No doubt – I have bored my reader away from my months of silence. So, I’m virtually assured I will be the only contributor and reader of my blog.
It’s 1:45 in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’m watching some really bad show on E about penitentiary romance, “Love Behind Bars.” I wonder if Foucault had this in mind when he wrote of the Carceral in, “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.”
I am overwhelmed by the utter lack of substance we have as a culture. Yet at the same time, we have a most imperialistic culture. Like the BORG, from Star Trek the Next Generation, the American “popular” culture relentlessly overwhelms aspects other culture.
Commercials at 2 am consist of sixteen-year-old girls in bathing suits pretending that all they do is ‘hook-up’ on a phone chat club. I can’t decide which part of this little charade most mystifies me. The fact that there are phone hook-up places (that compete with the internet); they make enough money to pay the sixteen-year-old and the advertising time; or there are legions of pubescent boys dialing the phone. Who knows.
The single most nauseating feeling I have about the whole thing is the insufficient distance between shit like this and myself.
Clearly, the critical path of logic and decision the brought us, as a culture, to this abysmal position is long, crooked and sinuous. I believe in both chaos and tipping point theory. What if there were a way to locate the pivotal decisions that contributed to our cultural architecture.
I don’t believe in time-travel – at least as we’ve conceived it at this point. However, what if there were a way to change the trajectory of the production of culture. I’m not suggesting anything as drastic, or fictional as messing with the ‘time-space continuum.’ Given this concept, and the impossibility of time travel, what can I do to change the trajectory of popular culture today? What degree of change will have significance?
