Meal tickets under glass

The circus continues.  What was not said here and that which was hinted the first time around are grotesquely obvious now.  The death penalty pundits make the political pundits look tame, tamed by their corporate masters rather like seals on skirted pedestals from one of many rings in which monstrous acts take place every day and every night under the Big Top until there is no memory of a beginning or any end in sight.  MSM prime time punditry would be fired for behaving as outrageously as the dagger death pundits, the couch potato noodle noosers bonbon-ing their ways into stampede wearing flip flops and halter tops, hair rollers and the ever present shopping bags overflowing with cameras, thumb twittering cell phones, awaiting their moment of a lifetime on youtube to imbed into the empty echos of their social networking sites.  Like?  One hundred and fifty million people liked this.  These particular pundits are insatiable and demanding, where's my panel? As the screen breaks up into squares of faces all speaking at once which means they have to yell in order to hear themselves as they are overridden by each others caterwauling.  I was hoping Bose earphones would sponsor this event, you know, those phones suggested to be worn in the presence of heavy machinery such as aircraft interiors.  Bose shows themselves to have somewhat more selective marketing moderation than underwrite death penalty pundits which are actually sponsored exhaustively by that shrill automotive insurance actress delivering her monologues as if she was in the front row at a Stones concert selling deep fried pretzels and pork rinds.

One of the events, many in fact, centered around the vivid technological displays of human decomposition by, heh, decomposition experts.  Who knew such gigs exist?  The crowds went gaga, you could hear the saliva quicken for the drools, quickly hidden by all manner of wipes.  The cries of disgust, the puking, things never before imagined in the actual slide shows of horror beyond all previous horrors as bone after bone was displayed accompanied by the imagined gnashing of animals chewing and dragging the toddler's torso through forested overgrowth.  So what I thought.  What did they think happens to the body in death anyway?  They think it must be pumped with formaldehyde, painted and hair-styled to look alive, gussied up in formal attire, rosy cheeked and merely asleep, sealed in an airtight gilded plastic and metal box six feet under the topsoil and guarded by armed security.  The point being there is big, big money in an industry to keep your true self cosmopolitaned for eternity and the circus audience stamps and screams in mass nausea if somehow one is revealed to have been flesh and blood all along, under all the frills and pretense, under the facade of the magazine mannequin, an unblemished, idealized product of the demographically targeted corporate consumer ... "Why God forbid!  Such a disturbance in thought is sheer blasphemy!"  Like?  Two hundred and sixty seven million people do not like this suggestive dialogue.

We've been all over that issue before, haven't we.  More times than I recall, here and at Su's, anywhere we have the opportunity to spread the word, the death industry is solitary incarceration extreme guaranteeing two thousand or so years from now you'll be dug up and showcased under glass in a natural history museum.  "Isn't he well preserved!  He looks so, so alive.  Beautiful work, taxidermists were real craftsmen then."  It all reminds me of people who have Elk heads on their wall, lacquered fish glued on plaques over the fireplace, the prized and princely testosterone den decor forevermore outdone, one upped by Jibbertongue Rumsfeld and his piece of a 911 airliner displayed on his former office of special plans wall.  A souvenir.  Perhaps it, like all of it, was just another high tech hologram.  Like?  Two hundred and ninety one million crazy baldheads do not think like this and will stamp their feet and screech at you for such wicked speech.  Why, they'll probably have a trial in the main ring complete with the prosecution's selection of experts yukking it up in their fifteen minutes of face time on TV, yeah! TV.  You are no one, you know, in this lonely beleaguered, hardass shell of a civilization unless you are on TV.  It doesn't matter if you are selling insurance or pork rinds, expertly analyzing computer generated news with your computer generated peers squeezed evermore tightly in between the headline banners, any airtime will do.  Of course, they have rules. The most sought after quality in addition to being fully integrated with your representative self so that the representative self is always in complete control, is high ratings appeal.  You'll note that the two most desirable qualities are actually one pure, homogenized quality unadulterated with any experience that cannot be easily explained.  There are no "ifs", no guesswork in questioning the possibility of something larger than can't be covered between trips to the pork rind bag and cerveza cooler.

In the trial, to date, still the question of a father for the toddler remains unasked and unmentioned.  This is a first, and how it is left to the unknown unmentioned is an amazing mystery, although, some dire and distant message comes through regardless and that would be, of course, the possibility in vitro fertilization at some point will be the future's sole legally controlled method for producing new generations of replacement representative selves.  In a throwback to early technology, designer DNA will be the cultural norm, children born never knowing what came before, true products of the moment, pudgy, steamrolled, cookie-cut and pundit-like in discourtesy, quick to condemn, always in control of themselves and their bleak surroundings seen as delightful, amusing, progressive, evidence of perfection everywhere because they can not possibly ever know what they like and don't like, in praise, always kneeling before the altars of quack dogma, the Big Top drawing in whole manufactured families to stare in awe at roadkill in sideshows unburdening them of their doubts.

There is nothing we think or do that someone somewhere can't figure out how to eek out a living off of you and in doing so, laws attempting to refunnel the cash flow are designed, voted and approved.  Legal or illegal.  There is also nothing that anyone anywhere does that cannot be defined by its opposite intention depending on the approval ratings within a culture.

It helps to understand these times in general by thinking about what isn't being presented and less about what is.  What drives the desires of entertainment seekers and what drives you.  While it may seem much like Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery, where the villagers drew lots to see who would be the annual stoning victim, it is only slightly more complicated being that approval ratings change as the situation worsens.  Ratings attempt to create a sense of growth and prosperity just around the corner in spite of the hopelessness of their tattered Big Tops and rigged sideshows of the fallen, shredded by the stampeding crowds lusting to be something more than a social networking wall, forever locked into the impression of free will and miraculously, never attending to the slightest concern they are the meal ticket du jour.

Granville Redmond, Malibu Coast Spring, c. 1929

... The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.