Hunt (& Bash a Few Heads When Necessary)

Izzy is in the early stages of production of her first feature length film! I can’t believe I am able to write that. So ANS is left to the old man to spew out that which does not fit at nftrh.com.

As a second side note, I am using this website as much to get comfortable with a new WordPress backend admin as anything else. I will need to be comfortable before changing the NFTRH site over.

From the day the first Caveman picked up a rock (his first tool) and bashed his fellow caveman over the head, took his food, left him for dead and moved on, we humans have been on our evolutionary continuum.

Cro Magnon Man followed, and eventually fashioned the tools to hunt, often in groups, which was better than the old ‘bash ‘n grab’ method.

That was oh, about 50,000 years ago. Let’s briefly review the filler in between, and fast forward to today.

After Cro Magnon man came Neolithic humans, agriculture, community and farming. In the Bronze Age, those communities became villages, towns and cities. Within these new systems, modern man needed to figure out how to coexist without feeling the need to bash his neighbor’s head in.

Modern Man and the Spectacle

In the social and cultural realms, we have devolved, err, I mean evolved in the areas of the arts, entertainment and equitable society:

Did we evolve or merely progress? One might have thought we’d hit Peak Stoopid around the time of the Super Bowl XXXVIII NippleGate spectacle. But no, the progression has relentlessly continued, day after day, year after year.

To my eyes, popular culture gets dumb and dumber all the time. And the stultifying banality and distraction is multiplying, replicating and invading every corner of society. It has been so consistent and relentless over so many years that I would wager the state we find society in today has barely been noticed by a majority.

It’s generations now, bred this way. As if the big dumb-down is normal. In this widening void, where the mundane, banal and downright stupid dominate the public arena, real art exists. It is real if it has the capacity to stand apart from, critique, confront and make fun of the drive to stupidity.

Despite individual capacity to think critically (in some cases), modern humans of the developed world have long-since become commodities; tools, raw materials in and of their own lives. Commodities owned by entertainment industries, traditional media, governments, and of course and especially, that cesspool of influential robots and robotic thinking, social media.

Guy Debord and the Situationists understood this as far back as the 1950s, through the 1960s. But back in the 1950s it was a much more innocent-seeming, post-war uniformity. A uniformity that the 1960s saw to with a great adjustment.

Society as we knew it ceased to exist, as it had become something else entirely. The murders of a popular president and his popular brother, a civil rights leader and all that acid… man. Minds blown, and minds expanded.

1960s-1970s

The 60s were innocent too, in hindsight. Anti-war, questioning government and authority at every turn, free love (oh how naive) and a side order of Timothy Leary to have your mind expanded while you listen to the music of the first psychedelic era.

Or, if Garage Psych is not your style, and a more Metal sound is, well, here ya go.

I was a kid in the 60s, grew up in the 70s and have watched the slow decline in independent thought and lifestyle, as technology marches onward, amplifying and somehow whitewashing the process with so much noise (disguised as change).

In short, we don’t even have enough time to learn the latest cool sayings before they’re outdated (disclaimer: I never once in my life uttered the word “groovy”, wore a leisure suit, bellbottoms or a perm, for that matter. In the 70s it was t-shirt and straight leg jeans for me.

Through it all, I knew something was wrong with society. Who am I to decide what is right and what is wrong? Well, it was wrong to me, and that’s what mattered. Maybe my sense of humor was not as fully developed as it is today, but all I saw was fascism in the culture. Everybody wearing similar uniforms, dancing in lockstep to crappy music, brains on pause.

I guess I was a little severe in my internal voice of criticism. But I knew this was coming, I tell you! I knew society was devolving even back then. My personal antidote came when one night, out with some buddies, I stumbled into an old Italian Restaurant in Boston known as Cantone’s. Restaurant by day, and host to some great garage and punk rock by night.

Let us not talk of the bar fight, in which I was primary participant, in that place one night. Let’s just say a guy sat in my friend’s chair while he was in the head and would not unseat himself when I politely told him it’s my buddy’s seat.

Again…

1980s

All I have to say is…

People tell me disco was fun, new wave dance music and saccharin 1980s bullshit music was fun. It was not fun. It was anti-human. It was stylized, uniform and above all, boring.

Okay, let’s move on.

1990s

There was something of a respite in the 90s. A knee-jerk back to some forms of grounded culture and harsh reality in the decade of OJ, Waco, the Unibomber and a deeply troubled mother who drowned her own kids. The symbolic fun was over and music got better:

Today

Fast forward, since I am not writing a book here. I am writing a post for a website that is yet to fully define itself.

Today we have a product of a society drowning in its dissolving culture, with a literal Reality TV star at the top and a cluster of made-for-TV sycophantic characters under his command.

In this command structure, stupid is as stupid does, and stupid is layered upon more stupid. You know, just like those fucking reality TV shows that signaled “Peak Stoopid” for America.

Of course, this was a great and decidedly not stupid movie about an America that once was.

Ah, this is more like it. Stoopid is as stoopid is.

It has been decades of systematic dumbing down. We are talking generations here. Now, if your Algo is tuned a certain way you get every lunatic on YouTube siloing you off, reinforcing what you already believe. What do you have?

It’s complicated.

You have compound stupidity. Stupidity layered upon unthinkable layers of ignorance and bias reinforcement. You’ve gotta do some work to find real things. Then the Algos can work for you, to a degree.

Back to the 70s (and the future)

Donald Trump was a developing (pun intended, I guess) icon of this society in the 1970s. Today, many of his administration’s policies are taking us back. I am not going to argue the pros or cons of various deregulation and initiatives. There is some good stuff in there and there is a lot of really bad, short-sighted and/or regressive stuff in there.

I am going to argue from my wheel house, which is the financial realm. Rising interest rates in response to decades of fiscal policy excess by both parties, and of course the producer of inflation, monetary policy by the Federal Reserve.

The system runs on inflation, I am sure you know. Imagine that, a system where the Fed needs to pretend to be ‘anti’ the very thing it creates (prints) in order to bail the system out periodically. That is because with $39 Trillion in debt leveraged to the hilt and neither political party willing to address it, it is “inflate or die”.

How fucked up is that? ‘We stand against inflation, now STFU and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

This is fundamental macro change and it is here for the long run. The rules of 1980-2022 are off the table. If you’re still following them, well, good luck.

Not a Good Mix

The bottom line is that as society has dumbed down on the whole, as the political environment has siloed off the dummies to their own particular world views (AKA ignorance).

Meanwhile, those who realize that the society we knew it is in extremis are siloed off from each other (on the left and the right) and from influencing the great blob of siloed dummies.

The financial system has become choked by a critical mass of inflation (and begun to react to it in the form of rising interest rates). That’s, as they say “not gonna end well”. Or per the Seinfeld ‘Bad Chicken’ episode…

“That’s not gonna be good for anybody”

There may be wonderful changes ahead for society. But the adjustment before they engage and have efficacy is gonna be a bitch.

Today, humans are commodities in their own society. Siloed off by media, Algos and ignorance. Pay your taxes and shut the fuck up (or speak only in the terms sanctioned by the major media) while the machine, driven by greed and those actually in power, auto-controls the direction for society.

More to come, I guess.