In keeping with the latest obsession of our collective form of consciousness I would like to share my thoughts on a movie I watched this evening, a rather spectacular film from a rather annoying director. I really don’t know how the director of The Da Vinci Code could possibly have been responsible for a movie that is not only historically interesting but takes a piece of history and makes it universally relevant handling themes as far reaching as power, manhood, leadership, democracy, speech, and all the ways in which these ideas intersect. It’s beautiful. I will give it 4 out of 5 lightning bolts. I am tempted to give them all away, but I must confess I had low expectations of the film, so that allowed for perhaps more of a bang than if I had not formed such a resistance.
Properly understood, war is not primarily a military problem.
In the conventional modern sense, the winning of wars requires public consent or, at the very least, the absence of open rebellion among civilians. And this in turn requires a program of education about the purposes of war, the promulgation of a rationale that can make the case of progress toward improved social order via a temporary state of disruption. So long as the political state can justify the state of war for the public with promises of improvement, war continues and recurs in its conventional form.
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Emil Alzamora “Plank”
Spewing hatred from mountain tops that flop. ” I had nothing to do with those killings”, he says. “I only reported the truth about Tiller the Baby Killer”, and the Reverend says, “It’s the Jews who are keeping the President from talking to me. The Zionists that is.” And Palin’s family is off limits. After all there are limits. As North Korea readies their warheads. Steadies its war shed. As Iran votes itself a revolution.
We sit here clicking the channel between a dancing show and the news; whoever spews the most hatred wins. As seen on Facebook. As seen on Twitter. I must admit I don’t tweet they say. As we pay dearly in an over populated e-world. As mother Earth is melting its polar caps. As the maps change and Manhattan will be covered by another icecap. Zap!
Humans are a blip on the radar of universal history. A mere speck of sand. That sand is being tested. Nearly bested by our own needs and wishes to be the center of the Universe again. It was much better when we believed the world was flat and there were no dinosaurs. When we could sit down at night and read Bible verses versus watching the Colbert Report. Was it?
We are sitting on a cliff. We are peering over into an abyss. We can pull back and continue on the same path or we can dive deeply into the hole of universal nihilism. Where our morals could be shaped by something internal. Where we do not battle over religion. Where peace reigns down as an eternal infinite power of human consciousness. In this hour let us choose to stand united. The choice is OURS on this hour.
At Globatron, I would imagine we are not in the business of promoting products, and I am not doing that here. I am merely posting these videos to point out developments that are certain to change the nature of human connectivity and affect how we think about ‘culture’ and ‘cultural products’, and all those terms I will soon be seeking new terms for. With this new iPhone, one in a variety of items that uses the mythical letter ‘i’ in front of other seeemingly public words, such as Life and Work, to create ‘branding’ around such terms, we have arrived at that point where an individual is capable of walking around with a fully functioning, multi-platform computer in their pocket, able to record, manipulate and create data in a way that is integrated with normal physical routines. This is not so much a revolutionary moment as it is another glaring reminder of the revolution that is occuring daily, a revolution that is occuring in an emergent way. This iphone is a type of license, an entry point into a new history, a history being built by what might mistakenly seem like a large number of people, but relative to the world, it is a very narrow spectrum of human diversity.
After reading Logocentric’s “Notes on the Frontier” and its dealings with the issue of homelessness, shedding light, as it did, on the relationship between homelessness and the expectations society puts upon its members, in how it defines normalcy, I recalled this paper, a fictional doctor’s article from a novel my alter ego Ken Vallario is working on. As with all great discussions I have decided not to solve the problems in Logocentric’s post, but to pose even more questions.
Akbar Lightning
Because I am (at least for now) an historian, I like to tell stories. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. However, instead of taking on some of the momentous events in the early history of Globatron (the other gods in the pantheon are doing a fine job of this), I would like to briefly reflect on my recent road trip to the end of the old American frontier. In doing this, I hope to shed a little more light, both for myself and for our readers and contributors, on ideas that we have already discussed, as well as on the concept of civilization and ways in which the language we use to describe these things impact some of the identities we rely on for meaning and order. Read the full story »
Akbar
A sounding board for developing contemporary art and culture founded in Jacksonville, Florida.
