress may be made against cigarette smoking because our absence of standards or our relativism does not extend to matters of bodily health. In all other things the market determines the value. (Yoko Ono is among America's small group of billionaires, along with oil and computer magnates, her late husband having produced and sold a commodity of worth comparable to theirs.) Rock is very big business, bigger than the movies, bigger than professional sports, bigger than television, and this accounts for much of the respectability of the music business. It is difficult to adjust our vision to the changes in the economy and to see what is really important. McDonald's now has more employees than U.S. Steel, and likewise the purveyors of junk food for the soul have supplanted what still seem to be more basic callings.

 This change has been happening for some time. In the late fifties, De Caulle gave Brigitte Bardot one of France's highest honors. I could not understand this, but it turned out that she, along with Peugeot, was France's biggest export item. 

Just as Nixon met with Elvis, or JFK with Marilyn Monroe.  The government knows that Hollywood is a giant supplier of information to the youth of the country, you know, the ones with the highest amount of disposable income, and besides capitalism, that money can also go towards political activism.  Just recently Lady GaGa, whose male counterparts will be discussed later, went to meet President Obama.  These marriages of music and politics are measured tactics to keep the movements of musical social reform in check, allying themselves with the current administration.  That marriage, of politics and entertainment, will become more and more connected, with the result of Brave New World, a government who controls its citizens with pleasure, being the end result.  Perhaps we should have kept the Constitution as "the pursuit of property," and not of "happiness," as, in my opinion, our happiness is not what the government should be dealing with, but rather our safety.  We shall, as Postman says, amuse ourselves to death, or even worse, to slavery. 

As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment. The end for which they had labored for so long has turned out to be amusement, a justified conclusion if the means justify the ends. The music business is peculiar only in that it caters almost exclusively to children, treating legally and naturally imperfect human beings as though they were ready to enjoy the final or complete satisfaction. It perhaps thus reveals the nature of all our entertainment and our loss of a clear view of what adulthood or maturity is, and our incapacity to conceive ends. The emptiness of values results in the acceptance of the natural facts as the ends. In this case infantile sexuality is the end, and 1 suspect that, in the absence of other ends, many adults have come to agree that it is.

It is interesting to note that the Left, which prides itself on its critical approach to"late capitalism" and is unrelenting and unsparing in its analysis of our other cultural phenomena, has in general given rock music a free ride. Abstracting from the capitalist element in which it flourishes, they regard it as a people's art, coming from beneath the bourgeoisie's layers of cultural repression. Its antinomianism and its longing for a world without constraint might seem to be the clarion of the proletarian revolution, and Marxists certainly do see that rock music dissolves the beliefs and morals necessary for liberal society and would approve of it for that alone. But the harmony between the young intellectual Left and rock is probably profounder than that. Herbert Marcuse appealed to university students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man he promised that the overcoming of capitalism and its false consciousness will result in a society where the greatest satisfactions are sexual, of a sort that the bourgeois moralist Freud called polymorphous and infantile. Rock music touches the same chord in the young. Free sexual expression, anarchism, mining the irrational unconscious and giving it free rein are what they have common.//

This strong stimulant, which Nietzsche called Nihiline, was for a very long time, almost fifteen years, epitomized in a single figure, Mick Jagger.

Or, for today's world, Prince, Michael Jackson, Boy George, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Adam Lambert, even Justin Bieber, for the younger crowd.

A shrewd, middle-class boy, he played the possessed lower-class demon and teen-aged satyr up until he was forty, with one eye on the mobs of children of both sexes whom he stimulated to a sensual frenzy and the other eye winking at the unerotic, commercially motivated adults who handled the money. In his act he was male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; unencumbered by modesty, he could enter everyone's dreams, promising to do everything with everyone; and, above all, he legitimated drugs, which were the real thrill that parents and policemen inspired to deny his youthful audience. He was beyond the law, moral and political, and thumbed his nose at it. Along with all this, there were nasty little appeals to the suppressed inclinations toward sexism, racism and violence, indulgence in which is not now publicly respectable. Nevertheless, he managed not to appear to contradict the rock ideal of a universal classless society founded on love, with the distinction between brotherly and bodily blurred. He was the hero and the model for countless young persons in universities, as well as elsewhere. I discovered that students who boasted of having no heroes secretly had a passion to be like Mick Jagger, to live his life, have his fame. They were ashamed to admit this in a university, although I am not certain that the reason has anything to do with a higher standard of taste. It is probably that they are not supposed to have heroes. Rock music itself and talking about it with infinite seriousness are perfectly respectable. It has proved to be the ultimate leveler of intellectual snobbism. But it is not respectable to think of it as providing weak and ordinary persons with a fashionable behavior, the imitation of which will make others esteem them and boost their own self-esteem. Unaware and unwillingly, however, Mick Jagger played the role in their lives that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so boring and unable to charm youthful passions. Jagger caught on.

In the last couple of years, Jagger has begun to fade. Whether Michael Jackson, Prince or Boy George can take his place is uncertain. They are even weirder than he is, and one wonders what new strata of taste they have discovered. Although each differs from the others, the essential character of musical entertainment is not changing. There is only a constant search for variations on the theme. And this gutter phenomenon is apparently the fulfillment of the promise made by so much psychology and literature that our weak and exhausted Western civilization would find refreshment in the true source, the unconscious, which appeared to the late romantic imagination to be identical to Africa, the dark and unexplored continent. Now all has been explored; light has been cast everywhere; the unconscious has been made conscious, the repressed expressed. And what have we found? Not creative devils, but show business glitz. Mick Jagger tarting it up on the stage is all that we brought back from the voyage to the underworld.

I absolutely love the comparison here at the end to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  The void that modern philosophy has left in the minds of the intelligent, and is now being filled, even in the minds of the masses, with popular culture and music, is much like the void in the heart of Africa, in the heart of the Congo.  The problem is, instead of finding one's self, when we set out from the riverbanks and head into the unknown, we find other philosophies trying to get our attention.  We find the metaphysical realm calling from the New Age rack, where the Law of Attraction reigns supreme.  We find this need to enter the primordial stages of our Sub-consciousness, much as in the movie (and book) Altered States, where chemicals and stages of isolation were used to hallucinate the main character into some form of primitive man.  But the clear winner is the world of popular culture, which clouds the void with suspension of belief of anything, except for that "We are the World" feeling that gets people to donate money. It provides for the hours of "entertainment" to be on in the background, in the form of TMZ or any of the various "reality" television programing. It brings artificial pleasure to the minds of everyone who would do anything except face the void that is in their own lives.  We have found fame to be the new god, and the more outrageous and spectacular the stunt, the more that fame grows.


Fame is what brings us to riot after the basketball championship games, to make out in the middle of the Vancouver riots.  To be noticed, to make Karaoke videos of ourselves and put them on Youtube, for all the world to see. The visual and audio world of communication collides, and it makes us feel happy.  "Pleasure, the inevitable by-product," as the tour director said.

Sex is but one avenue which the producers of entertainment, including music, uses to make us happy, to convince us to buy stuff, to use all that disposable capital. Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational , studied a group of college students and the decisions they make while in an aroused state.  He found that many of the students would make very different decisions while watching a porn tape than they otherwise would have.  If a state of arousal is all that consumers need to change their decisions, then using the subconscious rhythms of music to influence children without actually showing them porn (although a shirtless Taylor Lautner will work just as well), is a great idea to get money from today's youth.
 ***


I really do recommend Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, at least to those who are of conservative mindset, as many of the things he talks about are very relevant to today's education system.  And while the second half of the book is like climbing up a mountain with your teeth, it does reveal how many of the beliefs of today's world come out of the German philosophers from the 1800's.  I doubt I will do any more actual blogs coming from this book, as it's been a while since I read it, but I wanted to finish this blog before I moved on to other, heavier projects. 

The Mouse in the Cave (Plato Blog Pt.2)

 Pleasure, the inevitable by-product of our civilization...A new world, whose only preoccupation will be, how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want. ~Inspector Shrink, from Monkees' Head.

Our only preoccupation will be how to amuse ourselves.  That certainly fits, whether we use Huxley's Brave New World or Neil Postman's philosophies.  I think it's quite clear that Inspector Shrink's quote is quite correct.  There are two types of people in this world, people who consume entertainment, and those that support them.  We have lost our ability to produce anything, for the most part.  Some specialization still takes place, the scientists who develop the small microchips in our cell phones, or the antibiotics that cure us from disease.  We make those things.  But put me in front of a rod of molten metal and tell me to make a screw out of it, and I'm dumbfounded.  Certainly, those things are made by robots now anyway.  That way we don't have to get our hands dirty and can spend more time talking about last night's American Idol. I certainly do appreciate the many pieces of machinery that makes my life easier, but I say this with the full knowledge that I am not using that time to forward the progress of man, to payback the makers of society with anything substantial with the time I have saved.  No, I am using it finding things on the Internet, or watching the same reruns on TV over and over again.  I would argue that the vast majority of time American's spend on this Earth is used pursuing ways to amuse ourselves, or working so that we may have the money to  take on that pursuit.

A prime example of this in action, squeezed down to 11 minutes for our inspection, is the Phineas & Ferb episode "Attack of the 50 Foot Sister." Take a moment to watch it on Youtube.  Okay, Candace is obsessed with going to the Midsummer Carnival to enter the auditioning for "Flawless Girl" cosmetics. Along the way she runs into Mr. Odda, who is the host of the Oddball show.  As she realizes, both of these companies make money on taking advantage of the insecurities of today's youth.  One by showing off the aberrant objects of the world to make normal people feel better ("at least I'm not like that,") while the other uses modern communication to project an image of perfection, that which can only be attained by purchasing cosmetics from their company.

On the way, Candace stops to ridicule her brothers, Phineas and Ferb, who are trying to help a friend grow a giant watermelon (at the expense of hanging up the shame curtains).  In this sense, the brothers, using their chemistry lab, are the producers, the makers, as Ayn Rand would put it, of this world, while their older sister ridicules them, until she needs their growth elixir for her own superficial needs.

This seems to be the case in reality, as well.  A recent Facebook status by one of my friends describes complex mathematical calculations he took in order to plant a tree that would provide the correct amount of shade for the house, the garden, etc...  For which he was called a geek, a dork, etc... However, if calculations such as this is not done, the shade can kill gardens, and not enough shade can bring sunlight in on a home and cost hundreds in electricity bills.  The thought processes behind planting a tree, the science behind it, is the antithesis to the people controlling the images in the caves.  For producing, or thinking, saves money, creates time saving efforts that has nothing to do with entertainment.  This is the free man living his own life outside the cave, and for which the self-absorbed inside of it are insanely jealous.

Back to Phineas & Ferb for a minute, the other character in the program who consistently builds machines for himself (usually for superficial reasons, which is a paradox to my theory), is Dr. Doofenshmirtz, the evil scientist. His creations are as awe inspiring as P&F's inventions, but his are supposedly used for world (okay, Tri-State Area) domination. However, the boys' also have a hint of wrongness to them, as Candice is always trying to get them into trouble, as if by them creating a portal to Mars, they are doing something wrong against society, or at least Mom's rules. It's amazing how the inventors and thinkers of the shows on the Disney Channel are ridiculed or stereotyped as wrong or evil.  Stewie is done the same way in Family Guy. Those that think are anti-social, awkward, even evil, and those that are rich are so through no thought of their own.  They are stupid, without morals, and always anti-environmental. It's also interesting that the majority of shows on the Disney Channel, the main characters are head actors(tresses) in bands, on television shows, in fixtures of entertainment for teenagers everywhere. Hannah Montana, for instance. Or Icarly's crew on Nick.

In short, those that create or support entertainment are lauded, and those who produce non-entertaining things, or those that impede entertainment, are ridiculed. All this from children's television. How much of this is internalized and brought into adult culture? Where scientists and thinkers are ridiculed and branded as anti-social or perhaps even evil (or sent off to Iceland as in Brave New World),  while entertainers and those that contribute nothing substantial to mankind are lauded as role-models and heroes.  Would that the construction workers working high upon the Brooklyn bridge get as much praise as Kobe Bryant playing an hour of ball and getting  thousands of dollars. I would rather be the worker, standing on the apex of the bridge, looking out over the ocean and seeing the sun rise upon New York City, and know that below him is a structure that he helped to build, to form with his own hands, than to entertain the masses endless staring at the glowing flames, the images from the screens, the television and the computer, the shadows on the walls.

Plato, The Monkees, and Jumping Dandruff

"The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want" ~Inspector Shrink, from The Monkees Head

If Bill and Ted ever stop by my house in their phone booth, I need to borrow it and bring Plato back to the present and, given my advanced knowledge of Ancient Greek, the conversations we would have.... He would be amazed, I think, with our houses, with the lights and electricity, air-conditioning, all the comforts we have. But I think, after looking at our lives, he would conclude that we haven't progressed much since his days at the Academy, where he would argue with his students and reveal truths about mankind. Specifically, the passage in The Republic, where he creates the analogy of "The Cave."

Imagine Plato sitting in the town square, trying to engage his students in a conversation. Amongst the idyllic manufactured town park, the planted trees, the statues of the local hero, the ancient philosopher sits unable to carry on a lesson in metaphysics, because someone is sitting in their polished crimson sports car blaring music, the female accountant is talking on her cell phone about plans for tonight, the electronics store is showing the football game on the new 50 inch flat screen in the store window. Then there's the kids walking behind their mother, but who often bump into things because they have their heads buried in the latest Pokemon game on their Nintendo DS. But of course, Plato doesn't know all this... all he sees are lights and sounds and images being projected on the walls. For that's what we have, our own walls, projecting unreal images onto themselves and into our minds. We live, unchained, seeing the images that others wish us to see, on the wall.

What Plato doesn't realize is that the metaphor that he used is correct, but incomplete. Seeing the reality of things, the "forms" outside the cave, the man comes back in, tries to tell his friends about the outside world. And it's not that they don't believe him, they simply find it boring. There's so many other wonderful things going on in the images, who cares about the sunlight and the flower and the perfect chair. It's all about the images. So, the man realizes that he now is free, and that he can now take advantage of his knowledge. He goes up to where the images are made, kills the people controlling the fire, and makes his own images. Further, he allows those watching to determine what images they see, as long as they pay him a monthly fee. In the cave then, there are two kinds of people, those that produce the entertainment, and those that consume it.
***

A break to tie in the quote at the top.  While looking for the exact wording of the quote above, I chanced upon IMDB's page on the Monkees' movie Head, which had a page of quotes.  Among which was the follow up of Peter Tork's conversation with the philosopher in the sauna.  The swami is included on the Head soundtrack, but Peter's communicating this to his fellow band mates (which is overlooked just as the man in the cave's communication was), is left out.  Here that quote is in it's entirety:

We were talking with the Master regarding the nature of conceptual reality. Psychologically speaking, the human mind, or brain or whatever, is almost incapable of distinguishing between the real and the vividly imagined experience. Sound and film and music and radio. Even these manipulative experiences are received more or less directly and uninterpretative by the mind. They are cataloged and recorded and either acted upon directly, or stored in the memory, or both. Now this process, unless we pay it tremendous attention, begins to separate us from the reality of the now. Am I being clear? For we must allow the reality of the now to just happen, as it happens. Observe and act with clarity. For where there is clarity, there is no choice. And were there is choice, there is misery. But then, why should I speak, since I know nothing?

It further solidifies Peter Tork as the wise fool, the Rousseau-ian Noble Savage, as it were. He becomes the free man, the one who has looked outside of the cave, or, as the Monkees have deemed it, the world in which the band was manufactured, created, and manipulated, and has come back into that world to tell his band mates how they may become free. Of course, much as the metaphor ends for Plato, the Monkees realize they can never be free at all. They are trapped as characters, as images on the wall.  And in real life, the characters of Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and others, become those they portrayed on Television.  As Tork said in the boxing ring, "I'm the dummy. I'm always the dummy."  Moving on...

The entire quote from the inspector is:

Pleasure, the inevitable by-product of our civilization (cut scene of a butcher pounding meat)...A new world, whose only preoccupation will be, how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want.

After this, the Monkees are taken into a scene where they are dressed in white, and are encouraged to jump up and down in what looks like hair. They are dandruff you see, for a shampoo commercial. I wonder what Plato's opinions would be on the suppositions made by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.  A government that not only provides justice and peace, but controls it's subjects through the pleasures it seeks.  Much like baby Robins following a worm dangling from their mother's mouth.  In order to get the entertainment we desire, we would give up our liberties and our freedom and our education all to be happy.  The philosopher kings would be exiled, to Iceland, as Mustapha Mond reveals to Helmholtz Watson at the end, and the commoners will all be perfectly happy never to achieve self-awareness, as long as their free supply of drugs and religion-sex is unabated.  But we were talking about dandruff...

Because the scene where the Monkees become dandruff is as telling as the rest.  Imagine the Three Tenors having to do such exercises just to fulfill a contract.  The Monkees must sacrifice their dignity in order to pursue their music.  Which brings the money they can use for drugs and other entertainment.  They become the amalgamation of society, both consumers and producers of the entertainment they so are addicted to.  As viewers of the images on the cave wall, they become puppets for the image makers, as well as images themselves for others watching on other cave walls.  There is no freedom here.  No sunshine, no perfect forms, only illusion. 
***

I guess I need to split this into two posts, because the making, selling, and consuming of entertainment develops into an economy that is quite interesting, and is best laid out in a Phineas & Ferb  episode. 

Government and a Brave New World

Well.... I think there's one thing for it then, as the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The government seems bound and determined to dig its way into socialism, nationalizing the banks and playing doctor with our ailing economic systems. It won't let the free market system fix itself (which, admittedly, it did a wonderful job at messing itself up, no thanks to large amounts of greed and corruption stemming from large amounts of unsecured money, loans, and whatnot left over from the bubble bursting in the 1990's. They had to have someplace to put the dough, so they put it in mortgages, bad and otherwise, and now that bubble has burst. It's taking a bigger and bigger government fix to keep everything under control, and soon it won't be fixable.)

As I see it, there is only one way to adapt the government's current path, which is down the slippery slope of socialism, into the current market. And this goes double if Obama gets elected. But for the answer, we have to turn ourselves to Literature for models. I think the best model the government for socialism where a free market system is still able to exist lies in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

I've been saying for years that the world we live in now is much more like the dystopia of BNW than it is the Communistic approach that Orwell did in 1984. The government is much more successful in ruling through pleasure and happiness than it is through fear. Get someone addicted, and they'll depend on you forever, but if they're afraid of you, they'll eventually rebel.

And if you think about it, the government has been providing addictive programs for years now. To be dependent on food stamps and welfare is much easier to work hard and be successful in earning the money yourself. And with the regulations about how much money you can make on the side, it's easier to not be married, not work, and let the government carry you through, with all the computer gliches and red tape and whatnot, than it is simply to make the money needed to do it yourself. And with the economy and available jobs the way they are, it's necessary to do it this way. Jobs are being pulled overseas where they are cheaper to invest in (based on corporate taxes and quality of life, and the absence of unions), and so there just isn't any way to make money here. The interesting thing about this is, that the most valuable asset that we have in this country is our ability to spend way beyond our means. So the companies that are pulling jobs away from the US citizens are actually hurting themselves by keeping us from having the money to pay off our credit cards. (Course, that goes into the idea of "consumerism", where people are renewable resources, and very expendable, which I have outlined in past blogs).

Anyway, so the government is in a position to provide for it's citizens. Food, Shelter, Health Care, and the Democrats and their Media pundits have been preaching that it's our "right" to have all these things, and that the government is obligated to provide us with all the things we need to be Happy They forgot about the whole "pursuit" word. It's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." There is no guarantee that we will be happy, only that we should be given the freedom to be given the chance to find happiness. But now the government has taken that word away, and now they will have to provide for our happiness.

So if we're going to go the socialist way, which seems certain if Obama gets elected, or probable if McCain does, then we must give every government official a copy of Huxley's Brave New World to show them how it's done.

First, reform the education system, so that people are taught based on their skills, and are not taught equally (this is a good thing, and should be done anyway). Then, place them in jobs based on their skills (sounds good). Whether they make a ton of money or not is not important, as the government will be taking care of housing, food, transportation, health care, and most importantly, entertainment. The extra money that people do wind up with can be used to buy differing methods of enjoyment, through gambling (lottery tickets, which they already do), state run casinos and sports betting, drugs and sex (might as well legalize both, cause prostitutes can benefit the government as well), or other methods of distraction. And money can be given as salary based on the needs of the government to give x y or z to the people. And this falls in line with what is already going on. Sports and entertainment people will make the most. Other things could be decided upon based on what is needed. Law enforcement, teachers, industrial workers, etc....

Also, this falls in line exactly with the type of housing I talked about 6 months ago with Le Corbiseur's architectural plans (see previous blogs) as well as the development of mass transit systems and environmentally friendly methods of transportation. See, it's not all bad. Things could get better, with it all government controlled.

But it has to be everything, or nothing at all. Because happiness cannot be provided for part way. So the officials in Washington are going to have to be prepared to switch to a Huxley model, and convince the other world governments to do the same, or it's not going to work. Because corruption and greed and human nature sets in and destroys it all. And while Huxley banished the thinkers and revolutionaries to Iceland, it's gonna take a much bigger place to banish them if the government screws it up.

So it all comes down to this. If Obama and McCain and the other people in the government want to provide for our happiness, that's fine. We can go socialist. BUT, it must be all the way, or the state of our economical system and our country in general will go downhill fast. And that opens up a power vacuum that our enemies will be only too glad to fill. We will have done ourselves in.