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In this country, there can now be only one, no matter what the
topic is. We say we have at least two distinct political parties, but we do not.
There is only one party, the party in power, and its members all share the same
general viewpoint, endorsed and created specifically by the multinational
corporations.
In the school system, from the very earliest of ages, all the way up into
college—too often—there is only one acceptable point of view. We say that
this is a country where ideas can be discussed in the marketplace of opinion.
But that is not how this system is structured. What we say we believe in and
what we do in our lives are two distinctly different things. The
compartmentalization of our lives is how this came to be embedded in everything
we undertake to do.
In the arts this problem is best illustrated by an everyday occurrence in
that field. When a writer or an artist creates something and it’s published;
this fact tends to leave a distinct impression, for every future contact that
the creator makes. Projects that are very dissimilar are simply out-of-bounds;
because they bear no resemblance to what the prospective client supposedly
already "knows" about the creator. Creative people often have several
areas in which they work, and no one of them can describe the whole of their
work, which is why labels tend to stifle who they are and what they can do. The
practice is not limited to creative types, but rather has become all too
pervasive throughout the working world in America today. This is
compartmentalization, at its worst, or labeling: but wherever it occurs it
limits everyone it touches. This is a stigma that the whole of this society now
practices in almost every area. And that is exactly why compartmentalization is
what corporations are built upon. It divides people and ideas into categories
that ought to be compatible, yet because they are forcefully segregated, neither
can benefit of the other. This is the first step in polarization, and this
division begins the dumbing down of the population.
Society says that we have free will and the freedom to choose new paths for
our lives. Yet when we go into a theater, or discover a new idea, while we are
allowed to think about whatever we might discover there, while there—we are
technically not allowed to change our lives accordingly. That’s why we have a
ratings system that decides for us what to see and how to think about what we
are about to see. The system prohibits sexual encounters but allows the most
obscene violence and random chaos possible. We preach equal rights, but practice
racial segregation, and religious persecution, usually in subtle but distinctly
preferential ways. We talk about freedom and democracy, but we invade other
nations for no reason at all, and murder innocent people every day, in the name
of what we say we stand for—when nothing could be further from the truth. Our
"word" has become an international joke in very bad taste.
Two things are operative here. The first is that we do not trust ourselves to
make real changes in our lives, so we leave all that to others. The second is
that we’ve been very carefully prepared over the last fifty years to get in
line and just follow the leader, regardless of where that leader might be taking
us. What happened to our right to listen to all points of view in the free and
open marketplace of ideas? It appears that when we allowed others to make those
decisions for us (during the 1950’s), the decisions were made by those who
were afraid of communism. Thereafter we began to let their fear rule our lives.
Now we've expanded that fear to include all kinds of terrors in the darkness of
our unreflective thoughts.
There is a third thing that has had a major impact on all of this—that is,
that we have become lazy. Hence the hundreds of laws that were passed to allow
us to let "the law" do the heavy lifting, so that we could just get on
with our lives. That has been our undoing. Now we have given up too much of what
we should have reserved to ourselves – and in that bargain, we have lost
almost all that ‘freedom and independence’ that we have said we stand for.
Whenever an actor tries to change the stereotype of his or her role, it is
very difficult to get a chance to read for anything other than their perceived
"type". The same is true of writers who try to change venues, or
artists who that want to change directions.
A serious bad-guy can’t usually get to read for a romantic leading role,
just as someone known for her comedy, cannot usually get the chance to play a
true villain with a complex mind. Writers famous of murder mysteries seldom opt
to do a satirical study of the human sex drive – just as artists known for
their fine arts abilities, seldom successfully cross over into political
illustration. In each case the crossover is the issue. When the person
successfully accomplishes the shift, then all is wonderful, but more often the
switch just simply doesn’t take. This is because we grow used to people being
a certain way, just as we mentally typecast most of those around us. It’s not
evil, it's just shorthand for who is who, and then on we go on with all the rest
of what makes up our lives.
This happens because despite the willingness of many to try and envision what
others might be able to do – for most of us, the imagination is simply broken.
We lack the ability to envision something that we cannot see or touch, until
whatever it is - has been completed. Part of that, is politically what has
screwed up all that’s happening now.
This is why so many cannot connect the dots; it’s also why so few can ‘see’
what lies beneath the lies. But most of all it’s what is keeping us from
acting on our instincts, to prevent the multi-headed crash that is about to
happen soon.. This has been the result of a directly engineered system created
by the mega-corporations to directly influence all of us. They do this through
educational and business climates that will not tolerate deviation from their
self-referentially mandated (corporate) point of view.
This can be clearer still if we go back in time, to that point when all of
life was altered by human beings and their perspective then, on nature and the
world, as people thought it should be. The ‘time’ was when people moved from
being hunter-gathers to an agrarian society. When we were nomadic, we were part
of the natural world and subject to the laws of nature in very clear and
meaningful ways. We also had to understand our place in that world, as well as
the parts that everything else played, in our continued survival.
When we became sedentary and began to grow the crops instead of just
harvesting whatever grew wild, we became vulnerable to the erratic and sometimes
violent laws of nature, in ways that we’d not experienced before. This led
humanity to look at nature as something that needed to be controlled—and in
some instances nature began to be seen as the enemy of human life. This fact
changed our world forever.
Out of this has grown the desire to rule over nature, and from that concept
has come land ownership, the control of natural resources, the accumulation of
wealth an on and on – and it has been these artificial excesses that allowed
civilizations to flourish. Those same excesses have also led those same
civilizations to become corrupted. Eventually our empires have always fallen
upon the swords that excess fashioned and that simple farming from that
oh-so-distant past, made possible.
Instead of learning from the failures, from our continued quarrels with the
nature of both humans and the natural world; we have continued on the selfsame
paths that brought down the last despotic regime. It's as though each new
version of this battle might be the one that will finally conquer, where all the
rest have always failed. But "that’s history" as they say: and while
we can’t change it, we have the opportunity to at least begin to change the
level of influence that we’ve allowed the upper-crust to play, in the ways we
tend to look at all of life today. We must restructure corporate charters, or
cancel them: if we want to have a future.
The corporations have had far too much influence on every aspect of our
lives. To them, only their answers matter, there are no other mitigating
factors. No ethical or moral considerations, no fairness, no balance need be
part of whatever view they promulgate. We need to allow questions back into our
lives. Because it’s the questions that we ask, and not the answers that we
think we have—that really matter.
The reasoning behind all the decorum in diplomacy, in public manners, and in
all the rest of it; is to further dialogue, to enhance understanding and enable
the advancement of any civilizations at issue. To spit on all of that, and then
lie about everything that’s being done today, is not a way to reach for
anything of value. So why have we allowed all this to get this far? We’re
living in a hole, hiding from the shadows of the people that we used to be. In
1976, on America’s 200th birthday I wrote this intro for
"SPEAK!"
"The stars and stripes have changed their spots;
Now pentagrams and bars enshrine a mockery of tongues,
And courage shares the darkness
With the corpse of private conscience.
Where dialogue and discourse thundered
Cowardice now crawls the over-crowded floor.
Where innovation and determination came to joust,
The drunken stutter of imagination
now stumbles in a headlong sprawl.
Doorways once flung wide in confidence,
are now shuttered, bugged and barred;
in terror of the hunger in the world outside.
Wolves of violence prowl beneath our bolted windows
while we watch Justice sell herself on every corner;
And who are we to decry the cancers in our ‘system’
From beneath our feather-beds of folly."
In 1976 we were seeking a way to become satiated, the path to the
middle-middle of a nation that was born upon the edge. What we began to sow then
has become the problem now. We have lost that sense of who we are, because we’ve
allowed too many others to tell us how to think and what to be. The introduction
ends with this:
"Our birthday party has arrived,
Yet here we sit; bloated, bored and shapeless,
A headless eagle shorn of wing
Whose painted talons glow with the swollen budgets of corruption,
Introverted and diminished in the litter of excess,
We are the tarnished remnant of a nation, that struggles to attain,
the nothingness of middle-middle.
Tormenting all our mentors,
While flinging bribes into the looking-glass;
Within the wrath of morning-after, as slowly we begin to seek to
ask...
Who is the fairest nation of them all?
For answer – there is only
silence".
Happy birthday America
And welcome to the Risen-Fall of Justice.
www.kirwanesque.com/cal17.htm
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