WTF- Anti-corporatism, District 9, the Economic Meltdown, Basic Math, and Matt Taibbi. Kitchen Sink Optional.

Another brief moment on District 9, but not really. Actually this is something I rarely do, that popular blog format- the point by point snipe. But it isn’t actually that either. It’s just that something reviewer Daniel Engber wrote in his review of District 9 for Slate.com well and truly pissed me off:

“And so the film abandons any pretense of exploring the dynamics of social upheaval. Instead we're treated to yet another take on the evils of corporatism. Could there be a more egregious sci-fi cliché? In Moon we had Lunar Industries Ltd.; in Wall-E it was Buy N Large; Blade Runner featured the Tyrell Corp. And let's not forget the executives from the bio-weapons division of Weyland-Yutani, who cause all the carnage in Aliens.
…
It's a little odd, if you think about it, that District 9—and the whole sci-fi genre—should be so hung up on this one issue. Especially since creatures that arrive from another planet so clearly stand in for humans who arrive from another country: space aliens, illegal aliens. On the io9 blog, Charlie Jane Anders has argued that the archetypes of science-fiction are refugees; indeed, a long list of sci-fi novels explore the theme of immigration in great detail.”

Duh! Most Golden Age SF was written by Jews and the genre emerged just before and after the second world war. How oblivious can Mr. Engber be?

“Film directors, too, have in the past used stories of marooned aliens to examine race relations (e.g. Brother From Another Planet, Alien Nation) and assimilation (e.g. The Man Who Fell to Earth, Superman). Yet recent sci-fi cinema continues to dwell on the corporate menace.”

Obviously the answer to my previous questions is: completely. Personally, I don’t find anything odd at all that SF is interested in corporatism. Corporations as they exist in the modern world are a virtually unparalleled organization in human history. Huge completely amoral social structures, without geographic boundaries, immensely influential and wealthy, often more powerful than governments, with no motive other than avarice, and a organizational structure which is basically a meritocracy where merit consists of being Machiavellian in the pursuit of personal ambition and power.

In fact, it seems that if corporations didn’t exist, SF would have had to invent them.

Corporate intrigue really hit mainstream SF with the advent of Cyberpunk. There had been cautionary tales of large business interests in SF before that- Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl’s classic The Space Merchants pretty much laid the groundwork for the idea that business interests would surpass both government and religion as the dominant organizational structure in human society. But with Cyberpunk, corporations became a SF staple right along with space travel, aliens, and technological advancement. It makes perfect sense. Corporatism has that wonderful Frankenstein monster duality that drama depends on. As technology becomes more complex it requires more resources to improve that technology. Yet as society progresses we expect government (naively) to become more responsive to the citizenry. Thus we become caught in a catch-22 of high-tech capitalism requiring decisive innovative organization while high-tech democracy requires more slow moving bureaucracy. In a Darwinian sense it’s easy to see why the natural selection of the marketplace, which reassesses feedback four times a year, would result in more powerful social organizations than government which are naturally and contrivedly resistant to change even in a democracy.

The result seems to be the system we currently find ourselves in. I haven’t commented for awhile on what Matt Taibbi has been writing in Rolling Stone over the last two months but it is the most cogent and clear explanation of the economic situation over the last 12 months that I’ve found. If I were to consider myself a diminutive Diogenes, Taibbi is perhaps the last honest man I’ve found in the media. He is non-partisan, hellishly smart, unrelenting in his pursuit of a story, and perhaps the funniest writer anywhere in the mainstream media. He often gets compared to Hunter S. Thompson and rails against the comparison. And for good reason. He may be as funny and irreverent as Thompson, but what he is practicing isn’t gonzo journalism- it’s real journalism. It’s just that in our Pepsi drinking, McDonalds eating, GAP wearing, plastic culture, where real debate is ignored and faux debate is ubiquitous, where “news” reporting has the same relationship to real news that the WWF has to real sport, he’s an oddity. Someone who looks deep into the world and reports on what he sees and is flabbergasted that his society is so completely stupid and gullible.

A couple of months ago he wrote an article for Rolling Stone that pretty much laid out one (just ONE) aspect of how the government came to give so much of the American population’s money to a few obscenely rich private organizations for no reason other than that they were a big part of the status quo that is turning this country into a slave state. Since then he’s been shouted down by any number of corporate shills (slate rears it's ugly head again- who says there aren't callbacks in my writing?) defending Goldman Sachs for both infiltrating our government and taking TRILLIONS of dollars out of taxpayer’s pockets. Now it looks like Taibbi may resemble that character in DISTRICT 9 awaiting trial for revealing his company's illegal business.

A democracy cannot stand without an informed electorate. And the lack of basic math skills in America is apalling. Here is a short primer of what you are being told without realizing it:

There are about 330 million people in the US.

An average family consists of 4 people.

So there are 82.5 million American families.

A trillion dollars is a thousand billion dollars. And a billion is a thousand million dollars. So a trillion is a million million. (Yeah, I know this is stupid, but what are you going to do?)

So every time you hear the word trillion, if you are a member of the average America family needs to think, “They just used TWELVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE of my dollars.

That’s right but even that may be a little abstract. So instead, every time you hear trillion on the news remember that your family just bought somebody a 2008 Honda Accord!

(Look it up on kbb.com, the Kelly Blue Book site. I put in parameters for several cars and was non-plussed that last year’s Accord, at the base level, with 60,000 miles (as my top number- basically unlimited mileage on a one year old car), in good shape, resulted in about 13 thousand dollars. It seems a wildly low number. But OTOH I have a confession to make. I’m a middle-aged single man who makes what I consider a decent living and I can’t understand how an average American family lives on 50K a year with kids in school and cell phones for everybody. So I sure can’t realize how our government indebts every family for a year old Honda Accord for every trillion dollars they spend when the average family can’t afford to DRIVE year old Honda Accords.)

Anyway, a trillion dollars is every American family buying a car for somebody who already has more money than they could ever dream of. Last I heard, 50% of the wealth in this country is now controlled by the top 1% of the population. It is nothing short of obscene feudalism. And of all the corporate media, I’ve found only Matt Taibbi and a couple of others with the wavos to call our “representatives” out on it. Read his articles. Read his blog on True/Slant. He’s trying to clue you in.

Anyway, we’ve traveled far and wide in this post. And that’s why this blog has degenerated to movie reviews and random insaneness. The world is a complex place. And to really examine the problems in it takes complexity. A blog may not be the format for that and there may not be any place for it in an America that not only thinks there are simple answers to complex questions but can’t understand complex answers in the first place. Who knows. Matt is trying and SF continues to present cautionary tales of our own excess.

Next: facts about health care and the best superhero movie ever made.

Stay tuned…

POLITICS- The Court Jester (not Danny Kaye)

The court jester, or court fool, was a unique character in the medieval royal administration. Perhaps this is best evidenced in Shakespeare’s plays where often the role of the fool was exemplified as the one person able to comment on the action, on the follies of the characters around him that were driving the drama with their own seriousness and failure. Only the character of the fool could say what everybody in the audience was thinking. Only he had liberty to speak the truth because no one had to take him seriously. After all, he was just a clown, meant only for amusement.

In a world where everyone is participating in the drama by saying whatever they think is to their advantage and all proclamations must be parsed for the actual aims of those making them, it’s easy to question whether you have been overwhelmed by cynicism (which is ABSOLUTELY NOT pessimism, as I often hear it mis-described). The professional cynics in a free society are supposed to be the news media. The “fourth estate” as Thomas Carlyle put it in his book On Heroes and Hero Worship. Since then it has come to mean almost a fourth branch of government. The one without civil power but with ultimate oversight on the other three. The final check and balance of power in a system where, ultimately, the people are expected to rule. But since our democracy has become a plutocracy the actually government has been bought and paid for by the rich and the fourth estate is outright owned by them, the only people left to tell the actual truth are the fools, the jesters.

Witness this last night.

Part one

Part two

Part three

Those three videos, in a form only slightly longer than the actual program as aired, are perhaps the most shocking news interview I’ve seen in the last decade if not longer. And that’s saying a lot when you consider how often the GOP vice-presidential candidate was allowed to show her true colors on network TV over the last several months. But it’s one thing to turn on the camera and have someone show themselves as an idiot in response to a few innocuous questions. Republicans chided the “media” for attacking Sarah Palin when in fact they hardly asked a question harder than “has your stupid ass even heard of any Supreme Court decisions other than Roe v. Wade?” Last night we saw what the press might be like if they took their adversarial role with the government seriously. And it wasn’t from some bloviating anacephalic bully’s self proclaimed “No-Spin Zone”, or from some pretentious Edward R. Murrow wannabe’s “Special Comments”. It wasn’t from a nightly network news broadcast or a (gag) serious newsmagazine. It was a simple case of a court jester asking an expert who claims to be a journalist why he didn’t say anything about a situation that anybody with half a brain saw coming. I’ve mentioned several times on this blog before that if you think people can own homes that cost half a million dollars with a mean family income of a tenth of that, you aren’t a financial expert, you are an idiot. And I’m sure as hell no expert. I just had basic math in school.

Thank you, Jon Stewart. You’re gonna get heat for this. The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes has a fake ending. If it had been truthful it would have ended with the loud-mouthed child beaten to death by the crowd for being unpatriotic. A few years ago you called out Tucker Carlson for being a lying, fatuous douchbag and if it hadn’t been for the internet no one would have known. So far I haven’t seen the reaction from the media but it’s going to be even more telling than your one man stand for speaking the obvious truth. (I don’t watch Joe Scarburough in the mornings because I have better ways to start my day that to have fat, rich, white guys wake me up by screaming at me about how fat rich white guys aren’t the problem. And I think that Mika Cadillac, daughter of Zibignew Cadillac, doesn’t even have the qualifications for being a woman who reads aloud on TV in the morning. If I wanted a horse-faced idiot to greet me every morning with a combination of superiority and stupidity I wouldn’t have thrown my ex-wife out of the house a couple of years ago.)

But thank you, Jon Stewart, you motley fool. Here is one insignificant Diogenese who appreciates that there is at least one honest man left.

SOLUTIONS- The Story of Stuff

This is the first of a new category.

I'm not a fanatical environmentalist or necessarily anti-corporate. And I realize that this little (at 20 minutes) video is simplistic. But I also realize that most people don’t give a second thought to where stuff comes from of what we’re doing to the planet. So I’m posting this as a sort of primer into further posts that will deal with some answers to the questions we are going to be faced with over the course of the 21st century. Plus, it’s entertaining and funny. Enjoy.