Premonition of a Civil War, Salvador Dali
☞ Funny that the millennial generations are so fixed on apocalyptical horror when it is they who seem most helpful in bringing it on. Take Representative Eric Swallwel, who identifies with the millennium generations. Swallowwell is truly representative of mindset Calif, he who wants to abolish all border control. How’s that for an invite to the apocalypse? When the first wave of flesh eating bacteria from Honduras breaks out, it would be interesting to hear what Representative Swallowwell— with ego so swollen he wanted control over the ship of state— would have had to say about that. Or the new outbreak of measles. Or murders. But he’s entangled with a more interesting apocalyptical rendezvous named Fang.
☞ Take a moment to weep for San Francisco, the city SF Chronicle columnist of the 60s Herb Kane tagged “Bagdad by the Bay.” Kane was waxing poetic about a beautiful city with the glow of an exotic moniker out of Kismet. Today, however, it’s closer in aspect to the actual Bagdad, with filthy beggars occupying the streets and fantasy levels of corruption.
☞ But really, no need to single out SF. It’s only one of many US cities opting for the Bagdad model. So take a moment to weep for California’s former industrial and farming communities. Bye bye to homegrown farmland fruit. Where cousin Joe once managed pear orchards in Cupertino, there now blooms a different produce that might be called fleurs de mal, or flowers of evil. Pear orchards of yesteryear now flower in different crops, now grown by millennium generations. It is the produce of pixilated groups in large compounds, compounding codes to fit a constantly changing proper form for a singular national communication. To put it simply, the pear trees were pulled up and grown in their place are citadels of pixels. The pixels are formed to fulfill the new consciousness developed out of fields of universities, bureaucracies, and pod casts.
☞ A personal survey estimates the formal transition occurred in 1955, or Age of Television One. A few random but integral factors contribute to that year of ATV 1. Eighty per cent of households by then had a television set, and the TV set fast became the dinner host. Mass marketing exploded with its messages. Fin-tailed car manufacture was at its peak. For the first time, the service industry (or what might be called the massage industry) turned a larger gross national product than manufacturing, which itself was at gargantuan level. And McDonald’s Hamburgers was born.
☞ At ATV 1, with one-eyed Polyphemus dictating from a corner of the living room an appetite and attitude for inactive viewers… Well, seventy years later we can see the results on the street, in that same living room, and shrunk into a doodle box held by inactive hands. Incidentally, according to brain studies, a result in ATV 71 is that the cogitative part of the brain noodle has been altered consistently over the years so that not so much imagination can be expected there, and memory on the minus.
☞ The state of withered ratiocination within left lobe domain has provided a ripe field for pixilation. Pixels occupy the mind in such a state that the exterior world is nearly eliminated from individual cognizance. This was demonstrated on a recent trip involving four different airplane flights. All screens were flashing in every seat— and no window open. An amazing demonstration of solipsism, mind fully enclosed within itself, and only open to mini-Polyphemus.
☞ Such a brain seems ripe for university training. Notice the word for enrollment in a four-year institution for higher learning is no longer “education.” And the training in place goes back to early progressive theories by John Dewey, and the like. The Russian Bolsheviks admired Dewey’s ideas in “education” so much so because his thesis was an obvious trend-setter among mind-controllers. The idea was simple: condition the mind early to whatever poppycock it can accept and destroy all conventional forms of learning. So the poppycock becomes transcendent in later instruction. That’s the way you get Stanford law students to throw one of their usual protest tantrums when a federal judge is invited to speak to them. After all, what use would the knowledge of a practicing federal judge be to law students?
☞ Just one anecdote to illustrate the cockamamy concepts of progressive educators… er, scuse me. Educationists, progressive educationists. I encountered one sentence in a teacher’s manual that spoke volumes. It abjured the teacher to “never let the student feel that he is being taught.” I suppose that sentence would read today to never let the student feel that she/he/ze is being taught. However put, it shows how willing the teacher is to absolve any authority or superiority or even knowledge in the classroom. The student is expected to somehow teach himself with teacher as handmaiden. Makes you wonder about any other profession with such practice. If one goes to a mechanic, for example, and complains of a funny sound coming from under the hood, the mechanic responds with a question: What do you think it is?
☞ One further survey might help measure the effect. In 1984, a significant year on this theme, Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary in the Ed Dept., determined the percentage of functionally illiterate adults was around 37-8% of the population. Functional illiteracy is defined as the reading (and therefore, in my opinion, reasoning) capability at sixth grade level. The most recently determined percentage of functionally illiterate today is running at 67%. Thus, from ATV 24 to the present ATV 71, the number of folks at sixth grade reading level has virtually doubled. And you could bet the ranch that many of them with sixth-grade minds are college grads. That statistic alone helps this prospector understand the unreasoning childish behavior on the street.
☞ And lest we forget, the digital world also spends much entertainment time providing actual visions of Apocalypse. Post-apocalyptical fiction was formerly not so mainstream, merely popular in the pulps. Only when the stories were translated into pixels did they become church to disaffected non-illiterates. Film technique began almost exclusively as the invention of D.W. Griffith, a film-maker Hollywood hates most, who was also the man who pioneered every technique film makers relied on— fadeout, montage, the works; that is, until digital pixilation was born. Now folks have the means of depicting smash/n/crash on an astronomical level. Whatever you got. Cities, countries, blow up planets, take a hunk off the solar system. Totally apocalyptical, man, for real!
☞ But for that really real apocalyptical shudder, that titillating frisson down to the genitals, folks might direct thoughts instead toward the Obama team bend-over deal to put Iran on track for a nuclear device. To make it an even tastier civilization killer, throw in the deal for a multiple-head rocket delivery system Billy Jeff Clinton made available to the Chinese, who turned around and made it available to their mullah pals in Tehran. There you have an intercontinental ballistic nuclear shower ordered by Allah.
☞ What could go apocalyptical there? In Bagdad by the bay?
JoCo, 2026
