Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I Smell Boilng Frogs from An Angry White Guy in Chicago

There's No Such Thing as a Dystopian Vision When You Live in Dystopia

A staple of American paranoia has been the science fiction Dystopian Future Story. Set any-when from "Seven Years from Now" to "3,000 Years in the Future" (most have learned from both Orwell's 1984 and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that it's best if you don't date your dystopia) the stories usually involve a world where the population of the planet/country/state/city/town has undergone the inevitable and bleak conclusion pointed by our current practices. It also usually has one person in the future who 'wakes up' to the awful reality and wants to know more - the message being that knowledge and truth exposed will save the future.

Many resonate with our current state of affairs (The Matrix reveals that our reliance on machines will ultimately make us drones and that which seems like a normal but life draining existence tied to cubicles in corporate America is actually a great hoax - essentially a high tech modern version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis) and speak to our everyday reality with the cautionary caveat that we too must 'wake up' and change the direction of our lives before it is too late.

The best of the lot deal with broader human issues - war, control, power and it's abuse - and have a timeless quality to the despondent future we have in store for us. There will always be war - there's even war in Roddenberry's Star Trek universe - and these stories warn against complacency in the face of those who would wage these wars and the control over the individual freedoms we all crave (if you're not American) or think we are entitled to (if you are American) that will ultimately be stripped.

So what happens to these dystopian adventures when we are living in the dystopian futures that have been predicted by these modern Cassandras? Lately, the best futureshock predictions are coming not from fiction but from fact - An Inconvenient Truth and Stephen Hawking and the Doomsday Clock.

Cassandra Was Right

In Greek mythology, Cassandra (Greek: Κασσάνδρα "she who entangles men") (also known as Alexandra) was a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy whose beauty caused Apollo to grant her the gift of prophecy. However, when she did not return his love, Apollo placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions. The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to those whose predictions of doom are initially dismissed, but later turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to deny and disbelieve such predictions. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what will happen but not being able to convince others.

So who are our Cassandras?

Aldous Huxley

A Brave New World presents a future where all war, crime and dissent is relocated to a Savage Reservation and the World State and it's citizens are kept in line with a miracle drug called soma that so dulls the natural curiosity and rebelliousness in humans that it creates a completely conformist society.

In a present day where pharmaceutical companies are among the largest corporations in the world and are offering a constant parade of mood altering drugs to meet the manufactured maladies created by the new religion of psychiatry, it is easy to locate obvious versions of soma, however, the great equalizer isn't a drug one ingests but a drug one observes. Television (which is ultimately controlled by three corporations that have managed to purchase control of everything from what we eat to the manufacture of the aforementioned mood altering drugs to the weapons we wage war with) is the most pervasive opiate of the masses ever conceived of.

George Orwell

1984 presents us with BIG BROTHER and the use of perpetual war against a pernicious enemy to reduce every liberty and freedom. BIG BROTHER watches our every move and regulates every conceivable freedom.

Again, anyone who thinks George W. Bush is the first President to wiretap ordinary citizens in the name of security has a very shallow understanding of history. With corporations essentially running all aspects of our government (including the Federal Reserve Bank, which is a privately owned bank that has the power to create money and that our government borrows money from and uses the bulk of income taxes to pay off the interest alone AND that is owned by an undisclosed group of corporations) and using new technology to be able track our every purchase and location, this is an easy parallel to make.

On top of that, many of our basic civil liberties have been stripped from us due to first a perpetual 'war' on drugs and now a conflicting 'war' on terrorism. When someone can be shocked by a taser into compliance because they are driving with a license suspended because of parking tickets and incarcerated for questioning authority, when a person's property and liberty can be taken from them for refusing to pay a tax on their income that, according to even the IRS Tax Code, is not mandatory but voluntary, when a person can be jailed based on the mere accusation of drug use or Islamic ties, it is obvious that Orwell's predictions are now reality.

Terry Gilliam

Brazil begins "somewhere in the 20th century" at 8:49PM, and the retro-futuristic world of Brazil is a gritty, post-apocalyptic, urban landscape in which terrorist attacks, counter-terrorist measures and a bureaucratic quagmire are so obviously present day truth it is absolutely numbing.

In Brazil:

• Sam Lowry's mother (representing the wealthy consumer class) is addicted to plastic surgery. Check.

• Bureaucratic inefficiency causes the unlawful and unjust incarceration of an innocent man that leads to his death. Check.

• Every aspect of society requires forms and fees to be able to legally do anything. Check.

• The government tortures it's citizens indiscriminately in the cause of order. Check.

You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to see that Gilliam's universe in Brazil has too many similarities to our current state to simply write off as 'an entertaining cult film.'

Frog Soup Tastes Pretty Bad to the Frog

There's an old folk myth that if you throw a frog in boiling water he will quickly jump out. But if you put a frog in a pan of cold water and raise the temperature ever so slowly, the gradual warming will make the frog doze happily . . . and will eventually cook to death, without ever waking up.

The question begged is this: Is it too late to wake up? Have we gone beyond that point in the boiling that we can no longer jump out of the pot?

In May of 2008, Congress has authorized the implementation of a National ID Card with a microchip embedded in it. This is designed to ensure that anyone flying, opening a checking account, or entering a government building is easily identifiable. There is no doubt about where this all leading us to - sheep, compliant to do what we're told, to buy into the half truths and lies we are told, to be blinded by the shiny objects thrown in our path in order to avoid seeing what is in front of us.

Is it too late to wake up or are we soup?

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