The Mayday Cafe The Mayday Cafe
[....being a virtual coffee house with a choice of intellectual brews available for cerebral sampling, including, but not limited to the following strengths: 1) Avgas Broast; 2) JP4 House Blend; and 3) Sanka Very Mocha. The flavor of the day will vary with the given paradigmatic catalyst of the moment.]
AVGAS BROAST: ON SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY and AMERICAN FREEDOMS (caffeine thoughts)
One of the most serious concerns I encounter recurrently in attempting to gain better understanding of our developing contemporary American culture is the perceptional interplay between individual freedom and the ethic of social responsibility. This social dynamic ties in congruently with several other cultural processes in present focus among thoughtful individuals and helps characterise a phenomenon others have termed the 'dumbing down of America'. Of special concern in this last nuance is the especially insidious collaboration of popular communications media with multinational corporations in fostering a politic of 'democratic econo-fascism' within our present society.
As the 'soft socialism' of FDR's reforms in the 30s and 40s gathered steam, recharged with fresh energy from American ascendance as the victor of a world-wide war and tempered by the challenges of that period, unprecedented burgeoning economic growth of post-war America took place. Helping fuel this new era of immense American economic gain, a new wave of national optimism admixed with a fresh wave of modern immigration to remodel the traditional ethic of 'melting pot America'. These waves of immigration have long been encouraged, in part by the glowing nostalgic memory of how previous immigrants have embraced the American ideals of 'freedom' to augment and substantially contribute to our nation in all areas of social, political, and economic development. 'Ms. Liberty' has therefore continued to welcome the..."oppressed, the downtrodden, the economically disadvantaged, etc.", through the intervening period, to these shores in search of fulfillment of their dreams of fortune and personal happiness.
In the wake of these demographic changes, and others brought about by the hopeful rebels of the 60s in their reaction to the misadventure that was the Vietnam war, the American Left has succeeded in the past 50+ years in bringing a new standard of liberal permissiveness to the maintenance of moral norms that are now peculiar to our national social and political matrix. Taking place most conspicuously in Pacific Western states (bellwethers of social change and technological advancement), regions such as California have become havens for profusely diverse ethnic and demographic groups from all over the world. Counter to the old cultural ideal of "becoming American" (i.e. read: "...be as much like an White Anglo Saxon Protestant as possible"), empowerment dogma growing out of the cultural self-pride movements of the 60s have today encouraged ethnic, racial, and cultural groups to polarise away from the old WASP norm and develop principal identification and self-worth actualisations within their primary identity groups. While the theory is commendable, one of the practical results has been the establishment of a frequently destructive and often severely fragmented state of chaotic social heterogeneity in our society as a whole. The result thereupon, in a practical application, has been the institution of a reign of 'politically correct terror' that today pervades all areas of social, political, and economic interaction.
As the true nature of this policy of liberal sentiment has grown, several responses have been apparent on the part of both government and society. Government, for its part, has virtually embraced whole-heartedly the policy of absolute compliance with the theory of 'political correctness' so as to help fend off legal actions being brought by any social, racial, or ethnic group that feels slighted in our public or economic bureaucracies (...as blatant an expiation of liberal guilt-anxieties as one could hope to identify, I fear). Business, on the other hand, has adopted a mode of response that is socially co-optive by virtue and spurred on solely by crass commercial interest in gaining most directly from any given cultural rent in the social fabric (an interest devoid, of course, of any genuine empathy for individual or group needs).
The socio-political atmosphere of 'political
correctness', that hideous simulacrum of moral rectitude we have belatedly come to
recognise as uncomfortably oppressive, has resulted in a blanket policy of deference to
any small but powerful interest group that demands 'special status' and privileged
consideration. It has also come to represent for far too many people, a sort of behavioral
code that is the functional equivalent of....and here's a nice irony for you....social
fascism. Rather than recognize the fact that odd, quirky, sometimes unpleasant little
vicissitudes of social misunderstanding & interaction are a part of the greater thorny
norm of life (in a much larger context), these unhappy policy makers seem to have decided
that human beings are so unable to act and react responsibly enough on their own, so
completely unable to decide issues of 'right' and 'wrong' by sole virtue of their own
reasoning abilities, that tight and grimly humorless imposition of social control is
mandated. This attitude merges in a most unpleasant way with traditional attitudes of the
conservative right that feel there must be a law for every single human action conceivable,
to create what has today become a socially oppressive American institutional
status quo.
No wonder the NRA are getting their gun-lobby wagons in increasingly tighter protective circles. No wonder the radical survivalist fringe are building 'safe-house' hidey-holes out in the wilderness like beavers preparing for a harsh winter. No wonder the anti-gun lobbyists are becoming near homicidal. And no wonder the clinically paranoid social worriers (but are they actually?) fear that the corporations of today's world are trying to establish a 'one world government' through cultivation of brand/logo loyalties that span whole global hemispheres and utterly transcend traditional national identities and political controls.
This whole, horrible and grossly uncomfortable social sea-change that is going on at present is gathering momentum concurrent with increasingly rapacious, soulless hyper-exploitation of human spiritual needs by commercial business (read: monolithic multinational corporations) in substituting that uniquely American sickness (amoral 'material acquisitiveness') for traditional religious and cultural value systems, that in the past have provided safe navigation through troubled social waters. Several factors have contributed to this in the greater view. First, America has become increasingly demographically fragmented, socially polarised, and disruptively heterogeneous to the point where today many people believe the only place they truly feel safe is in the sanctity of their own homes. This situation creates the perfect opportunity for commercial enterprise to socialise the entire nation into one vast, faceless mass of (and I hate this word passionately!) consumers, who depend utterly and completely on the only real source of diversion their homes provide them in their scant leisure time away from the office: the television. The traditional "Man's home is his castle" of ancient times appears to have given way to "Man's home is his virtual prison."
Consider the television, that source of endless diversion and noise, that non-stop baleful eye of beamed electromagnetic energy that occupies the central foci of our family rooms. Today, our entire concept of what constitutes REAL life (REAL modes of interaction with others, REAL problem solving solutions applicable to life, REAL responses to ordinary, daily life crises) comes to us through our televisions. When media hype and mindless sensationalising of domestic violence (usually masquerading as 'news') creates so much free-floating fear of what lies beyond one's own walls, that it is impossible to obtain any meaningful sense of what reality actually is through contacts with neighbors and others in the immediate community (as was traditional, before the introduction of the television), the only apparent recourse is to watch the 'hungry eye'.
The 'entertainment' programming on both private and commercial channels
is bad enough, what with mechanised laugh-tracks, obsessive doting on violence, cheap sex,
and compulsive anxieties over 'being cool', but commercial advertisements are far worse.
When you critically reflect on what you are seeing in the typical TV ad and stop to
reflect on what messages are being driven home in your brain, minute after minute and day
after day, it should REALLY alarm you. It should alarm you that all women are ideally thin
and beautiful, all men are ideally strong and handsome, that new automobiles ideally
must be driven recklessly and dangerously, and that only BUYING new things will bring you
ideal happiness. In fact, it should properly terrify you.
These are only the most purpose-driven commercial attacks on your sanity, as visual/sound bites intended to make you spend your money as fast as you make it (or worse yet, to work only for the purpose of being able to spend more and more on these things), but there are far worse things to be aware of. It should seriously worry you that the same sort of bland, uncomplicated, just 'simple, ordinary American folks' myth of worry-free, "everything works out in the end" construct of domestic contentment that you see in the typical Disney Corporation movie is also the frenzied working principle behind just about every major commercial activity in our modern world. The only 'reality' that we thus have thrust at us through our televisions, movie screens, and video screens is deliberately, coldly, maliciously, and unrelentingly intended to enslave you as an unquestioning "consumer of (as the Conehead credo put it) mass quantities."
The problem, of course, in this particular context, is that we simply don't have the luxury of enough time within which to apply critical reflective discernment to every aspect of the dazzling and deceit-filled light and sound show that televised media is. To do so would be exhausting and there simply is not enough simple pleasure left in our stressed-out, pre-programmed lives to allow for it. Thus, we are further enslaved by the very processes we find ourselves forced to turn to for amusement and entertainment.
Today, with people under the age of 18 constituting a HUGE market of potential wealth, another subject with collateral ties to the above process is the modern tactic employed by commercial business and corporate enterprise to co-opt youthful rebelliousness and turn it viciously back at the source as a particularly effective tool to ironically exploit even the act of rebellion itself. While co-option as a marketing technique has been around at least as long as humanity, the artful precision with which it is practiced today is truly frightening. A great example that comes to mind is what I like to call the 'reversed ball-cap affectation' phenomenon:
A decade or two ago, some unknown and long forgotten youthful gang member suddenly decided it would be 'cool' to wear that most holy of American head-coverings, the baseball cap, reversed with the bill to the rear. While the American baseball cap at best is a stupidly grotesque item of headgear that looks good only on someone with perfect cranial structure, this fellow, whomever he was, was truly a pioneer of 'cool'. He was, nonetheless, a genuine and authentic individualist in the truest and finest sense of the word. Undoubtedly, he wore his cap this way to tell the world to "F**k O*f and as an expression of Weltschmertz it was a beautiful, pure gesture of defiance, without question. In fact it was so cool and pure and defiant that it wasn't long before this 'reversed ball cap' look became institutionalised as part of the standard youth gang Class A uniform. So far so good. However, one day an equally uncool lad at one of the advertising agencies spotted this look (undoubtedly while anxiously passing through a bad neighborhood in his Porsche, on his way to the office) and decided to promote the symbol, thereby sterilising the look and using it co-optively to sell commercial products. Thus, even the essential 'bad-boy' mode of abject attitudinal rebelliousness was decisively emasculated in one fell swoop that ended up proving itself to be worth millions to the commercial corporations that subsequently cashed in on this faddish affectation.
It's bad enough that kids don't seem to be astute enough to figure out that by willingly displaying brand name logos (and wearing their caps reversed), they are helping promote these same self-serving commercial interests that are rapidly destroying what little reality we have left in America. What really adds insult to injury is seeing people old enough to supposedly have the cumulative benefit of several decades of cultivated observation and wisdom (say someone in his 50s or 60s) wearing a ball-cap this way; out of a misguided and misaligned effort to be 'cool' in what is now a conventional, normative mode of personal expression, what used to be an expression of individualism now has all the exciting individualistic character of bland commercial vanilla pudding. Talk about cultural lag.....
Hmmmm. Just noticed that the AVGAS BROAST has gone cold (the coffee, not the philosophical effluvia). Next topic under consideration: Professor Charles Sykes' theory on the decay of American character in his book A NATION OF VICTIMS (St. Martin's Press, 1993, ISBN 0312098820), or possibly THE OVERSPENT AMERICAN, by Juliet B. Schor (Harper Perennial, 1998, ISBN 0060977582). A still further recent release of substantial importance, is Naomi Klein's 1999 release in hardcover (Picador/Saint Martin's Press, ISBN 0312203438), entitled NO LOGO (TAKING AIM AT THE BRAND BULLIES). Two quotes from this last extremely informative book on corporate attempts to control the consumer market through brand identification follow: "We, as an industry (referring to the advertising industry), must recognize that 'adbashing' is a threat to capitalism, to a free press, to our basic forms of entertainment, and to the future of our children" (quote by Jack Myers, market researcher)......and this absolute gem: "Consumers are like roaches--you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while" (quote by Senior Ad Executive for the Omnicom Group, David Lubars, in reference to the need to saturate the consumer public with impactful and highly manipulative forms of advertising).
Until the next cup of thought-coffee is brewed, be cool but just put the baseball cap back on the shelf, OK....?
Audio tracks courtesy of James Chas. Kaelin [http://www.earthstation1.com/ ].
