“The technologies divide the...citizenry into constituencies of one and encourage the broad retreat into the pools of Narcissus where the summer nights are loud with the croaking of blogs.” (Lewis Lapham)
Just another cynical frog, I guess
Just another cynical frog, I guess
I'm posting Mr. Lapham's quote as both a caution and admonition--a challenge to myself, if you will.
It is my fervent intention to avoid what my personal survey of the Internet landscape seems to reveal: that the majority of blogs are predominantly electronic sloughs of self-absorption, self-aggrandizement, rhetorical and semantic chicanery and intellectual and moral cowardice.
The alarming speed in which the Blogosphere has become an immense informational refuse heap of assorted pseudo-intellectuals, reactionaries, PR and media hucksters, and commercial flim-flammers of every race, colour, creed, political and religious affiliation is indeed disheartening when measured against the imagined Brave New World that the proponents of The Digital Age of Information predicted.
The desperate citizen yearning for illumination, inspiration and evidence of intellectual courage is forced to pick at and sort through this foul conglomeration of self-interest and id run amok on only the faintest hope of discovering something with which to clothe, nourish and protect the ideal of individual personal liberty, the right to dissent and collective reason.
So it is that I hold that truths held out as purportedly self-evident are anything but.
Particularly hat man is not created or treated equally anywhere in the world. The arbitrary nature of one's race, geographic place of birth and historical context of that arrival predicates much--though not all--of one's life and expectations during that life.
In every corner of the world, the freedom of assembly, of speech, of thought, of opinion has never existed save what the state has been prepared to tolerate or offer up as an illusion to the masses who toil under the weight of elite classes who plunder, pillage and loot the earth.
The historical and contemporary examples of human repression and suppression of free expression present an overwhelming case that the oaths of allegiance, loyalty and fealty demanded by states and institutions are the handcuffs used to enslave their wards.
Institutions such as the United Nations, which purport to speak for the world's peoples, are nothing more than grand conglomerations of the collective interests of the elites and individual world states where famines, war, disease and political and social repressions are coerced, massaged and manipulated and traded upon for geo-political and economic advantage..
These powers hold that the individual and their collective flesh, bone and blood shall and will be pulverized by the actions and failures of the state to serve its citizens--a state that holds that the dreams, hopes, ambitions and security of the individual are at all times violable.
It is under the weight of this reality that those who dare to dissent labour under. It has always been the case, of course, but in the past there was, at least, some possibility that the "truth will out." That possibility realized brought about many changes and improvements in the lives of the average citizen in Europe, North America and other parts of the world...which have now almost entirely been diluted or erased during the last three decades of institutional and corporate re-organization and takeovers.
And so the ultimate goal of globalization, of the New World Order, is being fulfilled: the impoverishment of the earth and the majority of its inhabitants; of their minds, bodies and spirits so that the insatiable and rapacious appetite of the elite classes can be fueled.
But the greatest failure of all in the end is that of the liberals, who have consistently abdicated their individual and collective moral responsibility to counter right-wing ideology with something more than the same old tired rhetoric and cliches.
They failed to focus their energies on the urgent primary collective social objectives confronting the world and the average man, woman and child, preferring instead to squander any moral, political and intellectual capital on narrow vanity projects.
And during the period when women's, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered rights were being secured, the fate of the planet, of the millions living in poverty, in starvation and under universal subjugation was sacrificed at the alter of the personal agendas of liberal sub-classes of elites.
While Noam Chomsky is without a doubt a vastly informed and intelligent observer and critic of The New World Order...his near passionless, almost lifeless, written and oral dissertations are hardly treatises able to inspire or awaken the down-trodden masses or effect any sober second thoughts among the elite classes.
His pedantic drone salves only the comfortable liberal classes, as equally far removed from the daily concerns, tribulations--the reality--of the ordinary man, woman and child as any corporate CEO.
Notwithstanding some of the public attention Michael Moore and others have been able to bring to some worthy issues, it is a measure of the impotence of the left to inspire and provoke fundamental change at the ground-zero life of the ordinary man, woman and child's existence, that hunger, disease. arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and avoidable mortality still vex billions of the world's citizens.
In the poorest homes in America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, fathers, mothers and children have immediate concerns pressing upon them that are as fundamental as life itself and as unchanged as they have always been for the poor for countless generations.
As such the New World Order is nothing more than the continuation of the Old World Order: re-invented re-imagined and executed under the watch of the liberal classes, who are most assuredly as culpable in perpetuating the grand illusion as the neo-conservatives.
Even this thing, the blogosphere, is part and parcel of sustaining the illusion, that free will, free expression and freedom of thought are in any way capable of providing any real comfort to the afflicted or capable of afflicting the comfortable.
At the end of this all, I am struck by my own croaking, just another small voice in the the choir of croaking blogs that Lapham envisaged and warned of. (RH)
So it is that I hold that truths held out as purportedly self-evident are anything but.
Particularly hat man is not created or treated equally anywhere in the world. The arbitrary nature of one's race, geographic place of birth and historical context of that arrival predicates much--though not all--of one's life and expectations during that life.
In every corner of the world, the freedom of assembly, of speech, of thought, of opinion has never existed save what the state has been prepared to tolerate or offer up as an illusion to the masses who toil under the weight of elite classes who plunder, pillage and loot the earth.
The historical and contemporary examples of human repression and suppression of free expression present an overwhelming case that the oaths of allegiance, loyalty and fealty demanded by states and institutions are the handcuffs used to enslave their wards.
Institutions such as the United Nations, which purport to speak for the world's peoples, are nothing more than grand conglomerations of the collective interests of the elites and individual world states where famines, war, disease and political and social repressions are coerced, massaged and manipulated and traded upon for geo-political and economic advantage..
These powers hold that the individual and their collective flesh, bone and blood shall and will be pulverized by the actions and failures of the state to serve its citizens--a state that holds that the dreams, hopes, ambitions and security of the individual are at all times violable.
It is under the weight of this reality that those who dare to dissent labour under. It has always been the case, of course, but in the past there was, at least, some possibility that the "truth will out." That possibility realized brought about many changes and improvements in the lives of the average citizen in Europe, North America and other parts of the world...which have now almost entirely been diluted or erased during the last three decades of institutional and corporate re-organization and takeovers.
And so the ultimate goal of globalization, of the New World Order, is being fulfilled: the impoverishment of the earth and the majority of its inhabitants; of their minds, bodies and spirits so that the insatiable and rapacious appetite of the elite classes can be fueled.
But the greatest failure of all in the end is that of the liberals, who have consistently abdicated their individual and collective moral responsibility to counter right-wing ideology with something more than the same old tired rhetoric and cliches.
They failed to focus their energies on the urgent primary collective social objectives confronting the world and the average man, woman and child, preferring instead to squander any moral, political and intellectual capital on narrow vanity projects.
And during the period when women's, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered rights were being secured, the fate of the planet, of the millions living in poverty, in starvation and under universal subjugation was sacrificed at the alter of the personal agendas of liberal sub-classes of elites.
While Noam Chomsky is without a doubt a vastly informed and intelligent observer and critic of The New World Order...his near passionless, almost lifeless, written and oral dissertations are hardly treatises able to inspire or awaken the down-trodden masses or effect any sober second thoughts among the elite classes.
His pedantic drone salves only the comfortable liberal classes, as equally far removed from the daily concerns, tribulations--the reality--of the ordinary man, woman and child as any corporate CEO.
Notwithstanding some of the public attention Michael Moore and others have been able to bring to some worthy issues, it is a measure of the impotence of the left to inspire and provoke fundamental change at the ground-zero life of the ordinary man, woman and child's existence, that hunger, disease. arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and avoidable mortality still vex billions of the world's citizens.
In the poorest homes in America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, fathers, mothers and children have immediate concerns pressing upon them that are as fundamental as life itself and as unchanged as they have always been for the poor for countless generations.
As such the New World Order is nothing more than the continuation of the Old World Order: re-invented re-imagined and executed under the watch of the liberal classes, who are most assuredly as culpable in perpetuating the grand illusion as the neo-conservatives.
Even this thing, the blogosphere, is part and parcel of sustaining the illusion, that free will, free expression and freedom of thought are in any way capable of providing any real comfort to the afflicted or capable of afflicting the comfortable.
At the end of this all, I am struck by my own croaking, just another small voice in the the choir of croaking blogs that Lapham envisaged and warned of. (RH)
