War and Culture

Galveston was supposed to ‘pipe off’ along with vast sections of the Texas coast depending to which network hysterics, “distressing acts” themselves, made landfall in your home. This is the age of the Spectacle, of Disaster and horror movies, the War on Terror, AIDS, Lyme disease and Oprah; it also is the age when “all roads lead to socialism,” to “political federation, economic collectivization…and world collectivism leading to world socialism.” These roads are paved by disasters, proclaimed, contrived or genuine [2].  So some mighty important people have a lot invested in hyping hurricanes to keep the populace ‘glued to their screens,’ reacting frantically to sensory overkill, and in  spreading fear and a sense of disaster to justify the next round of emergency measures.

About 16,000 people in Galveston and 140,000 along nearby coasts were told they “faced certain death” by commissioners wiser than God and seemingly unacquainted with the fickle nature of hurricanes. Eighteen hours after the blast blew by four deaths were confirmed; another fifteen hours and the toll was seven. But those 140,000 deniers and clingers-to-their-homes, what’s to be done about such a “serious social nuisance”? Their survival ruined the planned and utterly erroneous outcome.

“Some emergency officials were angry and frustrated” that so many people ignored the warnings the networks and our public servants emitted. One can’t wholly blame the EMT and first-responders who get calls for help at the most difficult of times. But liberty and responsibility mean a balance must be maintained in demands and expectations on both sides. An example of compromise was the small group, including two dogs, atop a house waiting for rescue. Eventually a sheriff’s truck arrived, got as close as it could and those on the roof “dove into the floodwaters and swam to safety, their dogs paddling behind them” [3].  All involved made a series of choices; if it had not gone well it would have been sad but the discourse of need would not lead to fascism. 

Can this nation of individuals, families, neighborhood and electoral communities keep this balance; or will we fall under the battering of “indecent and distressing acts” like that of Geraldo Rivera hyping the apocalypse while bent over his microphone like Joe Cocker croaking about “a little help from my friends”? Network storm teams belched tsunamis of blather about a twenty-five foot “surge” of water that never topped fifteen or old Geraldo, foam around his ankles like Aphrodite would have been washed to Fort Worth. But the great entertainer survived: some might term that a “serious social nuisance.”

We have not heard apologies for fear-mongering and error from those who demanded evacuation and asserted “certain death”; in future would such officials fulfill their predicted outcome by eliminating stubborn facts? In any case, to keep the terror hot for viewers, FOX interrupted its relentless storm-watch to show a train-wreck in California: disasters everywhere rather like that ‘patriotic’ Chevy ad rock song they used at the 2006 World Series.  

Officials told those along the Gulf coast who disobeyed orders and remained in their homes to write their social security numbers on their arms to facilitate identification of their soon-to-be-dead bodies, an ominous policy. 

Virtually every event and pseudo-scientific notion (human-caused global warming) is inflated into “the moral equivalent of war” a book by William James that was a favorite of Mr. Wells: “in consolidating world socialism…every citizen” should have “a sense of personal obligation to the World State” [4]. The same Olympian hauteur, the very British noblesse oblige that informs the entire oeuvre of Wells lets him blandly emit phrases like “normal citizen” while unaware or unconcerned that those who define and enforce standards of ‘normalcy’ may be very far from what most people consider “normal.” Perhaps his sense of embattled excellence blinded him to the implications of his comments on “the sturdy and assertive variety of the new young [that] will be needed for the police force of the entire world” where guns will be forbidden, to all but the police, presumably. Of these “new young” Wells writes, their “loyalty will find its best use and satisfaction in the service of world order” [5].

Is it loyalty or slavish self-service that is the primary motivation of the talking hairstyles, the pretty boys and zombie gals on the networks? Perhaps it is loyalty to the “world collective” and to their pay checks that led them to hype the disaster, repeating – as if per script – that “this will drive the price of gas to $5.50 / gallon”: you see, it’s because of a natural disaster, not part of a planned economy and re-organization of our lives. Sure enough, not twelve hours later, the price at the pump 1500 miles away jumped ten cents per gallon, probably because those two dogs swam to the truck; or maybe because a geezer wanted help getting out of his trailer, not so much from the water but “because [he] was getting too many snakes in the house, otherwise I would have stayed.” If he can wait for the team with the reptiles on premises, that’s up to him; he didn’t expect instant service and the new overlords should not expect instant blind obedience every time they declare that “your lives are certain to be lost.” Even the fervently World Collective Socialist Mr. Wells put the inviolability of “one’s private house or apartment and garden” onto his short list for his Declaration of Human Rights. Did he suspect such rights would now include chimps, reducing all human beings to primates?

Well, the Secretary for Homeland Security was perturbed that so many had “stayed behind” and jeopardized themselves (an “indecent and distressing social nuisance”) as well as “the first responders. Now we’re going to see this play out” he said; what did he mean by “this,” hopefully just the clean up and last rescues which will be paid for by “the government,” i.e. taxpayers [6]. Probably his remuneration is adequate.

Perhaps Homeland Security could secure America’s southern borders, or allow the national guards of the various states to do so… That would be healing so it won’t happen.

At the State and municipal level, officials in the Age of Security (Wells wrote of “World Pax”) echoed this perspective. “This was a mandatory evacuation, and people didn’t leave.” Ah, but official projections and warnings of “certain death” were exponentially mistaken; and people are to be secure in their homes. The hurricane is in the emotionalism of networks and officials, very much at variance with the “logic and law” that with socialism form the legs of the tripod Wells prescribed for peace. “This is very frustrating” said a Galveston city manager. “Now we have to deal with everybody who did not heed the order.” Perhaps it’s the rising level not of the water but of emotionalism in discourse (“I was out on the hotel balcony and it was scary” said a reporter for FOX. If the winds really were 110 mph one should not have been “out on the balcony,” then it would not be so “scary”; but then an opportunity to emote with and to EXCITE the viewers would be lost) but one sees in that phrase, “have to deal with” a looming cloud; perhaps in future, those who do not obey such orders will be punished by rationed care, or no care at all for disobeying orders. Nature and the Creator did not conform to the scenario of our masters: will they let humanity work its way on a case by case basis? “What is to be done” as both Lenin and Wells were wont to say?

As for emotional hyperbole, ‘the man in the street’ sees some broken glass, torn road signs (built rather like sails) and downed trees and comments that “it looks like ground zero.” This indeed is the age of inflation, of thought, response, and ‘venting’ sharers of debased language as much as of the specie. How apt that Ike gave place to the more destabilizing hurricanes of the involuntary, taxpayer backed bailouts of AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; such homey names, such ugly scams.

“Newspapers and publishers,” Wells lamented (what we call the media), “are morbidly discreet” in discussing ideas. “They do not understand that they should put public service before gain.” Sounding rather like Julien Benda, he adds that the media “have no pride in their function. Theirs is the morale [morality] of the profiteering world, filled with brave-looking articles of conventional liberalism” [7]; he didn’t grasp that the media, then and far more now as standards fall, grow rich by “spreading and perfecting the concept of a new world order” and a “liberal socialist regime” that will deal sensitively, for the people’s own good “with the degeneration of the species” and panic that his own program propels [8]. Aldous Huxley’s satire Brave New World that Wells airily dismissed was in fact a brilliantly conceived and barbed depiction of the hive of nightmares Wells’ notions would produce, have produced, and are producing. His calls for vigorous and open discussion, “for intensive education” and “enfranchisement of the mind” are totally at odds with the World System he sought above all else, “a reorganization that  at first must be mainly the work of a party, religion or Cult.” There must be free thought but it must lead to a world state: how does that jibe with “the extreme need for more fresh-minded and inspiring teachers”? Again, it depends on who defines the adjectives but he had his eyes on the prize and didn’t notice or care. Wells also decries the “impoverishment of free opinion and free scientific initiative” but the hype-heavy, reflexive hysteria of crisis-management produces the ills his socialism is meant to cure [9].    But it’s likely that, though he might distaste Wells would understand the shocks of our days as necessary to “demand for establishment of the Modern State.” In a fictional study that anticipates the “counter-factual” history of the postmodern era, whether in law, media or academia, he wrote that “the wars, depressions, pestilences, semi-famine and starvation, in the hundred years before 1914 were necessary” to destroy the “encumbrances of tradition” barring the path to a World State. “Without the sufferings of these generations, men’s minds could never have been purged of their obstinate loyalties” [sic], “never roused to the disciplines and sacrifices” to bring us to the World government that was his goal, for peace [10]. It is as if modern leaders simply read from his texts, add water, and bring to a boil… 

Educators and Education: if the leaders of the reorganizing world want that, let them contact this writer, among others. As of now the schools sport stables of pod people and programmers which some would say are just what they want, “to coordinate the personality of the patient” for acceptance into “synthesis and light,” a “group activity for integration of the human family” in “the world collective” [11].  

This essay, putatively light-hearted to offset the tropical depression of our days, must, before departing, bow to hurricane Sarah whom the merchants of “etheric consciousness” have splashed across every piece of tabloid anesthesia we have: Ike is now a hurricane, thanks to the “gender balance” of these “frustrating” and “scary” days in which mind and education more than Galveston have sunk beneath Culturetainment sludge and the dogma of an utterly feminized educational industry, indeed, of an entire society besotted by its queens of beauty, as Camelot was…

The Blue Group has dragged Sarah into the mire for a cat fight, their natural condition. To listen to them, she’s her own grandpa, doesn’t know the distance from Timbuktu to Tbilisi or, like everyone else, what the “Bush doctrine” is unless it’s to create “a new world money, a specially contrived money” for the “World Pax.” Perhaps it refers to “monetary collapse [being] the most immediate factor in the world’s disorganization, enfeeblement and famine,” an idea that resonates this September [12].  

The young woman says tap her state’s energy reserves: excellent; she supports the second amendment which now earns a profile in courage. But she will not make policy unless the Kraken has an accident [13]; even then she will only sell policies cooked behind the arras: what else could she do? Will she use her bully pulpit to repeal the pernicious bias of “affirmative action?” Will she stop funding schemes for impoverishing Americans under color of “ending global poverty” [sic]? Will she demand major tax cuts and limit the size of government? Will she explain the lies behind the “equal pay for equal work” facet of the feminist juggernaut? Will she demand an end to the nightmare of “no-fault” divorce or break the monopoly of the education industry? Will she put an end to the cult of the “tough-as-nails” modern American wonder-woman horror? Dear reader, no; the lady is on the ticket to trump the O-man’s race and diversity card with the most potent ace in the deck: the “super-Mom” who will smash through every “glass ceiling.”

There’s a storm coming, more “indecent and distressing acts” from which the State is only too well-prepared to protect the “normal entitled” citizen-dependent. Heaven help us from this heavy weather.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.