I See Food Dying

Now, I famously hate salad bars. I don’t like buffets. When I see food sitting out, exposed to the elements, I see food dying. I see a big open petri dish where every passing serial sneezer can feel free to cough, drool, and fondle with spittle-flecked fingers. I see food not held at ideal temperatures, food rotated (or not) by person or persons unknown, left to fester in the open air unprotected from the passing fancies of the general public. Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light, sensible lunches? You’re eating more bacteria than the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick.

—Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour

Squirters

Jane Mayer, our correspondent from The Dark Side, has filed a valuable piece with the New Yorker on the increased use of predator drones in the War on Terra. Mayer’s piece makes four important points:

—Drones are a weapon of targeted assassination. Though traditionally disfavored or actually prohibited in this country, targeted assassination has become, with little or no public debate, the primary means by which the US wages the War on Terra.

—Drones are ineffective. Sixteen separate drone strikes targeting one individual killed more than 300 other people before the targeted man was himself killed.

—Drones create enemies. “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

—Drones corrupt and debase our people. From 8000 miles away, Americans observe on video screens “little people scurrying”; they then push a button, and end those people’s lives. People now smugly derided, among those who kill them, as “squirters.”

All Hail Atlantis

A 5000-year-old sunken city off the southern Peloponnese is the latest candidate for the fabled city of Atlantis. Known as Pavlopetri, and straddling some 30,000 square meters of the ocean floor, it is the first submerged Greek city found that actually predates Plato’s 360 BCE-era references to Atlantis in Critias and Timaeus.

Meanwhile, in their continuing refusal to address climate change, the planet’s industrialized nations are proceeding to slip beneath the waves new cultures, new peoples, new civilizations, new Atlanti. The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, for instance, is expected to disappear into the Pacific Ocean in less than 50 years.

In Dubai recently opened the $1.5 billion, 113-acre Atlantis Hotel, located on the world’s largest artificial island, offering rooms for $26,000 per night. This when roughly 1 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry every night.

Welcome to our world.

The Moon Is Blue

All that is created comes of water.

—Mohammed

NASA is bombing the moon. Last Friday the Houston doubledomes smashed a two-ton rocket hull the size of a bus into the lunar surface. Four minutes later, a second probe, also hurtling through space at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kamikazed into the moon.

The bombing commenced after science-types in September announced they had determined that the lunar polar regions contain water molecules. The bombing was intended to suss out just how much water might be lurking beneath the lunar surface.

The bus-bomb attack, on a two-miles-deep crater at the moon’s south pole, was supposed to send a plume of debris into space that could be analyzed for the presence of sub-surface ice. Although party-poopers at the MMT Observatory in Arizona, which closely observed the shelling, claim not to have detected any debris plume, NASA spokespeaks pooh-poohed this naysaying. “We have the data we needed to address the question of water,” said NASA’s Anthony Colaprete.

The twin bombing, intoned a second spokespeak, is “NASA’s first step in a lasting return to the moon.”

Money Is Not Speech

The lower house of the Argentine Congress has approved a bill that would strip monopoly broadcast-media companies of the ability to control political discourse in that country. The measure is expected to also slide through the Senate, and be signed into law by President Cristina Fernandez, who introduced it.

The nation’s existing media law, which favors monopolies, was imposed by the military dictatorship that controlled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Fernandez’ bill will restrict the number of broadcast licenses allotted to corporate bigfoots, and allow smaller companies and non-profit groups access to the airwaves.

Leftist Latin American lawmakers, like Fernandez, who seek to advance reforms in nations long run for the benefit of a privileged few, have in recent years been viciously set upon by large media conglomerates representing oligarchic interests.

The agent of reaction in Argentina is Grupo Clarin, which dominates not only the airwaves and cable, but also newspaper publishing and web traffic. The company had heretofore successfully blocked all media-reform measures.

In April of 2008, Clarin, gloating in its power, circulated the above cartoon, which depicts a silenced Fernandez. The drawing was emblematic of the fact that Clarin, through its monopoly control of Argentine media, had ensured that no positive news of government reforms had reached the Argentine people. Fernandez promptly denounced the “mafioso-like message,” emanating from Argentina’s “multimedia generals,” who she likened to the tank commanders who in 1976 overthrew the country’s democratic government.

You Could Be Happy

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided that traditional indicators of a nation’s economic progress are insufficient, misleading, even dangerous. Thus, he has announced, France will begin factoring into analyses of its economic vitality such intangibles as “happiness” and “well being.”

Sarkozy believes that reliance on gross domestic product—GDP—as the main measure of economic prosperity contributed to the recent global financial crisis. He is urging other nations to join France in measuring less materialistic indicators of progress.

The French President said the current crisis does not just give the international community the freedom to imagine another economic model, but it obliges the world to do so. “We do not have the choice,” he said.

See Me, Feel Me

The earth shall cry out: “I entreat Thee, O Lord, in Thy mercy to spare me, for behold, I am sick and persecuted with all wounds.”

—The Discourse of Jacob of Serugh

As the melting of Arctic glaciers, occasioned by man-made global warming, continues apace, the earth seems increasingly to be striving to form itself into messages that we might understand. As in this photograph, snapped by marine photographer Michael Nolan, of a crying human face emerging from an icy cliff on the Norwegian island of Nordaustlandet.

The ice cap containing the face has been shrinking by as much as 160 meters annually over the past several decades. Dubbed Austofanna, the cap is the second largest in Europe, and the seventh largest in the world.

Another possibility is that melting glaciers are unearthing those folks referenced in Genesis 6:4, wherein it is noted “[t]here were giants in the earth in those days.” Said giants were among those who perished when Yahweh, grumpy, brought forth the flood, thereby washing away everyone but the bibulous 600-year-old Noah and his motley crew. Dude, after the drown job, threw up a rainbow, as a sign and a promise that “the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

Didn’t promise not to send any other plagues, though.

Shock Jocks

“They lie. They lie, and we have to be merciful, for those who lie.”                                                                                        —Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

Recently a judge in the Canadian province of British Columbia ordered transit officers to cease tasering people for evading fares. In Australia, police encountering a native man awash in gasoline tasered him on the bridge of the nose, at which time he burst into flames. In Alabama a man deaf and mentally ill was tasered for remaining “too long” in a public restroom. Into our office here in California walked a person who, locked away in a jail cell, had been surrounded by six deputies and then repeatedly tasered. And down in Arizona, folks at Taser International sunnily announced a new device that does not require officers to “reload,” and allows up to three people to be electrified at one time.

When tasers were introduced, they were sold on the notion that they would only be used as an alternative to deadly force. In other words, no officer would use a taser unless faced with a situation in which s/he would otherwise shoot to kill someone.

This, it soon developed, was a lie. Today tasers are used whenever those who wield them feel like using them. Including for sport.

Ghosts In The Machine

The civility that is meant to be the foundation of civilization has become an antiquated thing of the past. Our new culture is not so much postmodern as postcivilized, and this cultural shift involves not a step forward but an electronic meltdown of civilization in which barbarism and savagery boil up to the surface once again. As James Joyce prophesied in Finnegans Wake: “Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil.”

At each stage in the cultural evolution of humanity, a new medium of communication comes forth, and the medium then effects a shift to a new form of polity. We begin with the origins of language in the African savanna, and we end up with the disintegration of literature on the Internet.

With the rise of the new postwar forms of electronic communication, philosophy and reasoned discourse could no longer hold together in the supersaturated solution of the global media. Democracy was replaced by mediocracy; citizen was replaced by media subject. Vast electronic latifundia took control of sports, entertainment, politics, journalism, and education; in fact, all forms of culture simply became variants of the entertainment industry. In the hands of a few giants of industry, new mergers created new global streams of techno-swill in which the believing subject was fed like cattle in feedlots.

The citizen who is “morphing” into the loyal subject of the media demands participation in the pageantry. He or she too wishes to become a celebrity and go on television. People will do anything or say anything to go on afternoon talk shows. Good taste and decorum are expressions of the vanished civilization. Television becomes, in fact, a new kind of human sacrifice. Rather than an Aztec ripping out of the heart from a living body and a tumbling of the bloody corpse down the pyramid steps before an awe-inspired multitude, we have a new form of evisceration in which the heart of the individual’s life is ripped out. Each spectator of the pageantry of the media tries to become his or her own spectacle. Fast-fame takeouts litter the information superhighway strips of the new electronic America. The media acolytes seek to attack the White House to gain attention, verbally expose themselves sexually on afternoon talk shows, or form a congregation around their personal obsessions.

If talk show hosts and radio commentators gain attention and become rich only to the degree that they are intellectually pornographic, why shouldn’t the average subject of the mediocracy aspire to his or her own fabrications of cultural history: that the holocaust never happened, that NASA never went to the moon and that the moon landing was all done in a television studio, that the Rockefellers are planning to set off a thermonuclear war and shift their headquarters from New York to Crestone, Colorado.

The representational government of the traditional literate nation-state undergoes an electronic meltdown in which archaic forms surface in new formations. Reasoned discourse in parliaments and senates is replaced by celebrity management for the new masses of the electronic mediocracy. As politics and sports create the Superbowl of the permanent presidential campaign, civilized discourse is displaced to the academy, but as reason is now powerless to counter either the economy of late capitalism or electronic media’s power to swamp literacy, “discourse” becomes an object of academic analysis, and violence becomes the virtual mode of discourse. As McLuhan said, “the sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new and invisible environment.” The new and invisible environment is the shift from natural selection through the vehicle of the human animal body by cultural intrusion. In suburban culture, with rifles and family values, we have the ghost dance of the rednecks. In urban postmodern culture, however, the body is the sloughed-off environment, so it is being painted, sculpted, pierced, lifted, and tucked. Since sex is no longer the agency of natural selection, sexual words become the punctuation marks in the new discourse of violence. “Fuck” and “bitch” are not tropes in the traditional sense of poetic discourse; they are cries in a sociobiological agon and part of the male display of conflict.

For the epoch of biological evolution, the human body had its own forms of signaling when to start and when to stop violent conflict. But because of what McLuhan termed “the media extensions of man,” the evolutionary system of inhibition expressed in the body and its forms of body language is short-circuited. Consider the fact that if we bump into someone around the corner, we back off and courteously excuse ourselves. But if someone cuts in front of us on the highway in an automobile, we shout out our obscenities in a steel-encased rage. We lose the system of check and balances expressed in the physical body with its biological systems for dealing with and containing aggression. Consider again how people on talk radio will become enraged over the day’s news, or how people who live in the cyberspace of electronic bulletin boards will “go up in flames.” There are no bodies in these modes of communication, so as we shift to out-of-body forms of projection into cyberspace networks, it is not surprising that the astral plane takes us over as we become possessed by those noetic parasites that older cultures liked to call demons.
                                                         —Coming Into Being, William Irwin Thompson

Make It So

When you go to psychic school, you will receive instruction in “mockups.” Visualizing something you would like, it is said, helps to tease it out from that ether where everything is possible, nudge it into the realm of “reality.” Conversely, allowing one’s mind to become an Eeyore-like gallery of “bad pictures” can act like a magnet, attracting negativity.

Is this stuff “true”? Who knows? Joseph Kern says: “Deciding what is true and what isn’t now seems to me a lack of modesty.”

I go with you, jefe.

It is certainly true that Important People have believed such things to be true. What John Lennon was getting at when he said “war is over if you want it.” John Wesley, founder of the Methodist variant of Christianity, counseled his acolytes: “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” People struggling in Alcoholics Anonymous, and in its various offshoots, are instructed: “Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to you.” No doubt because boatloads of creative artists have run aground on the shoals of addiction, this gentle admonition has slowly seeped into the popular culture, where it is now generally believed to be moored in scripture. David Mamet, for instance, in his script for The Verdict, allows his bibulous barrister Frank Galvin to present it as an article of the Roman Catholic faith. And so, today, many people are convinced it originally emanated from The Most High himself. And, in the circularity of such things, perhaps it did. ; ) 

King Of Pain

“Use your head, kid. There is no business today that can compete with owning a hospital.” He ticked the points off on his long fingers. “No credit for the customers, and they pay in advance or out on their ass. Next, supply and demand is constant. Third, a unique product—pain—right? A hospital is a hotel for pain, but what hotel gets those prices? Christ, the laundry alone throws off enough to pay the orderlies and the lab. And you should see the net figures on what one of those labs makes. I own twenty-seven hospitals in nineteen cities, kid, and I’d like to have fifty more.”                                                                                                                                                              —Richard Condon, Winter Kills

Wanna Be Stealin’ Somethin’

In the heyday of rocknroll, white musicians were occasionally apprehended in the act of brazenly stealing the work of black artists. Perhaps the most notorious offenders were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who once had the effrontery to rip off Robert Johnson, of all people, and for “Love In Vain.” They were promptly slapped down by Rolling Stone, which growled that they “should know better”; subsequent pressings of Let It Bleed properly credited Johnson. The Stones had already, and more successfully, filched songwriting credit for “The Last Time” from the Blind Boys of Alabama.

To be fair, Jagger’s sticky fingers were not confined solely to picking the pockets of black artists. He also wrested credit for “Wild Horses” from country boy Gram Parsons (who conveniently died during the struggle), and later floated as his own a boatload of tunes from bandmate Mick Taylor. Perhaps his most base act of thievery came when he placed his name on inamorata Marianne Faithfull’s “Sister Morphine”; only in recent years, and at the urging of Keith Richards, has Faithfull’s song been returned to her (Faithfull also had a hand in “Wild Horses”; that credit does not appear to be forthcoming, at least not any time soon).

Now, as they enter their twilight years, the Stones find themselves querulously pursuing people they perceive to be pirating their work, as in a 2008 action against Lil Wayne, for allegedly appropriating, without permission, pieces of the Stones’ “Play With Fire.” Amusingly, for a band that for so long marketed itself as “the bad boys of rocknroll” (“the Beatles want to hold your hand; the Stones want to pillage your town”), the suit against Lil Wayne additionally sniffed that Wayne’s riff on “Play With Fire” contained “explicit, sexist and offensive language” that, if associated with the Stones, might cause the aging rockers Harm.

One would think that, particularly given such history, black artists might be more sensitive to laying hands on one another’s work. But one would be wrong. For, as Kelefa Sanneh relates in the July 6 New Yorker, Michael Jackson built “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the first track off Thriller, on “Soul Makossa,” a song by Cameroon musician Manu Dibango. Jackson was eventually forced to come to a financial arrangement with Dibango, but apparently did not learn his lesson. For, even as he collapsed last week into death, he was facing another suit, in France, alleging that he had passed sampling rights to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to Rihanna for her hit “Don’t Stop The Music.” Problem is, he wasn’t empowered to pass on said rights without Dibango’s say-so, which he had failed to ask for or obtain.

Sheep Dip

The latest reality for the global-warming deniers and minimizers to ignore or explain away is the shrinkage of Scottish sheep.

Anglo-American researchers have determined that on Hirta island, located in the wild and windswept Atlantic some 100 miles west of mainland Scotland, Soay sheep are shrinking at a rate of roughly 3 ounces per year. The cumulative effect has been a 5% reduction in total body size over the past 24 years.

While evolution had previously favored larger sheep, as better able to survive Hirta’s harsh winters, “researchers have concluded that warming temperatures have made it easier for scrawnier sheep to survive, thus reducing the average size of animals in the herd.” 

As the Los Angeles Times puts it, this study “offers unusual proof that large animals are already evolving to adapt to changes wrought by climate change.” 

Bling Dynasty

Even when reading a cookbook, you can get a sense of why the Chinese had their revolution. You’ll learn that during the Qing Dynasty, for the rich folk a “light” meal consisted of over 40 courses, while dinner ran well over 100. This during a period when most of the citizenry subsisted on rice and a little soya. Rulers then were fond of dishes such as Jade Chicken, which required cooks to patiently peel mountains of grapes, or Bird’s Nest Soup, which necessitated employment of a stable of young girls “with perfect vision,” tasked with but one job: removing feathers and fluff from the nests of sea swallows.

But of course nowhere on the planet today are things quite so decadent and outre. Right?

Wrong. As Lance says in Apocalypse Now: “Jim, it’s here. It really is here.”

Here in the June 22 edition of the New Yorker, in a dotty little review of a Park Avenue tapas joint, La Fonda Del Sol:

Among the tapas . . . lamb dressed with hot peppers and roasted on a bed of grass from the field in which the lamb once grazed. The dinner version of this dish is stewed in yogurt made with the milk of the lamb’s mother.

I don’t think any more needs to be said.

Beat It

This is just great.

The autopsy surgeon had yet to apply the saw to the suddenly vacated corporeal container of Michael Jackson, and there were all the rats in his camp, squeaking and squealing, scrabbling all over each other in a frenzied attempt to alternately assign and escape “blame.” 

Out ahead of the pack Friday morning raced Brian Oxman, a “Jackson family attorney,” who scurried over to the UCLA Medical Center, where Jackson’s corpse had been belatedly transported on Thursday afternoon, after Jackson’s “live-in physician” and an unknown number of other panicked rodents skittered around his house for over an hour trying fruitlessly to revive him.

“I have warned,” keened Oxman, “that one day Michael Jackson would wake up dead, and that I would not be silent if that was the case, because of the misuse of medications.”

The newly outspoken Oxman disclosed that Jackson’s medication situation had seriously buggered Jackson’s rehearsals for an intended UK tour. Oxman hastened to add that “I do not know the extent of the medications that he was taking.”

Oxman next scampered onto the set of CNN’s American Morning, where he declared: “I talked to his family about it, I warned them—I said that Michael is overmedicating and that I did not want to see this kind of a case develop.”

Oxman has yet to explain why he did not publicly thump the tub about Jackson’s dire dope jones while the man was still alive.

Reruns

The arguments of ignorance tend to recur. It will always be so: ignorance is by nature a limited beast. Originality and creativity are not required, to persist in seeing through a glass darkly.

If you live long enough, you will witness the marshaling of the same arguments at different instances of space and time. If the arguments prove ignorant on the first go-round, you can generally expect that they will likewise wobble wrongly in succeeding revolutions. This is part of what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he wrote:

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished.

The cohorts of George II at present instruct that we must pursue all over the planet a War On Terra because “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them over here.” If you slip in a disc of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can watch one of the first known invocations of this same mantra, as a band of ur-men brandishing bones crushes the skulls of a rival band at a strategically important watering hole. Fast-forward the planet some several million years, and you may observe hundreds of thousands of Americans and Australians, awash in the same shibboleth, floating over to Europe for WWI, there to ensure Germans do not occupy Topeka, and Turks do not site a mosque on Ayers Rock.

In my youth, the United States transformed Southeast Asia into a charnel house in order to “there” put a stop to Communism, so that “here” we would not be forced to burn all our money and construct refrigerators out of cement. The US lost that war, but there don’t now seem to be any more Communists here where I live than there were before the defeat. Just the same one guy, an economics professor at the university, ready soon to retire. The US will lose the War on Terra, too, but I don’t expect that as a result my daughter will be immured in a burka, or that I will be impressed into service as a dervish.