We of this current public ‘uber-cult’ of the illusion of perpetual success are treading forth in a seeming sleepwalk that has deteriorated into a waking coma. Now the alarm bell has once again sounded, let me, as a temporarily risen ‘sleeper’ suggest to you my prescient experience of this. It’s called a happenstance viewing of life as it once was decades ago through the plastic eyes of a home recordable VCR. Now I realize that most of the current generation back up nothing on their own believing naturally that central storage will provide everything of any useful value to them ‘on-demand’ for a small fee. But, if they believe this then they don’t know what Capitalism or Empire is really all about. Obviously they haven’t really read George Orwell, but merely sat through a cartoon version of same. Some used to call it repression where it is now referred to as editing!
In this current forlorn existence where the corporate hegemony has cancelled the ‘future’ for the time being in return for a weakly brewed sense of a manufactured artificial ‘present’. The small ‘we’ sit in their flat screen paneled bunkers coddling themselves with the superficial and trite, believing somehow that everything ‘bad’ will, in the end, descend upon someone else. But not subsume them. And too many of us who have been around for much longer and should know too well what it’s like to be thrown repeatedly from their tiny skiff into the ocean, find themselves inexplicably swimming for the back of that great ‘white’ leviathan for safety just to escape the reality of how really vulnerable ‘WE’ all presently are.
In past centuries, people were connected directly to the land and didn’t have to be so completely dependent upon a dollar based marketplace. But the greater ‘WE’ have declined to a point where that that paper dollar based income is replaced by a ‘make work’ form of the government dole. Those who gain the fictional process of higher office do so based upon the mandate of providing livable sustenance. So the tare always superficially balances because despite appearance ‘we’ are all under its thumb. Since there is little money to run cars or planes and even less time to talk, ‘we’ must rely on the internal commerce of tiny portable phone terminals that are closely surveilled. The possibility of self-sufficiency is further fractured by the purposeful foster of self-destructive lifestyles that add nothing toward a workable sense of safety net of a commonwealth of family and society.
Some in the past have referred to this phenomena as decadence. Consider that when pre-adolescent children are expelled for throwing imaginary hand grenades or being arrested for the infamy of an innocent unauthorized kiss, then the illusion of that great eagle of freedom has finally dissipated to a pathetic coal gassed canary which has expired its last puff of breath.
I believe one has to be old enough to understand the loss of freedoms we are and have been enduring. There is something to be said of not being “plugged in” and living free.