Tuesday, July 03, 2007
forty years on
Today Leary's motto would be "turn off, tune out, drop dead". At the decline of American Empire, young people have all the bombs, all the post-September 11, 2001, cops in the world - and it is not theirs. They have Hummers, holidays in Cambodia, neo-Byzantine condos. But then, spiritually unfulfilled even though they have been to all the five-star healing spas in the world, they still think there is nothing else - apart from a shot at TV celebrity.
Nobody gives a damn: the best lack all conviction (and take refugee in their iPods) while the worst simply lord over all, unchallenged. In overwhelmingly dumbed-down global medialand, airhead heiress Paris Hilton is the Queen of News, governments are no more than "political commissars of economic power", in the formulation of Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, and the Bush administration/industrial-military complex merrily fight proxy wars in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Somalia.
History does repeat itself - as farce. By early 1967, the US had half a million troops in Vietnam. Massacres of civilians and torture - the precursors of Abu Ghraib - were routine. Half a million Vietnamese - the precursors of Iraqis - had already been killed. President Lyndon Johnson, another regular guy from Texas, was not going to "negotiate with terrorists". - Roving Eye
Our generation, the "i-pod generation", is saturated with the entertainment media, with overstimulation from images and impertinent information coming at us from every which direction, from bombardment by capitalist and government propaganda, which eventually encourages conformity and stifles the imagination. Sub-cultures continue to thrive, but in the U.S. at least there is not yet an authoritative and imaginative counterculture, one that could mobilize the masses to sway public opinion in an era of global mass communication technologies and unparalleled access to information and ideas.
Nobody gives a damn: the best lack all conviction (and take refugee in their iPods) while the worst simply lord over all, unchallenged. In overwhelmingly dumbed-down global medialand, airhead heiress Paris Hilton is the Queen of News, governments are no more than "political commissars of economic power", in the formulation of Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, and the Bush administration/industrial-military complex merrily fight proxy wars in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Somalia.
History does repeat itself - as farce. By early 1967, the US had half a million troops in Vietnam. Massacres of civilians and torture - the precursors of Abu Ghraib - were routine. Half a million Vietnamese - the precursors of Iraqis - had already been killed. President Lyndon Johnson, another regular guy from Texas, was not going to "negotiate with terrorists". - Roving Eye
Our generation, the "i-pod generation", is saturated with the entertainment media, with overstimulation from images and impertinent information coming at us from every which direction, from bombardment by capitalist and government propaganda, which eventually encourages conformity and stifles the imagination. Sub-cultures continue to thrive, but in the U.S. at least there is not yet an authoritative and imaginative counterculture, one that could mobilize the masses to sway public opinion in an era of global mass communication technologies and unparalleled access to information and ideas.
# posted by Surya Swamy : 11:43 AM
