FALLEN ANGELS

 SPECTACULAR GRIEF; 

Can there be any doubt that terrorists -- celebrants -- must engage periodically in A Black Mass of/and for state power? 

They lead the celebrations that people no longer have the heart for. 

 

BAD COUNTRIES!

These days, even a child can see how nicely the IMFication du monde is progressing. National sovereignty, which once was a, perhaps THE guarantor of capitalist prosperity is being consumed in the process of Jüngerian Total Mobilization, like Verne's steamship consuming itself in Around the World in Eighty Days. It's funny now to see the rhetoric of moral failure placed on the obliging western states as they struggle and fail to play the rigged game.

As a corollary: Given the rise of these zombie national economies, under the control of Papa Docs hither and yon, how long, I wonder, will rational economic actors pay (in taxes, in patriotic spirit or conscription) for the past incarnation of a state, or perhaps for the future promise of one?

MEA CULPA, MEDIA MAXIMA CULPA

...our most important spy.
Wounded in the line of duty,
parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties,
urging Fidel Castro to abandon fields and castles.
Leave it all and like a man,
come back to nothing special,
such as waiting rooms and ticket lines,
silver bullet suicides,
and messianic ocean tides,
and racial roller-coaster rides
and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.
I know you need your sleep now,
I know your life's been hard.
But many men are falling,
where you promised to stand guard.

Let me see if I have this right:

Two very entertaining gringo television "demagogues" make a very unpostmodern plea for sincerity and civility on the eve of a depressing election, and lead the crowd in a rather threadbare Woodstock of Mortification, and this whole program is branded as a sanity restoration...?

They don't call it Comedy Central for nothing.

THIS JUST IN...

Several things are happening quickly right now, at once:

1. The fusion of producer and consumer of the spectacle.

2. Commodification and fluidification of identity. “I’m Guy Debord’s friend on MySpace!”

3. Intensification of eternal present. Extreme commodification of the temporal. Twitter is not information, but a way of carving up time. It is a time medium. Also: texting/email is orality barely disguised as visuality. OMG. LOL!

4. Visual Platforms (cartographies) for the specularization of social relations. (i.e. social networking) The fact that social relations are visible (like Vertov’s dream of the intelligible soviet society) makes comparison pleasurable and irresistible.  Rear Window social platforms.

5. Globalization of terror as a secret anti-spectacular force, the solution to which is, naturally, more surveillance.

6. Insofar as all things are mediated through images/orality, (but without any final accounting from an AUTHORITY as in tribal culture) nothing certain can be settled, history made impossible, the rule of indeterminacy and many beautiful & wild gardens of disinformation flourish.