-
- Is it really so dire then, to sit in front of a tv or
movie screen, voluntarily remove the contents of our own heads and replace
them with the feelings, thoughts and motives of others? Don't we all do
it on occasion and survive? Yes, we do, apparently. (Although- how would
we know for sure?) There are two aspects to consider in this ritual drowning
of ourselves in the normally murky oblivion we call entertainment. The
first is the previously mentioned complete absence of personal self-existence.
Not a problem? But a good working description of totalitarianism would
be: the imposition of feelings, thoughts, and ideas on others. Then why
lay down our discriminating minds and beg to receive implants of imposed
ideas from who-knows-whose nefarious corporate brain?
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-
- Television could be a benign and useful tool IF the minds
and motives behind it were free from all desire to impose stupification
and robotic compliance in humanity. It is not, strictly speaking, the technology
itself that is so dangerous. It isn't the hardware so much that annihilates
consciousness. It's the deliberate and criminal use of scientific advances
in knowledge to manipulate the human mind and emotional nature downward
and backward. People watching a sacred drama unfold in ancient Greece were
also in a light hypnotic trance, but this served them in absorbing a message
that had genuine value to their lives. There is interesting work available
which relates the various degrees of what we call trance states, or passive
consciouness, to different kinds of religious and spiritual experience.
Still, it stands to reason that passive consciousness is fraught with peril,
to be managed with utmost discrimination. Or perhaps, we should let some
other kind soul manage this for us?
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- Almost everything we are absorbing on tv and at the movies
has been brought to us by a Thing calling itself a corporation. A corporation
is a legal entity with all the rights of an individual human being (and
then some, in reality). At the same time corporations have practically
endless "rights", they have, surprise surprise, no human sense
of responsibility whatsoever. If Frankenstein's Monster were to come alive
today, he would lumber on up off the table, look around, and hasten to
file articles of incorporation immediately. (Actually, of course this has
already happened, but that's another story.) Corporate Things need to throw
a discrete veil over their bald naked greed, and to generate public images
of what warm caring fuzzy-bunnies they honest-to-goodness really are. But
of course a corporation has as at the core nothing but a powerful single
icy cold will-to-devour, instead of a human heart and a human mind. We
have accepted this frightening Franken-fact about the foundations of our
society at present, without much of a fuss, and have completely confused
it with "the democratic process". Which is, of course, exactly
what they wanted us to do. We are taught by the paradigm itself however
to imagine there are only two possibilities here. If we feel it highly
objectionable to base a social structure on outright bloody-minded vampire
bat-ism, we must naturally therefore... be socialists, or communists, or
worse!
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- Corporations have brilliantly used a great totalitarian
device here, and leaped to all your conclusions for you, to save you the
trouble of thinking at all. They have quite successfully imposed the idea
on us that there are no possible alternatives to this revolting enslavement
of the human soul to a dog-eat-dog level of life: except for previous failed
systems! Faced with this false but powerfully imposed conundrum, most people
give up the attempt to think any further. Yet this country was founded
on a daring new experiment in human social engineering, never imagined,
never thought of, and never tried out before. And not a single one of the
great souls who devised the innovative form of a democratic system had
greed as their motive. Quite the opposite: most of them paid for this most
noble experiment personally, sacrificing their own health, wealth, happiness
and lives. How could they ever have imagined an entire nation lolling about-
in the time they can spare from direct unrelenting enslavement to the profit
motive- being electronically entertained, while simultaneously undergoing
a conscience-removal operation?
-
- Separate these two, democracy and nonhuman Thingified
corporate unchecked greediness, and consider as if for the first time the
following obvious fact. Everything we are sipping up inside ourselves by
sucking on the passive straw of tv and movie-watching has a singleminded
original dark intent. In back of The Dance of the Seven Veils of superficial
enjoyment lies the base Prime Mover: Profit-Without-A-God.
-
- Entertainment amounts to passively accepting being manipulated
and rearranged internally for someone else's profit, and your loss. Is
this not an absolutely astonishing and disgusting concept? Most astonishing
of all, we don't, by and large, object very strenuously. By "watching"
(a better description would be "unconsciously internalizing")
programs we are actually undergoing reprogramming ourselves by corporate
interests. Our beloved entertainment is scientifically calculated to the
last hair of a molecule...to methodically skin us alive. And we like it.
It's so enjoyable.
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- If a tree falls in the forest of your mind, and you don't
hear it, has it still fallen? Suppose our entire individual psychological
ecosystems are being demolished while we curl so cozily on the couch? If
we aren't aware of it, if we don't feel uncomfortable, it might somehow
be OK, yes? And what if our own tiresome thoughts are being replaced by
more interesting ones: why not share minds and go with the flow? Why be
so picky and prickly about this? Why, it's just possible that Gene Roddenberry
was the reincarnation of Homer, for example. The eternal urge to tell fascinating
stories is a great and lasting, ever-recurring human good. Well, yes, that
is clearly so. There are times when giving our minds over to others might
be salutary, healthy and reasonable. But now we are talking about being
extremely and consciously selective with a medium that presents us with
the opposite practical effect: it automatically mesmerizes, regardless
of content. Think of so vast a portion of humanity over the years, in an
induced light hypnotic trance, subconsciously superglued to the overt and
covert corporate message (BUYSEXBUYBUYDEATHCONSUMEHURTEATDEVOURMOREMOREMORE)
emitted from tube and screen. The last half of the 20th century has seen
the worst voluntary degredation of the human soul in recorded history.
And the great "secret" engine of "Project Corral-the-Populace/Denature-and-Dumbdown"
has been powered in large measure by the profoundly efficent dynamo of
commercial entertainment.
-
- There's an outstandingly horrifying example of what a
single truely dark person can do to an entire planet, in the life and works
of that revered popular icon, Walt Disney. Consciously or otherwise, this
man and his productions systematically destroyed one of the most precious
attributes of the soul in a large proportion of our most vulnerable population.
He sold his ugly crude little cartoons to the world as "works of the
imagination", purportedly stimulating to the fantasy-life of children.
In reality this gargantuan takeover of children's imaginations by artistically
vicious and stupid dumbed-down images accomplished precisely the opposite
effect. This stands alone as one of the most successful psycholgically
totalitarian con jobs of all time. To this day, most people do not know
what a cartoon really is, what it does, and why it is the worst assault
perpetrated on the souls of children in human history.
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- This Great Satan of the Entertainment Industry managed
easily to sell his dark distorted nightmares of banality to the world:
as "cute". Right here is a point of no return in the downfall
of our natural commonsensical perception. One of our country's best poets,
Walt Whitman, referring to the ineffable everyday glory of the created
world, put it this way: "A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion
infidels." And so it is! To the eye that can still see, it is. And
now, replacing this direct awareness of a quivering wee bundle of fabulous
complexity (which only a very great poet and a normal child can see) we
have something else. We have that mornonic, one-dimensional, hideously
anthropomorphic, squeaky-speaking, jerkily gesticulating stick-figure Mickey.
And an entire imaginative death-trap of a similarly badly fabricated ersatz
animal-crowd to go with him. That's still not enough, either- more can
be done here. So, presto, before you can say money-in-the-bank, we have
an actual entire manifested hell-on-earth kitsch-world to go around all
this. We have- Disneyland. Our children have been successfully programmed
to beg to go there, and we have been equally well programmed to be unable
to refuse. How cute.
-
- There was no effective resistance whatsoever to this
worst-case-scenario attack on the delicate and highly sensitive marvels
of a child's perception. Before Uncle Walt, the divine faculty of imagination
had not been surgically removed from the human mind on such a broad scale,
or so thoroughly replaced by the imagery of complete idiocy. There were
still exquisitely illustrated and beautifully written children's books,
and a parent not too exhausted to read bedtime stories. Yes, these books
still exist, but most children are more likely to be innocently undergoing
the torments of the damned, in front of the tv.
-
- Totalitarianism, quite rightly, has always feared and
hated human creative imagination, and has always replaced it with the most
visually and audibly brutalizing substitutes. And the place to start, as
all totalitarian regimes know so well, is with the youngest, most innocent,
and least able to protect themselves. Feed them the crudest eye-and-ear-offal
as early as possible, and they will never ever know the difference. Corruption
is complete only when you catch them young. The reason for this is simple.
Children are chock-full of the tenderest and most sensitive unformulated
feelings and perceptions. This sensitivity to impression and sweetness
will be projected willy-nilly onto whatever in is their enviornment, good,
bad or indifferent. We are designed to love, and to be impressed by the
lives and activities around us. This is why, for example, an abused child
will love a cruel parent as much as they can, just as a loved child will
love a wonderful parent.
-
- Totalitarian forces pushing all kinds and varieties of
obvious unwholesomeness on children have understood this perfectly. They
have aways liked to stomp right through this door of innocent receptivity,
right on into the vulnerable loving souls of children. They have no trouble
making themselves at home because a child has no natural defense system,
no discrimination yet, against incoming impressions. Therefore, once they
are in there, attaching the child's unconscious mind to their every bit
of proffered nastiness, it takes a miracle to get them out. Children are
the very essence of unthinking wholesale loyalty. It's a done deal, if
darkness can just slither through unnoticed- meaning, wearing the most
attractive mask the advertising department can buy.
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- To the unadulterated and developed imaginative faculty,
banality or crudeness in art is one of the manifestations of artistic "original
sin". It is registered as an aspect of primal imaginative evil. There
was a good reason for this massive assault on the perception of a generation.
Unfettered, unpoisoned positive imagination is the key to continual refinement
of perception. Creative imagination is a soul attribute, and of extreme
spiritual importance to the evolution of the human race. Children, of course,
are in the most need of the highest visual and audible representations
of refined human imagination. When these are replaced by products of uttermost
simplistic subnatural dopeyness, a child's very perception itself, and
growing emotional and mental interaction with the world, is short-circuited,
stunted and paralyzed. Once the world accepted cartoon images as "cute",
it was all over, for a while. Cartoons are to the imagination what a rotting
corpse is to food. Yet hardly anyone noticed: tv and movies slipped this
deadly Mickey to the soul of humanity with no trouble at all. And the public
demand for this perpetual artistic chloroforming of the souls of children
continues unabated. If you listen closely, and can bear to it, you can
hear angels weep. _____
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- End of Part One: Death By Entertainment Note: Email will
be read and appreciated (or otherwise) but not answered.
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