January 7th, 2010 by Hoopleton

As we move further from those gagged days of the Second World War and as the last of that generation which bore witness passes from the living world we see a significant rise in interest in Hitler’s Third Reich. The memorabilia of National Socialism is in higher demand than ever. The most popular play of war reenactors are the battles of the Waffen SS. Nazism has become fodder for a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. Extreme Right-wing parties which romanticize Fascism are appearing across the globe. Just a few weeks ago the iconic sign which hung over the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei (work will set you free) was stolen by a gang of thieves at the behest of an as yet unknown collector.

Our attitude toward Hitler’s Germany is increasingly complicated. On the one hand the Nazis remain the epitome of evil. A pack of racist mass murderers with illusions of world conquest. It’s impossible to think of the Third Reich without imagining newsreel footage of bulldozers pushing hundreds of naked corpses into mass graves. They are the quintessential boogie men. Used (to a nauseating degree) by politicians as shorthand for everything that is wrong between Heaven and Earth. On the other hand we exist in a world sixty-five years removed from the initial shock of such crimes. Our world is one that is both all too familiar with and also increasingly indifferent to the realities of genocide. In short we are desensitized. And so for many people living today the Nazis have become little more than caricatures. Fictional super villains. The bad guys of Quentin Tarantino movies and video games. Dressed in their Hugo Boss tailored uniforms, silver skulls shining from their caps, they have almost become cool.

Speaking of Hugo Boss, one needs only to look at the rise of “Nazi chic” in the world of high fashion. With military inspired styles dominating the marketplace (a sad statement on the values of our society in itself) we’re seeing a cornucopia of suspiciously Nazi-like apparel on the runway and the rack. Schott of New York for example, a clothing company that boasts outfitting American bomber crews during World War II offers a double-breasted “military-style” leather jacket for sale that looks like it slid right off Himmler’s back.

I’m not suggesting that Nazis have as yet crossed the line into the realm of acceptability. I couldn’t conceive of a time in the near future when someone strolling down the street with a swastika on their arm wouldn’t face a hostile reception (though stranger things have happened). As yet reenactors sporting War-era German uniforms go about their play discretely. Collectors of Nazi paraphernalia (legal and otherwise) are staying mainly in the shadows. However their numbers are growing. Prices are rising.

All of this comes at a time of increased extremism. Deeply nationalistic and fascist political parties are gaining power in governments across the globe. Even the European Parliament is today led by a coalition of far right parties, many espousing veiled bigotry if not blatant racism. Though perhaps such things are inevitable given enough time. Especially when a band of murderous thugs is made into caricature for the gain of political agendas and movie ticket sales.

At first we reject evil, but given enough time we commodify it, fetishize it. History defaults to whoever has the larger marketing budget. It’s not unthinkable or without precedent. Our history celebrates slavers and mass murderers. They appear on our currency. Our cities are named for them. Up is down. Black is white. The victims blame not their tormentors but each other. African Americans are said to “get handouts.” Native Americans become mascots. Jewish history is called a “propaganda tool.” Auschwitz is called a “Polish death camp.” Hitler’s willing executioners become the new cool. Absurdity becomes reality. Such is life in Naziland.

August 13th, 2009 by Hoopleton

When FDR was pushing through the New Deal or Johnson was moving the Great Society through Congress, often by the sheer power of their stubbornness, politics was certainly full of venom. The opposition was full of sound and fury, but there always remained, or generally there prevailed, a sense civic courtesy. Despite the turmoil brought on by the Great Depression or the 1960s, despite murmurs of fascist or communist uprising, or a youth movement ready to reshape social order, the system continued on as it always had. The nation changed, as it should have, and despite the omnipresence of extremists on both sides, the discourse of the public sphere was always generally calm and rational.

Looking back from our present political environment, as born out of those decades of necessary turmoil, it’s difficult to find examples before the 1990s of a time when American politics and greater American society were so consumed by bitter, violent divisiveness. The current healthcare “debate,” featuring angry, ignorant mobs screaming for blood, whites sobbing over an America that once was, may be most immediate in our mind, but the bile that is the modern town square extends to everything. Abortion, gay rights and education, guns, immigration and taxes. I don’t recall another President in the last hundred years so dehumanized. A foreigner, a radical muslim, a socialist. I don’t remember the media ever being so militant, so quick to incite unrest.

One has to go back to the days of the American Civil War to find a climate so rife with tension, bitterness and vitriol. A society on the brink of self-destruction, it’s undoing centered around the ugliness of slavery, which for many represented an entire form of independent culture. A vanishing America. Then too the citizenry of this land was bitterly divided, then as now the media stoked the fires of disunity, the representatives of the people not only held one another in contempt, but at least in one case, brutally attacked their fellows on the floor of Congress.

Are we on the brink of such times? Is America descending into the maelstrom?

Although anything is possible it seems unlikely that in this day and age our society would collapse into a second civil war, but things never need to be so dramatic.

In 1968, Edward Luttwak examined the whys and hows of planning and executing a coup d’état, or an usurpation of a legitimate government. He stated that a “good coup country” would be one in which politics were well organized, but polarized into hostile factions and where the country itself was completely independent of outside political pressures. Obviously, he added, the best opportunity for the seizure of power would be during a time of crisis, whether real or merely perceived.

Coups are nothing new to global politics nor to these shores. In 1933 a group representing some of the leading business interests of the United States approached retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler as to higher him to lead an overthrow of the Roosevelt administration. Butler turned out to be a patriot and immediately reported what has since been dubbed the Business Plot to Congress and later investigations, although confirming Butler’s story, concluded that the plot was far from ever becoming a real national threat.

But if we follow Luttwak’s formula the climate was not right for such treason. Although the United States certainly faced a crisis in the guise of the Great Depression and was quite isolationist, politics was not as bitterly divided as it is today.

As an aside it may be worth noting that Smedley Butler went on to become a voice against war profiteering, calling his own thirty-three year distinguished military career as that of being a “gangster for capitalism,” while Edward Luttwak, the man who in the 1960s came out as a voice against the dangers of political polarization, was quoted in 2008 as calling Barack Obama a muslim who would unhinge America’s standing in the world.

So here we are. The patriots seem to be of an older generation long since gone and those we’d look to for expertise and reason have instead taken on the banner of partisanship. If the conditions weren’t right for an overthrow eighty years ago, whether violent or bloodless, how do we fair today? Are we a people united, or does the tree of liberty need to be refreshed yet again?

July 24th, 2009 by Hoopleton

“Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

–J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945.

Lately I’ve been tortured by the seeming putridity of American culture. Why is it that we’ve become so selfish? So egotistical? So self-absorbed? So hateful? Whether speaking of politics, business, religion or the common interactions of everyday life, we exist in a society increasingly devoid of courtesy, decency and humility. Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff, the sub-prime mess, every case representing the sacred belief that it’s every man for himself. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, reality TV. We are obsessed with instant fame, with self-worship. Fuck what you have to say, read my comments, look at my pictures. Me, me, me. Forty years ago things were hardly perfect, women lacked rights, segregation reigned, but most people knew their neighbors. All service was full service. The customer was always right. Now we have self-checkout lanes at the supermarket and gated communities to keep the rabble out. The streets are drowning in tension and violence. Makeshift mass murderers slaughter entire schoolhouses, office buildings, churches and community centers. Our political leaders auction off their integrity to the highest bidder in a frenzy never before seen while our religious leaders rage for the blood of gays, Muslims and Jews. We all seem to suffer from the symptoms of some undiagnosed disease. Anxiety runs high. Small gestures seem absent. People practically bowl eachother over when walking down the street. A billion hands clawing at the walls and all there is to do is climb the bodies higher and higher pushing down anyone brazen enough to get in the way.

But why? What is the cause of this malady? Why do things seem to be getting worse?

America has always been a whore. We’re cheap. Walking billboards with price tags sown in. Since the founding of this great nation we have committed unspeakable acts of genocide and destruction. We took a land of vibrant beauty and paved a wall-to-wall strip mall in its place. We’ve commodified everything from our most sacred belief systems to the air we breathe. Whereas once we built great public works and exported idealism now we stand an indebted shill, arms broker to the world, an empire on the brink of collapse. Our turn in fortune is of our own making, a natural and expected result of our greed. As the ship sinks we scramble for the life rafts, women and children be damned. And yet it’s not as simple as all that. Our social morality began to collapse long before our dominance on the world stage.

In the 1950’s the generation that would elect Kennedy and usher in an era of social upheaval came into adulthood. Writers like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Mailer, comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, musicians like Miles Davis all rose out of the fires of global destruction to deconstruct a social order they saw as rigid and false. Academics like Alfred Kinsey and Marshall McLuhan challenged basic perceptions of human relationships and our trajectory as a species. Feminism, civil rights, revolutionary politics, concepts of decency, social order and basic rights. In film, music, literature, journalism and art. On every front everything was reexamined. Everything was taken apart. The world as it was didn’t make sense anymore. The old order had to be usurped. In every case these luminaries, these revolutionaries, were reacting to one and the same thing: an America brimming with unlimited prosperity while standing on the precipice of complete annihilation.

The generation that gave us the Beats and modern Jazz was the first to come into maturity under the shadow of the nuclear bomb. Cities melting into the ground, billions torn from flesh and bone, the eradication of civilization, the apocalypse alive in stark reality, one act of madness away from fruition. And so every generation since has come into the world with a gun cocked and pointed to the head. Aware, whether consciously or not, that the end of all things is omnipresent and inevitable. The social transformation of the 1950’s and 60’s was necessary, vital. The lessons learned over those decades invaluable, but unfortunately incomplete.

Today there are some 20,000 active nuclear weapons in the world, of which about 7,000 are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched within fifteen minutes of an order to do so. The largest of these weapons have a yield of some 50 megatons (which equates to a single warhead having the destructive power of 50 million tons of TNT). The system is called deterrence. The idea is that under the threat of complete global destruction no country would ever risk unleashing their nuclear arsenal. Yet conventional wisdom states that if you build a thing you must use it. And so we live with a knife at the throat, waiting, ready, expectantly for the final blow. This insane system, peace at the barrel of a gun, is, as it has been for fifty years, defended as the only way to avoid large scale conflict. When this stark raving mad concept in global diplomacy is understood and compounded further by the looming specter of climate change, the stifling problems of overpopulation and imperial collapse, is it really that hard to see where our society is headed?

A reality of our own making. The battle of Armageddon that a growing segment of our population would welcome with utter glee. An America in which we stand, as James Thurber once wrote, “not on the brink of war, but on the brink of was,” where basic human decency, civic duty and compassion are sacrificed on the alter of instant gratification and decadence. The me society. America has always been a whore, capitalist ideology run wild, greed as divine right, but now more than ever growing over fifty years strong there is the presumption that even if our actions have consequences we won’t be around long enough to face them. Live for today no matter the cost because tomorrow will never come.

In this same sense it’s easy to understand why so many have pinned such unrealistic hopes on Barack Obama, as they so desperately, hungrily crave, need a savior to lead them out of the dark. Ironically, despite our certainties of destruction we cling to hope. Despite our momentary lack of empathy and compassion we remain good people, or at the very least we hope to be good again. We just can’t make sense of the world right now. The end is coming soon. In our despair we become inhuman. Murderers, rapists, thieves, megalomaniacs. We embrace what is easy. We consume and allow ourselves to be consumed as our only means to cope.

July 7th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Sarah Palin is absolutely fascinating. She seems to be a perfect mixture of incompetence, ignorance, hypocrisy, stupidity, fundamentalism and egotism. In short, Sarah Palin is the perfect American politician. Her image is that of a hockey mom who can kill and dress a moose with one hand, while slashing budgets and closing abortion clinics with the other. She’s a crazy Bible thumper with delusions of destiny under the near constant scrutiny of ethical investigations into her conduct in office. The only way she could possibly be anymore ideal an amalgamation of our modern politics is if she was discovered to be, in fact, the real father of her daughter’s son.

In recent days Palin has been under increasing scrutiny and criticism over her decision to resign as governor of Alaska. Once you sift through the layers of rhetoric she cites three main reasons for her bizarre decision. Firstly, she has stated that she does not wish to be a lame duck governor. Why wait out the last eighteen months when she can work toward the future right now? I support this idea. Alaska probably doesn’t need a governor anyway. Secondly, she wanted to unburden her state from the costly headache of the ethics probes investigating her administration. Also a no brainer, if avoiding prison time is as simple as quitting your job, by all means, quit your job. Finally, she was quoted as saying that the reason for her leaving was in order to pursue a “higher calling.” Assuming that Palin doesn’t mean the Rapture, it would not be illogical to conclude that she means a run for the White House in 2012.

Back in the old days, and I mean way back in the old days, American politicians never really spoke as often about their special destiny to be elected into office. Arrogance, a presumption of superiority, was of course present, but they didn’t seem to flaunt it as much. I don’t recall Jefferson ever saying that God wanted him to be President. Or Lincoln mentioning that he was being driven toward a “higher calling.” There existed a sense of civic duty. At least publicly, a notion that political leaders were the servants of the people, not just those who voted them into office, but even those who voted against them. To be entrusted with the reins of power was a privilege. Election to political office was not the ascension into aristocracy, but the burden of awesome responsibility imparted by a trusting though weary public.

So we come back to Sarah Palin and her special destiny. Just as George W. and countless other politicians that have risen from out of the ether in the last several decades, she sees her ascent as the work of divine providence. It’s not only that she is the best person for the job, in her own assessment she is the only person for the job. Chosen by the almighty. A being who is flawless and infallible. And so, by the same reasoning, she herself is flawless and infallible. Her beliefs are God’s beliefs. Her choices are in step with the divine plan. Why, after all, would God choose her if she wasn’t the manifestation of all that he was? God is never wrong.

When politics becomes solely an exercise in arrogance and personal ambition, do we not suffer as a society? When national leaders claim power by divine right, should we not be concerned? Reading about Sarah Palin I start thinking about the French nobility. Papal claims on temporal authority. And the rise of theocracy in the Arab world. This is not to say that in her present incarnation Palin is at all a realistic threat to the political establishment. After all, she barely seems able to function outside of an electoral base that would bring back public stoning as a justified means of criminal punishment. But what is of concern is the form of politician, the evolution of American politics, she represents. An elected representative who governs only out of their own narrow interests. An official who sees power as intrinsic of itself and not born out of the will of the people. A union of arrogance and religious determinism. This is nothing new of course, but alarmingly it seems ever more common.

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was not merely the result of invading barbarian hordes. The breakdown of Roman power in fact began centuries earlier, as emperors increasingly acted out of delusions of divine authority and as the citizenry increasingly lost confidence in a government that became little more than perpetual infighting among the members of the aristocracy. As the ideals of the Roman Republic, those of working for the common good and service to one’s country, began to crumble, so did the basic foundation of the society. Today in the United States we don’t speak of service anymore. We don’t think about the common good. Our rhetoric is saturated with concern for our children’s future, but our political leaders seem far too preoccupied with their own legacies to lead us over the mountaintops. We stand as the Romans did, left to watch the aristocrats speak of their own “higher calling,” engorging themselves on their own egos, while we waste away in a pixilated gutter of poison food and commercial infotainment.

Sarah Palin may be little more than a joke, at least for now, but the doctrine she represents is not. A doctrine of selfishness, painted in the colors of providential validation. A doctrine that we see not only in the centers of political power, but in boardrooms, in hospitals and even in our neighborhoods. The ideology of lifting oneself up even at the expense of others. Under such conditions, how long can any government, any society, truly last?

July 2nd, 2009 by Hoopleton

Barack Obama has done a lot right. He’s not an idiot, for one. He displays both a dignity and intellect completely absent in the previous administration. In not even six months in office he’s managed to undo some of the damage done to America’s standing in the world. There’s a pronounced decrease, it would seem, of anti-US rhetoric. The Mideast appears more inclined to talk. Policies toward Cuba are finally becoming sane. For the first time in what seems to be a lifetime the Executive is in the hands of a man not only willing to talk but also willing to listen. A diplomat. A forward thinker. Obama isn’t some spoiled wannabe cowboy or a halfwit actor treating the office as if it were a bit part. He’s a self-made man who speaks with eloquence and certainty.

And yet, in so many other ways, Obama is a disappointment.

Obama established himself as the reform candidate. The progressive-minded democrat who was going to bring change to Washington. Despite his pick of an old guard Veep, the message was that of a new era. Together, Obama announced time and again, we would take on global warming, bring the troops home, provide universal healthcare, and realign the center of power to establish again a government for the people and by the people. Yes we can!

Today, nearly six months on, surprisingly – given Obama’s status as a politician – the President is trying to keep his promises. Bills that would construct a federal healthcare system are working their way through both chambers of Congress. A bill to cap carbon emissions is already on course for Obama’s signature. US troops have left Iraqi cities. And yet, despite all this apparent progress, there’s so little here that can possibly be termed progressive.

The carbon caps set by Congress are laughable. The goals for cutting greenhouse gases even less than what can be deemed the bare minimum. The healthcare proposals snaking their way through the House and Senate are terrible. The bailouts meant to bring us out of catastrophe are just as bad. Writing a blank check is not equal or greater than actually solving the problem. As to ending the wars in the Mideast, the plan to pull troops out of Iraqi cities by July was a Bush administration plan, and as withdrawal dates are continually revised, as units are shuffled from one war zone to the other, it’s becoming more and more obvious that we’ll probably be there for decades, not years or months.

In no time since Roosevelt has a President sat in the Oval Office with both the type of mandate and personal imperative that could drive the national discourse. He is a Democrat with block-proof majorities in both chambers of Congress. A man who commands such implacable charisma that it borders on a cult of personality. He leads this nation at a time when its citizens are ready for real, systemic change. A time when we seem ready to listen. And yet, he plays it safe.

While the Right accuses him of being a Communist, they miss the point entirely. Barack Obama isn’t some Leftist radical, the problem with the President is quite the opposite, he’s weak. He seems to possess that Clintonian obsession with staying in office over any concerns for doing what’s needed, over doing what’s right. Instead of pushing legislation that would remake the United States into the global leader for the 21^st century, Obama seems caught in a 90s mentality. The delusion that by not challenging the status quo he can still bring about a transformation. That to push the citizenry too far too quickly may cause blowback. The problem with this view is that the challenges we face are so great that they require bold action. In order to solve the healthcare mess, to combat climate change, to save the nation from fiscal collapse and end the wars abroad a President cannot be concerned with midterm elections or a second term. He can’t ask for the bare minimum because conventional wisdom dictates that anything more substantive would be unrealistic. For a man who speaks with such passionate idealism, Obama seems to lack the courage to champion those ideals. He seems more and more like the dog that finally chases down the car. Full of sound and fury, but ultimately empty.

This is not a time to play it safe. It’s not the time to worry about legacy or job security. It’s time for bold action. It’s time to do as Roosevelt did, throw caution to the wind and reshape society no matter what the polls may say. At no other point in modern American history have the stakes ever been so great. What happens now may ultimately dictate whether the United States soars or crumbles. Whether we lead the First World or revert into the Third. The people must be told that the road ahead is one of sacrifice and hardship. That tough, painful choices must be made now to ensure future prosperity. Unfortunately, Barack Obama, as of yet at least, doesn’t seem to be up to the task.

June 21st, 2009 by Hoopleton

“Walk away, asshole,” said the grinning blonde as she exhaled her cigarette.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“I said,” she said, “walk the fuck away asshole.”

I had approached her initially to try and resolve what seemed to have been a huge misunderstanding between myself and her boyfriend earlier in the night. Apparently, in some cultures it is considered a grave insult to ask someone to remove their elbow from one’s back.

What struck me was not the words she used, but the fact that she grinned at me as she said them.

As I got home later that morning I was left to wonder why it was that people were so awful to one another. How come it seems more and more that the members of our society are so very bloody-minded.

I’m not one to believe in the myth of a nostalgic past, but I can’t escape the feeling that things in our society are increasingly changing for the worse. I can’t recall a time in history when people would walk into office buildings, churches or schools and murder one another en masse. When insulting someone in the most vile way possible passed for acceptable behavior.

I’m reminded of the 1993 action crime drama, Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. In it, Douglas plays a laid-off defense engineer named William Foster who over the course of one hot Los Angeles day transforms from a generally decent human being into a maniac on a killing spree. What’s interesting is that although on the surface it appears to be little more than a popcorn blockbuster, the film actually offers an interesting commentary on the moral decline of our society.

Douglas’ character, Foster, is the archetype for the displaced American man. When we first meet him he looks like a 1950s stereotype. Rimmed glasses. Short-sleeve button down shirt and tie. Briefcase. Once a breadwinner, the king of the castle, he has fallen on hard times. His wife has divorced him. He’s lost his job. His car has broken down. There are holes in his shoes. He sits in his dead American-built auto, stuck in a traffic jam, as the people around him scream insults and honk their horns. It is at this moment that something in him changes. It’s at this moment that he realizes, perhaps for the first time, how ugly the world is and how powerless he is within it.

And so Foster gets out of his car, abandoning it in the street, and embarks on an odyssey through a world that would no longer give him the respect that he once deserved, hoping to reach his ex-wife’s house on the other side of the city in time for their daughter’s birthday.

In the film Foster encounters a series of seemingly trivial situations which drive him into a increasingly homicidal rage. What’s fascinating, as Rogert Ebert commented in his review of the film, is that there’s never a release. He never enjoys what he does. He’s scared and confused. He’s angry and disconnected. And in each encounter we are reminded, through Foster’s commentary, of the way things once were.

In a convenience store, after the owner refuses to give him any change for a phone call, Foster destroys many of the goods on display, remarking on the cost and screaming, “I’m rolling back prices to 1965. What do you think of that?” Then after a couple incidents with gang members he meets a homeless man asking for change and promptly picks his hard luck story apart. One of the most telling scenes takes place in a fast food restaurant, where, after he’s told that he’s 3 minutes too late for breakfast, Foster draws a gun (which he picked up from the gang members) and laments on the lack of genuine costumer service and the inconsistency between the appearance of the flat hamburger in his hand and the image of the big, juicy hamburger in the photographs on display.

Foster isn’t playing out a fantasy, he’s following a set of instructions programmed into him by television news and film. As he’s been devalued in society, he is transformed by that same society into what it does value, a maniac. He struggles against it, but ultimately is powerless to resist.

The two most vital scenes of the film take place toward the end. In the first, Foster meets a homophobic neo-Nazi who has been following the day’s events on a police scanner and considers himself a kindred spirit. To Foster the idea is revolting and he stabs the man (though it should be noted he does so in self-defense). In the second, Foster wanders onto a vast estate and meets a caretaker family whom he tells about his having been laid off by his defense-contractor employer when the Cold War ended. He also tells them of his feelings of being discarded as obsolete after so many years of study and work. When the husband offers himself as a hostage in exchange for his family’s freedom, Foster gets angry and leaves.

In these two episodes we see Foster recoil at being classified as the maniac that society has molded him into. He is a decent man, but in this new world that he inhabits he must either embrace his new role or be destroyed.

Ironically, the man who finally destroys Foster, Robert Duval’s character Sergeant Martin Prendergast, is but another example of the displaced, bygone American man.

Prendergast is on the verge of retirement. He’s another decent man, who doesn’t swear, is respectful and accommodating, and for these reasons is constantly mocked by his domineering wife and vile co-workers. At one point, his own supervisor effectively tells him that he’s not manly enough. Men swear, he informs him.

Throughout the film Prendergast is constantly just one step behind Foster, insisting on investigating the case despite the dismay of everyone around him. As we get to know Prendergast we realize that he too has just as many reasons as Foster to succumb to violence.

By the end Foster’s transformation is complete. The artifacts of his former persona (his briefcase, shirt and tie, etc.) have been replaced by a bag filled with guns and black BDUs. In the film’s climax Prendergast finally catches upto Foster and confronts him at the end of a pier (an obvious metaphor for the end of the world). There, after Foster is again rejected by his former wife, he and Prendergast discuss their mutual feelings of displacement. The cop mentions how the world has changed, how the water is no longer clean enough to swim in, how his daughter died and how powerless he is. Foster for his part finally realizes that he’s the villain in the story, and asks, “How did that happen? I did everything they told me to.”

In the final minutes Foster draws a toy gun, forcing Prendergast to shoot him. Although on the surface it seems that Prendergast is able to survive because he possesses more empathy than Foster, in reality Prendergast transforms as well. In the end he too becomes a killer, the decency in him drained away. Whereas at the start he was a kind man who could not even bring himself to use foul language, by the end that kindness is dead as he says to his supervisor, before a crowd of reporters, “Fuck you.” To this his supervisor grins sheepishly, as though to say, “Welcome to the club.”

Falling Down teaches us that in the modern world there’s no place for decency. In this new America one must either embrace madness or die. To revolt against the paradigm is to become an outcast. It is to become that which one abhors.

Ultimately, the film never explains why society is this way. Why people, like that woman from last night, would find so much joy in displaying their utter lack of civility. What it is that leads decent people to the breaking point. To the choice between inhumanity and destruction. Why, as William Foster might ask, have we all been lied to?

I imagine that more than anything else it has to do with overcrowding. Not that long ago it was still possible to escape. To find refuge from the noise and havoc of modernity. But as the population pushes past the 7 billion mark, as every square meter of the Earth is developed and populated, we find ourselves increasingly at the breaking point. We are constantly confronted by one another and in the resulting tension we fall back on our most violent inclinations. It is why seemingly normal people become mass murderers. Why students shoot up classrooms. Why devout worshipers become hatemongers. Why bankers and CEOs defraud investors. Why a person you don’t know can stare you in the eye, grinning, and say as naturally as could be, “fuck you, asshole.”

The world as we’ve constructed it is a crowded, stressful, impersonal place, drowning in the constant blaring static of our consumption and greed. In the resulting chaos few of us seem to possess the strength to remain upright.

June 4th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Congratulations on your purchase. What did you buy? Why, General Motors of course. Unless you’ve been dead for the last few days, you know that GM, formally the world’s largest car company, has filed for bankruptcy. And you probably also know that the government has taken a sixty percent controlling interest in the automaker. The brains behind such products as the Chevy Cavalier, the Hummer H2, and the greatest single line of passenger cars in the world, Saturn, are now your employees. Let the firings begin!

The GM bankruptcy represents the largest single business failure in United States history. With debts totaling some 173 billion dollars and layoffs expected in the tens of thousands, taxpayers can expect to wait a very long time before they see any return on their investment (in the last year GM has received 20 billion dollars in bailout money and is expected to receive another 30 billion in the coming months).

So why did GM fail?

The economic collapse certainly had something to do with it. As people lose their jobs they tend to spend less money, which means avoiding buying big-ticket items such as cars. But the failures of GM go far beyond recent events. Although once synonymous with strength and dependability, in the last three decades GM products have proven increasingly unreliable. In fact this extends to all three of the major America car companies. To buy American means to spend half your time at the mechanic, paying for repairs on things that you didn’t even know existed in the first place. While Toyota and Volkswagen can boast solid craftsmanship, products from out of the Big Three seem better suited for Walmart shelves than dealer lots.

Perhaps the biggest factor leading to the collapse of GM and the American car industry is the incredible lack of foresight. While Japanese automakers were making smaller, safer, fuel-efficient cars, Ford, GM and Chrysler were putting out gas guzzling SUVs. Some of the models of the Hummer brand, for example, managed as little as nine miles per gallon. Add to this unrealistic pension plans and the sort of hubris reserved for the heroes of Greek tragedy, and you get companies owned and operated by the United States federal government.

What’s interesting to consider is how this immense failure reflects on US manufacturing and the nation as a whole. In the post-war years America was a country of unparalleled production. We not only built things, but we built them well. There was a real pride in US workmanship. An ethos of hard work and ownership. But as corporations went global and a new crop of robber baron put fantasies of instant wealth ahead of civic responsibility, the American brand began to wane. Corporations once at the heart of community transplanted overseas for cut-rate labor. American workers became expendable. Products became cheap. Wages disappeared and with them the promises of the American dream.

Over the last forty years, but with greater ferocity over the last twenty, those who would lead the United States have mainly turned to pillage its resources. Privateer capitalism has become the name of the game, a brand of piracy that has been exported across the world. America stands now, mainly, a bloated arms factory. The idealism and innovation that were once the hallmark of national pride, replaced by the ethic of shortsighted self-interest.

As the Big Three transform into the Big One and a Half, the question that remains is whether the United States still has the capacity to remake itself. Do we have the strength to reclaim the virtues that once made this nation the leader of the world? Or are we doomed, just as countless empires before us, to fold back into the shadows of history, as to make room for the emergence of younger, stronger powers?

Saint Augustine once said, when speaking about the collapse of the Roman Empire, “If that which God has built will one day vanish, than surely that which Romulus built will disappear much sooner.” Nothing in the world lasts forever. America certainly can’t endure into the point where the sun irradiates the Earth. But are we witnessing that end now? Or is the indomitable American spirit still viable enough to lift us up into a better day?

May 29th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Photo courtesy LIFE magazine, by Margaret Bourke-White.

In no uncertain terms every generation is convinced that the next generation is the end of it all. They look forward with dismay, noting a general lack of moral fiber, a seeming overabundance of cynicism, and a decadence which threatens the mighty retribution of a vengeful God. Looking back, they remember a time when politicians were noble, when the young respected their elders, when wars were righteous and justice blind. Of course there were problems then. Of course things weren’t perfect. But life was simpler, better, full of an innocence and meaning gravely lacking today.

The world is in decline and the only way to defend against the inevitable collapse of the American way of life, if not Western civilization, is to reassert the old ways wherever possible. Enforce ideas of modesty and restraint where hedonism runs amuck. Reinvent common decency where there is too much freedom and transparency. Assert orthodox traditionalism even if it collides violently against the rise of social progress.

So it is that issues of vital importance such as environmental collapse, economic injustice, war and peace, take a back seat to cultural struggles of mutual assured destruction. Rational discourse gets wrapped in the fog of false nostalgia. Instead of taking a real survey of the past, there is only the shining city on the hill, full of Norman Rockwell gooeyness and the false illusion that America had always been a champion of good.

This is not to say the Left does not possess its own skewed version of the past. Whereas the Right clings to an idealized dreamscape of national pride and honor, the opposition tends to see history as an endless series of crimes and violations against basic humanity, which although is often a much more accurate view of the past, fails to offer anything even resembling a sense of historical relativism.

The problem is compounded by an ever widening ideological rift within the country as a whole. As the economics of the United States changed in the 1950s and 1960s, and as more families became reliant on two incomes, isolation increased and political discourse (or “bowling politics”) faded from sight. Moderates are fairly extinct as a result. Extremists on either side of the spectrum seem to dominate the debate while the mass media stokes the fire. The result is an increasingly polarized citizenry and politicians who then cater to and lead on the principals of institutionalized radicalism.

The irrational, based in a utopian view of the past thus becomes the basis for political leadership. Plans and strategies that might have otherwise seemed too dangerous or even criminal not that long ago, become viable, even necessary as to restore what never was. Extreme action calls for opposite reaction thus stifling discussion, halting all forward momentum and fulfilling the dire prophecies that began the whole damn thing in the first place.

So we come full circle. Ignorant of where we’ve been. Ignorant of where we are. Determined, it would seem, to never reach wherever it is we’re going. The irony is that every generation is convinced that the next generation is the end of it all right up till the moment that it comes true.

May 17th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Laika was a stray dog, and on November 3rd, 1957, became the first living creature to be launched out of Earth’s atmosphere. Riding in a tiny Soviet-built satellite dubbed Sputnik 2, she was plugged into an array of sensors meant to measure the effects of space travel on a living organism.

The voyage wasn’t a pleasant one. Due to a technical problem the temperature in the satellite’s cabin began to climb and eventually rose to well over one hundred degrees. Heat, and what I imagine was the terror of weightlessness, caused untold stress. Some seven hours after launch, the planet’s first space traveler died Sputnik 2 continued to orbit the Earth for five more months before finally disintegrating in the atmosphere, destroying every piece of the satellite along with Laika’s remains.

Interestingly enough the truth about Laika’s journey was covered up by the Soviet Union. Fearful that the canine’s premature death, along with the technical problems experienced on Sputnik 2, might make the Russian space program appear weak, party officials claimed that the launch had gone perfectly according to plan. Officially it was reported that Laika had lived for several days and was then later euphonized.

At the time of the launch there was of course no discussion on the ethical issues involved.

Laika is barely a footnote in history. The space race went on and in 1969 when a man actually walked on the moon, those first steps were largely forgotten.

This bizarre and strangely poignant moment in human exploration is remembered today by a small memorial in Moscow. Laika is immortalized in bronze for being the first living creature to travel in space, and the first living creature sent there expressly to die.

It’s fascinating to consider such a one-way trip. Was there ever a point when this former stray realized there was no coming back? Living organisms have a good sense of their own mortality. We are ingrained with instincts for this very reason. And what of the moral issues? In recent years former Soviet scientists connected with the project have expressed regret. This dog didn’t just pass suddenly, she suffered for hours under incredible stress. Scared, overheated and weightless in a small cramped enclosure.

I would think that Laika definitely knew what was coming.

But I wonder what this story says about us. There’s always a price to progress, and what is the life of one stray dog when looking at the full equation? Does this footnote reveal us to be cruel? Lacking in empathy and compassion? Or is it ultimately just a strange, sad little tale that has little to offer in the form of revelation?

April 21st, 2009 by Hoopleton

Marshall McLuhan

I’ve become convinced that there exists a multi-trillion dollar, international conspiracy in the world that at this very moment is working furiously against us. Its agents include everyone from the wealthiest robber barons to the lowliest anchor on the local news. At their employ are tens-of-millions of your neighbors, as well as, actors, sports figures and all other manner of celebrity. I can only deduce that their insidious final master plan is world domination, but their immediate goal is all too simple: they want you to join Twitter.

Topping the list of things that scare me and which I don’t understand, is the “micro-blogging” site Twitter that the mass media has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that none of us should be allowed to live without.

The idea behind the site is based on the presupposition that human beings have finally reached such a state of critical stupidity that we cannot comprehend any notion disseminated through more than 140 characters. Our attention span has apparently been so corrupted that we can only consume information in tiny bites. This perhaps helps partly to explain why the media (which has been trying to manipulate information into increasingly smaller grains for years) is so overly obsessed with the idea that they’ve actually turned some local news sources into glorified Twitter ads.

One of the worst consequences of “social networking sites” such as these is that it adds fuel to the fire of vapid self-obsession that has already turned most of our fellow man into ignorant narcissistic cultists, while at the same time further draining any sort of worthwhile expression from the web. Personally, I don’t find anyone interesting enough, including myself, to have to keep up with their constant random thoughts in quick-fire succession. Sites like Twitter unfortunately trick most people into believing that they have something in their brains worth communicating, when they simply do not. Leaving most us to dwell in tiny isolated bubbles of delusion, in which we mistakenly believe that we actually matter to anyone outside of our immediate breeding circles.

In addition to this, Twitter and sites of its ilk only further exacerbate the problem which is already destroying our political and cultural dialogue, namely, the rendering of complex feelings and ideas into overly-simplified forms lacking substance or context. Our discourse is already remedial enough as it is, we really don’t need it to be even further deluded.

Interestingly enough a recent study from a neuroscience research group has discovered that instant social interaction and rapid-fire news updates are too fast for the “moral compass” of the brain to process. The study showed it takes longer to activate processing of social emotions such as admiration and compassion, which are critical for developing a sense of morality. Perhaps this could be a new Twitter tagline: we undermine your sense of morality!

Seriously speaking, it’s something worth pondering. Could Twitter and similar technologies actually be undermining the development, or altering the alignment of a moral compass?

This isn’t at all far off from what Marshall McLuhan (I can already hear some of my students laughing), the one-time famed oracle of media studies, warned might be a consequence of extension. You see, McLuhan believed that every technology is an extension of man, altering and shaping human behavior (a car would be an extension of the foot, for example). Ultimately every technology gets over-extended, or in other words, the benefits of any media are always eventually undermined by its faults. This happens with cars and planes (i.e. global warming), with television and computers (i.e. illiteracy or stifled literacy, isolation), and every other form of technology we invent to make life “better.” Then instead of simply eliminating that technology we create a new one to take its place, thus further extending ourselves. Further changing us away from our previous or original constructs (i.e. essential humanity).

In this case, as McLuhan would say, it’s not the information that is transmitted by a site like Twitter that matters, it’s the vehicle, the medium that is of importance. It is the medium that is the message. How is the use of this technology, the very existence of this medium changing or shaping human interaction and human construction?

Although McLuhan would probably not make a judgment call, I for one cannot see any benefits from such an extension.

Human interaction cannot and should not be whittled down into bite-size pieces. It not only inflames the over-obsession people have with instant, undeserved fame, while adding another layer of dependence on technology based on trivial needs (another extension), but it also isolates us further from genuine social interaction. Far too often as it is I find myself in face-to-face encounters where the other person is so consumed with their artificial networks that I might as well be meeting them in a chat room. I’ve actually met people who would rather text on their phone than have a real conversation.

I for one will never join Twitter for many of the same reasons why I despise instant messages and the iPhone brand of technologies that have been developed around them. These forms of media serve only to twist and fracture our social identities, transforming passive, indifferent, impersonal gestures into acceptable forms of close human interaction. Nearly instantly these technologies seem to develop into over-extensions and the consequences are dire. Friendship (companionship) becomes increasingly artificial and meaningless, and we become little more than micro-social junkies, constantly looking for our next unfulfilling fix.

The most vital question, the one that the mass media conspiracy has failed to ask, is what will this brand of technology ultimately lead us to become?