Deeply Unimpressed

"What you're about to see may be disturbing," said Anderson Cooper unironically as he then proceeded to direct your attention to the spectacle of a sardine can of wealthy extreme tourists (one of whom had already taken a rocket ride to outer space with Jeff Bezos) and their cosplaying captain Nemo-- rather than privately taking an exclusive $250,000 a piece sightseeing tour to the wreck of the Titanic 12,500 ft (3800 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic as they intended-- went suddenly virally global as their toy boat lost contact with the ship they had launched from within an hour and a half of submerging and became the object of an intensive breathless search that was chronicled and speculated upon for days by our overpaid and underdelivering corporate media.  

It was disturbing all right, but not exactly in the way Anderson Cooper intended.  4 days later the mystery was solved -- their prefab coffin had imploded within an hour and a half of submerging, instantly rendering all of the passengers unrecognizably obliterated it was surmised, in retrospect mercifully as the media chronicling the incident  while the world assumed the submersible was impaired but still intact had painted an increasingly horrific alternative picture of the diminishing prospects for the passengers as the 4-day supply of air and sustenance were presumed to be dwindling in a cramped and enclosed space in which by design they would have been unable even to stand for their last moments.  But perhaps they got to see the Titanic up close for their money before it all went awry. 

On CNN's Situation Room last night, the sycophants of CNN desperately wanted you to see this as the latest tragedy in our ongoing human drama of exploration and discovery, but the experts they had on to sanctify the proceedings for once could not in good conscience spin the episode as anything other than what it was -- an entirely predictable and utter waste.* 

Ocean's Gate, the company of the submersible's pilot had this to say about their customers:

These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans.† Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.

Speaking for myself, I could have done without them.  They were free to do what they wanted with their money of course, unlike 99% of the planet.  It's the private extreme tourism that disturbs me.  If, rather than mere privileged gawking, there is true value to be found in exploring the wreckage of the Titanic and other artifacts on the sea floor-- or for that matter space-- then perhaps it's worth engaging the cooperation of nations and universities on exploration as a human project.  As a destination for those who have more money and self-regard and stunted adolescent dreams than they know what to do with, I'd rather not be bothered.

It's not like the careful tourist couldn't have seen this coming.  The company had already been scrutinized and reported on for its lack of regard for its customers.  As the pilot of the craft, the ex-CEO and founder of the company had famously boasted to a journalist:

You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.

This elective recklessness sounds like the operative strategy of every capitalist huckster out there and it's exactly why the planet is in the shape it's in and why those among these people who remain, who likewise use their obscenely outsized slices of the pie to consume the only planet we have rather than to save it,  need to be de-funded and de-balled yesterday.

~~~~~

*  Elsewhere in the sea, as many as 700 and possibly more African and Asian refugees died in the Mediterranean in 3 incidents in the same week when the overcrowded boats by which they were escaping poverty, war and drought caused by global warming wrecked off the coast of Greece.

† “….a deep passion for … protecting the worlds’ oceans.” Oh, please.  Funny way of showing it.  

Mid-Summer Feral Dance Rapture

Salah Ragab & The Cairo Jazz Band - Egypt Strut 

Vud (feat. TVÅ) - Underwater

Paupière - Défunte lune de miel

Kishore Kumar - Aise Na Mujhe Tum Dekho - from Darling Darling (1977)

The Go-Betweens - Was There Anything I Could Do?

Didem - Dum Dum Tak

Sparks - Perfume

J-Cut & Kolt Siewerts - The Flute Tune (Soulpride Remix)

Wayne Shorter - Tom Thumb

Chemical Brothers w/ Beth Orton - Where Do I Begin?

Sylvan Esso - Coffee

Sevana - Lowe Mi

Rita Lee - Panis et Circenses

The Royal Wind Music - Pierre Phalèse / Bransle Gay from Liber primus leviorum carminum

Viagra Boys - To the Country

Crystal & Runnin' Wild - What a Way to Die

Besh o Drom - Tortapápir

Trio Mandili - Rachuli (Live in Leipzig)

Ooh baby baby

We think we are a youth culture.  In truth we hate the young.   We now force them into existence.  Then we starve them.  We starve their schools. A good number of us are trying to censor their learning-- circumscribing what they can know or think.  We steal from their future by killing their planet.  When they reach voting age we shut them out of our politics by offering them no choices and lingering for far too long at the reins.  And then we blame them for the chaos that surrounds us.  

And yet for ourselves, as we exercise, dye, style, and surgery ourselves to keep old age at bay, youthfulness is everything.

Youthfulness is one thing, eternal babyhood is quite another.  For all of our fetishization of wealth and progress and growth-- ours is a culture stuck in babyhood.   If you have the television on for 5 minutes you will be assaulted by baby talk, baby music, baby thoughts talking down to you from every corner of the screen.  And that's just the ads.  Cartoon mascots, doody jokes,  bright baby colors, shiny objects, ludicrously fantastic baby messages trying to engage the infant part of your brain (and probably usually succeeding).   Our news is content free happy talk. Our entertainment is hardly better-- super heroes, that same sickly sweet computer animation that has taken over our culture since the 1990s, loud brain-dead game shows and contests, shows fetishizing fame or sitcoms about stupid horrible families in the suburbs, or dramas about big boy jobs like policeman and fireman and doctor. 

Television monopolizes our attention, but it’s only one way we maintain a baby’s eye view of things. Our culture is adamantly intent on remaining frozen in a mindset of object impermanence, ignoring what it doesn’t see.  TV is passive but much of our willfully limited attention is actively engaged in activities like bookburning, legislating against behaviors we don’t want to tolerate, censoring ideas as if covering our eyes makes what we hate and fear disappear. It's reflected even in our technology. We think AI will be super human, but I’m afraid super human means super baby. Why does Auto-correct have no idea what you meant when you wrote "motherficker"  by mistake?  Because the people who designed it would rather not deal with the babies among their users who don't want anyone to acknowledge that bad words and bad thoughts exist. 

The coming Presidential election as permitted to be seen on TV promises to be wall-to-wall baby talk, by and about a pathetic lineup of candidates from an atomically small number of parties and platforms trying to annoy us with wokeness and anti-wokeness long enough to keep funded until 2024.  That either of the only 2 parties that are permitted to figure in our politics represents "the grownups in the room" is laughable on its face.  But the "daddy"republican party is uncontestably the worst.  

Babies don't understand and may need explaining to that when and if they grow up, in spite of every effort that our baby education system will make to keep the information from them, they will develop feelings in their uh-oh places that are no one else's business.  Ron DeSantis or as I like to call him, Puddintane, doesn't want you to understand CRT because then you might understand him.  It's the same reason the recently deceased racist, cretin and simpering homophobe Pat Robertson lingered to the age of 93 without learning a thing.  And like a baby sitting in his spoiled diaper for 93 years, Robertson did not want anyone else to learn anything either.  This is what conservatism and fundamental religion are- willful selective stunting of the mind, of possibilities for life on earth, of tolerance for the growth and happiness of people who are not you sitting in your used nappy for 93 years.

It is a pity that there is no hell because that is where Robertson would surely be, but the consolation for the ironic deliciousness of Robertson writhing in eternal damnation not being a thing is that in reality he has just ceased, and is thankfully finally yielding his material back to the universe where something else can now surely make better use of it.

Self-stunting is not restricted to the right.  Far, far too many on the ostensible left think revolution is achieved by tattling and loud whining.  All the spoiled babies of the left are whining to be heard over each other in the tiny corner of the playpen that mother twitter has reserved for them, outbitching each other as if that is the method for getting a diaper change.  You can start to think the diaper is the only change we need to believe in if it would only ever come.

To ease the pain of our rash, we can go on pretending a revolution is coming to save us if only we could shut up the other loud left whiny babies surrounding us.  On the right, we could believe that if only by our performative tantrums we could prevent others from learning and reading about possibilities beyond the ones that favor us and our position of exaltedness in the high chair at the head of the baby table we could stay there forever.   We can keep pretending there is a caring loving god who rewards us for doing his will and cruelly punishing those who don't.  We can pretend Burger King gives a fuck about us having it our way.  We can pretend Pfizer's goal is our health.  We can pretend ExxonMobil is "fueling the world safely and responsibly."  We can pretend Santa Clause exists.  

Or we can grow up, quit treating each other and ourselves like infants, respect our differences, give the reality we have made for ourselves a long hard sobering mature look  and finally learn to take care of our planet,  ourselves and each other together.  Like grownups.   

Flat tones

 I’m reading a book about people who believe in a flat earth* so I’m frankly quite frightened of the USA.  While I was deep into reading about people who think the rest of the world is crazy for thinking they’re crazy this morning on metro, 2 very unconventional looking people got on the train—a tall skinny circle bearded man in a trucker hat with an American flag on a pole sticking out of his backpack and a female I assume is his significant other, a tall and gaunt sour faced heavily made up dyed blonde also with a backpack who took the seat behind him, both of them facing me.  I imagine the flag poking out of the backpack is what made the dude take so long to sit down.  I had to not stare at them for 2 stations and when I got off, the dude gave me the eye.  I’ll just say they fit the profile that is forming in my mind.  I was reading at the time about a guy who engaged in flat-smacking I think he calls it which is aggressively confronting globe earthers about their beliefs.  Globe earthers are everywhere of course, so all he has to do when he’s walking down the street and feeling pugnacious is film himself defying anyone who catches his eye to challenge his beliefs. He has a video channel for YouTube documenting the lunatic intransigence of globe earthers.  

It's important to note that those 2 weirdos were each wearing military green jackets and seemed to have the same material backpacks, but were decidedly not active enlistees if you catch my drift.  And the dude whose backpack was quite tall and as I say unwieldy onaccounta it had a big old broomstick with an American flag affixed sticking out of it, really slouched expansively in his seat with his giant backpack next to him which is probably why his old lady knew not to sit next to him but upright and alert in the seat behind him.  Real charmers in my fervid imagination.  But I’m not judgmental. 

A sudden spray of Glock fire did cross my mind as a possibility.  It wasn’t an obsession.  I was more in a hating frame of mind myself honestly.  Almost grateful to be handed a dickwad to loathe.  Just as a palliative or something. Because truthfully I am interested in the topic of what makes people be like people.  Why is everyone so typical?  I hear a bit of myself when I imagine flat earthers’ laying into those who in their company innocently betray a passive working theory that the world is round and not the center of the universe.  I hear in them myself reacting to someone innocently parroting some ass on CNN about Ukraine.  (usually keeping it to myself unless it’s my wife. Sorry, honey.)  So let me be clear: I hate in flat earthers and conspiracy dolts to a great extent what I hate in myself.  I feel like my convertibility flag was activated and hyperextended by religion and religious people when I was too young to know better and it makes me an obnoxious convert about everything that makes sense to me as an injustice.  It’s why I fear becoming a Flat Earther or a q-nut.  I engage with the facts the same way.  Like someone itching to proselytize (if only I could find a belief to proselytize about.)  I’m overstating a tad, but let’s be real, not completely.

A thesis of the book* is that facebook and youtube’s algorithms bear a good bit of responsibility for the global blossoming of flat earth theory (especially amongst certain types of Americans) after almost 2 centuries of nearly universal indifference to flat earth theory punctuated by periodic and isolated flowerings, because both platforms exploited the curiosity factor to push freaky fringe ideas on anyone who betrayed any interest in adjacent eccentric belief systems.  Flat Earth theory having a uniquely WTF allure to it fit the bill of both companies’ interest in addicting users of their sites to longer and longer dippings into the rabbit hole.  There probably wasn’t an appreciation at either facebook or youtube that in the face of near unanimous planetary consensus among scientists and laypeople alike that the planet is as round as all the evidence plainly shows, the hurdle of believing such a patently absurd notion as that the earth is as flat as the writers of the bible thought it was all evidence to the contrary is a guarantee that the belief will be unshakeable even in the face of ostracism and ridicule.  It’s tailor made for cult level thinking like so many other ideas that have been churned up from the depths of the web.  There’s a quality that these absurd theories have in common—they make fanatic true believers who are highly motivated to keep the addictive  corrosive irresistible material coming.  That’s really all that matters.  I mean what are they going to do, censor the stuff?  That’s even worse than giving it free reign in the marketplace of ideas.  

Catherine Liu's American Idyll is in many ways about this too.  People hate the experts.  They hate the know-it-alls.  So they full throttle embrace anything that flips the motherfuckers off.   They worship the anti-experts largely as a fuck you to the experts. And let's be honest, our experts are a very sorry lot who have fuck yous coming to them.   And ironically the people who hate experts, in flocking to anti-experts replicate a negative image of the institutions they hate, of the canon.  But it's a canon for them, and not for the know-it-alls.†

~~~~

*Off the Edge by Kelly Weill

† Having just read Elizabeth Winkler's Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies (which I also highly recommend) I'm reminded by contrast, after all, of the inability of the priests of the canon to distinguish between crackpot theory and legitimate scholarly questioning of orthodox received opinion.  Pursuing the Shakespeare Authorship controversy online, I came across a conversation between Carol Rutter and Stanley Wells in which the latter, perhaps the supreme Stratfordian (i.e., person who believes the author of the works of Shakespeare was ... get ready for this... Shakespeare!) actually says it's "immoral to question history" as we receive it.  If facts alone weren't enough to raise doubt about the official story (and they are), stuff like this is fodder for contrarianism.