After extensive research, and a few lectures I gave the Committee members last night about poor influence-buying techniques, I discovered why the European economy is in real trouble.
Apparently, while no one was looking, Bob Saget, of “Full House” television sitcom fame, substituted himself in a poor disguise as the leader of the European Central Bank:
So a friend asked, as a guy, what kind of messages are the political candidates sending him.
He can understand if nonheterosexual men are receiving “love letters” from male political candidates, even those that are unintentional/subliminal.
But my friend is a heterosexual male contemplating a vote for what he assumes is a slate of heterosexual men running for U.S. President, including the incumbent/sitting man on the White House Throne.
He never exchanged notes with guys in grade school that he exchanged with girls — the typical:
“Do you like me? __Yes __ No
If you like me, do you love me? __ Yes __ No
If you love me, will you go out with me? __ Yes __ No
If you don’t like or love me, will you go out with me anyway? __ Yes __ No
If you won’t go out with me, will you tell your friend Tiffany that I think she’s cute. __ Yes __ No __ Who are you, again?”
So, he wonders, if, like me, his guy friends were all about drawing scale models and interiour cutouts of ships and submarines as little kids and then dissing on girls, sports and maybe school subjects as they got older, how are the political candidates trying to reach out to him as he reaches voting age?
Well, candidates, what do you think?
What promises are you making to the 18-to-21 year young potential voters, voters who may be your champions for life?
When I was 18, I exercised my right to vote for political candidates, which included Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, John Anderson and a few other choices for U.S. President.
I grew up in a family where my father was a gun-toting member of the NRA and nonunion, my mother was a sharpshooter herself but a card-carrying member of the teachers’ union. He was a staunch Republican and she just as strong a Democrat, although at the local political level they voted mainly for the candidate and not just the party ideology.
I looked at the two main presidential candidates, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who pretty much touted their party platform, including planks that showed firm roots in the extreme version of the party’s main ideology, with plenty for noncommitted voters to consider.
Neither one appealed to me. Me, an 18-year old kid about to enter college on a 4-year Navy ROTC scholarship that honoured my male lineage of service to the military, voluntary and/or drafted.
Me, who was an upstanding citizen of my community because he knew how to keep his good (i.e., law-abiding) friends separated from his bad (i.e., troublemaking) friends, with neither telling the other about my friendship with them, or our habits — one of the advantages of having secondary school cliques with their imaginary boundaries that few talked about crossing, although many did and still do.
I wasn’t interested in the labels that either the Republican or Democrat candidate wanted to attach to its young voters, both who basically said, “You independents vote for me and together we can speak as one voice, wearing the same label,” which contradicted the whole idea of I-follow-no-one independence.
So I ended up voting for John Anderson, mainly as a protest vote against conformism.
Which led me to question why I was joining the U.S. Navy and its training me to be a good order-following/dictating officer after four or five years, but that’s another story to be told.
Well, my friend, what are you hearing from the candidates?
After 32 years of listening to candidates ask for my vote, I’ve stopped listening to them and started analysing what exactly they can do for me in reality, not in some fictional world portrayed in a brochure or 30-second advert.
I look at their social network, who they can bring into the political arena and who’s already in the arena they can make friends with, the business deals they’ve made, if any, and their personal will-to-power that every great candidate must carry, including strong selfish exhibitionist tendencies, to serve the political office well.
If they continually fall back on dogma to defend themselves, including religion or other emotion-based gobbledygook, then I tend not to take them seriously.
I don’t plan to fall in love with, have fantasies about and then imagine I’ll marry a candidate, which some middle-of-the-roaders seemed to think when they first saw Sarah Palin.
I want facts, not hope. I want action, not dreams.
If I had my druthers, politics would be less significant than it has become in our current polarised, binary, votebuying world, but history has a way of repeating itself, repeating itself, repeating itself.
Listen to the candidates, if you want, and let the subliminal hints of “Vote for me and I promise to like you, maybe even love you, in whatever way you deem appropriate,” wash over you like good advertising-driven campaigns should, turning candidates into a hodgepodge of parent/friend/lover/counselor/sage/god.
I suggest you ignore the messages altogether and analyse the candidate’s ability to get the job done. Everything else is just a thin coat of veneer that’ll scrape off at the first sign of abrasive trouble that every U.S. President faces as soon as the protective honeymoon phase washes away.
Or you can simply ignore the whole thing, spending Election Day with friends and lovers, far away from the hocus-pocus magic that politics pretends to be, and focus on what makes you special, including any skills/talents you want to share with the world that you don’t need politics to enable you to become/be the person in this moment that’ll make moments to come more fun, relaxing and enhancing the world around you.
Somebody tried to impersonate me 22 years ago and I have the video to prove it.
How many social media networks do you belong to?
I don’t keep up with the trend in online social networks so, a few years ago, I was surprised when a former secondary school girlfriend of mine invited me to a couple of social networks I’d never heard of.
The networks were geared toward schoolaged children, with a lot of the online checkboxes, smiley faces, etc., that we used to exchange in notes passed in classrooms.
I suppose the networks still exist, that the demand is still there, but since I neither have children nor am of schoolage (6-18 years) anymore, those parts of society aren’t of interest to me.
Unless…
Unless, that is, there’s data there worth mining to see where the leaders of tomorrow are going to take society and what the followers expect of their leaders.
Should mainstream media and/or the major blogging/tweeting community members pay attention to these feeder streams of age-specific social networks?
Or are they already buzzing about them and I’ve missed the symbol sets, the codewords, that go with those subcultures?
I never read the teen celebrity-following magazines when I was a kid. I was more likely to read a technology-based magazine, instead.
I passed notes in class, though, starting around age 8. No, I actually passed notes in my first year of school, when I was 5 to 6 years of age, but they were mainly drawings of cars, boats and submarines that I shared with other guys. It wasn’t until age 8 that I started passing love notes to girls.
In the U.S., I see a trend where the candidates for U.S. President are attempting to send love notes to women in an adult sort of way, one type for married/attached heterosexual women, one type for single heterosexual women and another type for nonheterosexual women, attached and/or single.
What kind of social networks did the candidates and the women to whom they’re sending signals use when they were kids?
Answer that question and you’ll know the political trends of the next decade.
Meanwhile, I return to the technological trends of this decade predicted by the view 1000 years from now, before seeing what the Committee wants to discuss at the next meeting…
A nod to Andrea, who attended Lee University. I hope you meet the person with whom you want to spend your remaining days on this planet, reinforcing the great life you’ve had already.
[Personal notes – feel free to skip]
Having written and published several books, a few that actually made me money, I enjoy reading about the lives of authors/novelists, what motivates them and got them started.
Take this fellow, “Americana,” for instance.
Like so many others before him, he is discovering the joy of dropping out of the rat race.
Leisure time.
How many young people, not just including trust fund babies, have fostered a luxury of life without the noise and haste of mass media?
Can you think of a book you read that talked about getting away from it all?
Isn’t this idea an odd thought, that one has gotten out of the hustle and bustle of daily living only to return to the life by proxy through writing about it?
What about those who live the life but don’t write about it?
Look around you. Do you live amongst those who aren’t spending their time constantly connected and checking their online community?
I look at me. Most days, the majority of conversation I have with any beings takes place between my wife and me in the mornings and evenings, the rest of the day spent sitting here or feeding/petting the cats, if I’m not taking a walk in the woods or riding a bicycle along a local river trail.
Close this notebook computer and I’m virtually cut off from the rest of the world.
Just me and my books and cats warming my lap.
In other words, happiness.
I was like the writer, Steve Tuttle, not too long ago — in meetings, on the phone, checking emails, creating/modifying spreadsheets, traveling across the globe, on a constant lookout for the latest breaking news in state-of-the-art technological advances that would enhance or greatly disrupt the business models which increased my personal wealth.
Then one day it hit me. I was no longer working for myself. I was working for a system of beliefs which were not my own but were given to me to accept as my own through years of primary/secondary/postsecondary education.
I was not interested in buying ever more expensive cars, eating in more luxurious restaurants or negotiating bigger and bigger deals.
I was interested in nurturing me.
But at the same time, I was interested in eliminating the expanding personality of me.
By stepping out of the need to participate in the social network of our species, I have stepped into a zone where one can observe patterns and predict trends because most of us follow a script we wrote together as a society a long time ago, are rewriting every day, in fact.
Which reminds me, how do empty-nesters feel after their lives, which were so wrapped around raising their little chickadees, suddenly end when the chicks grow wings and fly away? Is it freedom or torture or just sheer boredom?
Just 13959 days until an event occurs that is chronicled in this blog.
Reality is only seven letters. Which seven letters do you want to be?
As a funhouse mirror, I reflect both the good and bad in us, trying to make us think about the seeds we’re planting today for the trends we’ll follow tomorrow.
For instance, is there a possible resurgence in ultraleftwingism, followers of a group similar to the Socialist Party of old, workers who no longer feel “loved” by the corporate owners/leaders that employ them and rake in a lot more money through legislative-friendly policies that border on the exploitative?
Or, will this, solving the good business generation gap, be the new trend?
Finally, are states starting to see the light and will remove more nonviolent criminals from the prison system?
I’m willing to look backward and forward to find the trends that make my life of participating in the online community worth perpetuating.
Otherwise, the repetition of repetition gets repetitive, creating/mashing up offensive and nonoffensive jokes/observations/storylines to fend off ennui, all in the simple hope that we’ll see through the repetition and make a concentrated effort where/when our species will be the one to establish a colony of sustainable Earth-based lifeforms out of this planetary system.
It doesn’t matter to me what the people look like who inhabit the offworld colony or even if they’re totally “human” in today’s sense of the world, including cyborgs who live amongst us. The goal is the same: hedging our bets, taking one egg out of the basket and placing it in a surrogate nest as far away from Earth as possible.
Everything else is recycling Earth’s resources over and over, no matter how much fun or interesting it may be, including this blog, the books I’ve written and the retail establishments I visit (and have visited, for which I owe a debt of gratitude to pay with mentioning them here again soon).
And if we determine that a lifeform different than us, such as a simple one-celled organism, has a higher chance of survival, especially when we’ve searched a celestial body and found no lifeform that we may endanger with ours or any other we bring, then I’m willing to “plant” that organism in hopes that it will seed the solar system.
Call me a farmer whose field is this local area of the galaxy, hoping that in the current 200-million-year window of opportunity, we can hop, skip and jump our way, in one form or another, to the next safe agricultural zone.
In the meantime, there’s the matter of dark matter to resolve, a whole field, a vast tract of land, on which we haven’t broken ground yet.
Last night, my wife and I ate in Thai Garden, a local restaurant featuring food styles of SE Asia.
At a nearby table, a couple sitting near the window reminded me of some retrofuturistic social rebels celebrating a recent victory by having a romantic dinner together.
So, of course, I had to draw them on a paper placemat while I had a St. Valentine’s Day romantic evening with my wife:
"To the Revolution!" "To us!"
[Warning: the links below contain words/ideas/images currently subject to categorisation as inappropriate for family-oriented audiences]
Here’s the story that led me to this mashup. Word.
Make sure you listen to it accompanied by Delibes “Coppelia/Slow Waltz and Final Gallop” performed by the Royal Opera House – Covent Garden, Mark Ermie, Conductor, on satellite radio or digital TV.
Do you want the codewords of your subculture to join the repertoire of the general [regional/national/global/solar] culture?
Are you a member of a guild? You know, a craft/workers union, a medical association, a political party, a corporation, a sports club, that sort of thing.
Do you share a set of words solely around something like Earl Grey Tea?
What do I share with the bird pecking on the shagbark hickory tree outside my window?
What do I call the bird? Do I give it a common name? A botanical/Latin name? A list of descriptors? The sounds that it makes?
Black and white feathers. Tends to hop up the tree. Can’t hear what, if any, sounds that it makes from its throat.
Should I say downy woodpecker? How about Picoides pubescens?
As I drink a cup of water which contains a prepackaged bag of Twinings Classics Earl Grey Tea I zapped together in the microwave oven, what else do I observe that doesn’t necessarily pass by the viewhole-cut-in-the-wall called a window?
Today, I am alive.
Thoughts left over from previous days’ influences vie for my conscious action to record them here.
One to remember: [“Fascism under the guise of democracy is the rule of financial capital itself.” — Laibach], ironically read and recorded from a video on the commercial website, YouTube, along with [“What is art? Art is the goal and the end of progress.”], “Stop the parahuman” and the fact that art both creates a new mythology and should take the system more seriously than the system takes itself seriously.
Which means a performer like Jimmy Fallon is just another fascist propagandist, if you follow that line of reasoning.
IF, that is, you take art seriously and believe that politics is in the service of theatrical performances.
Global absurdistcynical art means nothing to the bird looking for a few bites to eat on this cool, late winter day. The larvae and other insects being eaten have no philosophical funny point to make in sacrificing their lives to feed the bird.
Can you protest against a government that provides the roads and education that brought you to the steps of the government building to wave legible signs of protest?
Of course you can.
What is education? Is it not our way of tricking people of all ages, not just children, into adopting a set of codewords to increase their success when interacting with others who most often use the same codewords; i.e., share the same [sub]culture?
A white breasted nuthatch, Sitta carolinensis, clears out an old nesting hole in the same tree on which the woodpecker was searching a few minutes ago.
How do we train ourselves to observe our codeword sets and our behaviours so we can make changes before we get to the point where we feel our only recourse is to generally protest the system that got us to that point?
How do we enhance our [bio]feedback system to protect ourselves as individuals, giving easily-accessible new routes for those who wish not to perpetuate the codeword set of the [sub]culture in which they/we feel trapped?
In other words, how do we take those who are mostly followers and readily give themselves over to hypnotic leaders, who aren’t interested in promoting more than one subcultural codeword set, and give those followers the ability to break their trances and follow the leaders they are best predisposed to emulate?
Those who can follow themselves, are able to self-hypnotise belief in the power of nonconformance, no matter how much the self is a product of mass hypnosis and thus not completely individualistic/unique, just a unique combination of mass [sub]cultural codewords, we need not worry about, but should still give them the same protection under the law as conforming, hypnotised followers.
No matter how much we adore/abhore the prevailing system of social interactions, we all contribute. In fact, diversity of beliefs is an inherent part of species survival.
We can still belong to our codeword groups — our clubs, corporations and associations — creating entrance exams and other means of excluding codeword noncompliers, including official denial/rejection codeword sets (“that person is an enemy of our [religious/political] belief system,” “your team sucks,” “you are not qualified to be an official member of our witchdoctor medical practitioners,” etc.), if we wish.
In the end, we are all selling something, ourselves in opposition to or ourselves as part of a system.
How do you/I buy or buy into a system?
That’s a question the birds would understand. Sometimes, they’re species-specific, mating with others of their kind, and sometimes, they’re members of a bigger flock, taking advantage of numbers, a group of different species gathering to elude a predator and feed upon the fat of the land. Safety in numbers as prey while the predator simply gets a wider variety of food to choose from.
That’s all we are, too. You/me/us.
When I was a kid, one of my favourite celebrities was a comedian named Don Rickles.
Something about the in-your-face insult versus the insinuated/subtle insult attracted me to the likes of MAD Magazine’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” series as well as Don Rickles and the occasional show that roasted another person in the limelight.
Not that Don Rickles is very appealing. In fact, my mother once said she was cleaning the garbage disposal and the gunk at the bottom was more attractive to her than Don in his best years.
Which says a lot about his comedy that fungus would even slightly remind my mother of Rickles.
I told her about this scene and she corrected me. It wasn’t the gunk at the bottom, per se, that jarred her memories of Don. It was the sharp teeth of the disposal that cut my mother’s finger and sent chills up her spine of nightmares she used to have, sitting on a big throne and having insult after insult thrown at her by Rickles and his roast club.
You see, that’s the thing about selling space travel or drilling to the top of a subglacial lake in the Antarctic.
Where’s the fun if you can’t make a little fun, subtle or over the top, about what really happens in special scenarios.
For instance, the real reason that the Russians took so long to get to the top of Lake Vostok was that they kept drinking all the vodka they were supposed to use to keep the drill from freezing up.
And do you know how difficult it is for FedEx or UPS to make an overnight delivery of alcohol to the South Pole?
Why, even Santa Claus won’t bother with the continent, which means the little, tuxedoed penguins aren’t exactly fans of the big fellow who only works one day of the year.
I’m talking about the penguin’s dislike of Don Rickles, not Santa Claus, you fools. After all, what’re they gonna do with Christmas gifts — store ’em next to their precious eggs or babies under their tushes?
Which reminds me… I had a private discussion with Ahmadinejad last night about all this controversy surrounding nuclear development. I mean, he and I both know that Allah is not a friend of nuclear armament in the hands of infidels or his followers. Ahmadinejad assured me that the only reason he’s paying scientists and technicians to make radioactive fuel is to heat the subterranean Roman baths that his family uses to stay out of the public eye.
I’m willing to believe anything. Up to a point.
Ahmadinejad, my friend, you have more oil reserves at your fingertips than Elizabeth Taylor had husbands, Queen Elizabeth has power or Elizabeth Hurley has acting skills.
Then he opened up and told me that his wife has an addiction problem. She can’t stop adopting orphans, especially deposed dictators and their children.
He showed me his family “tree” and it looks more like a forest, with roots and branches stretching all over the globe. That, he says, is why he’s afraid to tap the limited oil reserves to heat the baths and would rather use the unlimited power of nuclear energy.
Put it like that and I’m all teary-eyed…with laughter. Ahmadinejad can’t see the real problem. Why does his family need to take so many baths?
Cut down on the obsession with cleanliness and we could have peace in the Middle East in our lifetimes, dude.
Look at Don Rickles. He never takes a bath and doesn’t have any problems with his friends as a result. [The fact that he doesn’t have any friends is irrelevant.] Do you see him causing an international energy crisis? No.
Therefore, let Don be an example to all of us. A little less soap, a little less hot water, a lot more body odour and we’d be a peaceful species — at arm’s length (or at least out of range of each other’s noses), perhaps, but less dangerous, because of our energy-efficiency, if not our good looks, personality and charm.
treetrunkdings 