The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
September 25th
A SOCIETY of SPECTACLE!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
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"The
fearful standardization of this age is making one place so like another that
there will be no point soon in leaving home. Architecture, dress and food as
prepared by the gigantic hotel combines in their
exactly similar restaurants and grill rooms are becoming the same the world over." |
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- H. V. Morton, "In
Search of Scotland" (1929) |
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"If
I had a choice to either make money or be respected, I'd definitely go for
the money." |
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-
Vanilla Ice (whenever, dude) |
Flew to Washington... state of, with
the murder hornets, not the Fed’ral termit’ry nest... and, being as the flight movie sequel
sucked, I cracked this book: "Society of the Spectacle" by some dead
French people called Situationists as dismissed "the
whole modern culture as a manipulative system promoting a brutalizing mass
consumption." Near as I can figure, most Situationists
did a group Abbie Hoffman or, maybe, Jim Jones over nobody or nothing special
there in France... let alone America, or anywhere that really matters... givin' a half-kilo of merde
‘bout their grievances. (They did
inspire some English arts-hustler to dress up these rent boys in rags and
safety-pins and market their music as, quote unquote, punk-rock which, at
least, gave some depressed teenagers an alternative to countrypolitan
and disco.)
Back in the 1950s and '60s, eggheads
like President Eisenhower went ignored too, carping about the
military-industrial-complex (as became prison-industrial, then adding
surveillance-marketing so that would be PISMarC…
rhymes with Bismarck, doesn’t it, asks the Kaiser’s loathsomely incontinent
country cousin?). Herbert Schiller (in "Mass Communications and American
Empire", 1969) remarked: "...domestically, the realm is governed
confidently by a propertied managerial and industrial corps, instructing a
consumer community stratified by income and race," but questioners of the
spectacle went back to their espresso-ghettos of Haight-Ashbury, Venice Beach
or Greenwich Village (where they could afford the rents, in those days). Some
became performance artists... spreadin' chocolate
across themselves like Willy Wonkers and then pouring
jars of ants over their heads (heard t’was a terr’ble accident down in Florida with some of them as
mistakenly used fire ants)... or
politicians, drawing up legislation in elephant doody. More went into
advertising, public relations and the such, so... by
them elections as began George III's regime, the dangling chad one... Tipper
Gore got flown to Honduras, after a hurricane there, so's
people could take pictures of her campin' out after a
make-believe long day shoveling mud.
Why?
For the children.
For us, really... as our survival depends on consumerizing,
economic and political. If the reduced, so-called G-10 stops buying, the
global economy goes out of business (and we’re already flim-flamming
the debt ceiling by offloading our obligations onto state and local governments).
China appears lost... their retro ChiCom dictator apparently believing that the trading of
guns for Russian petrol trumps trade with the decadent west; Thailand, Japan
and the Taiwanese owners of Vietnamese sweatshops call in their margins unless
our children dress up like whores in the magazines and parents... adult
children of lax parents, themselves... self-medicate with laxatives, pain
pills, snarly SUVs and Botox, and bid thousands, online, for ancient Pez
dispensers as get factored into the rosy economic scenarios.
"We're going to be selling,"
Joan Rivers used to say on that home-shopping hour a’fore
her surgery went awry, "because that's what everybody's doing now." So... when the al-Zazzies took out the St. Louis Arch... the President could go on Fox News with the same what-to-do-America?
advice as after 911: “Shop!”
In fact, as the Don Jones people pointed
out a while back, we shop more and consume more than any other spot
on Earth ‘cept for the speck of chic-shopping sheep-dippin’ sheikhs that constitute the United Arab Emirates,
Qatar, Kuwait and the such!
"If there's going to be nuclear
winter," counsels Jill Porter in Philadelphia, "you might as well be
dressed for it." (Or, in the other
alternative apocalypstance, prepare for the global
warming with designer flip flops and sunscreen!)
We consume medical and economic
quackery (Xipecac, tenth waves, G-strings and
Z-forces!) ambush TV and Trumped-up pedophiliac "beauty pageants", watch
Stormy and Monica’s daytime talkshow and read Casey
Anthony's advice columns – worrying more
about who will replace Oprah or become the next American Icon and expect the
same from our Presidency. We listen to
talk radio disinfotainment as ponders, soberly, the
merits of exhuming Marilyn Monroe for traces of Presidential DNA or what old
8mm footage of what national status politician shows him kissing a baby back in
the last century when he was on the Water Board in Podunk, Illinois - as now
comprises felony child molestation of the sort as brought down that New York
Governor with the absolute audaciousness to ask a woman for a kiss, and speak
to another in… Italian! And then, over the summer, people eat bugs and get
fired - them with money as slid through the Frannie Mac,
SVB and student loan fiascos buy big African cockroaches, gussied up with
diamonds and gold to wear on their lapels.
Advertising being like antibiotics, we
human, unblinged palmetto bugs gradually develop
immunity, necessitating even more devious, stronger doses... like those pop-ups
on the CW, the insurance company hiring sports anti-icons Tonya Harding and Johnny
Manziell, the other fellows hiring sad, bankrupt
revenants like Jimmy Walker and Joe Namath, or the stripmining
of our dubious cultural heritage. The Beach Boys' "California Girls" touts
Clairol "Herbalessence hair", Carly Simon "anticipates"
ketchup flowing from the bottle. Michael Jackson's conservators selling "Yesterday"
to that chain of nursing homes, Dylan selling out “I Want You” to whatever the hell
we’re supposed to want this week, Cream pimping "I'm So Glad" trash bags,
"Satisfaction" hawking that sour lemon soda with the cow hormones and
just about every obscure album-track by the effin' Kinks.
And, to circle back to punk rock for a sec, at least obituary writers had the
decency... or squeamishness... not to mention Joe "Clash" Strummer's selling
off "London Calling" to the luxury car people.
One wonders how the course of
marketing history might have changed had Charlie Manson passed his audition for the Monkees!
"An old song rearranged and used
in an ad is not just another jingle," one Carol Lynn Mithers
wrote, the first time Jacko licensed "Help"
to Lincoln-Mercury, "...it is something that once had memory and personal
meaning appropriated until it no longer belongs to me. It is a piece cut out of
the soundtrack of my life. It makes part of my past disappear." But,
instead of Seneca, our scolding comes from "King Kong II's" plaything
Jessica Lange: "... everything is so dull, dull and dangerous at the same
time. Everything is so... unromantic!"
Or, as David Pierce informs me, "Today's
avant-garde is tomorrow’s bedspread pattern."
Americans don't produce much, anymore,
but... like Whacko Jacko... still possess valuable
trademarks – some of which are fungible, others not. Gumment's up to its greasy,
pencil neck in this... relocating cheese factory home-offices from Wisconsin to
Parma, Ohio so's to make runaway Malaysian "Parmesan"
street legally “packaged in America”,
selling off bandwidth frequencies and such to contributors (jailing low-power
community TV and streaming radio hams as raise First Amendment objections under
the RPA) and writing up extraterritoriality waivers for corporations and
neighborhood condo covenanteers, as if the Civil War
never happened; although, at least, prohibiting the tenants from running those
Confederate (or, even, Ukrainian)
banners up their flagpoles! Millions of
karaoke U-tube lawsuits in the pipeline to squeeze billions from “piratical”
teenagers! And then, replacing Broadway
Al Hamilton with failed Gubernatorial candidate
Caitlyn Jenner on the tenner as a compromise to the women’s and LGBT ain’t-I-persecuted libbers…
After Disney bought the rights to
throw Americans into their own private prisons from BilBarr
the Barbarian out there at Justice, lady from my district got six months in a private Mouskabrig for pepper spraying this costumed teenaged “Lion
King” hyena as terrorized her kids. Made her sew costumes fourteen hours the
day at a payscale as would have shamed Burma, and the
county wouldn't even allow her legal representation, being that the offense had
transpired on a place that wasn't... strictly speaking... American.
"These are magical people," says
Ken Norelli, deputy public defender, as counsels… to
the best of his ability and Guv’nor de Santis’ prerogatives… the wretched populice
of Disney's jails.
One more reason I pray the Coalition
for a New Consensus remains haven for both radicals and reactionaries... flying catfish,
soaring into the stratosphere of Schiller's phallocratic
Spectacle as "thrust(s) outward," like Big Bang debris, to become "a
pillar of the emergent imperial society!" With
G-spotters and the quasi-libertarian Rand Paulists parsing
greed as "geo-strategic thinking at the micro inner-space level!"
With a bewildered President of the
United States… seemingly unable to navigate the stairway into an airplane
passenger compartment but still capable of deputzing vigilantes
on horseback to horsewhip hungry Haitians back across the Rio Grande somewhat
and stumble around the circle in an autoworkers’ picket line the way his
predecessor jetted down to Puerto Rico
to throw a few rolls of paper towels into the crowd of starving, dehydrated
hurricane victims and blaming the fake news for reporting on the dead persons
that resulted therefrom.
And with Tipper Gore ushering in the
brave new milleniaum by wandering down the
mud-clogged streets of a Honduran slum, appealing to her own spotters: "Is
this where I'm supposed to shovel?" while they kept prodding her down the street,
towards a pile of mud at which cameras waited. "It was a strange pile, squarish and flattened, and it seemed odd that it had been
left to block the street and hamper rescue efforts," wrote Phil Davison,
correspondent for the London Independent. "But to everything there is a
purpose.”
“Turn, turn, turn?"
CLICK the CATFISH to go
to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |