tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16603879140192734892024-03-19T04:46:53.285-04:00I, Ron, eek!Where I, Ron, blog on a variety of different subjects--social theoretical, historical, cultural, political, social ethical, the media, and so on (I got the Max Weber, the Mark Twain, and the Stephen Leacock in me)--in a sometimes Niebuhrian or ironic way all with an attitude. Enjoy. Disagree. Be very afraid particularly if you have a socially and culturally constructed irrational fear of anything over 140 characters.Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.comBlogger974125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-41458183564640573292024-03-17T07:33:00.011-04:002024-03-17T12:00:11.247-04:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Hitchcock, The Birds, and the Happy Resolution<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkFGTCtxA5b6FFQ3nLmFt6FUyfDepNkz58UxgxASSVpMYE7JSWXHGsEcZZEaDCgNV14eRoRstxkr0le0xxFpwvqOko9tPtIpcVxhlkV2unUeE4B4nKLIMf7WXa9V1pPKWkWfS82niNvJ495eOKH-H9vWiGvvD3TARcm1F-MqKhC0NWKci4EqZZVMJsV6c/s1800/HitchcockTheBirds.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="972" data-original-width="1800" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkFGTCtxA5b6FFQ3nLmFt6FUyfDepNkz58UxgxASSVpMYE7JSWXHGsEcZZEaDCgNV14eRoRstxkr0le0xxFpwvqOko9tPtIpcVxhlkV2unUeE4B4nKLIMf7WXa9V1pPKWkWfS82niNvJ495eOKH-H9vWiGvvD3TARcm1F-MqKhC0NWKci4EqZZVMJsV6c/s320/HitchcockTheBirds.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>One of the fascinating things today about the brave new digital social media world is that a lot of those brought up and socialised into a world that thinks that it and its high tech, including its high tech films, are the best of all possible worlds and the best of all possible film worlds, are increasingly watching classic films these days. Though they have been socialised to dislike anything that seems studio bound, while at the same time, and paradoxically so, loving cgi, the new matte paining, while they have been brought up to hate black and white films not realising that black and white is sometimes an aesthetic choice and that some black and white films with their manipulations of light and shadow are works of art, while they have been brought up to prefer realism in their films, something that is ultimately not possible in books, films, or television given the reality that all of them are built on unrealistic manipulations of time and space, and while they have been brought up to dislike anything made in the past because it is technologically “primitive", they are increasingly watching the classic films of directors like Alfred Hitchcock on social media platforms like Patreon and YouTube because they have discovered that they can make monies by doing so. People will, you see, pay reactors to react to books, films, and television shows so they can watch how they react to them. Presumably, these voyeurs hope to see the reactor react positively to something they like, a fact that many reactors realise which is why they make sure to tailor their reactions so they can continue to make monies from their social media reactions. Commodity “aestheticism".<p></p><p>Alfred Hitchcock, of course, is one of the greatest directors of film of all time. He is one of the few masters of the cinematic craft and film art, as many of those watching his films on social media platforms for profit are learning. Hitchcock is not only the legendary master of suspense but he knows how to compose in black and white and colour, he knows how use music, he knows how to compose shots, he knows how to use delaying techniques for maximum tension, he knows, as did Shakespeare, mix tonal variations—comedy meets black comedy, meets drama, meets suspense, meets highbrow wit, meets even tragedy—all in order to manipulate those watching his films and to provide pleasure for those watching his films. One can, by the way, see just how good Hitchcock was at doing all of this even today thanks to the contemporary social media reactors we have been talking about, social media reactors who often describe how they were on the edge of their seats while watching a Hitchcock film. </p><p>Not surprisingly, the Hitchcock film that seems to be the most viewed by YouTube reactors these days is his 1960 film <i>Psycho</i>. This is not surprising given that horror films—which Hitchcock did not make despite some reactors thinking he did--along with science fiction films and action adventure films, the new Westerns of modern Hollywood (see <i>Die Hard</i>), are among the most popular genres in contemporary comic book oriented Hollywoodland. Some reactors are, however, watching other Hitchcock classics as well including <i>Rear Window</i> (1954), <i>Vertigo</i> (1958), <i>North by Northwest</i> (1959), and <i>The Birds</i> (1963). A few viewers are even watching <i>Notorious</i> (1946), a kind of companion piece to <i>North by Northwest</i> and one of my favourite Hitchcock films, and <i>Strangers on a Train</i> (1951), both in glorious black and white. Very few, unfortunately, are watching Hitchcock’s British films, films such as the brilliant <i>The 39 Steps</i> (1935) and the brilliant <i>The Lady Vanishes</i> (1938), films that are as good as any films Hitchcock ever made, </p><p>While the social media reactions to all of these Hitchcock films are interesting the social media reactions to <i>The Birds</i> are particularly interesting because they tell us something about the socialisation of social media reactors. <i>The Birds</i> is not your typical Hollywood film. Hollywood films are typically of the fairy tale variety with happy endings. They typically, in other words, have happy resolutions. <i>The Birds</i>, however, does not have a happy fairy tale resolution. Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch (the Australian Rod Taylor) may have found love by end of <i>The Birds</i>, by the end of the bird attacks that helped bring them together, but Hitchcock does not tell us the reason for the bird attacks on Bodega Bay north of San Francisco in the first place. Was it Melanie herself? Was it the caged love birds Melanie brought with her from San Francisco to the Brenner’s house in Bodega Bay for Mitch’s sisters birthday? Was it god looking down at the chaos caused by the attack of the birds on Bodega Bay, California and beyond and laughing at the absurdity of it all? Was it the end of the world predicted by Christians ever since the advent of that faith? Hitchcock doesn’t give us an answer or the answer. Nor does Hitchcock tell us how what we have just seen on the screen ended. Do Melanie, Mitch, Mitch’s mother, and Mitch’s sister escape the bird attacks after they drive off in their sports car at the end of the film? We don’t know. We can only speculate, surmise, hypothesise and most humans don’t like to do any of those three things.</p><p>In my experience those brought up on a steady diet of unrealistic fairy tales with happy endings and generally happy resolutions have difficulty, to use a contemporary phrase, wrapping their heads around works of art that don’t have happy endings where boy gets girl and life goes wonderfully on. I still recall, for instance, that when one of my relatives from Russia who was brought up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s on.a steady diet of happy resolutions came to visit me and we watched an episode of <i>X-Files</i> that didn’t have a happy resolution that she was flummoxed by the lack of a happy ending. She couldn’t understand why everything wasn’t tied up in happy social realist or disneyish bright ribbons and bows. Similarly, many reactors, most of them Americans I suspect, have the same reaction to <i>The Birds</i>. Why, the wonder, does the film not tie everything up in bright ribbons and bows?. Boo. Hiss. They can’t handle the truth that life often doesn’t have happy endings. And this is why, I suspect, those viewers who love <i>Rear Window</i>, who love <i>Vertigo</i>, who love <i>North by Northwest</i>, and who love <i>Psycho</i>, don’t equally love <i>The Birds</i>. </p><p>I, on the other hand (and yes I do realise that value is in the socialised eyes of the beholder), think that <i>The Birds</i> is one of Hitchcock’s greatest works for exactly the same reason most reactors don’t like it: it doesn’t have a happy Hollywood ending. And that is why, I suppose, that I also prefer the art cinema, particularly the “foreign” art cinema, to Hollywood. The art cinema is, I would argue, more “real” than that of Hollywood. That, however, is not why most people watch movies. They may sing a mantra like chorus of we want realism in our films but they really go to see movies because they want to escape from the “real world”. They go to see movies because they want the fairy tale. They go to see movies because they want the happy endings. They go to see movies because they want everything tied up in bright and happy ribbons and bows. They want, in other words, the bread and the circus. And who can blame them. Life, after all, is not a fairy tale. It does not often end happily. It is not often tied up in bright and happy ribbons and bows. Life is generally, as the Buddha said long ago, typified by suffering and the films Hollywood produces provide, as does religion, many with the serenity they need to get through it. They need their pie in the sky.</p><p> </p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-61641094296392945272024-03-16T13:55:00.006-04:002024-03-16T14:55:44.167-04:00Dreaming My Life Away...<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5K09Y6H1u_c6ZWQu0lEPX8yIY3yCXWbWYosNOd6gtlETi3m7VY_guhAsSx_ioD5GTBzohjTNpnzwCOFxKxTIDKG28tawEhE-Hj9NtKzPrmIxdOS-iLzF1aQlZRdIem7PGuqbL7EETAd9pJa_xnZK7JMyb7iAstOimNuJiYTWuNKrU_aA8nDYrxWq-Y4g/s850/PeepingTomPowell.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="850" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5K09Y6H1u_c6ZWQu0lEPX8yIY3yCXWbWYosNOd6gtlETi3m7VY_guhAsSx_ioD5GTBzohjTNpnzwCOFxKxTIDKG28tawEhE-Hj9NtKzPrmIxdOS-iLzF1aQlZRdIem7PGuqbL7EETAd9pJa_xnZK7JMyb7iAstOimNuJiYTWuNKrU_aA8nDYrxWq-Y4g/s320/PeepingTomPowell.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>Every night for the last two or three years it has been the same thing: I go to bed. I dream. I wake up from my dreams before they are resolved. I have to urinate. Then, if I am lucky and can use yoga techniques to relax my mind and my body—a body racked by the pains of old age and old age infirmities-- I go back to sleep and dream again only to have the same thing happen again. The dream ends before it concludes and I am once again off to the water closet for the second or third time that night.<p></p><p>Usually I don’t remember my various mini dream movies. Most of them over the course of my life have typically been mundane and banal—a typical post-Star Wars Hollywood film--and most of them have been mundane and banal for the last two or three years too despite their lack of resolution. This morning I did remember my nighttime reverie and I wrote it down as it was one of the more vivid of my dreams and I wanted to make sure I did not forget it it so I could write it down and think about it some more.</p><p>In this dream I was in lovely house with at least two storeys. There were a lot of people in the house taking and moving about. I seemed to have been plopped down in the middle of a crowded party. Eventually I made my way upstairs to a room with very few people in it who were watching classic movies. A reflection of my general dislike about being around too many people particularly at mundane and banal parties and a reflection of my longstanding cinephilism? Soon an announcement appeared on the television we happy few were watching that Michael Powell’s classic <i>Peeping Tom</i>—a film that deserves as much recognition as Alfred Hitchcock’s much better known <i>Psycho</i>—would be on next. I immediately headed downstairs and sought out two young French lasses. Did I assume they were cinephiles like myself because they were French and France—where I lived briefly and a country I have always been fond of—was well known for its cinephilism and film criticism in the 1950s and 1960s? I told them that the rarely seen and rarely shown <i>Peeping Tom</i> was going to be shown in a few minutes on the small screen upstairs. Initially, they berated me. Did they think I was trying to pick them up? Did they think I was ill? Did they not believe me? I left them immediately and climbed back up the stairs to watch the film. The two French lasses eventually followed which pleased me. Am I not as averse as I thought to watching small groups of others if they are also intelligent cinephiles? Then the dream ended.</p><p>As I thought about this dream I began to wonder if my endlessly repeating dream experience—dream ends before resolution—is a reflection of my age—I am not 69—and a reflection of my somewhat conscious concern about the end of my life.? I have long thought that I had resolved any issues concerning my mortality. Perhaps I haven’t managed to do this fully, however. One thing I do know is that I am weary and bored by the banal mundanity that is contemporary life in anti-intellectual America, a land where many right wing populists, many of them right wing know nothing theocrats, fascists, and xenophobes, seem to think that the stone age life was the best of all possible worlds in which humans had ever lived. As for me, I can’t imagine a much worse “utopia”, a utopia not that different from those when Christianity and Christian inquisitions ruled Europe, when Hitler and his inquisitors ruled Germany, and when Stalin and his inquisitors ruled the USSR, and I certainly don’t want to live in it now or at any time in the future or the past should the Doctor of <i>Doctor Who</i> really exist and can take me there. I would definitely want him to take me to almost anywhere else.</p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-4384972329562007262024-03-14T08:57:00.008-04:002024-03-14T19:12:55.748-04:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Why the Brave New Postmodern Digital Media World is Much Like the Brave Old Modern Media World <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSMIDvdZ1fGzCoYB2tbWtXvnKSxt1dfcoTomYwrI8_hiojZfAHEO5KrEz82D4uoasFsEUA0S-6q19Wl2md4TSx6syOslqrugWbdfU2giZX9c51Jh72tH2Duh-b9kCbsYeZv-sVhC7g_JMbgmyB8auVxogiD_PfvKMEKA07TlKoZqqqEcW6R_GAGVSkJpE/s474/GodardSuiveProstitute.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="216" data-original-width="474" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSMIDvdZ1fGzCoYB2tbWtXvnKSxt1dfcoTomYwrI8_hiojZfAHEO5KrEz82D4uoasFsEUA0S-6q19Wl2md4TSx6syOslqrugWbdfU2giZX9c51Jh72tH2Duh-b9kCbsYeZv-sVhC7g_JMbgmyB8auVxogiD_PfvKMEKA07TlKoZqqqEcW6R_GAGVSkJpE/s320/GodardSuiveProstitute.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>Since the 18th and 19th centuries mass capitalism has been the dominant economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic system in the world and particularly in the western world that gave it birth. On this fact both the major apologists and polemicists for and against mass capitalism, Adam Smith and Karl Marx respectively, agree. <p></p><p>Mass capitalism is an economic system, a system of exchange, with its own theology, a theology propagated by the high priests of mainstream economic theory who postulate—though they don’t see it as postulation hence the use of the term theology here--that humans are rational and that human greed is ultimately good for all. It is an economic system that dominates western and increasingly global politics because modernity and its mass capitalism are bureaucratic and the higher in the bureaucracy one is the more monies one makes and the more power and authority one has. This allows those in the higher realms of the bureaucracy to use their power and authority, to leverage their status, in a multitude of political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ways. They lobby, for instance, the American government and have a greater ability to lobby successfully compared to those with middling power and authority and those with low levels of power and authority because in capitalist societies money, as the proverb goes, talks. It allows those with money, power, and authority to use these monies and this power and authority for cultural purposes. When they buy art they impact the “value” of the art they buy. When they contribute monies to symphony orchestras they impact the type of music that will be programmed. When they engage in risky behaviours that come back to haunt them the world has to listen because, as happened as recently as 2008, their “coughs” wreak havoc on the increasingly integrated global economy. Those with monies typically live longer, have less deaths in childbirth, and have less child deaths than those with moderate or limited monies who live in poverty.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrp129m4amNCQ3-tPOqbryEZODKE-bldiqhKVdgcHuhV5lD6C-sta-5jjW0GC9WXenNQacZNfsHcan1EBLi3IJk3z6Q7c2QcMcliikAFP8AbAsEUyep4jZYQXKXzcFwdMwJuAb8BMR7HHSlDGUCAy4FzhkUtSC3_krHGEr2lITAP_g_Q22GzXa5sUTjKE/s474/GodardSuive.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrp129m4amNCQ3-tPOqbryEZODKE-bldiqhKVdgcHuhV5lD6C-sta-5jjW0GC9WXenNQacZNfsHcan1EBLi3IJk3z6Q7c2QcMcliikAFP8AbAsEUyep4jZYQXKXzcFwdMwJuAb8BMR7HHSlDGUCAy4FzhkUtSC3_krHGEr2lITAP_g_Q22GzXa5sUTjKE/s320/GodardSuive.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>The noted Swiss film maker Jean-Luc Godard, a director who has been categorised as part of the French nouvelle vague or New Wave by critics and historians, often used the “profession” of prostitution, as a metaphor for mass capitalism in his many films. In his 1980 film <i>Suive qui peut (la vie)</i>, [English title <i>Every Man for Himself</i>], for example, Godard stages a scene—I hope I am remembering this right as I have not seen the film since it was released--in which a businessman, sitting at a desk choreographs a scene for his entertainment in which one of his cronies has sex, including anal sex, with a prostitute while another character in the film voyeuristically looks on. The message of this film, of course, is that workers are exploited by their bosses and their sycophantic flunkies in the lower upper levels and middle levels of capitalist bureaucracies, something that makes the English title of Godard’s film not quite accurate given the realities of power and authority imbalances within economic bureaucracies.<div><br /></div><div>Godard, of course, is a polemicist who critiques capitalism in <i>Suive qui peut (la vie)</i>. One does not, however, have to buy into Godard's normative polemics for the exploitation scene in the film to be descriptively accurate. Those in the highest and higher levels of capitalist bureaucracies do have more power and authority than those beneath them (pun intended). They do have labourers working underneath them (pun intended) who do their bidding, at least officially. They do make more money than those in the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy. And the relationship between capitalist bosses and those beneath them (pun again intended) is one akin to that between a john and prostitute, one in which the john pays for a commodity, in this case sex, and one in which, arguably for some, he or she who is paying and playing is in an exploitative relationship with the worker who is doing the work, in this case the exploited sex work.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU1CiXF1lqgXWQbeET3NGGQ5YUvKTllGDouW8BhlKb_vLsbYA8jm6FoZRL3loMBYDRJvlOg9MIPzaw2qYNSwlTWl1Jw7R_teVGJ9Fr_5wmaSrD-QPb2DU1WW73Y1ZgIOpOLSkzY0Ri_Eq4RFXlCHX-tt_tVPzhSG4rym4lmpqAWXptEDkRQcoM7Wmlnvo/s474/GodardSuiveVie.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU1CiXF1lqgXWQbeET3NGGQ5YUvKTllGDouW8BhlKb_vLsbYA8jm6FoZRL3loMBYDRJvlOg9MIPzaw2qYNSwlTWl1Jw7R_teVGJ9Fr_5wmaSrD-QPb2DU1WW73Y1ZgIOpOLSkzY0Ri_Eq4RFXlCHX-tt_tVPzhSG4rym4lmpqAWXptEDkRQcoM7Wmlnvo/s320/GodardSuiveVie.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>Though <i>Suive qui peut (la vie)</i> was made in those days of yore before the postmodern age with its digital media arose, very little has actually changed in the brave new postmodern digital world. The economy is still dominated by the few. These few oligarchs who run the few dominant corporations of the economy continue to, while not monopolise power and authority hold the lion’s share of it and as a consequence have a massive influence on the political culture of the West, which itself dominates the global economy. They continue to maintain this power and authority thanks to the greater social, economic, political, and cultural capital they have and which they are able to transfer to their heirs via primary and secondary socialisation. They continue to believe that they are the best and brightest and blessed by nature and/or god. They continue to benefit demographically from a system, particularly in the United States, in which economic, political, cultural, and demographic—health care, for instance--is inequitably and irrationally distributed (irrational because of all the unnecessary redundancies in the US health care system). Despite all the initial utopian rhetoric that the internet would bring “liberty" and “freedom" and “democracy” (all ultimately empty vessels into which are poured several cultural meanings) to humankind the internet, including its numerous porn sites, remain dominated by mega or uber capitalist bureaucratic corporations like Google, Amazon, Mega (formerly Facebook) and Apple, to note a few, and massive inequities. <div><div><br /></div><div>As I have noted previously on this blog, I have been engaged in ethnographic work for several years on the social media site YouTube which is owned by Google. Google, like many capitalist bureaucratic corporations of the modern era, is an economic giant whose earnings rival the gross national and gross domestic products of some nation-states around the world. It is a political giant lobbying governments in its interests. It is geographical giant in t that it is global. It is a demographic giant in that millions if not billions of consumers “buy” or “consume" its products, products that for some have no inherent value since it is, they argue, impossible to quantify the value of knowledge labour. And it is a cultural giant.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJWOOvtzei6HK6or5vBZBBnOMgb3InZGgXiPJnNKYXaYl81kkCeHkS5zQTCnyWCqZNtRa6bnhCEM6qGJkqKSc_KfWCbx2op8sY-volgK0B1KzQ6frPldQLLPdfrzw2-Bgh4XJWSspBmO64mmoKkSRXJ-4E4iIfZiIe8kxGAKPZG-KQlZbUEjE64oV7sLk/s474/GodardSuiveImaginaire.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJWOOvtzei6HK6or5vBZBBnOMgb3InZGgXiPJnNKYXaYl81kkCeHkS5zQTCnyWCqZNtRa6bnhCEM6qGJkqKSc_KfWCbx2op8sY-volgK0B1KzQ6frPldQLLPdfrzw2-Bgh4XJWSspBmO64mmoKkSRXJ-4E4iIfZiIe8kxGAKPZG-KQlZbUEjE64oV7sLk/s320/GodardSuiveImaginaire.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>Despite the rhetoric of utopian digital media cheerleaders social media forms like YouTube are quite similar to other cultural and communication forms of the past. Like capitalist cultural communication corporations of the past social media forms are bureaucratic with remuneration, power, and authority inequitably distributed within them. Like capitalist communications bureaucracies of the past there are those who work for the communications corporation and those who run the corporation. YouTube, for example, like other social media corporations, takes a significant cut of the revenue generated by its “employees”—something many would argue is inherently exploitative--along with advertising monies it generates and plays, as did and does commercial television, over its videos unless one buys a VIP package from the corporation. Like capitalist media corporations of the past those who run the brave new digital communications corporations establish standards for the corporation and censor that which does not meet those corporate community standards. Like capitalist corporation communications forms of the past “employees” can be “fired. YouTube”employees”, for instance, who do not bring in enough revenues—reportedly 10,000 views over a period of time—are made redundant. Like the knowledge industries of the past the brave “new” social media are not interactive beyond the comments sections boxes below the videos in YouTube which may or may not be read by those who make the videos largely for monetary gain that voyeuristic consumers watch on social media sites like YouTube, comments, including the comments of most of those who do the reaction videos of films and television shows themselves, that are largely mundane and banal—lowest common denominator--and focused on a summary of the story and plot and whether the reactor and commentator liked what was being reacted or not. In other words, they, generally speaking, function in order to establish a community of the like-minded with their like-minded echo chambers and ostracisation of any who “deviate” from the constructed or fetishised norms. In this regard they function like most films and television shows of the past and like society and culture in general, they recapitulate socialisation for conformity and create and recreate, in the process, self-satisfied and self-righteous identity groups which are ethnocentric, hardly the cosmopolitanism some polemicists for the brave new digital media envisioned in their radiant brave new digital future narratives. Like capitalist corporate communications media of the past avant-garde artsiness and real critical criticism is barely present on social media, the content of which is mostly a vast wasteland of popcorn culture. Like the corporate media of the past Western media, and particularly American media and American English predominates. Social media, in other words, continues to mirror broader society and culture.</div><div><br /></div><div>The more things change...<br /><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><div><div><div><div><p><br /></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-19582160003155545332024-03-13T11:52:00.005-04:002024-03-17T07:38:17.815-04:00A Critical Ethnography of the Media: “Reading” What Isn’t There<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCBWcoPxoTuAN6XsOgZFSaxUln02v_9FVs2Wg8dvnVNy1mVeGDaCjWOfi5aLs_ON_QuaF6aBS0inFhUjSM-ebqqv4_JdCjU0zbDBAEyovALAt8rzGJ59UekIqSubMgVOEyyVM_j618EFoRW-mlxojDlsZlLmAY0GS234mrHzMaFFah4vSjMJlDobGwePw/s584/FaithandtheMayor.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="313" data-original-width="584" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCBWcoPxoTuAN6XsOgZFSaxUln02v_9FVs2Wg8dvnVNy1mVeGDaCjWOfi5aLs_ON_QuaF6aBS0inFhUjSM-ebqqv4_JdCjU0zbDBAEyovALAt8rzGJ59UekIqSubMgVOEyyVM_j618EFoRW-mlxojDlsZlLmAY0GS234mrHzMaFFah4vSjMJlDobGwePw/s320/FaithandtheMayor.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>There are, of course, a number of problems when it comes to the reaction videos of YouTube amateur reactors to to literature, films, books, and television programmes on that social media opiate, the newest of the lowest common denominator modern media form. Take for instance, the responses of most though not all social media reactors to the character of the mayor, the big bad of season three, in the masterful television show<i> Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>. <p></p><p>For most of these amateur reactors whatever the mayor says can’t be trusted. In the age of Trump and others of his ilk before and after the coming or modernity he has to be gesticulating and behaving simply for his own advantage, they believe. The problem, of course, with this “argument” or “hypothesis" is that while the mayor is is clearly a parody and satire of the all-American family values guy and gal he truly believes what he utters just as, one presumes, so do at least some of his politically and ideologically correct brethren, particularly those of the sucker sort who have been adeptly pied pipered. He is serious when he warns of the ungodly dangers of uncleanliness (a good old time proverb many of the reactors don’t grasp in these radiant best of all possible world days). He is serious when he tells Angel and Buffy that their relationship is doomed just like that or Romeo and Juliet. And he is serious when he treats Faith like the daughter he hasn’t had in some time—he is over a hundred years old after all—or never had. A few reactors eventually get the Faith/mayor relationship--a doubling of that between Buffy and Giles (season three, in fact, is full of doublings including that in the aptly named “Doppelgangland”)--only after the intense confrontation between Angel and the mayor in the hospital in the last episode of the season, “Graduation Day”, as Buffy and Faith lie comatose in their hospital beds.</p><p>There are, of course, several reasons for the amateur Buffy reactor’s misreadings and misinterpretations of the mayor’s discourse and actions. The literalist kiddies (metaphor alert) of today can’t even see the literalism on the screen in front of their eyes and ears (literal and metaphorical). That is because there are things that don’t change. As PT once said, suckers are born every minute. Demagogues, of course, love that fact, that suckers—those who don’t know the difference between past and present spatially or temporally—are born every minute because it literally and metaphorically means they can more easily manipulate the masses for cultic politically and ideologically correct conformity. Now that would be a great allegory if it wasn’t for the fact that it is so literally true.</p><p>Another problem with the kiddies of the today, something that also connects them to past kiddies, is their inability to read or grasp tone. But then they don’t have experience with those adept at tonal shifts (and intellectual wit for that matter) like Shakespeare, Gogol, Turgenev, Bulgakov, Twain, and Hitchcock to help them since they have been fed on a steady diet of literalist and lowest common denominator cinematic crap that is characterised by low level wit, low level literal tonal shifts, low level literal parody, and they don’t really read much these days beyond their cell phones.<i> Buffy</i>, like Shakespeare, like Gogol, like Turgenev, like Bulgakov, like Twain, and like Hitchcock often comedy, tragedy, drama, satire, and parody all at the same time and while deciphering these changing tones may be a challenge for some of those brought up in this increasingly humanities free education world one would still expect that even the educated amateur should be able to discern the changes in tone and how tone works in <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>. It is not that difficult even for the socialised for conformity literally minded crowd.</p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-49267185415984785102024-03-05T14:07:00.008-05:002024-03-14T09:48:25.931-04:00Harmony, Shut Up: Musings on Hedgehogs, Foxes, Wolves, Sheep, and Human Moronicity<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2RIkJgT92f_sa_ldJrnl96rvAWlIiio8onFHc38swKaTHIxDhFvb8DusDREv-IY66UYPlZB9OelAC7rbqgqPHzwZLxp1Hc-fwBht8lkVFLCymBZemOAA8i22sZyOIj0MJsrX0AousEDzXDSptG5xWcWnWrBc327xGuBXgJ4KWsrY1semgO9OU-kVxRQI/s620/BlackSheepWhiteSheep.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="389" data-original-width="620" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2RIkJgT92f_sa_ldJrnl96rvAWlIiio8onFHc38swKaTHIxDhFvb8DusDREv-IY66UYPlZB9OelAC7rbqgqPHzwZLxp1Hc-fwBht8lkVFLCymBZemOAA8i22sZyOIj0MJsrX0AousEDzXDSptG5xWcWnWrBc327xGuBXgJ4KWsrY1semgO9OU-kVxRQI/s320/BlackSheepWhiteSheep.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>The social sciences—Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and History—do, when founded on empiricism and interpretations grounded in political, economic, cultural, biological-demographic, and geographical facts--help those of us interested in real humanity understand real humanity, the real human condition, and the real factors that impact humanity. They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology, help us, for example, to understand how humans often construct their own “realities”. They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology, tell us something about the role ethnocentrism has played in human history and continues to play in human culture and society. They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology and Sociology, tell us something about the social and cultural construction of “normality” and “deviance” and the role socialisation plays in replicating notions of “normal” and “abnormal” through soft power or the inability to think outside the socialised for conformity box and through hard power or coercion. They, and particularly Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and History (the academic discipline most prone to pull its own punches and provide, in the process the mythological, the mythhistorical, substructure for societies and cultures) tell us something about how humanity has changed over time and how human society and culture have varied across time and space.<p></p><p>The social sciences, of course, are not the only intellectual cultures that help us understand humanity and the human condition. Fiction, particularly classic fiction and particularly serious fiction, the fiction of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, of Lev Tolstoy, of Mikhail Bulgakov, of Nikolay Gogol, of Mark Twain, and of Alice Munro, to chose a few examples, have long helped many including me grasp the “nature”of humanity and the “nature” of the human condition. Perhaps the work of fiction that has helped me most understand both is a short story by the noted science fiction writer C.M. Kornbluth titled “The Marching Morons”.</p><p>“The Marching Morons” is fascinating on a number of different levels. On the basic or literal level it is a tale about how the few intellectuals have to spend large chunks of their lives inventing devices and making them work in order to protect the masses, the marching morons, from themselves. On another level “The Marching Morons" is a clever inversion of Karl Marx’s conception of the working class, who Marx sees as the carrier of real humanity and real human society and culture and who will, thanks to the dialectic of time and with the help of intellectuals, restore humanity to its real nature by undermining breaking the cultural and ideological chains associated with the fetishisation of the commodities.</p><p>I don’t think I have ever read a piece of fiction or non-fiction that, as does Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”, captures something essential about humanity across both time and space. When viewed in combination with Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox” it helps us understand something important about not only intellectual culture but mass culture. Berlin, of course, divided intellectual culture into two groups: the hedgehogs, those who try to find the essence of humanity, society, and culture in a single factor, and foxes, those who see multiple factors as providing the bases for humanity, society, and culture. </p><p>The division between hedgehogs and foxes may be quite compelling when we focus on intellectual culture particularly in the West. Intellectual culture, however, is only a minute and perhaps shrinking part of human culture. Intellectuals, whether hedgehogs or foxes, are countercultures within a tiny broader counterculture. Broader society and culture is made up more by sheep than either hedgehogs or foxes as Kornbluth points up While the hedgehogs and foxes can and sometimes do think outside the cultural and ideological boxes they have been socialised for conformity into, the sheep rarely if ever think outside the box. They live largely contented lives fetishising the ideological commodities they have been socialised into as long as they can eat the bread and attend the circuses that help breed contentment or at least vaccinate the masses from thinking outside the box too often or too much.</p><p>The problem with Berlin’s division of intellectual culture into hedgehogs and foxes is that it is not broad enough. Those intellectuals, those apologists, those polemicists, those demagogues, who are courtiers, who are sycophants to those who have power because of their economic positions, their political positions, and their positions in the media, and who help the powers that be manipulate the socialised for conformity masses, the suckers as P.T. Barnum called them, are best described as wolves. </p><p>Like intellectual culture in general, this culture of wolves, this culture of demagogues, is characterised by countercultures. There are, for example, demagogues on the left, demagogues who identify as liberals, demagogues who identify as conservative, and demagogues who are actually right wing populists. Those in the last counterculture, this culture of hired spin doctors who play sweat and sweat sour political and ideological flutes to the masses, differ in degree or quality from those in the other countercultures in that for them any means—lies, disinformation, scapegoating, slurs, inquisitions, uber hypocrisy, even murder (killing for the Lord)--can be used to achieve their theocratic ends because they believe that they and they alone are directly wired into god, history, nature, whatever. And yes I do realise that polemical (and to some extent analytical) intellectual Marxism shares this ethnocentric ideological and utopian trait.</p><p>With the triumph of mass modern society, mass capitalism, mass faux democracy—even Iceland is not a democracy in the real sense given bureaucratic realities though silent Friends communities may be—the masses have come to play a central role in producing and reproducing mass society, mass capitalism, and mass faux democracy given the extension of the franchise and the increasing role the mass media, including the mass brave new digital media, plays in pied piping the sometimes if not generally gullible masses. Paradoxically, even when the masses are not gullible they often get their cognitive wires crossed as when the right wing populist masses in the US, blame the federal government for all the ills of society, except when it comes to imperial warmaking, of course, rather than the economic elite who actually, thanks to their wealth, their bureaucratic positions, and the power and authority that comes from these, who really run most of the governments of the Western world. Both the Marxist Frankfurt School and Conservative Mass Society critics, of course, recognised these problems of mass society even if they did not always divine the cures for the mass society sickness. </p><p>Will any of this ever change? I doubt it. The Frankfurt School and Foucault were actually right. Postmodern digital media have made it possible to spread bullshite, lies, delusions, and hallucinatory conspiracy theories faster and farther than was possible via the oral media of the traditional world and the modern media of the modern world. Education cannot stop it because schooling is not liberatory despite the liberal dogma that it is save only for a small minority. Delusion is probably even more prominent today than it was in the past. There are more masses than intellectuals and more conformist intellectuals than dissidents, those whose voices are always crying in a wilderness. The historically dissident Society of Friends, a group at the forefront of peace activism, indigenous rights, women’s rights, gay rights, for instance, even when its conformist wings are counted amount to only 400,000 worldwide. Even economic crises these days, thanks to socialism for the rich and powerful, thanks, in other words, to the use of taxpayers monies to bail out risk loving economic and financial vampiric corporations, have little impact on the systems that have been developed by those in power to maintain the dynamic status quo in mass capitalist societies like the US. </p><p>Perhaps only an ecological catastrophe can bring about real change at this point. And ecological change is coming. In fact, it is already here in the form of pollution, climate change, health problems associated with both, and the declines in animal species, to name only a very few things associated with the human made apocalypse. While environmental catastrophe is unstoppable at this point what this entails for the human animal is uncertain. Perhaps the powers that be will leave this planet for another and the whole sick cycle will start anew. Regardless of what happens stay tuned for while the human drama, tragedy, comedy, black comedy, parody, and satire may not be all that suspenseful what is scarier, more horrific, more terrifying, more barbaric, more sickening, more distressing, and more full of blood and guts than the seemingly never ending plague that humanity brings in its wake. As always, candy and popcorn are always available in the lobby or in the kitchen.</p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-43437036381665289222024-03-02T08:46:00.009-05:002024-03-04T19:21:02.533-05:00The Mystery that is Amazon or, Lowest Common Denominator Capriciousness in the Brave New Digital Age<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPbm3AzoVyhi9VQ9x2FDgVNQ9I0OhGZWA2VQxT5mSJ-aOGpfdUWWnf06x0otQzYKoCJn3s4eceRnIKz5Unq0V_CJfxdhGlaXphcgIartWNGV9mhsnjjZTsEhzZkG7hd8xkv3CyCiiHaL230HRuH-QPZY0zg4S3YMmYeWHUHFfDnHJudJ-BpXhkhkw8gp4/s1600/Amazeus.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPbm3AzoVyhi9VQ9x2FDgVNQ9I0OhGZWA2VQxT5mSJ-aOGpfdUWWnf06x0otQzYKoCJn3s4eceRnIKz5Unq0V_CJfxdhGlaXphcgIartWNGV9mhsnjjZTsEhzZkG7hd8xkv3CyCiiHaL230HRuH-QPZY0zg4S3YMmYeWHUHFfDnHJudJ-BpXhkhkw8gp4/s320/Amazeus.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div>Trying to figure out the “logic” of Amazon is like trying to figure out why the Holocaust happened in a world supposedly presided over by a caring god. It is like trying to figure out why good things happen to bad people. It is like trying to figure out why the innocent die young. It is like trying to figure out why elites who sit on their arses spinning their world controlling webs wage wars that kill not them, generally speaking, but kill those who have little to do with why such wars are fought in the first place. You can’t understand any of this unless you assume that the capricious gods of myth are really real.<p></p><p>Take a recent experience I had with Skankizon. I have purchased a number of Alto Classic reissues from Amazon.com over the years. In fact, I recently purchased--since the beginning of the new year in fact-- Alto ALC 1485, Richter playing Prokofiev, and Alto ALC 1469, Simon conducting Grainger. I wanted to purchase two more: Alto ALC 1318, Oistrakh playing Prokofiev, and Alto ALC 1218, Ashkenazy playing Chopin. When I got to Skankizon checkout, however, Amazon claimed that it could not post these to my US street address. Uh, why? It could not be that the CDs weigh over 70 pounds or are more than 108 inches in size. They aren't. It could not be because the CDs are restricted because of hazmat regulations. They aren’t toxic though some might see them as such. It could not be that these CDs violate Amazon policies. Amazon offers them for sale so they can’t violate these policies. Moreover, Amazon has, as I mentioned earlier, sold several Alto discs to me over the years already including another Prokofiev played by Richter. It could not be that the item is restricted for sale by Alto. Why would Alto restrict Amazon sales of specific discs to upstate New York or restrict sales of items Amazon stocks to sell? It could not be because the item is restricted for export. Amazon.com has the item in its US warehouses and I live in the US. New York hasn’t seceded from the Confederate states yet as far as I know. It is not because Amazon.com does not export items. It does. Moreover, this item is not being exported unless New York is now, for Amazon, a foreign land.</p><p>Why will Amazon not sell these two Alto discs to me? Who knows? Though the actions of gods like Zeus are ultimately comprehensible those of Skankizon are not.</p><p>Postscript…I actually got a response, a real and not a bot one from the Amazonian heavens when I put this blog up on the Amazon's Facebook page. I was—formulaic, formulaic—told to mosey on over service and ask my questions there. The thing was I had done that already. Yesterday, in fact. And guess what I got there? Yup. Nothing. To be precise I was abandoned by one chat customer service operative for a future one who never, a la Godot, showed up. As I told the once correspondent on Amazon’s Facebook page who likewise left me an orphan, I will, in the future, get my Alto discs from Target in the USofA because unlike Amazon I haven’t experienced Mickey Mouse at Target…Yet. </p><p>Postscript 2: I was, by the way, able to get the Alto Prokofiev Oistrakh disc I wanted from Target. Unlike US Amazon, US Target actually sells Alto discs they claim to have in stock to New York consumers. As I told Kramazon today, up yours. I will get my items from other sources even if they cost more first in the future.</p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-66009901521178235502024-03-01T09:59:00.000-05:002024-03-01T09:59:34.698-05:00The Books of My Life: Canada (Cook)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirAV-hnTYrPAWj_BFqu4ClgGA23H3ptLrAKM1u1l1cYCuPNvjKk-CAubNkP9V8iMZpLfgMhun88ME9RqxoL9VEBUT2mFV4KfftxATC8cA3n2B-QkRjacdNiYYzD-iWc4WHzhSJmZaMDCe4hbfJL79CKvO8Ftvfmxg6hqLW9rl8XFOI5Y4IfktvL4JGkIc/s491/CookCanada.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="491" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirAV-hnTYrPAWj_BFqu4ClgGA23H3ptLrAKM1u1l1cYCuPNvjKk-CAubNkP9V8iMZpLfgMhun88ME9RqxoL9VEBUT2mFV4KfftxATC8cA3n2B-QkRjacdNiYYzD-iWc4WHzhSJmZaMDCe4hbfJL79CKvO8Ftvfmxg6hqLW9rl8XFOI5Y4IfktvL4JGkIc/s320/CookCanada.jpg" width="196" /></a></div>Though it is now almost fifty years old <i>Canada: A Modern Study</i> (Toronto: Irwin, Contemporary Canada: Issues and Insights series, revised and enlarged edition, 1977) by noted Canadian historian Ramsey Cook with John Saywell and John Ricker, remains an excellent brief introduction to Canadian history from the British conquest of New France to the early 1970s. Unlike the fragmented introductory textbooks that dominate the college and university textbook market these days <i>Canada: A Modern History</i> gives interested readers a coherent narrative thanks to its focus on political and economic history, its focus on francophone and anglophone relations in British North American and Canada, and its focus on relations between British North America and Canada and the "first new nation" the United States. <br /><p></p><p><i>Canada: A Modern History</i> provides readers with the highlights of Canadian political and economic history from the British conquest of New France, to the important fur and fish trade in British North America, the rebellion of1837--a rebellion that had both francophone and US dimensions--Confederation, the prime ministership of John Macdonald, Canadian expansion into the West, the prime ministership of Wilfrid Laurier, World War I, the prime ministership of William Lyon Mackenzie King, World War II, the prime ministership of Lester Pearson, and finally the prime ministership of Pierre Trudeau in the late 1960s and early 1970s. </p><p>Cook does an excellent job of exploring the transition of Canada from a rural and agriculture economy to a modern industrial economy in which mining, timber, iron and steel were important. He does an excellent job of exploring the history of political parties in Canada, major and minor. He does an excellent job of exploring tensions between the provinces and Ottawa. He does an excellent job of exploring how a Canada that was part of the British empire became, thanks in part to its geography, an economic and cultural adjunct of another empire, the United States and the tensions that have sometimes surfaced in that relationship. He does an excellent job of exploring the tensions, tensions which ebbed and flowed over the years, between the English and French, anglophone and francophone British North America and Canada. He does an excellent job of exploring the complexities of identity in a nation that was French, British, increasingly less Anglo-Saxon after World War II, and massively impacted economically and influenced politically and culturally by the United States. He does an excellent job of exploring the roles status, class, ethnicity/race, and gender have
played in British North American and Canadian history. And he does an excellent job of integrating a bit of quantitative social and qualitative cultural history into the broader text,</p><p><i>Canada: A Modern Study</i> is, of course, somewhat outdated and some may wonder whether it is worth reading some fifty years after its revised edition appeared. I would strongly argue that it is. <i>Canada: A Modern Study</i> provides readers who want a brief overview of British North American and Canadian history with a sound understanding of the political and economic history of British North America and Canada--an economic and political history which every student of Canada should know--and it does so in very readable and concise prose. So while we may have a more nuanced picture these days, for example, of the Loyalists who fled or were expelled from the United States (a kind of political and ideological cleansing) and who eventually made their way to Canada, <i>Canada: A Modern Study</i> nevertheless remains a solid introduction that provides students and interested readers with an excellent introduction to the essentials of the history of British North America and Canadian. Very highly recommended.<br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-43279109031286804732024-02-22T09:40:00.003-05:002024-03-15T06:36:19.442-04:00We Want Your Money: The CVS Health Kiada<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWq39BdIyrkdefDKqoNxi5iewUTG6LGZbwABpr5kH7mySIQ6Ic-8krdiFKdfxzn18l120-GV27HvdNDovqplNR7mIdHTP5GK9E0lULuz72m6rMM128B-B17IbTgQciCHB-38a7p311_U7bnCmv9vaXeIkKDXs3qAz9ltnARo5pyBCUNAeERW0N8Vs-mTQ/s474/CVSHeallthSilverScript.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWq39BdIyrkdefDKqoNxi5iewUTG6LGZbwABpr5kH7mySIQ6Ic-8krdiFKdfxzn18l120-GV27HvdNDovqplNR7mIdHTP5GK9E0lULuz72m6rMM128B-B17IbTgQciCHB-38a7p311_U7bnCmv9vaXeIkKDXs3qAz9ltnARo5pyBCUNAeERW0N8Vs-mTQ/s320/CVSHeallthSilverScript.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I never had a single problem with my health care pharmaceutical insurance coverage during the sixteen years I worked for New York state until September of 2021, the month and the year I retired from the New York state workforce. It was then, thanks, no doubt, to a wealthfare contract New York state made with the for profit CVS Health and CVS Silver Script (a cool $140 billion plus last year), that all that changed and trouble started and it started almost immediately.<p></p><p>I was told by my largely useless union's health care specialist that nothing would really change when I was force switched from the prescription coverage I had been on to the new one they had "negotiated" with CVS Health and CVS Silver Script. Boy was he wrong. Within weeks if not days CVS Health forced me to accept an overpriced generic version of Advair because the doctor had not noted on the prescription form that only Advair should be prescribed, a feat that would have been impressive given that neither one of us knew that there was a generic equivalent to Advair on the market some thirty years after Advair had its coming out debutant party. </p><p>Not knowing any better given the switchover in my prescription coverage, I bought the generic Advair, took it, and immediately and had an allergic reaction to it, something I am still dealing with and have never fully recovered from. Needless to say CVS Health took no responsibility for this but then that is one of the joys of being a corporation that is a person and not a person at the same time. I didn't do it and my team of highly paid lawyers silled in delaying tactics will keep you from proving it. </p><p>This was not the end of my trials and travails with this for profit healthcare bureaucracy. Last month I was informed that CVS Health was striking the once numbered amongst the elect Advair from its holy Formulary no doubt because of money. Generics cost them less. They told me I could apply for an exception to this dogmatic rule, which I and my pulmonologist did.<br /></p><p>When I went to get a refill of Advair from my pharmacy, however, the bill was $120 dollars for three, a bill I could not and cannot pay as I am on a $20,000 dollar a year income and have a car payment of nearly $400. So I contacted my doctor. They tried to talk reason to CVS Health but had no success. CVS sent me two letters and had a bureaucrat likely from their PRor Propaganda Ministry call to explain the situation to me, a flunky who did not even know that I and my doctor applied for an exception to the holy rule because I had an alergic reaction to the generic version of Advair and could not take it.<br /></p><p>My solution--one I was forced into--was to opt for a similar drug, Wixela. So the doctor wrote me a prescription for it and sent it to Lincoln Pharmacy. They called me to say they had to order it and then, an hour or so later, to say they could not get it from their distributor. Not surprisingly I was forced to put in a prescription for it to CVS Health's CVS Caremark Pharmacy. Needless to say, I was shocked, shocked. </p><p>So that is where we stand at the moment. Let me simply note, in conclusion, that the US health care system with its millions uncovered, undercovered, and manipulatedly covered by Mr. Potter like for profit health care companies is the worst in the "civilised" core nation world, a fact pointed up not only by the fact that the US has millions uncovered or underovered while corporations doing the same things--a little thing called unnecessary redundancy--make millions for their morally bankrupt shareholders and corporate elites but also by the fact that the US numbers among the leaders in infant deaths and mothers dying during childbirth. Now that is something to be proud of. </p><p>Let us now pledge allegiance to American exceptionalism...<br /></p><p><br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-83815837030348605762024-02-20T14:58:00.003-05:002024-02-20T17:47:18.199-05:00The Walmart Kiada: Lose Money, Live Worse.<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj08RxnAEoafKkDeupzhmpVOVXS3bhR4sV0HNFatP_3xEmscda0kJmtH2R1poK8YEl_mamKpDfptmyYbEMQC5rNcx12awCAcI0GvL_8CKT_xQvn6xdgsYqtGWYw_8YEMjbJvKugUT6hge41cVEsagHmzGLmBYRl2L4ISvsJMcONph4kVamO4HUBHwzAYLI/s400/WalmartSucks.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj08RxnAEoafKkDeupzhmpVOVXS3bhR4sV0HNFatP_3xEmscda0kJmtH2R1poK8YEl_mamKpDfptmyYbEMQC5rNcx12awCAcI0GvL_8CKT_xQvn6xdgsYqtGWYw_8YEMjbJvKugUT6hge41cVEsagHmzGLmBYRl2L4ISvsJMcONph4kVamO4HUBHwzAYLI/s320/WalmartSucks.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I really dislike Amazon but then there is a lot to dislike about Amazon. It is a monopoly. Its CEO, Jeff Beezos, is yet another one of those avoid corporate taxes liberal who likes to throw his weight--his monies, in other words--around to defeat candidates like Kshama Sawant, a socialist member of the city council in Seattle who strongly supports union. Beezos--I am shocked, shocked--doesn't. He wines and dines with other pinky liberal elites of his political and ideological and narcissistic ilk like the Clinton's and the Obama's and even the Saudi's. He plans to join Donny "Tangholio" Trump in that "heaven" that is ruled by the self-proclaimed High Priest of the Low Church of Ideological and Political Correctness, Blarmey Ronnie DeSantis. And he now presides like the sun king over an empire that used to have one of the best websites on the internet but which now has one of the worst. For all these reasons and more I decided to try to wean myself off the overgrown and overripe pig that is Amazon. I decided, therefore, to take more of my business to Walmart.com. That decision, it turns out, was a bad one.<p></p><p>During my month or so on Walmart.com I was sent an item that did not work, an item that was lost in transition, an item that was put outside my house on the steps rather than in the foyer below the post boxes, an item that was not as pictured, and an item that was supposedly delivered but, while it may have been delivered somewhere was not delivered to my. Now to be fair Walmart.con, oops Walmart.com, was only complicit in the item lost in transition, the item that was not as pictured, and the item that disappeared into another dimension. What they are complicit in is that in the last two cases they, when I contacted them, did the Pontius Pilate jig and washed their hands of the whole affair. In fact, in the case of the item lost in transition--a large bottle of Method dish soap--they told me to contact my bank to try to get the monies back. One of the problems with that scuzzy solution was that I actually put the on my American Express card, something they could have found out if they simply looked at my account.</p><p>Long story short, I deleted my online Walmart account and will no longer be making purchases from them on the web. What I will be doing is filing a complaint with the New York Office of the Attorney General to get back the monies Walmart stole from me. As to buying in the brick and mortar store I think I am going to switch my business to Target and see if they are as skanky and slaggy as Walmart. Needless to say, Target has a Herculean task in front of it if I wants to become part of the that group of slaggy corporations that includes Amazon, Walmart, CVS Health, a lingload of tax preparer corporations online, and Tracfone.<br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-4214377679630694862024-02-18T10:07:00.008-05:002024-02-20T13:17:19.230-05:00The Great American Taxpaying Kiada<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRGpEXEwS2DP5TMIn8xSG8ir3vTzvhDDAwDyRjWqb5k_mrnDCawdLMONUOtzB9E4GWqQEzFGG8AtLp4B5zp_Zkf8Hdn3GE3yq5l04ow2nfB_fujX7cbf24yMoKvbLAltMMeSFPUgVImeeJzxSyjAIJn2OUfOtl2A6aZOwLg_wvD-J8UZRHS5io5lTCROQ/s474/FreeFilleTax.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="355" data-original-width="474" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRGpEXEwS2DP5TMIn8xSG8ir3vTzvhDDAwDyRjWqb5k_mrnDCawdLMONUOtzB9E4GWqQEzFGG8AtLp4B5zp_Zkf8Hdn3GE3yq5l04ow2nfB_fujX7cbf24yMoKvbLAltMMeSFPUgVImeeJzxSyjAIJn2OUfOtl2A6aZOwLg_wvD-J8UZRHS5io5lTCROQ/s320/FreeFilleTax.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>It is time once again for that dreaded event that happens every year in the United States, paying one's taxes. I spent several hours doing mine yesterday all in the midst of being told by the fascist and vampiric CVS Caremark a division of the skanky and slaggy CVS Health, that a medicine I have taken since 1990 and which I depend on would no longer be available to me because it was no longer one of the elect on the corporte formulary. This meant, in turn, that this essential medicine had become too expensive for someone on a very limited budget like me to purchase. This just added to the inherent pain that is doing one's taxes in the backward we love the stone age United States.<p></p><p>Over the years, despite the stated intentions of those governmental and corporate elites who have the power and authority to determine how taxes work in the United States, doing one's taxes has become ever more difficult. It did not used to be this way. At one time the US Internal Revenue System, the government bureaucracy that collects American taxes, had what they called an 1040 EZ form that people who had limited incomes and who took the standard deduction could file. Between 1982 and 2017--the day the EZ form died--I always used the 1040EZ to do my taxes save for one calender year when I was self-employed while working on the <i>Encylopedia for New York State</i> thanks to Syracuse University Press's decision to treat its <i>Encyclopedia</i> personnel as freelancers rahter than employees for obvious reasons. Then Dandy wolf boy Donnie "Tangholio" Trump and his "tax reforms" came along and the EZ form disappeared and those of us who had no problem doing the EZ form were suddenly faced with a far more daunting and absurd project, doing a much longer tax form, the 1040.</p><p>Those of us with tiny incomes did have another option by then. We could do our taxes online. Of course, tax preparer services, both independent and corporate, have been around for some time, something that is at least partly a measure of how easy and difficult filing taxes in the US was and is.The private H&R Block, for instance, was born just after World War II to help taxpayers do their taxes. With the coming of the brave new digital age, not surprisingly, tax preparer services went digital offering software that could be purchased and used by taxpayers to file their taxes and later online services that could be purchased by taxpayers and used to file taxes. Turbo Tax, for instance, came into existence in 1984 and offered software for sale to those who wanted an easier way to file US taxes and now offers the same services online.<br /> <br />In the early part of the twentieth century, after some criticism of the cost of these private services, the Free File Alliance of tax preparing bureaucracies arose and entered into a public-private partnership with the IRS in order to allow those on limited incomes to file their American taxes online. This public and private partnership is supposed to allow Americans who make less that around $70,000 dollars a year to file their federal taxes (and in some cases state taxes) free. But do they?</p><p>To take Turbo Tax, a service I have used for several years now and which opted out of Free File Alliance in 2021 after being at the forefront of its founding, investigative reports have, over the years, found that this now Intuit owned corporation made their free tax service forms hard to find and that Turbo Tax intentionally steered free form users to paid services. They still do. Turbo Tax, for instance, which I have used to do my taxes for the last several years, channelled me, thanks to, they claimed, the massive $26 dollars in book royalties I received last year, onto a pay platform despite the fact that my income was well under the $70,000 dollar threshold--it is around $20,000 dollars--the fact that I owed no taxes and got no tax refund, and despite the fact that $26 dollars in royalties does not an aristocrat make. I could find no way around this honey money Berlin Wall like trap pot Turbo Tax had put in place though there supposedly is one, according to online posters, if you want to start all over again--and have lots of fun, fun, fun in the process--and then hitting some virtual buttons. </p><p>To digress a bit, I had the exact same problems with Tax Act and another "free" tax service whose name I have forgotten this tax filing year in addition to Turbo Tax. Free for them is not what we generally mean when we talk about getting something for free, namely not paying for it. They make it virtually impossible for the uninitiated not to pay for their "services". Perhaps I will see what EZTaxReturn is like next tax season. I suspect I will find more of the same.<br /></p><p>This political lobbying by private corporations, of course, points up the real nature of the public and private partnership between the IRS and various private for profit tax preparer services in the US. The IRS, which could easily do the taxes of those who make below a certain income threshold and who take standard deductions, is handcuffed by the fact that the wolves, in this case the for profit tax preparer corporations and the politicians they control, are in charge thanks to their economic and political power and lobbying efforts and they have no interest in supporting programmes that would help most Americans but cut into their profits. </p><p>These private companies use all sorts of strategies to maintain their privileged positions including lobbying the American legislature, contributing to political candidates, and forming their own "governing" bodies. Paradoxically, it was Intuit which helped form the Free File Alliance to head off possible federal government investigations into their flim flam and snake oil practise of using the claim of "free" tax filing to entice those who use their services onto pay platforms in order to futher enrich themselves. Like Hollywood and like comic book peddlers in the US a before them online tax preparers instituted a private body to allow them, the wolves, to continue to guard the henhouse without any government "interference" to assure that what the tax preperation services said they were doing, namely offereing free tax services for those on iimited incomes, is what they were actually doing. </p><p>This cynical prophylactic seems to have worked at least for the moment. But, as I noted, the rhetoric is different from the reality. "Free", for these vampire corporations, actually means getting as much blood from the stone as they possibly can. Will things change in how the US collects their taxes? Will the IRS be given the power to file forms for taxpayers who make less than a threshold income and who take the standard deduction? Will American politicians put people over corporations and their never ending obsession with nore and more profts, an obsession that borders on if not passes over a sadomasochistic fetish line? Will a private corporate service arise to help online tax filers get around the firewalls put in place by tax online tax preparers to wring monies out of tax filers for a fee, of course. I doubt it. See the government-corporate complex. But hey, stay tuned, perhaps Pollyanna was right and America isn't a bunch of pink houses for the 99% to live in.<br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-24754973763857621282024-02-16T12:12:00.009-05:002024-02-16T13:33:24.142-05:00The Continuing and Never Ending Saga of Corporate and Governmental Merry-Go-Rounds...<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifz0wHpKZjUTl-64oscH6cviQgkO4czYXN1PD-3axIt3s-ynxUfmvf_mkIanpUg1pQms0BtiQuEWS04RDMNTvPOfv9P7-UkPSzOgIjgn1Gyd2Jn8E-Ocwbb2WjqKvkuX0Mj32tkUBct0RYrOqkyHLHEQxP9lbBt5hAbsqJ0Xb4NYTWNObLDNfBE2SQjYs/s500/FuckBureaucracy.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="334" data-original-width="500" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifz0wHpKZjUTl-64oscH6cviQgkO4czYXN1PD-3axIt3s-ynxUfmvf_mkIanpUg1pQms0BtiQuEWS04RDMNTvPOfv9P7-UkPSzOgIjgn1Gyd2Jn8E-Ocwbb2WjqKvkuX0Mj32tkUBct0RYrOqkyHLHEQxP9lbBt5hAbsqJ0Xb4NYTWNObLDNfBE2SQjYs/s320/FuckBureaucracy.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I have written about the hair pulling and soul killing experience dealing with bureaucracies--corporate and governmental, public and private--are many times before on this blog. Today, I am going to talk about it again because dealing with bureaucracies of all kinds never ends in a life cycle that, in the brave new digital bureaucratic world, has become increasingly about managing crisis after crisis caused by bureaucracies.<p></p><p>So, today the bureaucracies I want to talk about are four: Intuit Turbo Tax, the Empire State CVS Caremark prescription programme, and the New York State Civil Service. Let's start with Intuit.</p><p>Today I got up early in the morning--around six am to be precise--to do my taxes, one of the most hated things I have to do in addition to going to a laundromat, going to doctors, having one of those CT Scan dye tests, being forced to watch American television and YouTube reaction videos, and dealing with bureaucracies in general in my life. Though I have used Turbo Tax before I could not get into my account this morning because they wanted to send me--shades of idiocies past--a security code to a phone number that is no longer in operation as the phone died and I ended my awful relationship with Tracfone. Will they send the security code to my email which they have? Of course not. Welcome back to Kafkaville.</p><p>Now on to CVS Caremark and the New York State Civil Service. The problems I had with CVS Caremark and the New York State Civil Service this morning are the same and both revolve around the same thing, prescription issues. Some backstory first. I have been taking Advair for my asthma since 1990. When I retired and my pre-retirement prescription coverage was changed to CVS Caremark Silver Script things changed despite claims to the contrary by the good old useless union who told me little if anything would change for me. I was immediately given a generic version of Advair that unbeknownst to me and my doctor, had just come on the market. I did not know that I should not get this generic given the change in my coverage. Now don't get me wrong, I like generics and I find it morally disgusting that the rich pharmaceutical companies do everything in their power--and their power is extensive; just ask the lawmakers in DC--to keep cheaper generics off the market. They care more about profits than people after all. However, I unfortunately had an allergic reaction to this generic Advair which my health has still not recovered. So, I had to go back on Advair.</p><p>Jump ahead some two years later: CVS Caremark (remember corporations are always about profits over people despite their demagogic rhetoric), took Advair off my formulary, the holy list of the elect and the damned kept by America's insurance corporations. Both I and someone at my doctor's office noted that I had an allergic reaction to this medicine and that therefore Advair should be approved for me at formulary prices. CVS Caremark denied this peasant's petition saying the PA who put in the request did not have royal permission do so. Given this my pharmacy had to charge me $120 dollars for the medicine. Needless to say, I skipped this honour, this act of royal health insurance patronage, as I don't have that amount of monies to pay for this medicine on a regular basis and even if I did I would would not pay such an obscene price for it. Welcome back to Kafkaville.<br /></p><p>So, I contacted my doctors office and I called the number on the back of my Empire Plan, NYSHIP, CVS Silver Script prescription card, 877.769.7447. Empire Plan NYSHIP, CVS Silver Script, in turn, told me to call New York State Civil Service. So I called NYSCS at 518.457.9375. They told me to call Empire Plan, NYSHIP, CVS Silver Script...AGAIN. Since Empire Plan, NYSHIP, CVS Silver Script had previously told me to call NYState Civil Service that seemed like a no go. Welcome back to Kafkaville.So, I asked to speak to a supervisor. He put me on hold--of course--and tried to transfer me to the New York State Retirement System. Eventually I was able to request a call back but since they had my telephone number completely and utterly wrong I don't have much hope for a call back. I did, of course, put in the correct number but that was followed by a request for an extension, which I, of course don't have since I have a personal rather than a corporate phone. Welcome back to Kafkaville.</p><p>At this point I have given up. I simply can't deal with this bureaucratic bullshite anymore. I am fucking tired of having to manage crisis after crisis every month of my retired life. The doctor's office, the only competent one of the bunch, is trying to get this rectified. I am at the point, however, in favour of going on a less effective medicine that is on the Holy Formulary simply to avoid this never ending bureaucratic bullshite. Bureaucracies, after all, particularly in the unmerry-go-round world of brave new digital age, wear and beat you down mentally and physically, eventually.</p><p>So, the doctor's office reports that I can no longer get Advair. The alternatives on the formulary are too expensive. Let's hear it for the American health care system, the worst in the "civilised" world, the health care unsystem that puts profits over people's health. Speaking of profits over people, GSK, who makes Advair, no longer offers assistance to those who use it now that it has gone all generic on my allergic arse.</p><p>For your information...Notes from my doctor's office on this matter...<br />Note One:Hi Ron, I am on the phone right now with Caremark, they manage Empires prescription drug plan. They confirmed that the Advair Diskus 100-50 is non-formulary, but they did approve it with a PA last year, I confirmed the PA on file is active, I explained that you have trialed basically every formulary alternative they have suggested, generic or otherwise, and you copay for the inhalers have gone up from $10/3month to $120/3 month and that's not appropriate for a medication that we have obtained Prior Auth for and there are no reasonable alternatives for you to trial. I am also submitting with your insurance a "Tier lowering" form to see if we can get the cost reduced. The plan also recommended that you contact the number on the back of your card for member services. Just in case we cannot get the tier lowering form approved with your insurance, they may have other options for you such as patient assistance programs and such. As far as alternatives, there are not many available in the class of inhaler you are prescribed that are comparable and formulary and would be as effective. </p><p>Note Two: I hit a road block myself too. I got all the way up to the clinical specialty pharmacist. Medicare has really covered all of the loop holes, and I tried to get the formulary tier exception pushed through. So even though you have a prior auth on file, its not assigned a "tier" what the pharmacist told is that means they cannot lower the tier because the PA's don't officially have a "tier" assigned, even tho it sounds like it gets assigned to the highest tier anyway. I reiterated that you have tried almost every formulary alternative, generic, etc. And that none of the alternatives that are preferred or lower tier that are in the class of med you are taking are appropriate. Medicare guidelines also don't allow tier lowering exceptions for Brand medications, only generic. And Medicare has been smart by taking a lot of the generics off the formulary and putting the brand medications as "formulary" this year. So now they set the brand medications to a slightly higher "tier" so that we cannot request a tier exception. There are only 2 other inhalers that you haven't tried that your insurance recommended that are on your plan, both name brand medications so they are set at Tier 2. One is Breo Ellipta, the other is Trelegy. The Breo is in the same class of medications as the advair diskus so it is comparable. The Trelegy is a triple therapy inhaler. Both of those inhalers are $30 for a 30day supply, $90 for 90day, Advair 100-50 diskus that you are currently using remains at $40/30day, $120/90 day. Wixela is the generic for Advair Diskus that you trialed in the past, that one is formulary preferred tier 1 but not appropriate for you to be on because you had a medication reaction. I am at a loss I am so sorry. I spent over an hour on the phone today trying to get this to work. Would you be interested in trying the Breo ($30 a month is still a lot)? Or would you prefer to discuss further with Dr. Conuel when you see him on the 28th? </p><p>So much for the bs that CVS takes exemptions seriously and that they CARE. Bullshite. Welcome to Kafkaville again. Hospital here I come.</p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-13467102451569175012024-02-09T17:52:00.003-05:002024-02-09T18:49:03.086-05:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Californication, Disneyfornication, Googlefornication...<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh-CCa5nkuwP694BSB3fckfmBd9_UUKLk_kVhpeAzeb8kP6vu4TUWhvhmzoLl8LAhIZLJYAHJrdVWJOOKsdz2Qp1aE-5-hvLvNCapPTZKvTiXZJpmsyNVsGXOvrraKMloeA5YtaHM0TfzQvrMlfXS_yBD4pBydgTTLb_wle0iGv4LfYYEW1sMW8s8IS7s/s960/AbbeyStew.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="960" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh-CCa5nkuwP694BSB3fckfmBd9_UUKLk_kVhpeAzeb8kP6vu4TUWhvhmzoLl8LAhIZLJYAHJrdVWJOOKsdz2Qp1aE-5-hvLvNCapPTZKvTiXZJpmsyNVsGXOvrraKMloeA5YtaHM0TfzQvrMlfXS_yBD4pBydgTTLb_wle0iGv4LfYYEW1sMW8s8IS7s/s320/AbbeyStew.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto">YouTube! </span><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto">Edward Abbey once is supposed to have said that "[s]</span>ociety is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top”<span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto">.
YouTube and other social media prove the truth of that quote every
second of every minute of everyday thanks to their generally vacuous,
mundane, banal, and at best, mediocre recraperation videos. </span><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto">Scum, as social media shows, generally does indeed rise to the top.</span><p></p><p><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto">Quakers, of course, have
long talked of the need of speaking truth to power. In thie era of
continuing mediocrity and of mediocrates slumming for monies on YouTube,
which, in turn, makes monies off of the banal, the mediocre, the
mundane, and the ill researched videos they broadcast--lest we forget,
YouTube is home of never ending if more readily available digitalised
opium--it is long past time to speak truth to those who believe and
those who enable videos grounded in the fallacious notion that anything
said is worth saying. It isn't. Of course, I do realise the quantity of
quality digital media is, historically speaking, no less or no greater than the
quantity of quality books, television, or movies. There isn't much quality anywhere in the mass media world. The crap, however, is
more widely spread on the stale bread producing hallucinations that is social media. And nowhere
is this fact more in evidence in the core nation world than in the not
so mythical kingdom of media bread and circuses, the USofA, that home of
Califonication, Disneyfornication, and now Googlefornication. </span></p><p><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto">Golly
gee that is something to be proud of. I hope the employees of Google, land also of paternalistic censorship, are basking in the glorious and radiant heat of their brown hole sun.<br /></span></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-22299353064961036822024-02-01T09:26:00.000-05:002024-02-01T09:26:27.470-05:00The Books of My Life: The Vimy Trap<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFGGjaee16S178yhwBVTYXRD18b5qjVEqOnQQ_A96McvGnNTJT3X3__2l7YEf9OZGuyXJDf5Qk7nuFR0YXs9_0zZLIaKbcLbgHfcU4Dq4_5hqWEGZhrYvhoeNiThZm9KIoUYt6BLtptmbjj0Kkj7V5Bw2b6b9etCMIl8x6mXG8qbh7wdKDENljOBL/s1202/VimyMcKay.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1202" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFGGjaee16S178yhwBVTYXRD18b5qjVEqOnQQ_A96McvGnNTJT3X3__2l7YEf9OZGuyXJDf5Qk7nuFR0YXs9_0zZLIaKbcLbgHfcU4Dq4_5hqWEGZhrYvhoeNiThZm9KIoUYt6BLtptmbjj0Kkj7V5Bw2b6b9etCMIl8x6mXG8qbh7wdKDENljOBL/s320/VimyMcKay.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div>Humans, as all social scientists should know by now, need myths and fairy tales to live by. Myths and fairy tales, particularly in their disneyfornicated form, help weak humans, both individually and socially, survive the struggle that is life just as religion has done for centuries. If history is a guide it is clear that most humans need myths and fairy tales, for example, that explain why, or so it is perceived, good things happen to bad people and bad collectivities in real life and vice versa, myths and fairy tales that generally deflect attention from the real factors that cause suffering in life such as class, status, gender, ethnicity, and unequal cultural capital, to note a few examples. They give humans a sense of purpose. They provide humans with meaning for their lives, and meanings to their lives within the collectivities they are part of. They provide the happy or stoic faces humans need to live by in order to survive in a world of chance, pain, tragedy, drama, and comedy.<p></p><p>Collective human myths and fairy tales, of course, are, generally speaking, deeply embedded within and deeply imbibed and imbibe from the universal waters of ethnocentrism. Australians, for example, think they are the bee's knees. Americans think they are the best thing since sliced bread. South Koreans think they are the real middle kingdom. One central form that ethnocentrism takes in modern and postmodern life is nationalist or civil or civic religion. Like myths and fairy tales in general, national myths and fairy tales socialise most humans in modern and postmodern societies and cultures into comic book like emotional and sentimental laden tall tales in which we are superior to them, in which we are innocent and good while they are devious and bad Boris's and Natasha's.They create civic rituals associated with these ethnocentric nationalist faiths, rituals that take place, for example, at monuments to those killed during one of humanity's many and seemingly never ending biggest cock on the block wars. Finally, these nationalist myths and fairy tales have symbolic and iconic hero figures that are akin to those in earlier stone age tales and in contemporary superhero comic books who have been transformed into the saints they never were and never could be in real life because they are human,</p><p>In their follow up to their excellent <i>Warrior Nation</i> Ian McKay and Jamie Swift explore, in their <i>The Vimy Trap or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War</i> (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016), one of these nationalist myths and fairy tales of late twentieth century and twenty-first century Anglo-Canadian life, the Vimy myth and fairy tale. McKay and Swift do an excellent job exploring the Vimy myth and fairy tale. They note that the myths and fairy tales associated with Vimy, namely that it created or helped create a Canadian identity (if one erases Quebec entirely, of course) which today dominates much of Anglo-Canadian civil religion has actually been contested in hot and cold culture wars between dominant, counter, and sub cultures since the Great War even beyond French Canadian culture. They show that the Vimy myth and fairy tale is the product of what is essentially a power grabbing advertising campaign by late 20th century Canadian elites with their Canada is a city on a hill public rhetoric in order to promote a variety of things including a common Canadian (translation Anglo-Canadian) identity and the need for Canadian militarism in alliance with that other city on a hill, imperial America. They note the similarities between the publicity and advertising campaigns that turned the limitedly effective Canadian Vimy battle and its close Australian cousin, the dismal failure at Gallipoli, into stirring mythic and fairy tale tales in which Canadians were made Canadian and Australians Australian. Even tragedy and meaningless wars, you see, can be turned into comic book superhuman triumphs in nationalist fairy tale myths. They explore the humans who the national faith turned into inhuman saintly hero icons and symbols such as Currie, the romanticised and sanitised Canadian grunt and villainous others, to wit those dreadful British officers who thought father knew best and the Hun, of nationalist manichean myths and fairy tales. And they explore the attempt of official and semi-official court polemicists--some of them academics--to demonise those on the "wrong side" of manichean myth and fairy tale "history" such as critics of these fairy tales and myths and pacifists, who pointed out again and again the surrealist absurdities and human rights violations association with almost all wars.</p><p>I highly recommend <i>The Vimy Trap</i> to anyone interested in cultural history, cultural anthropology, cultural sociology, ethnocentrism, and the human ability, or at least the ability of some powerful humans, to create hybrid fictional and factual discourses to live by. I particularly liked how McKay and Swift drew on Martin's Caedels's ideal
types--militarists, crusaders, defencists, pacificists, and pacifists--
to explore the contradictions and complexities of this Canadian (and
Western) culture war over war and its associated myths and legends. My only qualm about the book is that I wish McKay and Swift had explored in greater detail the role power and the media--mainstream media, after all, has been and is generally controlled by those embedded in the nationalist passion play--played and play in the construction of the mythic and fairy tale worlds most Anglo-Canadians live by today. </p><p><br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-49473677609239008122024-01-25T12:29:00.002-05:002024-02-02T11:42:27.209-05:00The Governmental EZ-Pass Kiada: Life as Bureaucratic Crisis Management<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGSE8aADDhIudVT3xRvizj6wt6GepTWTIobqP1nwW5jpF2TOo1hxFWF2KXbifn4wqw8T71mM2GkmgZ1Qp1dYM3d9cBhyJGp27Zev1Qp54Ro2L5tbPqS5AHQm1rf4onZDiUdE-7wUbWcBPdrOnsFthm_8FODPMcGCd6nYzKqk5q2z3rBq4yylkZXqMW3wo/s499/KafkaWeberBureaucracy.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="499" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGSE8aADDhIudVT3xRvizj6wt6GepTWTIobqP1nwW5jpF2TOo1hxFWF2KXbifn4wqw8T71mM2GkmgZ1Qp1dYM3d9cBhyJGp27Zev1Qp54Ro2L5tbPqS5AHQm1rf4onZDiUdE-7wUbWcBPdrOnsFthm_8FODPMcGCd6nYzKqk5q2z3rBq4yylkZXqMW3wo/s320/KafkaWeberBureaucracy.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Life is too short to have to deal with the invariable and inevitable muck ups of bureaucracies. Unfortunately, however, bureaucracies don't appear to feel the same way.<p></p><p>I have had numerous problems with bureaucracies over my sixty-nine years of life most of them sadly since I retired as readers of this blog should know by now. Signing up online for Medicare wasn't too difficult until it came to light that my chiropractor had not signed off on the insurance company coverage I had for problems resulting from a car accident I had. It took me at least a month to get the doctor to sign off on the insurance company coverage of my treatment so Medicare would pay my outstanding medical bills. You see, Medicare, it seems, assumed, since the insurance coverage was listed in my permanent file, that the insurance company was responsible for my medical coverage. The insurance company bureaucracy, however, unsurprisingly vehemently disagreed.</p><p>There was also the passport, New York driver's licence and title to the car fiasco. In 2018 I bought a used car. Unfortunately, since the passport I had identified me as Ronald Helfrich and my New York driver's licence identified me as Ronald Helfrich Jr. the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles was not going to give me title to a car I purchased with cash. They did not like the massive difference between the names of Ronald Helfricha and Ronald Helfrich Jr. Only after the pleadings of the dealership from which I bought the car did the DMV relent and give me title to my car.<br /></p><p>In the meantime, of course, I had to deal with the United States Department of State because they are the governmental bureaucracy that issues US passports. Interestingly when I first got my US passport it said Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr. In a subsequent renewal, however, State allowed me to "change" my name from Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr to Ronald Helfrich, something I should not have been able to do. Needless to say, changing it back required a modern day labour of Hercules that even the post office in person to try to change it back to the original couldn't believe I had to do. Still, after a month or so of wasted hours spent talking to various people within the bureaucracy I was able to get Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr restored to my passport. I was once again bureaucratically consistent across driver's licence and passport.</p><p>This was, however, not the end of corporate or governmental bureaucratic muck ups. Yesterday I learned that I now have yet another bureaucratic problem to deal with, this one involving EZ Pass of New York, which began life as an affiliate of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a public agency in New York City, and which involves several state entities including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and and the New York State Thruway Authority.</p><p>Yesterday I went into my online EZ Pass account to make several changes that needed to be done. First, I changed my phone number because I had to get a new phone thanks to the legendary incompetence of Tracfone and after me existing the awful Tracfone stage left right and centre. Then I changed my email since I am doing everything in my power to no longer use anything Google including trying to get nothing sent to gmail account, something virtually impossible to do in the brave new digital age since so much online is tied to one's email. After two attempts at changing both, success. </p><p>Success with EZ Pass turned out to be very short lived for what I could not change on my EZ Pass account was my licence plate number. One of my licence plates, you see, was stolen a year or two back. The police discovered it somehow and gave me a form so I could get new plates at the DMV for no charge. Getting the new plates at the DMV on Central Avenue was easy thanks to the form. However, and this may be the reason for the muck up, I chose to get the most recent version of NY State plates and this meant a new licence plate number. This, in turn, required me to, if delinquently, change my licence plate number on EZ Pass.</p><p>Sadly and not surprisingly this turned out to be easier said than done. When I tried to change my plate number in my EZ Pass account I got a no such plate known message despite several attempts of putting in the numbers in various configurations, including the seven digit plate number on the licence plate on my car and on my registration. When I tried to call EZ Pass the wait times were over an hour and I have better things to do than wait for an hour to talk to a customer service worker about dealing with something that I shouldn't have to deal with in the first place.</p><p>This was not the only problem I had with my EZ Pass accounts page. They have my name as Ronald Helfrich Sr, my father, rather than Ronald Helfrich Jr (Jnr), me. And guess what? Yup they would not allow me to change that mistake, a mistake that never should have occurred in the first place since my vehicle registration has my name right.</p><p>Long and traumatising story short, I am giving up on EZ Pass. I may opt out of the system entirely and return the tag, itself an annoyance since you have return the tag and return it wrapped it in tin foil, something involving more expenditures of time and monies since you have to buy a requisite sized bag to post it in and you have to take a trip to the post office. Alternatively, I could just say fuck it to NY State because I don't want to have to deal for hours on the phone thanks to yet another bureaucratic feck up and spend time and energy mailing the tag back. I am frankly tired of again and again having my life disrupted by bureaucratic bullshit and I do so like to contribute to bureaucratic chaos. To both ends I deleted my credit card infomation from EZ Pass so they can't automatically charge my account. After all, I haven't used the tag on my car to traverse the NY State throughway system since before the pandemic.</p><p>It is, to say the least, annoying to have to deal with bureaucratic muckups, something the brave new digital era has made worse thanks to the fact that incorrect information is imputed regularly into online account pages and beyond. I realise that bureaucracies are necessary in a large scale society consisting of millions of people. Still it is a pity that so much of life, including so much of retired life, has to be spent dealing with the crises associated with the bullshite bureaucracies, public and private, spew and spread. And some wonder why so many people hate bureaucracies. The answer to this question is, of course, simple, while bureaucracies do provide a degree of efficiency, including efficiencies in information gathering in large scale societies with large scale bureaucracies such as the US, these large scale societies and their large scale bureaucracies have also grown way too big for their britches making it them impossible for them to really work and function efficiently and effectively anymore since the nations they service have grown way too big. And this, of course, makes it impossible, particularly when you take into account the rise of new online bureaucratic services and all the muckups those entail, for them to function efficiently and effectively any longer. A plague on all their houses.<br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-53973084148885171302024-01-14T13:50:00.000-05:002024-01-14T13:50:51.264-05:00The Broadview/SEFCU Kiada<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEj99odoymiLoNMrv9LceKjLlUbkaQGVsLicGww39N9M26OTUEvlG82OcSJYdjPrggrZvtElPGPtyWWOOlFWDZGmhdTAq6rZhjrZlHkYn7uZA5xKmTCnUFmk2FL2D_WoMHgDK48Jv6tnGPL_YktyBOuZ1Ya5hpmIg-DVItfE_7b7SjFvWbUCSfeCtInFw/s474/Bradview.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="92" data-original-width="474" height="62" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEj99odoymiLoNMrv9LceKjLlUbkaQGVsLicGww39N9M26OTUEvlG82OcSJYdjPrggrZvtElPGPtyWWOOlFWDZGmhdTAq6rZhjrZlHkYn7uZA5xKmTCnUFmk2FL2D_WoMHgDK48Jv6tnGPL_YktyBOuZ1Ya5hpmIg-DVItfE_7b7SjFvWbUCSfeCtInFw/s320/Bradview.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>There is a universal law as ironclad as Murphy's Law. And that law--shall we call it the double-edged sword law??--is that any change in technology makes things easier at the same time that it makes everything harder, much harder, hairpulling harder. That law certainly applies to online shopping, banking, etc., etc., etc.<p></p><p>I have written extensively in previous blogs about what I regard as the worst craperation I have encountered in 69 years of life, the dreadful Tracfone, and the pain in the arse it is to do business with. I have noted similar if not as bad problems with Empire Blue Vision not Anthem Empire Blue Vision. Now I can add Broadview Federal Credit Union (formerly SEFCU) to my shit list.</p><p>As I noted in my blog on Tracfone I finally ditched that craporation for the much superior Consumer Cellular because of a variety of headaches including bad customer service, moronic rules of engagement, and a cell phone that no longer works because it split in half. This means I have a new phone and a new phone number since Tracfone would not allow me to port my contacts over without sending a code to a phone that no longer works. Well it turns out that Broadview/SEFCU is as bad.</p><p>Today I went to change my phone number on my account and I can't because SEFCU needs to send a code to my old phone number, to a phone, in other words, that no longer works, so I can log in and change it. Catch-22 rides again.</p><p>I am sorely tempted to tell Broadview to feck off. That would mean having to change all my set up online payments. Still it might be worth it becasue I increasingly find Broadview if not the worst craperation I have encountered in 69 years of life I find it the second worst craperation after the truly dismal, skanky. and slaggy Tracfone. I also find the merger, the new name, and the new logo awful. See devolution is real. Broadview proves it.<br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-68382106544556170202024-01-11T19:57:00.007-05:002024-01-19T11:46:09.738-05:00And the Worst Crapitalist Craperation Award Goes To...Tracfone<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpL8iTJb48G4NpKLdIAYYSxxt_APmBCQx2K0FdM1wh3yTYHa0cSAkM9tAD2kF55fhvVXRJPKGc9m_J9nmfpiklR3rLuVt49LrUMLq-3DPrRZ-FkM2NZlBcnS-8PdB8d9YfAVie81xlbtR_vr9XfImy5EjmYEvRE-nK7wnnhIl2azme7_DB8TedEAptxnU/s474/TracfoneisCrap.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="249" data-original-width="474" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpL8iTJb48G4NpKLdIAYYSxxt_APmBCQx2K0FdM1wh3yTYHa0cSAkM9tAD2kF55fhvVXRJPKGc9m_J9nmfpiklR3rLuVt49LrUMLq-3DPrRZ-FkM2NZlBcnS-8PdB8d9YfAVie81xlbtR_vr9XfImy5EjmYEvRE-nK7wnnhIl2azme7_DB8TedEAptxnU/s320/TracfoneisCrap.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>A good rule of thumb is to remember to beware of missionaries
and their close cousins. evangelical crapitalists, bearing false gifts. I should have
kept that proverb in mind when I signed up for Tracfone some ten years ago.<p></p><p>I have spoken several times about my problems with Tracfone in previous blogs on this site. The latest occurred earlier this week. Some backstory first, however.</p><p>After I complained for the third time to the attorney general of New York State I had the opportunity to drop Tracfone and obtain a full refund in the process. I stupidly decided--I wasn't feeling well and didn't want to pursue the tracfone merry-go-round of emails, calls, and demands for security codes--not to do this. I thought I could hold on until my service expired in March of 2025, a $200 dollar unlimited plan I purchased in Octorber of 2023. Needless to say this was a moronic decision on my part.</p><p>It was a moronic decision as I discovered earlier this week. My tracfone flip phone fell out of my arthritic hands onto my carpeted floor and split in half on Tuesday of this week. As a consequence I no longer had a functioning phone. I no longer had a working phone that I could call emergency with, that I could call my doctor on, or which I could call anyone on. So I drove to Walmart and bought a new Tracfone phone, a big one this time, and returned home with it in order to set it up on line. </p><p>This sounds it would be easy but with Tracfone nothing is, as I should know by now, ever easy. Tracfone, you see, required that a security code be sent to my old phone--yes the phone that doesn't work--before they would link the new phone to my existing account. Take a minute to reflect on this surreal and absurd fact. Tracfone would not set up my new phone until I supplied them with a security code from my old phone which no longer worked. Needless to say, the devoluted morons at Tracfone should read Joseph Heller because they have mastered the single entendre of Catch-22.</p><p>Giving up the ghost after trying three times to get this crapitalist craperation to send the code to my Facebook account or my email--old or new--an email contained on my Tracfone account page--I contacted Tracfone by Facebook and on Tracfone chat. I reminded them several times that my Tracfone no longer worked and that as a consequence they could not send a security code to my Tracfone phone.They declined to send me a security code in any other way. They refused to accept the SIM and IMEI mumbers of my broken phone as alternatives. As a consequence, I demanded that Tracfone issue me a full refund by the end of the month. Not surprisingly I have not heard a word from them yet. So I contacted the attorney general of New York for the third time, a record that I suspect will not be topped as I have, over the sixty-nine years of my life, encountered a craperation as awful and as incompetent as Tracfone. Finally, I ordered a Consumer Cellular smart phone from Walmart and tomorrow will sign up for their twenty dollar a month package. I suppose I could call Tracfone from my new Consumer Cellular phone but given that Tracfone mandates that their security code go to my Tracfone phone, the phone that does not work, it would not be worth my time or my effort.</p><p>Let me end this essay by answering the question posed in the photo above: What is the Worst? The answer to that question is easy to answer. The worst craperation, and is so by a wide margin, is Verizon's Tracfone. Goodbye Crackfone. I am embarrassed I ever knew ye. <br /> </p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-78883508839861007372024-01-01T08:24:00.002-05:002024-01-01T08:25:58.692-05:00The Books of My Life: A New History of Australia<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm38eZ7zao4oGqgVlcZmWO1WUW6BHE7m2m8gVbpeqviwRh9_suYhmZE1mNjTLgY_RXm3F8Ct8rDPuIRrP5GmbCZOXPfkLWfuyWKiK7-atBq9cQ-axD9_mB1E2UXlEbpjb3aznXjQwJezQS3rAM7IkIsSfO4knO9WqK1mvNYVmDb7PWksJcf7Fa8CGVW50/s448/CrowleyAustralia.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm38eZ7zao4oGqgVlcZmWO1WUW6BHE7m2m8gVbpeqviwRh9_suYhmZE1mNjTLgY_RXm3F8Ct8rDPuIRrP5GmbCZOXPfkLWfuyWKiK7-atBq9cQ-axD9_mB1E2UXlEbpjb3aznXjQwJezQS3rAM7IkIsSfO4knO9WqK1mvNYVmDb7PWksJcf7Fa8CGVW50/s320/CrowleyAustralia.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>I have complained about the lack of narrative coherence, the choppiness, the fragmentation, and the ornamentation of so many contemporary college and university introductory textbooks these days in previous reviews. Given this it was a pleasure to read an older textbook for a change, a textbook not surprisingly published before the torrent of postmodernist and hence problematic textbooks since the 1990s and a textbook that provides a superb overview of one national history, the history of Australia, Frank Crowley's edited collection <i>A New History of Australia</i> (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974).<p></p><p><i>A New History of Australia </i>is divided into twelve chronological chapters all written by experts in the field ranging from the British settlement of Australia in the eighteenth century to the prime ministership of Gough Whitlam in 1972. Each chapter contains not only the highlights of Australian political and economic history of the specific eras. It also integrates social, demographic, and cultural histories into the chronological narrative making it an example of how well social, demographic, and cultural histories can be integrated into the more traditional political and economic history format. In this regard it is an outstanding example of how the old history and the new history can be melded to provide readers with a broad understanding of Australian history from above and from below.</p><p>Some, of course, will, not surprisingly, find things to criticise in <i>A New History of Australia</i>. Some reading it today will find the writing in some of the chapters somewhat antiquated. Some will decry something that is often present in other national histories of Australia, including the two volume <i>The Cambridge History of Australia</i> (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), namely, chapters on pre-European Australia. Some, particularly those raised on postmodernist textbook robbery, will find the text too dense and encyclopedic, something I instead find worthy of praise. Some will undoubtedly find the book somewhat out of date and, admittedly, it has not been revised since 1974. Despite such criticism, however, <i>A New HIstory of Australia,</i> though published almost fifty years ago, remains a classic in the writing of Australian history. Very, very highly recommended. <br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-2450057936739464882023-12-22T11:32:00.003-05:002023-12-22T19:16:27.945-05:00Life in the Pissant Swamp: Musings on the University at Albany's Project Renaissance<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0866gdw8xeJ3gtkYgmSuZLo0mOdb5Gu912Uw42f5iWctKixGFVObqQvfjTdgGEQTQrQZMzTlQNv6sVhB1qUInrRld4PDAgxEO4PfZ7YfKC_xvumnC2yUAxLDtK8Okrr-uTsVgOxYO4Ec4Sqt590Noir90myiGBSBFEH587QNZUWT70UIMqxlUjv3oNNQ/s1050/Erasmus.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="806" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0866gdw8xeJ3gtkYgmSuZLo0mOdb5Gu912Uw42f5iWctKixGFVObqQvfjTdgGEQTQrQZMzTlQNv6sVhB1qUInrRld4PDAgxEO4PfZ7YfKC_xvumnC2yUAxLDtK8Okrr-uTsVgOxYO4Ec4Sqt590Noir90myiGBSBFEH587QNZUWT70UIMqxlUjv3oNNQ/s320/Erasmus.jpg" width="246" /></a></div><p>For many of those who dream of going to university and who dream of being an academic someday the academic life is often surrounded by and encased within a web of romanticism. The problem with this is that many of those who romanticise academia have a Californicated rather than a real view of university life and of the professors they hope to study with. In actuality, the academic life is very different from the fantasies that fill the minds of those academic wanna bes who romanticise higher education and the academic life. In fact, academia is closer to <i>Peyton Place</i> crossed with <i>The West Wing</i> if <i>The West Wing</i> was much ado about very little if not nothing, than to the fantasy world of mediaeval romance and chivalry which was never really real in the first place. <br /></p><p>When I was young and naive I was one of those who romanticised higher education. These romantic illusions and delusions about academe were largely maintained during my undergraduate years thanks to my limited knowledge of and experience with the more <i>Peyton Place</i> and <i>The West Wing</i> aspects of life within the ivy-covered sometimes gothic walls of higher education. Fortunately, this romanticism did not survive my postgraduate years thanks to a number of smacked by reality moments during my postgraduate sojourn including professors who blackmailed female graduate students into having sex with them, its more powerful professors leaving their wives for the less powerful client younger graduate students they worked with, and its ultimately petty political and ideological machinations.</p><p>My most intimate experience with the petty political and ideological machination side of academe happened around 1997. I was hired to be one of, if memory serves, six teaching assistants working with six faculty members for a new academic programme at the University at Albany in Albany, New York, Project Renaissance. While I no longer remember all of the dramatis personae in the Project Renaissance saga thanks to the passage of time, I do recall that Project Renaissance was the brainchild of Lil Brannon, who had a doctorate of education from from East Texas State University (one of the many teacher's colleges that became universities in the post-World War II era and now Texas A&M- Commerce), the head the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, CETL, at the University at Albany at the time. </p><p>Project Renaissance's goal was to provide a multidisciplinary living and learning educational experience for selected students. All selected students were assigned to Mohawk Tower, the 22 storey skyscraper in the centre of Indian Quad (now Indigenous Quad), one of the quadruplet quads on the University of Albany campus. At the heart of Project Renaissance's educational focus was a course called Human Identity and Technology, a course that all the students had to take and a course which fulfilled the University of Albany's general education requirement, something that made it more appealing to some students. The goal of these courses--there were eight sections of the course--over the two semesters was to explore how individual identity was impacted by groups, cultures, and institutions, how human identity was impacted by various technologies, and how human identity was impacted by nature, religion, the arts, literature, society, genetics, gender, race, and ethnicity <br /></p><p>Six faculty members and six teaching assistants were hired to teach this course and its course sections. The faculty and graduate assistants were assigned to two groups with each group putting its own spin on the class.. The course I was assigned to, which included V. Ng, some bloke from the mediocre Religious Studies Faculty at SUNY Albany, and another chap whose name I don'tt recall, decided to put a historical spin on the class, something I was not particularly comfortable with given that it seemed to me to replicate the world history courses that were already offered in the History Faculty at the University at Albany. I thus decided, in my discussion section of the course, a section that supplemented the larger course taught by the faculty to at least one hundred students, to be more topical emphasising identity--class, ethnic-racial, gender, sexual/gender identity--in my section. Needless to say, this was a course massively unworthy of the name Renaissance. By the way, I was also uncomfortable with the large size of the generar class meeting--100 students--since it seemed to me to undermine what I thought was one purposes of Project Renaissance, to wit, to provide greater student-faculty intimacy in both its courses and its interactions<br /></p><p>I made my concerns public at one of the planning meetings for my group. As a consequence within a few days I was taken off the project at, I was told, the request of the faculty members that ran my group. They didn't even talk to me about this issue before they did the you're fired rag. They simply branded me a heretic--I was told there was concern about my general focus on identity and sexual/gender identity in particular--and ingloriously dismissed from Project Renaissance. They apparently wanted nothing but yes men. Needless to say I learned a valuable and important lesson in how petty power and petty ideological politics play out in the postmodern American university that day. </p><p>My ignominious dismissal was, to say the least, a serious problem for a graduate student like myself as I no longer had an assistantship and hence no longer had financial support for the school year. Project Renaissance, perhaps as a result of History Faculty lobbying for me, gave me an administrative assistantship. This lasted a semester instead of the school year as promised. I was summarily dismissed from my administrative position at CETL and Project Renaissance claimed that they no longer had the monies to support me for the next semester. It turned out, of course, that this claim of poverty was a lie. Just before the end of the term I discovered a letter that said that Project Renaissance was planning on getting rid of heretical me and giving my monies to someone else instead.</p><p>I contacted the Graduate Student Union of which I was a card carrying member about this injustice and provided the union with a copy of the letter detailing the fact that the powers that be were giving my money to someone else and thus unfairly dismissing me, and filed a formal complaint with the union. The union representative met with Brannon and, at least on one occasion, with Brannon and me. Brannon continued to claim pennilessness throughout the meeting. This experience with the union complaint process provided me with yet another valuable lesson which I have never forgotten, a lesson in the limited power of unions, and in the limits of unions in general. The union was of absolutely no help to me. In fact, the union rep seemed to be more interested in pleasing the powers that be than in helping me in a case where the powers that be were clearly dissembling. As a result, I was only able to continue my doctoral education thanks to
the History Faculty which provided me with an adjunct position so I could
continue to pay the rent, buy food, and pay for and take classes. By the way, this lesson would be replayed several years later when I taught at SUNY Oneonta where the union conceded to the bureaucrats the right to hide the classes of adjuncts during the pandemic making sure that students could't enrol in the class. a situation that made it impossible for me to continue to teach at Oneonta given that it meant that I would only have one class and would thus not have health insurance and that my pay would be halved, both of which made it impossible for me to continue to commute to Oneonta from Albany to teach given the associated costs. So I retired.<br /></p><p>Project Renaissance did not last long. My sense was that many administrative personnel and faculty members at the University at Albany were sceptical about the programme and raised questions about the it during the reevaluation phase despite claims by Project Renaissance that it aided student retention, something increasingly important to the increasingly neoliberal bureaucrats who run second or third level research universities like the University at Albany given the declines in state financial support for higher education. Additionally, the founder of the programme was no longer there to fight for it. Like so many faculty and educational bureaucrats in American universities these days Brannon seemed to be more interested in moving up the corporate ladder to better paying and higher status academic bureaucratic duties and used Project Renaissance to help accomplish this upward mobility bureaucratic feat. Brannon moved to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1998 where she initially coordinated that university's master's programme in English Education and later became the director of Charlotte's writing programme and the dean of the College of Arts, a position she currently holds at UNCC.</p><p>As for my romantic illusions and delusions about academia, they died the day I was wrongly made redundant. I was, as Nick Lowe says, nutted by reality, the reality that academia is just like any other modern corporate bureaucracy in the core nation world and the reality that academic bureaucrats are just like other modern bureaucracies coloured as they are in Niebuhrian grey. The soap opera that is academia is actually, and one should be surprised by this, a mirror of life in general. It. like them, is full of petty
rivalries, petty back stabbings, petty blackmailings, petty adulteries, and petty kafkaesque soul stealing bureaucracies. While I am not sure that that old proverb about the less important an institution is the pettier and less important its politics is is true, I am sure of that academia, which is kind of an alternative counterculture that gives academic administrative personnel and its academic faculty a degree of limited and limitedly important power, is, in the final analysis, filled to the brim with a lot of petty power games that mirror those, if in much less important and impactful form, how governments operate, how economic corporations act, and how humans typically behave. And that ain't romantic at all.<br /></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-79110702541811905222023-12-18T11:57:00.007-05:002024-02-09T18:42:19.941-05:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Isabella Balkert and the Amazon Factor<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY66LGrJSjtqwQRV12FaejkrKNPxXX5xZEc5rEyIIdUA_ypVZda2tonnvOozeYZEgxUAgZw8hBFOC6kzvIZxuoAONvYvAJT0o91HUnKaR_LhqQEIah8cWDSO88yPmjCVbwrlTvgAgC8WYvbizXgvNbB0_iqv7-_8_x0Irtol0QSwN0nK90OYnlejMN2eY/s474/DumbingDown.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY66LGrJSjtqwQRV12FaejkrKNPxXX5xZEc5rEyIIdUA_ypVZda2tonnvOozeYZEgxUAgZw8hBFOC6kzvIZxuoAONvYvAJT0o91HUnKaR_LhqQEIah8cWDSO88yPmjCVbwrlTvgAgC8WYvbizXgvNbB0_iqv7-_8_x0Irtol0QSwN0nK90OYnlejMN2eY/s320/DumbingDown.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>It is quite clear by now that social media have played to a lower common denominator than even the critics of television as the lowest common denominator could ever have imagined. Both Google, particularly its YouTube division, and Amazon have played a major role in this dumbing down of the already dumbed down. I was reminded of this recently when I looked up a film on Amazon, a site that used to be easy to use in order to find what one wanted but which is now one of the worst even when you put in the actual title of a book, a movie, or a CD.<p></p><p>I was reminded of this social media dumbing down recently after I watched the 2005 film <i>Conversations with Other Women</i> on the This channel. I was pleasantly surprised by the film as I had almost forgotten that once upon a time independent films with wit, intelligence, and even some cinematic innovation, i.e., art, in other words, were made in the United States, a land where most films have been made for adolescents, literal and metaphorical, since the 1970s in order to "entertain" them and increase craporate profits. Independent American cinema, of course, was put on life support thanks to the Machiavellian strategies of the oligarchic suits who run Hollywood, strategies which included the buying up of independent production companies which were subsequently downsized of eliminated, the blackmailing of cinema houses--which are also dominated by crapitalist cartels--in that tried and true crapitalist and craptorate way--if you want to show our films then--and Hollywood's success at regaining control of the means of production, distribution, and exhibition, aka synergy in postmodernist capitolese over the film industry. This, of course, made it virtually impossible for independent films to be shown in the US and Canada and even beyond if to a lesser extent in places like France after a time. By the way, this was also, and not surprisingly, the same strategy Hollywood had used to run foreign films out of the US and Canadian market (and even beyond its North American kingdom to some extent) and who used their positions of market dominance to create a ratings system blessed by Washington that ran pornography out of theatres during those same years. Hollywood, you see, has never liked competition anymore than they liked much in the way of narrative innovation. All this, by the way, made the 1948 US Supreme Court decision breaking up the Hollywood cartel something that had been thrown into the dustbin of history for by the 21st century Hollywood once again controlled production, distribution, and exhibition putting the Hollywood cartel back in place thanks largely to neoliberal free marketism, a wonderful misnomer to describe a crapitalist world dominated by vertical and horizontal (the old and more descriptively and accurate terms compared to the faddish synergy) integration and the resulting craporate monopolies and cartels, and propaganda which, whether in primary or secondary forms, socialised and socialise the post-<i>Star Wars</i> "kiddies" into a world in which the blue meanies include black and white films, subtitles, and repetition</p><p>But back to <i>Conversations with Other Women</i>: After watching the film I thought I might buy it. So, I went to Amazon to see if the film was still available on either blu ray or DVD. What drew my eye almost immediately, however, were the "reactions to the film in the dumbed down and even dumber downed Amazon "review" section . One reaction in particular drew my gaze, a reaction by Isabella Balkert apparently posted on Amazon.UK in 2007. Balkert gave the film one star compared to over 70% of reactors at the time of this post who gave the film 4 and 5 stars. She did so, she claimed, because she found the split screen technique, the interior reactions of the characters, and the flashbacks in the film, flashbacks which provided critical plot points, too difficult to follow simultaneously. I suppose these more complex art films way too difficult to follow for someone presumably brought up on movies made primarily for those with limited cultural capital and limited attention spans.<br /></p><p>Balkert went on to condemn art films in tried and true and predictable ways. She condemned the film as pretentious, boring, and the acting awful, Pretentious and boring, of course, are the rather boring cliches of those for whom any film that strives for art rather than "adolescent" entertainments and tells us more about the person uttering such rhetoric than it does about the film being "reacted" to. As for Balket's claims of bad acting, this is rich coming from someone who, I assume, is an amateur and who has never acted in a feature film in her life according to IMDb. This discourse, one which ignores the fact that Helena Bonham Carter has been honoured for her acting by her peers, i.e., those who work in film. She has, in fact, to note two examples of awards she has received, BAFTAs and Emmy's to her name and has been nominated for academy awards twice. Someones, in other words, find her an excellent actor as do I. The other lead in the film, Aaron Eckert, has also been praised for his acting chops by many critics, particularly for his performance in Neil LaBute's art film <i>In the Company of Men</i>. Needless to say, Balkert is the pretentious and boring one here given that she seems to be speaking in cliched tongues and offers no empirical evidence to substantiate her very weak godlike claims.</p><p>If I may, I would like to offer some advice to "Critic" Balkert. I would advise her to stick to the (occasionally gloriously) simplistic, formulaic, and linear films of paint by the formulaic numbers Hollywood. In fact, there is a simplified version of <i>Conversations with Other Women</i> which eliminates the split screen as an alternative for those traumatised by art films and their artistic complexit. There i, after all, room for flims of all types whether genre grounded, artistic, surrealistic, complex in its narrative, or even "adolescent". It is too bad Follywood doesn't recognise this any longer. </p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-42904721280721742742023-12-13T17:12:00.019-05:002024-02-09T18:42:43.412-05:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Riskpig Meets Buffy and Firefly<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVOzH-KWJ5YgQBbDPDgqplqwTlP-f0W9k_INQRJuXTfCwbNlHPf7QQOW52Ka6oiIOsDQr10WlsIX7rLp1EfDX1HkfkX8laF8QmreK8s-5KPPiIvn6vZfuAhLMBXKgHHP6VwQJfcfkzP_UwVmCSKI2NtEGmE-fENW9-X3rcFK7QBwMJFBIA_WnKyqR6SHs/s741/MonetRouen.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="741" data-original-width="474" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVOzH-KWJ5YgQBbDPDgqplqwTlP-f0W9k_INQRJuXTfCwbNlHPf7QQOW52Ka6oiIOsDQr10WlsIX7rLp1EfDX1HkfkX8laF8QmreK8s-5KPPiIvn6vZfuAhLMBXKgHHP6VwQJfcfkzP_UwVmCSKI2NtEGmE-fENW9-X3rcFK7QBwMJFBIA_WnKyqR6SHs/s320/MonetRouen.jpg" width="205" /></a></div>YouTube videos never cease to amaze me but then as a misanthrope I am a sucker for the inherent absurdity of human life. Today the YouTube video that did not cease to amaze me was a "reaction" to the season two episode of <i>Buffy</i> called "Passion" by a poster who calls herself RiskPig. <br /><p></p><p>In the final minutes of this "reaction" the Goth kitted RiskPig makes some brief remarks on the differences between <i>Buffy</i> and <i>Firefly</i> which she notes she is watching at the same time as <i>BtVS</i>. According to RiskPig <i>Firefly</i> is more "intense" than <i>Buffy</i> because, she arges, <i>Firefly</i> requires less of a suspension of disbelief. One feels, at any moment she says, that any of the main characters might die even though none of them did through the course of the television show. It would not be until the movie <i>Serenity</i> that any of the major cast of characters in the show would die and those deaths may have been due more to the decisions of the actors not to return to the franchise should a subsequent movie be made, something that never came to pass given the lack of success--something that Hollywood defines purely in monetary terms--of <i>Serenity</i> at the all important box office.<br /></p><p>There are major problem with RiskPig's hypothesis. Before I discuss these problems, however, I should note something critically important at least for those of us with an scholarly and empirical bent. At the time that RiskPig offered her observation on "Passion" she had only watched <i>Buffy</i> up to "Passion", the seventeenth episode of season two. Since <i>Buffy</i> ran for 144 episodes and was a show about the loss of innocence as one grew up--it is a <i>bildungsroman</i>--one can compellingly argue that RisPig had jumped the gun at least a bit. Scholars, before they offer analyses of their object of study, prefer to look at all the evidence before they jump over the interpretive cliff. By the way, I should also point out that by the time Riskpig watched "Passion<i>"</i> she had reacted to all but episode 14 of <i>Firefly</i>, the 14th episode being the last episode of the show, a show shown out of order by the braniacs at Fox and a show that was cancelled before all the episodes of season one were completed. A movie, a movie that according to sources was originally meant to be the season two finale of the show before it was cancelled in 2003 by the suits at Fox, followed two years later.</p><p><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">Now back to the problems with RiskPig's hypotheses about the differences between <i>Buffy</i> and <i>Firefly</i>. RiskPig misses the fact that <i>Buffy</i> is, as I noted earlier, a <i>bildungsroman</i> and that this fact matters when comparing <i>Buffy</i> to <i>Firefly </i>The fact that <i>Buffy</i> is a <i>bildungsroman</i> makes <i>Buffy</i> far more structurally, generically, and tonally a more innovative television show than <i>Firefly</i>. <i>Firefly</i> is, like another of Whedon's adult oriented shows, <i>Angel</i>, a more traditional show. Both <i>Buffy</i> and <i>Firefly</i> may play with metaphors. <i>Firefly</i>, however, given that it is an adult show, plays less with metaphors than does <i>Buffy</i>. <i>Firefly's</i> one major metaphor is the one that plays off the differences between the core nations and the modern nations in the late 20th century world.</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">
</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">
</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">The Alliance, for example, is a metaphor for the core nations of today, the rich Western nations of the contemporary world that design product in the core, manufacture them in the semi-periphery and exploit the resources of the periphery, the global capitalist "frontier", so they can make mass marketed consumer goods relatively cheaply. The frontier planets, the outback planets, the bush planets, the places that want to be left alone by the Alliance but aren't, which is why Captain Malcolm Reynolds, keeps pushing his Firefly class ship named Serenity further and further into the black, further and further into space, in other words, each year, are metaphors for the wilderness. Whedon, after all, it should be remembered, studied with Richard Slotkin, author of a highly regarded trilogy on the history of the culture and mythology of the American frontier, including its culture of violence, from its beginnings in the 1600s to the 20th century. <i>Buffy's</i> metaphors, on the other hand, are embedded in the monsters of each episode of the show and sometimes in its longer season, series, and character arcs. So while both <i>Buffy</i> and <i>Firefly</i>, work several levels--the literal plot and narrative level, the the metaphorical/allegorical level and the mythological worldbuilding level (which includes existentialist and theological themes) <i>Buffy</i> is much more complex because it intersects its metaphors much more extensively with adolescent and young adult life cycles, life cycles that, in turn, intersect with a variety of economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic forces. </span></p><p><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">RiskPig also misses important similarities between <i>Buffy</i> and <i>Firefly</i>. Both, not surprisingly, share similar themes. They are, after all, both authored by Joss Whedon. Both explore issues like chosen families, and existentialist choice. Both are also heavily influenced by Whedon's love of classic cinema, the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford in particular. <i>Firefly</i>, for instance, is Ford's <i>Stagecoach</i> in space--a film that was adapted from Maupassant's brilliant short story "Boule de Suif"--and combined with the tough professionalism and chosen family themes at the heart of the films of Hawks. The suspense in both <i>Buffy</i> and <i>Firefly</i> is, of course, quite indebted to Hitch, the master of the thriller who no one working in the industry today can come close to matching.</span><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto"> </span></p><p><span class="style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto">Finally, what RiskPig, like most of her other amateur fellow "reactors" typically miss is the fact that literature, films, and television, are not real and can never be real anymore than opera or operetta can be "real". Even documentaries are manipulated through the use of editing and music, to note just two ways docs are manipulated by their makers. It is this uninterrogated faith, a faith akin to a belief in resurrection, the virgin birth, or reincarnation, in "realism" or naturalism, a term I have never heard one "reactor" use, that is a major problem in the "reactions" of most YouTube reactors. It is a faith, an almost cult like faith, which has socially and culturally constructed a very narrow and parochial conception of aesthetics, a term I really shouldn't use for "reaction" videos, a conception of aesthetics that deletes other approaches to art--allegorical, impressionism, expressionist, dadaist, surrealist, theatrical--from its approach to art. It is a narrow conception of art which would celebrate a colour photograph of the Rouen Cathedral by a tourist as superior to the impressionist paintings of the same cathedral by Claude Monet because it is more "real". One wonders if these true believing amateurs are even aware of the fact that Monet painted the cathedral in different ways in order to, paradoxically, capture how the cathedral looked like at different times of the day in different light, to capture it more realistically or scientifically, in other words They certainly don't seem to aware of the fact that notions of realism have differed across time and continue to differ in Western theoretical discourses.<br /></span></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-43106159389613886182023-12-10T12:46:00.015-05:002024-02-09T18:43:13.753-05:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: When Fantasy Became Real, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Limitedly Examined Life<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2l2dw_CLpcKFsg0HbdRzCm30bMcLW4-NEODpWXpKmYVkF23Y67bWC3Z3fEyoWTHxuoUoRlVBXZb2cRlmVypUyfu71lT3fin2CVh21RkCAdKgLqu5ZTPiFNOXaJFWU11BJwj48j8FjWn7EuwbUTSLI1CJt3b9OBuf5e7IN_E3OkK2tRlJGXuNZeaaUDa0/s474/MovieBlissdom.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="242" data-original-width="474" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2l2dw_CLpcKFsg0HbdRzCm30bMcLW4-NEODpWXpKmYVkF23Y67bWC3Z3fEyoWTHxuoUoRlVBXZb2cRlmVypUyfu71lT3fin2CVh21RkCAdKgLqu5ZTPiFNOXaJFWU11BJwj48j8FjWn7EuwbUTSLI1CJt3b9OBuf5e7IN_E3OkK2tRlJGXuNZeaaUDa0/s320/MovieBlissdom.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I love those "kiddies" who spew fragments of their unexamined lives out for all to potentially see and hear on YouTube. They whinge and whine about petty little "unrealisms" in the very limited range of moving "entertainments" they watch, cliched mundanities that suggest that those who utter such banalities are constricted not only by limited experience and limited cultural capital but also by Freudian anal disorders. That the cinema they are whinging and whining about, much of it fantasy, nay hyper and uber fantasy--action adventure fantasy, fantasy fantasy, and science fiction fantasy--is as far from the realism or naturalism they claim to treasure, as far from realism as musicals, in fact, a genre they generally despise, doesn't seem to cross their limitedly active minds. </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">One gets the sense from these social media "kiddies" that if they sat down and read Gogol's classic short story "The Nose", assuming they read classics of course--a huge assumption--that they would whinge and whine and scream and shout</span> "oh come on, a nose would never detach itself from face and go slumming
around Sankt Petersburg living the life of a state councillor", a title they wouldn't do research on because they don't do research or they want you to post the answer on their reaction page so they can make monies.<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> As a consequence of their limited understanding of art one supposes that these social media "kiddies" would likely find a slice of life masterpiece like Olivier Assayas 2008 <i>Summer Hours</i> "boring", though, in fact, like many of the films of Eric Rohmer, <i>Summer Hours</i> is far "realer" than the fantasies they are devoted, in a groupie sort of way, to. And that, dear reader says all you need to know about the contradictory stream of consciousness that operates across the little grey cells of most "kiddie" "reactors" on social media. </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">All hail the not so examined life where "boring" is not in the socialised eye of the beholder but out there some where in FetishLand.</span></p><p></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-13644397880067777992023-12-09T11:16:00.016-05:002024-02-09T18:43:29.462-05:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Elise Stefanik and the Dumbing Down of America<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqs-C4Ld1yrUsAelHe3IUk7mbZUJ-nwJnm0NfvyCA6rCrC2tQO0NdMPIYuVbasQHRGj95bdUomx2R1BiAAgrAeHRgLC4sEJ1w7Y1OUhtjJvr02_JVQ8Uux9ZS9elXQwouuhijS8kHs8lMF3YNBcPH43CuKVlf9B1MCIwzeYh1ZmyIDYUaZDqe4rw57Z04/s474/Stefanik.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="474" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqs-C4Ld1yrUsAelHe3IUk7mbZUJ-nwJnm0NfvyCA6rCrC2tQO0NdMPIYuVbasQHRGj95bdUomx2R1BiAAgrAeHRgLC4sEJ1w7Y1OUhtjJvr02_JVQ8Uux9ZS9elXQwouuhijS8kHs8lMF3YNBcPH43CuKVlf9B1MCIwzeYh1ZmyIDYUaZDqe4rw57Z04/s320/Stefanik.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>The self-proclaimed princess in waiting of Tangdonia, Elise Stefanik, is at it again. And thank Yahweh she is. <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I mean what's not to love about a group of we were schooled in posh educational institutions scribes, hypocrites, Pharisees, and pots--or is it kettles?--like proud as peaches Reptardians such as Elise Stefanik. What's not to love, after all, about a pollution of politicians who have perfected the "fine art" of nudge, nudge, wink, wink and being very very economical with the truth, so economical with the truth, in fact, that there often isn't any truth in theur screed at all. Anyway, you know the world is Pythonesque when someone like Stefanik, whose party is full of both sides of their mouth real anti-Semites for whom the only good Jew is either a Jew vaporised by the second coming (can you say genocide?) or converted to Christianity can make political hay by selectively "condemning" anti-Semitism (something, by the way, that spews out in many directions) and deliberately confusing and conflating valid empirical critiques of Israel and nationalist Zionism with anti-Semitism .And let's not forget that politicians like Stefanik, while condeming limits on speech out of one side of their gobs advocate for it out of the other side of their reality challenged gobs. Stefanik and her ilk, after all, are not about free speech for all. They are about free speech only for those that follow their parochial party line. Now that is good old time Republicrat pied pipering at its "finest". Doubleplusgood Elise, doubleplusgood.</span></p><p>One of those who seems to have been well pied pipered on Facebook by Mrs. Stefanik and her comrades is one John Joseph White who, in an impressive rant with an abundance of demagogic slings and arrow but without much in the way of empirical evidence, well actually any empirical evidence whatsoever, " claims, and I quote here [that] <span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u" dir="auto" lang="en">it’s the federal government’s involvement in education that has led to the creation of dopey young Progs"</span>. Prog rock fans? One might suspect after reading this missive that JJW is a prime example of what he condemns, the dumbing down of American educational institutions, a dumbing down that has produced several bushels of empirically challenged social media "reactors" as even a glance at social media would confirm. The only
problem with this hypothesis is that JJW's lowest common denominator jeremiad is, as is almost
the case with demagogues, polemicists, and ideologues of his reality challenged ilk, off
the mark. But then people who have little grasp of historical reality
are always off the mark even though such rhetoric plays well in places
like Peoria aren't they?<br /></p><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">There
are, of course, a variety of reasons for White's rather naive knee jerk
manicheanism. Don't you just love a world consisting solely of uncool black and dope white?
Reality isn't, as I noted, one of them. In reality, of course, the
increase in federal spending at research universities in the wake of
World War II--see the Cold War and its consequences that Ike warned
Americans about-- along with increased "investment" from other parts of
the military-industrial-economic complex, has increased research in
American universities. In reality the increased amount of research in
American research universities thanks to this increased public and
private support for research in American universities, has turned
American research universities, including Harvard, into world renowned
centres of research that many other smaller nations are envious of. All
that said let me note that I would support JJW if he called for an end
to imperial war making research in American universities for, after all,
I agree with that commentator who once admitted to the fact that he
couldn't tell whether MIT was a government-corporate department with
educational courses attached to it or an educational institution that
did extensive, financially "profitable", and high status military
research for government and corporation, something that is, of course,
quite profitable for the latter.<br /><br /></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">One
of the reasons for the current state of American universities is a lack of funding from those deluded many who want to
turn American universities into knee jerk purveyors of selective
holier than thou myths they picked up through socialisation for deluded
conformity, something Stefanik cynically knows how to manipulate for
power and plunder purposes. Another is the neoliberalisation of American
universities, a neoliberalisation that has turned American universities
into beggars for students because they need the monies. This begging
for students, in turn, has meant that neolliberal university
administrators, devoted as they are to the Mammonish theologies of
economics and business, preach the gospel that everyone should go to
university because it will lead to a greater financial return for them
over the course of their "radiant futures". This, in turn, has led to the
trivialisation of the humanities and the critical thinking aspect of
education and schooling. And it has led, as a consequence, to the
retailisation of the university, the corporatisation of universities, a
corporate/retail model in which the customer is always right. </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Speaking
of universities and neoliberalism, it needs to be pointed out that it is
hard to discern whether many American universities these days are semi-professional and private sports teams or clubs with educational
courses attached to them or educational institutions that have sold
their souls for something you don't find at the University of Toronto,
Cantab, Oxon, or Laval, sports and the status and retail branding they
bring. The paradox that for profit sports are taking over and
transforming academic institutions that are putatively not for profit
"educational" institutions should not be lost here though I suspect it
will by many.</div></div><p></p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-60601917106030109392023-12-04T11:50:00.010-05:002024-02-09T18:43:45.300-05:00A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Narrow Minded Tyranny of "Realism"<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH5dlIiWZR-V5lE3CJpHoeCcboejRDHwuJXt4E_fWgVbkTaQQ4qTCH6p3-mzVIcewZWvaJGvC3yq6MXsrW6GqZExhhd_Ycw1HYT31722bjIlRZd6XndREyNI9gyIf7WJO-MGgODRWDAjER3xSqvxSeFXc6yyKk2Dfjcek28eABLoCveJsaVKhJJM1w5Hw/s540/GigiMinelliColourII.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="540" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH5dlIiWZR-V5lE3CJpHoeCcboejRDHwuJXt4E_fWgVbkTaQQ4qTCH6p3-mzVIcewZWvaJGvC3yq6MXsrW6GqZExhhd_Ycw1HYT31722bjIlRZd6XndREyNI9gyIf7WJO-MGgODRWDAjER3xSqvxSeFXc6yyKk2Dfjcek28eABLoCveJsaVKhJJM1w5Hw/s320/GigiMinelliColourII.png" width="320" /></a></div>When one reaches the autumn years of one's life one, or at least some of us, begin to reflect on the lives we have led and on what we have done and not done with our lives during the years we have lived. As someone whose life has often revolved around art, around an obsession with and devotion to books, music, film, and television art forms, I have long regarded the life without art as the life that really isn't worth living.<br /><p></p><p>As a result of this what might reasonably be called a cultural prejudice I have long thought about how art works and how it functions. I don't know precisely how this works, but there is, I think, some art that seems to transcend or appears to almost transcend its space and time at least for those of us who have acquired a degree of cultural capital over the course of our lives. Some works of art, such as, at least to me, the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, many of the writings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, Maurice Ravel's string quartet, Hector Berlioz's <i>Symphonie Fantastique</i>, many of the operas of Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler's <i>Das Lied von der Erde</i>, Alfred Hitchcock's <i>Rear Window</i> (1954), Stanley Kubrick's <i>Dr. Strangelove </i>(1964), and Joss Whedon's <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i> (1997-2003), to note a few, seem to draw me out of the mundane and banal space and time that is my life and draw me into an almost magical realm of intellectual and emotional joy. I know, of course, that empirically speaking this sense of transcendence is, at least on the empirical surface, nonsensical. I have long been aware of the fact that art is inscribed within the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts of its space and time. Nevertheless, when I read, listen to, or see works of art, I have a sense that some art, what I regard as great art, takes me, thanks to their magic, out of the realm of the everyday and propels me into a transcendental realm of immense intellectual and emotional <i>jouissance</i>.</p><p>I don't mean to imply that this notion of art as transcendental means that we have no need of understanding how works of art work and function in their various economic, political, cultural, geographic, and biological-demographic contexts. Nor do I mean to imply that everyone needs to recognise and value as art that which I value as art or see as beautiful. It is clear, after all, that beauty and value are indeed in the socialised eyes of the beholder. I am not arrogant and ignorant enough to believe that I speak in cathedra when I, for instance, categorise Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as great transcendental art and something else, such as the television show <i>Silver Spoons</i> (1982-1986), as lowest common denominator bread and circuses entertainment, a far too common conceit that many people, particularly on social media sites like YouTube, unfortunately have and a common mistake far too many reactors on YouTube unfortunately make.</p><p>As someone who, as I noted, is moved intellectually and emotionally by specific works of art, works I regard as great art, I have been utilising the time that I now have thanks to my retirement reading and rereading books, watching and rewatching movies, and watching and rewatching television shows that I have long wanted to read , listen to, and watch, and watching reaction videos on YouTube, something that rarely results in the transcendental experience great art sometimes brings. Recently, as a consequence of this retirement programme, I rewatched a movie which I have very fond memories of, Vincente Minelli's <i>Gigi</i> (1958). </p><p>As I was watching <i>Gigi</i> several things came to mind beyond the nature of art and the nature of the experience of art. I, a baby boomer who came of age in a cinephilic age, a cinephilic age in which many of us cinephiles went to first run and second run cinemas so we could see what were regarded as classics of the cinema from the silent era to the 1960s, thought about the fact that many of the contemporary social media film reactors tended to ignore musicals in their reactions and, if they deigned to react to them, regarded them with disdain, a common prejudice among the broader film going public today which is why so few musicals are made these days. My sense is that much of this disdain for musicals, a disdain that turns musicals and other non-realist forms of cinema, such as screwball comedies and surrealistic films, into acts of profanation, is due to the fact that far too many gensolescents apply a very narrow notion of "realism", a very narrow time and space bound notion of "realism", to films that are not and were never meant to be "realistic". Now, I guess, I know what commentators mean when they talk about people who possess limited imaginations. No wonder many of those same people think that art, including film art and film entertainments, which have never been "realistic"---a descriptive fact--save perhaps in rhetoric must be "realistic"--a normative
rather than empirical polemic--even when they can never be "realistic" given the nature of the cinematic apparatus.</p><p>There are, of course, problems with applying a very narrow notion of "realism" to films in an ex cathedraish way. A screwball comedy like Howard Hawks's <i>Bringing Up Baby</i> (1938) is not and never had any intention of being "realistic", something that should be obvious from the fact that commentators have been calling films like <i>Bringing Up Baby</i> screwball comedies since the 1930s. The term "screwball" hardly screams I am realistic. Nor are musicals, like Minnelli's <i>Gigi</i>, meant to be realistic. They, like opera, operetta, and musicals before it, merge genre, tone, acting, and music, including singing, into a potential art form that is, as are all books, films, including documentaries, and television shows, inherently unrealistic because they are manipulated in a variety of ways through things like music, editing, and selectivity, something the great German playwright, art polemicist, and social theorist Bertolt Brecht recognised long ago which is why he tried to use his art for political and ideological purposes in order to raise the political and ideological consciousness by pointing up for them the creative and manipulative processes at the heart of so-called "entertainments". Perhaps no film genre foregrounds its cinematic apparaturs and construction more than the musical. <br /></p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY9dQVIGKHmb99TvFiIfHA5tbmiWPMUPi9z8pd-7q6pLDxB0RRAgyWJvEj0f9NyefkHU71poU50G9WxcYwJ0iGtXffRrFEQVQSpd2ed5a2byDIpwfjZZSVcCBZxNeqFluJrVVkOOIhnpzJGC_4OteAomCga0nWqLapkoSZs3OWYw86MEiZqgZ6dRBdTbE/s1024/GigiMinelliColour.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="579" data-original-width="1024" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY9dQVIGKHmb99TvFiIfHA5tbmiWPMUPi9z8pd-7q6pLDxB0RRAgyWJvEj0f9NyefkHU71poU50G9WxcYwJ0iGtXffRrFEQVQSpd2ed5a2byDIpwfjZZSVcCBZxNeqFluJrVVkOOIhnpzJGC_4OteAomCga0nWqLapkoSZs3OWYw86MEiZqgZ6dRBdTbE/s320/GigiMinelliColour.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>As I was watching <i>Gigi</i> there were several things about film
art that came to mind. I thought about how Minnelli was one of the few
directors of which I am aware who knew how to use colour in a way
similar to those who filmed in black and white and who used shadows and
lighting for aesthetic and expressive purposes. <i>Gigi</i>, for
instance, is full of Minnelli reds, colours that for me echo the vibrant colours of Van Gogh, and colour contrasts via sets,
clothes, and natural settings. Minnelli's art is also expressed in his
use of domestic and "natural" spaces, in his compositions, and in his utilisation of Belle
Epoque art and architecture. <i>Gigi</i>, in other words, is
manufactured art as are all books, musical works, films, and television
shows. It is a pity that so many don't grasp this simple fact. And it is
a pity that so many don't grasp the significance of mise-en-scene in
some films and television, something that, in turn, can perhaps be used
to distinguish art from entertainment.</p><p>These observations on Minnelli's mise-en-scene, by the way, have no bearing on whether one likes or dislikes <i>Gigi</i>. They are descriptive empirical facts that any educated close observer can deduce simply by watching <i>Gigi</i> attentively.
Unfortunately, many of those who react to films and television shows on
YouTube have neither sufficient observational skills or sufficient
educational skills to deduce much of anything from the films or
television shows they watch beyond simple plot points. And this is one
of the reasons why social media sites have replaced television as a vast
wasteland, as the purveyor of mostly narcissistic for profit lowest
common denominator content. It is a pity that this state of affairs is
likely to change anytime soon if at all. Humans, after all, are human</p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-58020821014828548832023-12-03T10:49:00.002-05:002023-12-03T13:05:26.680-05:00The Grocery Store Kiada<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJkDSxijiuemXm9bU2jMULV0yamu_66uysNM8rd7Y7JV5_s7A5eU5ddcfjcin4hRFNcoq7ZjnDSHy5vvFaLuHgJWtxs-77r2C8ckfd-cDIF8CXop6-5twcYUbsUtXVXLQjGV7Y7soqCigiwRbBDJ9-7JwkQ9GIT63DtKXiX5t4oLmXmedJL8PPDqwwI7M/s2000/WalmartAisles.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1333" data-original-width="2000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJkDSxijiuemXm9bU2jMULV0yamu_66uysNM8rd7Y7JV5_s7A5eU5ddcfjcin4hRFNcoq7ZjnDSHy5vvFaLuHgJWtxs-77r2C8ckfd-cDIF8CXop6-5twcYUbsUtXVXLQjGV7Y7soqCigiwRbBDJ9-7JwkQ9GIT63DtKXiX5t4oLmXmedJL8PPDqwwI7M/s320/WalmartAisles.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>There are a lot of things I really don't enjoy doing. I don't like going to the laundromat. I really wish I lived somewhere that had laundry facilities on site. I don't like cleaning the toilet bowl. Mom, why did you not tell me that I would be cleaning crap from toilet bowls for the rest of my adult life? And I don't like shopping particularly when there are hordes of other people shopping at the same time. And that is why I try to shop earlier in the morning or later at night.<p></p><p>Today was one of those days when I did some shopping in the early am hours on a rainy Sunday that felt a lot like Cambridge, England. I needed to pick up some groceries, I needed to get some medications, and I needed to fill my gas tank up with some petrol before petrol prices start rising again thanks, in part, to cartellisation and speculation, both inherent aspects of modern capitalism. So around 8 am I got in my car and headed off to the Delmar Hannaford and the Glenmont Walmart.</p><p>Both stores reminded me about two of the things I really detest about shopping for groceries and medications. I had a coupon for ten dollars off at Hannaford. It was one of those coupons where if you buy $25 dollars or more worth of items you get a $10 dollar discount. Among other things I wanted to pick up some Siggi's Honey Yoghurt, which I like very much and which was on sale at Hannaford. So I went to the yoghurt aisle and guess what? Yup, the Delmar Hannaford did not have any Siggi's Honey Yoghurt on the shelves. Nor was it on the cart that the person stocking yoghurt had out so he could fill the empty yoghurt shelves. As I didn't want to wait on a check of stock in the back I decided to skip the yoghurt--the other varieties did not appeal to me--and pick up enough other items so I could make the amount needed so I could get the coupon discount.<br /></p><p>My experience at Walmart was a bit different from that of Hannaford. I managed to find most of what I wanted at the Glenmont store even if I had to do a bit of searching for several items, something I almost always have to do at Walmart. The Equate Alka Seltzer was a bit hard to find since they recently moved it for some reason. Walmart seems to like to move stuff once you have found out where it is. Something else that was recently moved and I wanted to find at the Glenmont store was the Beyond Meat burgers, which I like very much. I went to where they were the last time I was at Walmart a few weeks ago but lo and behold they were nowhere to be seen. It was like they had been raptured. Giving up, I went to the self checkout in the store. Seeing an employee there I asked him where it was and was told to look on A32. Unfortunately, I could not find aisle A32 or even the signage for aisle A32. As I did not want to continue looking for the Beyond Meat burgers--I had perishable frozen items in the car from Hannaford--I gave up and went home.</p><p>Stupid me you see I had forgotten about the rules of one of those many variants of Murphy's Law. I had forgotten that generally speaking when you want to find something in a mega grocery store or department store with their labyrinthian aisles and their items sometimes on the move you won't be able to find what you are looking for because the item you are looking for is out of stock, not on the shelves, or you can't find the aisle it is supposed to be in. And so it goes.<br /> </p>Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660387914019273489.post-42215171081038207622023-12-02T13:38:00.030-05:002023-12-03T11:43:06.805-05:00The Books of My Life: Rites of Spring<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv0pp93gxqjdmUT_8BtyWB4nMs9oXs5mXXJrabyc0ZeUW6ex6-0pwdUcAd_V2b1ra2yL01-OiTkRtQimQMmZwyXCWu-lnNdmudUOP_UCRglhz3A7DhZ_n4VX_faST-kij9GLZq2wU1ZvzIzp5dDomi7YaaX8IDHCBcdkBJWXk9ememi5-YTKXZgUXC/s293/ecksteinsRites.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="293" data-original-width="189" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv0pp93gxqjdmUT_8BtyWB4nMs9oXs5mXXJrabyc0ZeUW6ex6-0pwdUcAd_V2b1ra2yL01-OiTkRtQimQMmZwyXCWu-lnNdmudUOP_UCRglhz3A7DhZ_n4VX_faST-kij9GLZq2wU1ZvzIzp5dDomi7YaaX8IDHCBcdkBJWXk9ememi5-YTKXZgUXC/s1600/ecksteinsRites.jpg" width="189" /></a></div><p>Scholars and intellectuals have long debated the question of how the history of the war to end all wars should be approached and viewed. One group of scholars of the Great War argue that World War I was the product of economic and political tensions between the European great powers of Great Britain, France, Russia, and the new great power kid on the block, Germany. The German nation-state, as they note, emerged in 1871 after Prussia's victory in the Franco-Prussian War. It was, they assert, the nationalistic fervour that gripped and united the German speaking states in the wake of that war that was the major factor that united the German speaking states into a nation. </p><p>Other scholars of the Great War argue that the war to end all wars was the product of ethnic tensions, ethnic tensions particularly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multicultural empire that united German speakers, Magyar speakiers, and Slavic speakers into a tense confederation. Slavophilism, a Slavophilism manipulated by great power Russia which fancied itself as the messianic protector of Slavs everywhere, gripped parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly Serbia, where ethnic tensions between it and Austria-Hungary played themselves out in deadly fashion resulting in the assassination of Austrian prince Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. This assassination, in turn, set the war into motion thanks to the alliances that European countries had made with each other, alliances which lead Austria to declare war on Serbia, Russia to declare war on Austria, Germany to declare war on Serbia and Russia, and Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany. </p><p>For other scholars the Great War was the product of both long term great power politics and nineteenth century and twentieth century nationalisms. The match that set both low burning flames alight was, these scholars tell us, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, an event that set in motion military mobilisations which were impossible to stop after a tipping point had been reached leading inevitably to the war to end all wars. <br /></p><p>University of Toronto professor Modris Ecksteins, in his superb<i> Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age</i> (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989), adds another dimension to the study of the political and military forces that led to the Great War, culture. While not ignoring the role that economics, politics, demography, and
geography--four of the five factors that make humans human--have played and
play in human life and human history, Ecksteins argues that culture--manners, values, norms, and morals, all things that allow social scientists to unlock the spirit
of an age--are central to understanding why World War I happened. <br /></p><p>Eckstein begins his tragic tale about the relationship between culture, modernism, and World War I in France. In the first chapter of the book Ecksteiins focuses his historian's gaze on art entrepreneur Sergei Diagilev's, composer Igor Stravinsky's, and choreographer Rudolph
Nijinsky's controversial <i>Le sacre du printemps</i>, the <i>Rite of Spring</i>,
which was performed by the Ballet Russes at the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées in a Paris in 1913. At the heart of Paris's cosmopolitan modernist culture, according to
Ecksteins, one that brought together composers, choreographers, artists,
dancers, artistic entrepreneurs from the bohemian quarters of modernist Paris, was a modernist bohemian culture that defined itself in opposition to bourgeois
cultural values, its other. This modernist bohemian culture, Ecksteins argues, celebrated the artist
who, through his or her art, transcended or rose above the conventions, mundanities, and trivialities
of modern bourgeois culture. <i>Le sacre</i>, in both its music and in its choreography, Ecksteins argues, was meant to offend "traditional"
bourgeois sensitivities through its celebration of the primitive via its primitive violent rhythms and its primitivist and violent
choreography. The ballet ended up, as Ecksteins notes, dividing its audience into warring cultural camps of modernist "traditionalists" and
bohemian modernists.</p><p>Transcendent heroic modernist artist heroes like Stravinsky and Nijinsky, Ecksteins argues, were reacting against the mainstream bourgeois culture of duty that had
dominated and continued to dominate both France and Britain in the late 19th century and into the 20th. In England, according to Ecksteins, a nationalist ideal of duty filtered down from the English manorial elite to the
English bourgeoise. It was a conception of duty in which the individual meshed unproblematically with the nation-state. These French and British conceptions of duty were, according to Ecksteins, eventually allied to and aligned with
notions of progress, namely, the belief that France and Britain were helping to make the
world a better place, an ideology that dominated French and British manners, customs, values, and
morals. Duty thus, according to Eckseins, was the key symbol around which "traditionalist" French and British bourgeois culture floated. It was this concept of duty allied with notions of defending and extending civilisation, according to Ecksteins, that rationalised and justified the decision of France and Britain to go to war with Germany. <br /></p><p>German modernist culture, a culture of moral countenence and secular outlook, on the other hand, Ecksteins's argues, defined itself in opposition to French and British and particularly English bourgeois culture. This, according to Ecksteins, made Germany the true heir to the avant garde idealist and primitivist culture represented in <i>Le sacre</i>. Germany was, after all, the new nation-state on the block. It was a new nation in the throes of an industrialisation and militarisation that would eventually allow the ethnocentric and nationalist German nation-state to compete on the world stage with the other great powers of Europe, if tensely. Great powers, after all, have historically had tense relationships with each other for a number of political, economic, cultural, geographic, and demographic reasons.<br /></p><p>Like France and Britain, according to Ecksteins, German modernism centred around the key symbol of duty. The German conception of duty was, however, contends Ecksteins, different in important ways from the conceptions of duty which dominated French and English culture. Germans, Ecksteins argues, were drugged up, thanks to socialisation, on the belief that it and it alone instantiated a civilisation in which the state was the literal embodiment of the <i>volk</i>, the folk. Germans thus came to believe that their civilisation was a civilisation that was superior to all others, something the French and English also believed about their civilisations if in a somewhat different way. Germans, Ecksteins asserts, came to believe that Germany had a unique destiny, a messianic destiny in which Germany and German culture, thanks to its creative artist warrior culture grounded in ideologies of technique, scientism, efficiency, self control, and right, would supplant Great Britain and France as the true city on the hill. This distinct and hegemonic German culture of duty and destiny, Ecksteins contends, was an important causal factor that led to World War I. <br /></p><p>After the Great War, Ecksteins points out, cultural disillusionment set in in France, Great Britain and Germany, a disillusion captured nicely, Ecksteins notes, in Erich Maria Remarque's <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i>, a book which had a major impact on how people viewed the war all across the core nation world at the time. Thanks to Remarque's book (and others similar to it such as Charles Yale Harrison's <i>Generals Die in Bed</i>, I would add) This cultural disillusionment, argues Ecksteins, was driven by cognitive dissonance, the cognitive dissonance between the fervour with which men initially went off to war and the disillusionment they experienced thanks to the brutal realities of modern warfare, particularly modern trench warfare, during the war This disillusionment, in turn, one that was driven particularly in Germany by economic despair, political dysfunction, and culture wars, led to a variation on the German culture of duty and transcendence, one that was grounded less in creativity through life than in creativity through death, Nazism. Ecksteins argues that Nazism, the German cultural and political movement that was born out of the belief that for the Fatherland, in order to achieve its destiny "decadent" Germany had to recapture the spirit of comradeship, the comradeship that paralleled the comradeship of the German trenches in the Great War regardless of the cost. Nazism, Ecksteins argues, was thus kitsch. It was kitschy, Ecksteins argues, because it took selective fabrications from the past and mixed and matched them with selective fabrications of a glorious utopian future, a utopian and radiant future where all real Germans, or at least real German men, would be transformed into warriors marching ever onward even unto death for the for the messianic cause of the fatherland, <i>Gotterdammerung</i>. <br /></p><p></p><p>In many ways the world of the early twenty first century seems to be cycling back to the late 1920s and early 1930s. Many in the 1930s argued that capitalism was dead thanks to the economic collapse it caused and found salvation instead in the Nazism and Bolshevik communism, a Nazism that was pulling Germany out of Great Depression thanks to military spending, industrialisation, and cultural revival and a Bolshevism that kept the Soviet Union from having a depression, again, at least in part, thanks to industrialisation. In the wake of a series of economic busts and increasing political and cultural polarisation many in the post-World War II North America, Europe, and the Antipodes, once again seem to be looking for an alternative to the political and economic systems that have dominated the core nation World since World War II. Many of them, particularly on the populist right, blame the state itself rather than capitalism, for their many difficulties. <br /></p><p>As Ecksteins reminds us, fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevism were not the only strands of authoritarian, melodramatic, and banal kitsch that arose in the 1920s and 1930s that appealed to many on the populist right in the post World War II core nation world. As Ecksteins notes, Nazism was cousin to another kitschy cultural and political movement which emerged during the Great War and the post-Great War era, American Christian fundamentalism and, I would add, Christian fundamentalism's close cousin American Christian nationalism. Like Nazism, American Christian fundamentalism and the right wing American nationalist faith that would emerge from it mixed selective delusions of the past with selective delusions of the present. Like Nazism, the American nationalist faith was and is grounded in delusion, was and is narcissistic, was and is self affirming and self-righteous, was and is filled with hate for an evil other, and was and is stoked up on a sense of choseness and victimisation. For the Nazis, of course, the German race was victimised in particular by Jewish vermin (who Hitler wanted to gas in the same way that rats were gassed in the killing fields of Flanders and France during the Great War as Ecksteins notes), decadents, the infirm and disabled, pacifists, the irresolute, socialists, and communists. Today many American Christian nationalists and their fellow travellers believe likewise that they have been victimised by a host of vermin others including liberals, socialists, communists, gays, trans, politically and culturally incorrect books, somewhat paradoxically by Nazis, and even, in some quarters, by Jews. Like the Nazis of the past today's American Christian nationalist onward marching soldiers are as immune from self-criticism as their Nazi kissing cousins and are just as deluded, thanks to their paranoias and conspiracy theories, including one about blood rituals being performed by demonic liberals in a pizza parlour in Washington, DC. And so it goes...</p><p><i>Rites of Spring</i> is a landmark book that I can't recommend more highly for anyone interested in nationalism, cultural history, and the history of ideology. Ecksteins book is a fascinating excursion into the social and cultural construction of national culture, national character, and civil or public religion. It is a book grounded more in social and cultural psychology than in a fetishised psychoanalysis that a product of the social conditions and the culture of fin-de-siecle Europe and is. as a result, all the better for it in my opinion.<br /></p><p><br /></p><br />Ronald Helfrich Jnr.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01979221009291819300noreply@blogger.com0