In the red, white and blue aftermath of jingo amerika's July 4th, I think we, if you're still a human, need to think with some perspicacity about the language we use and the words and semantic concepts we embrace, we accept and we propagate.
It was hard up here in this dumb head-in-the-sand town I am in on the Gingham Coast, not to question the the Jonestown-ness of bacchanal all around me.
We've swallowed the Kool-Aid, hook, line and battery-acid.
Obese people festooned in flagginess. Drunken barbecuing. And signs and t-shirts everywhere with the words "independence," "liberty" and "freedom" on them. Also, trucks the size of two-bedroom apartments, spewing toxins everywhere from their un-mufflered 5.7-liter Hemis.
I'm reminded of what Tacitus said about Rome's military and foreign policy. “They make a desert and call it peace.” In amerika, we give you nachos and call it freedom.
Patriotic, ain't it.
Meaningless words. Or words that are bludgeons of complicity.
We are independent.
But we have no healthcare.
We are free.
To have our taxes transferred to the rich who pay no taxes. And we are in debt from birth to death.
We have freedom.
To hate brown people, to breathe dirty air, to be subject to one of the two-dozen or so monopolies that really run our lives.
All while supporting the largest, least-accountable military in the world. And militarized police all around us, also accountable to no one and wielding the business end of a truncheon, an automatic weapon, masked and carrying a shield.
I think as all this gets worse, we need to pay attention to the language all around us and the vise grip of authoritarianism tightening around our jugulars and scroti. We might want to watch this:
I think we can see, as Plato saw in his Republic, that the characteristics of the state, apply too to how we act, how we believe, our judgments on fairness, right and wrong. In other words, I wish we had been paying attention, as an industry, to our mean-ness, our victimization of people and our maniacal fervor to extract everything possible from every person, including our co-workers.
I dream-woke a sentence an hour ago. I wrote it down so as not to forget. That's what got this post going.
I wrote.
"We target people. If that doesn't work, we retarget them. We assess and extract their lifetime value. We maximize our returns. We move them through a funnel and send programmed messages to them wherever they are in order to get them to perform to the metrics of our performance marketing."
I am not a Christian. Maybe I don't understand the increase of god-ness in every political speech from every politician, almost everywhere.
Does this sound like "Love Thy Neighbor"?
God is merely mind-control.
As an industry, or a bloated governmental kleptocracy, is this how we should be treating people?
Going back to David Ogilvy and amending him.
We are doing worse than treating people like morons. We're treating them like morons and victims. We're treating them like morons and we work to wrest their money from them, not even providing value in return, instead we sell never-ending subscriptions.
My guess is most people pay about $200/month on subscriptions they don't even realize they have.
Forget about the nation or our world for a minute. Is this how we want to behave? Is this how we want our industry to treat people.
In my small, beautiful, quiet office up here in Connecticut, I am surrounded by books I love and from which I learn. I buy ten a week. Because I want love, beauty and intelligence around me, that's all.
But maybe the thing in my office I enjoy most is the paper-shredder I bought for $99. As a tool, it has a certain mean-ness to it, a lupine aggressiveness.
As the Roman playwright Plautus wrote 2400 years ago, "Homo homini lupus." "Man is wolf to man" is a Latin proverb.
One of the highlights of my remaining days on our dying anthropocene planet is getting wickedly stupid direct marketing from various banks, investment companies, ISPs and other extortionists. The slow grinding of their incessant come-hithers in my aggressive shredder is as pleasing as almost any consummation.
Of late, as my linked in feed has gotten more filled with platitudes, pablum, boasts, self-promotions and far-right-wrongisms, I've taken to shredding, slowly and inexorably, ten or twenty "connections" a day of the more than 31,000 people I am linked in to.
I am doing the same to more and more companies. More and more social organizations. More and more purveyors of lies and garbage.
If it's dumb, I give it the thumb.
Insult my head, I'll give you the shred.
My best resistance is to ignore your existence.
It's hard to not see the darkening that is happening all around us.
But I get, maybe, three lumens per shred. A little light each time I toss out someone who says their f-in' ad for mayonnaise is influencing kulture.
Getting three lumens back is not a lot of illumination.
But the English movement to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave-trade started when women decided not to put sugar (which came from the slave-economy of the British West Indies) in their tea. Spoonful by spoonful an evil was attacked.
One misanthrope in Connecticut shredding people, ignoring blowhards, not buying junk from monopolies won't do much. Pollution is too all-around us.
But every little bit helps.
No comments:
Post a Comment