#today i learned that echo has a theme of psychological horror

[dravidious]

Vague Echo spoilers for TJ's route

When I started playing Echo, part of my reason was a youtuber's recommendation, and I remembered her saying that the ending of Flynn's route was so emotionally devastating for the writer that they had to go on break and leave the last two routes for someone else to write. So I decided to save that one for last, and instead started with TJ's route, because he's small and cute and innocent.

As it turns out, because it took me so long to finally play Echo, I had misremembered what she said. It wasn't Flynn's ending that emotionally devastated the writer. It was TJ's. And. Um. God damn.

[just-existing-as-you-do-blog]

Belated happy halloween! Submitting a request for more of your thoughts about the difference between Dark Romanticism and Gothic literature in Frankenstein? I am an amateur researcher who loves Mary Shelley while at the same time I'm not so keen on the monstermash side of gothic lit, is why I'm curious.

Oh DUDE get ready for a wall of text.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstien is one of the pieces that is often lumped in with the Gothic movement and the Romantisism movement. What most people do not know is that the Gothic and Romantisism movements had a baby named Dark Romantisism. (A topic I took upon myself to learn as much as possible about.) It began in the 18th century and carried on into the mid to late 19th century BUT like the Gothic movement it persists in many works today (like batman).

Many people credit Poe's contributions to the Dark Romantisism genre while entirely ignoring Shelley's MASSIVE influence on the genre! Even in academic settings.

Before we truly begin defining the genre crossing nonsense of Frankenstein we need to define the differences between Gothic and Dark Romantisism. The main tenants of Gothic Literature of the time (with some exceptions I'm sure) were as follows:

1) The setting, the main necessity for a Gothic setting is the mood. Giant cathedrals with complex labyrinths that could devour one whole. Castles dusty and filled with the ghosts of the past. Or in southern Gothic a much later addition to the genre, old rotting plantations filled with old men holding onto their wealth through unsavory means.

2) Horror, terror, and the sublime. I am sure you know the difference between horror and terror and understand how that factors in, but I will define the sublime. In this case we will define the sublime as that feeling when you see something beautiful and impossible. Something to big to quite put into words.

3) Transgressive subject matter, critiquing the church, critiquing men. Incest, SA, gore!

The Romantisism movement and the Gothic movement critiqued each other. Romantisism is full of fairytales and isn't real art, Gothic is too macabre, you get the picture.

But when they finally mixed as they were always going to, you get my beloved, Dark Romantisism which tenants are:

1) Themes of the beauty of nature, science going to far, and the beauty of the horror of the human mind. (Sublime psychology if you will.)

2) Mood, screw realism. The weather and environment match how the charecter feels. The symbolism is intense. It's full of mystery and gloom and beautiful nature scenes. And the horrible things humans do to each other! And how it goes wrong.

3) Torture, most every Dark Romantisism story is filled with it, whether emotional or physical. See the Rappanicis Daughter or The Birthmark as examples.

SO there was alot of overlap! And Shelley's work was often both. Frankenstien, I believe, is more Dark Romantisism then Gothic. There are the themes that are more wholly Dark Romantisism. There is some incest but both parties seem uninterested in pursuing it without the pressure of their parents. (Also Mary Shelley I believe was good friends with Lord Byron and Mr. Frankenstein is nothing if not a Byronic "hero". Byron had quite the history with incest.) But the true horror comes from the inner working of Mr. Frankenstein's mind, his obsession that he calls a "sickness" to my favorite framing device Robert Walton (in either the 1816 or 1830 version I cannot remember which.)

The setting is far from constraining to Mr. Frankenstien, he travels the world. He is always outside, in nature, with the environment being effected by his mood. It's all mountain tops and college dorms and dank cramped interiors of ships.

ALSO ALSO ALSO

Dark Romantisism has some heavy scifi elements as it developed as a genre, AND MARY SHELLEY INVENTED SCI FI WITH FRANKENSTEIN. Her work pulled Dark Romantisism down the path it went down practically single handedly!!! It was a defining work of the genre! A genre that echos through works today- The Hunger Games, The Matrix, and Batman!

But, Frankenstein is always solely labeled as Gothic, which it was technically, but it was also Dark Romantisism.

[improbable-outset]

𝐀 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐬 - 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞: 𝐑𝐞𝐝

Hank J. Wimbledon x gn!Reader

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 2.7K

MadCom Masterlist | AO3 | 🅱️laylist

𝐓𝐖 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐖: Non-cannon Hank bc I said so 🤌🏽🤌🏽Yandere themes, Obsessive behaviour, some psychological horror, serious gore, graphic descriptions of injuries, injury marks during work, mental asylum settings, cursing (sorry can’t help myself) a brief description of mental disorders and slight manipulation at the end - please be mindful of the triggering content.

𝐀/𝐍: Okay, so I’ve got the Yandere themes from @saltymongoose head cannons here and here. (Look salty, I would submit this to you but I have no idea how submissions work) Of course, reader isn’t a Player! But a Doctor! I put my own twist to it so it will match the story line. Yeah it gonna be a little bit more… violent than wholesome. Also you don’t understand the amount of research I had to do to perfect this 😭 watching a documentary of inside a psychiatric hospital and read a handful of articles. Also after watching season 4 of Stranger Things I kinda grew an interest on asylum AU’s - I’ll give you a small spoiler for this fic quoted from the show ‘what have you done?’😟 (also want to thank @deimosed for those sweet words from my last Hank fic)

𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: After working your way up your career ladder, you’re excited to be offered a place in Nevada’s notorious psychiatric hospital as a full time psychiatrist. This is a massive opportunity for your career. But things aren’t so glamorous and rewarding as it seems when you start to discover the inside works of the hospital with their dark and twisted system to ensure everyone, especially the employees, abides by their extensive rules and policies. You start to learn that the hospital's high reputation may not be so organic. Meanwhile, you develop a secret admirer amongst one of your patients who will do anything to be alone with you and to have you for himself (and maybe save you) - even if it means breaking a few rules.

I’d let these people bleed out if you told me you liked the colour red.

The janitors must’ve used some strong cleaning products again. Waking up to the bitter-sweet smell of disinfectant is not really the ideal way to start your morning. After a few inhales, it starts to get into your head and makes you nauseous. It’s not a scent that you would call ‘homely’.

Fortunately, it does fade as the day goes by but the pungent smell of old piss quickly replaces it by late afternoon and then the vicious cycle starts again in the morning. The sickeningly sweet smell really reflects the cryptic ambiance of the building.

But for patients like Hank, who has stayed in the hospital for a while, the stench doesn’t bother him. It does start to grow in you to the point where you forget what fresh clean air smells like.

Hank takes another glance at the clock for the umpteenth time in the last couple of hours. It was coming up to that time. He can feel his heart accelerating as the seconds pass by. Since he’s all ready, he can sit and watch in front of the clock until finally hearing those footsteps echo in the hall, getting louder as they step closer. Two nurses reach his room, both in their scrubs and ready to escort him out.

“The doctor wants to see you Hank, let’s get going,” the taller of the two says.

They both lead him to another room. This isn’t anything new to Hank. Having to go to the checkup rooms regularly to see the doctor was part of the routine. More footsteps could be heard and immediately he knew it was you. He has your footfall rhythm memorised. Even outside the checkup sessions, he can easily recognise you walking from a distance away. He watches as you make your way in - a warmth reflecting from your eyes with a smile.

“Nice seeing you early today Hank, did you sleep well?” Your voice is amplified over everyone else’s; it’s sweet, hypnotic and endearing to the ears.

All of his senses heighten as soon as you’re near (or as he watches you from afar). As you step closer towards the seat opposite him, he catches the familiar soapy aloe vera scent from you. It’s refreshing and it's definitely more pleasant than the sterile smell of the hospital. Whenever his session ends, he feels like he can still just capture the scent lingering a while longer the minute you leave the room. You’re just so fascinating with how you approach things and how you approach him.

You start to write on your clipboard the date and his name. Hanks eyes are stuck staring at your hand holding the pen. He secretly wishes that you would accidentally misplace or leave your pen one day in the room before you go to your next patient so he could keep it for himself - something that you touched and held onto everyday and probably has your sweat and fibre on it. But unfortunately, due to previous cases of patients using pens as weapons and poking peoples eyes out, doctors and anyone else using a pen has to make sure they keep them safe with them.

“Your mood has definitely improved in the last few weeks Hank, I’m pleased to see that,” your praise causes a wave of euphoria to surge through him. He wants all of your praises. All of the sweet words that come out of your lips. He knows he wants you for himself and wishes the nurses weren’t in the room with the two of you so he can be all alone with you.

The check up comes to an end and you finish it off with “I’ll see you next week Hank,” before you leave to go off to your next patient while he stays in the room with the two nurses beside him a little while longer. It’s easy to forget that he’s not the only one you’re caring for especially with how he’s so engrossed in the moment.

But the thought of you looking after other people besides him, giving them your attention and your time to them doesn’t sit right with him. Actually it enrages him. They don’t deserve you. You need someone who you can feel safer with. These people don’t have the facilities for that. The more he thinks about it, the harder his fist clenched to the point where the knuckles were turning white. Fortunately, he’s able to keep this heated anger in control quickly since he’s still on the fucking medication that slowing his brain .

But Hank is not going to allow their luck to run any longer with you…

Working in a mental hospital isn’t something that you nor your colleagues discuss outside of work. As far as people outside are aware, you’re just a doctor working and giving care in a private hospital. Confidentiality is strictly enforced - anything that happens in the building stays within the four walls.

You have to wear full sleeves to hide the bruises that you get from handling some of the violent patients. The nurses always have it worse since they do interact with them more but that doesn’t mean yours aren’t visible enough to raise some concerns. You do try to scrutinise the job and see the rewarding sides to it though, despite how exhausted you are already.

That burnt soreness on your tongue is still there from the hot coffee you finished just earlier and what's worse is that after rummaging through your work bag, you found that you’re fresh out of breath mints. Well shit then - you’re stuck with having coffee breath until your tight lunch break. Coffee breath was the last thing that you’re concerned about though, with the busy schedule you have today. You just completed the inpatient care and are now providing care to the outpatient department.

Your clipboard is under your tight grip as you’re filling in the details. Sitting opposite you is Peter, your last morning patient. He has a skinny and pale frame and just like most of the other patients, he has a buzz-cut hairstyle.

“So, it’s been a good month since I prescribed you your new medications for your schizophrenia. How has it been affecting you?” Your eyes are still glued to your clipboard.

“It’s been better than the old one, I don’t have any severe side effects,” Peter replied, possessing a strong southern accent.

“That’s perfect, but I will still need the nurses to check your blood sugar levels from time to time. High cholesterol is one of the side effects of this new medication,” You scrape your tongue with your front teeth briefly, trying to soothe the soreness as you speak while mentally reminding yourself to push through and that this is your last patient before your break.

Out of nowhere, the sound of someone screaming could be heard coming from a few rooms away. It's normal to hear some patients yelling occasionally whether it’s them resisting medication or their mood swings going haywire. After all, one of the biggest conflicts between patients and doctors is medication. But this doesn’t sound like someone was resisting. None of the screaming that you’ve heard sounded like this. This is more shrilling, you can almost hear the fear in their cry before it cuts off with crunching sounds and gargling despair and then it stops.

“Doc…?” Peter’s voice shakes as he speaks. He's now starting to hyperventilate - a bad sign that his anxiety is accumulating.

“Everything will be okay, I’m sure the nurses got it handled,” in truth, you were pretty tense yourself but you had to keep your composure and stay calm, for the sake of your patient.

One of the many vital rules that is heavily emphasised is that healthcare staff must leave their patient in a healthy and calm condition. Anything else is a sign of inadequate treatment and can result in a strike. You’re already on your first one and the punishment you faced was just about bearable. You can’t afford another strike on your record - the week has barely started. Really, that should encourage you to prioritise your patient but you can’t help but wonder what was going on out there. It doesn't help when you hear more screaming, this time it’s a masculine voice and you could just about make out what he’s saying before it stops.

“Please don’t hurt me! Where are the fucking nurses ah-!” There’s a painful howl before it cuts off silent again. You and Peter stay quiet waiting for any more disturbing sounds but the silent prologue for a full minute.

“Will it make you feel better if I take a look outside?” He nods, still staying quiet from shock. You’re not going to leave the room since you can’t leave Peter unattended, they’re watching what you’re doing in a control room through a monitor, so you just stick your head out the door and scan the wide hallways. Of course, you can’t see anything because it was coming from one of the other rooms.

The temptation of just leaving the room is drilling in your head. For God's sake, why would they be focusing on you and watching you do your job when they should be focusing on whatever the hell was going on out there?

It seems like they read your mind because the emergency alarms start blaring through the perpetual halls with red lights flashing. You’ve never heard the emergency alarms go off, not until today at least and that was enough for you to exit the patient room. You can hear Peter calling after you, asking where you’re going or what you’re going to do. You don’t really know what you're doing, you're just following these intrusive thoughts, jogging lightly and just hoping it’s not the worst. Whatever the worst may be.

There's more uncontrollable screams that continue to echo through the halls sounding more distant as it bounces off the walls but with still the same level of fear etched in their voices if not, more. The ringing of the alarm is still going off, sounding more urgent and louder. Your head starts to spin as you replay that one sentence in your head…

I’m sure the nurses got it handled.

You stop for a moment and look back at how far you’ve gone - Peter's room feels like miles away now when you’ve only walked a few metres. You have a sense of discomfort that seems to erupt inside you. A strong feeling that something was going to happen. Before you could turn back to continue you felt something hit the back of your head causing a sharp pain shooting through your skull. Your body collapses forward and slowly and you feel your consciousness slip away and vision fade into blackness.

There’s a sharp inhale before you feel your senses coming back to you slowly as you open your eyes. It took you a moment to gather yourself together and remember your surroundings. There’s no more screaming or alarms - nothing but the sound of your pulse hammering in your ears. The halls are still flashing red. Not good. Your vision is still a little blurry and your heads throbbing like mad. Stupid concussion. You still don’t know who the fuck just slammed the back of your head like that.

What’s worse is you don’t know how long you were knocked out but if it’s this quiet, something is definitely not right. What happened to Peter? Shit. With extra precaution and making sure you don’t collapse again, you lift yourself up from the floor and make your way to Peter’s room with wobbly steps. The room isn’t that far for you but your body is still weak and moving painstakingly slow. When you reach his room, you almost throw up at the sight inside.

Someone got to him before you could because now he’s on the floor with his mouth stretched open so wide, the cheeks are torn out. Despite Peter’s thin face and prominent cheekbones, you could still see the fleshy meat from his cheeks that had been plumped out. There was no way someone could do this with their bare hands. Some sick person must’ve used a metal instrument to rip this poor man’s face.

His arms and legs were completely popped out of their joints and dislocated. The crunching you heard earlier must’ve been the sound of bones joints snapping from elsewhere. His gown is now stained with blood from his mouth. You’ve seen a lot of gory scenes at your job but nothing like this. You can’t stomach the sight any longer so you leave feeling utterly repulsed and a little guilty that you can’t do anything. Why did you have to leave him alone? You were hoping the image would leave your mind but it’s already locked in making you feel queasy.

You don’t know where you’re going since there’s no lead and the screaming has stopped. There’s a feeling of emptiness and torment hovering around you as you stiffly walk through the halls, closing in on one of the ward rooms - you weren’t prepared to see inside so when you catch a glimpse of one of the patients on the floor, the squeamish feeling inside your stomach returns.

Inside you could see a few more patients on the floor, arms and legs dislocated as well as their heads being twisted until their necks were snapped. Their faces aren’t mutilated like Peter’s but you could see some of them have holes on the side of their heads where their ears used to be and are now replaced with a crimson pool that dripped down their faces and on the floor. Clearly whoever did this, wanted to get the job done fast.

Each room you pass, you see more and more limp forms littering the floor, not only patients but the healthcare workers there as well - doctors and nurses. It’s all out of control. There are bloody hands smeared and printed on the wall too. The more you continue to walk, the more alone you feel knowing that the people you care for and work with are gone. You feel like you’re surrounded by ghosts - spirits just floating around you. You push your way through the double door and make your way to the main reception, now fully bracing yourself for the worst yet to come.

Hank can feel the heated vexation across his face and the blood rushing in his ears as he gawks down at the last dead body with pride. He was sure that he managed to wipe out everyone in this poor excuse of a hospital. It’s not like it’s a big building so surely after 2 hours, he can wrap it up and call it a job well done. But it’s not complete until he finds you again. Find your sleeping form that is, since he had to knock the fucking day lights out of you. You don’t deserve to see what he did - he’s hoping you’re still knocked out before he retrieves you.

Before he could turn around, there’s the sound of the heavy double doors squeaking as you pushed your way with aggression. The hostility quickly melts away from you as you stare intensely at him, frozen in place from shock. Your mouth starts to quiver and Hank notices a few tears just spilling from your eyes.

“What have you done?!” Your voice breaks with distress. Hank steps a little closer, the metal pipe slips out from his bloody hands as he walks towards you. You’re always easy on the eye but now the glow that would always radiate from you is flushed out. The eye bags under your eyes is more visible now and the rims of it are now red from your salty tears. You look raw and Hank finds himself absolutely adoring this state of you. Probably more now than ever.

He still doesn’t understand why you’re so upset though. Why do you cry for these people? You didn’t mean anything to them. They just used you as a product for your intelligence and for their advantage. Of course you don’t understand that now but one day, you will be grateful for what he has done.

And that’s a promise.

Dividers by @maysdigitalarts

I usually rely on Grammerly to check my spellings and grammar but I’m literally typing this on my phone as I speak so there might be some errors.

[catatonicengineers]

A Defense of Cait Sith

Plushie Princess Saga:

A Hundred Ways to Put the WRO Back Together

A Hundred Ways to Wreck Shinra HQ

Reeve’s Adventures in Babysitting and World Saving:

And Take a Stand at Shinra

While There’s Still Time

On Plushies and Oppenheimer:

A Defense of Cait Sith

~

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer

I was eight-years-old when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, exactly one year after its release. Like many 90’s gamers, FFVII was a turning point into the world of RPG’s from which I’ve yet to recover. Kids today will never understand the coming of age that occurred somewhere between Yoshi’s Island and grappling with the ethos of Avalanche blowing Sector 1’s reactor sky high. It’s no surprise that my 3rdgrade brain found an essence of familiarity to cling to amid the existential dread and ecoterrorism that was the greatest game ever made.

Cait Sith was the cute, cuddly party member that validated my love of cats and ignited my adoration for moogles. I would relentlessly make room for him in my party, despite his terrible combat stats, and hurl endless Phoenix Downs every time he fell.

He was quirky, he fought with a megaphone, his limit breaks were oddly sparse compared to the rest of the cast, and his home base of Gold Saucer looked like a unicorn threw up all over a casino. What’s not to love?

According to recent Reddit threads, Youtube comments, and rage bloggers, apparently a lot.

The advent of the long awaited FFVII remake rightfully caused a massive revival of the excitement first felt by long time fans of the franchise. The release date has been confirmed for March 3, 2020 – two days before my 30thbirthday. Not gonna lie; feels like the universe aligned to bless the official passing of my youth with this nostalgia bomb.

It’s with this love of all things FFVII in mind that I’d like to formally pose a defense of the game’s most hated character.

Cait Sith/Reeve, this one’s for you.

The Laughter

We first meet the lively, dancing robo-moogle and cat combo in Gold Saucer and we’re not quite sure if this strange entity should count as one party member or two. Either way, he joins your crew as the quintessential comic relief with nary a backstory in sight. That’s right; you are now the proud owner of Cait Sith. A “fortune teller” by trade, Cait Sith’s motivations remain as murky as your party’s future.

At first glance, it’s easy to pass Cait Sith off as a filler character, the cute one added for giggles. The one the writers never bothered to flesh out because, let’s face it, that moogle is mostly fluff anyway. The “most useless character” title isn’t entirely unjustified.

If this was where Cait Sith’s story ended.

I still remember the day my older brother announced that he’d read ahead in the player’s guide (this used to be a thing, kids) and discovered Cait Sith was a Shinra spy. I’m pretty sure I went through all the stages of grief before settling on denial and assuming he was playing a joke on me. Surely, my favorite slot machine loving companion couldn’t be a traitor.

Enter Reeve Tuesti, the man behind the moogle. He’s the head of Urban Development at Shinra Electric Power Company. He wears a signature blue suit to work everyday. He hates board meetings. He’s not fond of his coworkers. Like Tifa, he’s an introvert. And he’s the guy who engineered the Mako reactors.

If Hojo is Dr. Frankenstein, Reeve is Oppenheimer. The tragedy of the monsters we create is always greater when it’s a monster we loved. Where the other Shinra execs are motivated by greed, power, and a desire to play God, Reeve is the only Shinra higher up we encounter with genuine empathy and a sense of advocacy for the people. It’s easy to assume that Mako reactors would improve lives, but as Marlene so eloquently asks, “isn’t that because we were taking away from the planet’s life?”

When faced with the guilt of a design gone horribly wrong, those in authority have two choices; own the guilt or double down. And Reeve doubles down.

I’ve never been a fan of the way modern RPG’s have everything clearly spelled out and spoon fed to the gamer. The reason we don’t need further backstory for Reeve is because his character arc is already apparent if we do a bit of digging. I was surprised to learn that the common conjecture behind the exact mechanics of Cait Sith involved him being a remote controlled, autonomous but non-sentient robot. Given that assumption, it’s fair to say that Cait Sith is a worthless character who lacks emotion or consequence.

One opinion I’ve seen trending is why not simply make Reeve join the party, sans the giant stuffed animal? After all, we’d get to see how he grapples with his role in Shinra and eventual betrayal of Avalanche.

Two words; cognitive dissonance. You have to question what kind of 35-year-old executive creates a plushie cat proxy to begin with. See I’ve never thought of Reeve and Cait Sith as separate. The gritty psychological mechanics that are Reeve have always been there, plush or human. Reeve has developed an alter that’s effectively a form of escape. The assertion that Cait Sith lacks consequence isn’t false – a robot carries out its duty, incapable of harboring guilt, blame, or moral repercussion. That’s a pretty darn good way to remain detached enough to stab your party members in the back!

Cait Sith is also an outlet for everything Reeve’s repressed executive life lacks. As Cait Sith, he’s silly and carefree, though not completely unfamiliar. Glimpses of Cait Sith’s witty quips are echoed in Reeve’s mock nicknames for his colleagues – “Kyahaha” and “Gyahaha” respectively. When life is tough to take, we laugh so we don’t scream.

Plus, the idea of Reeve controlling Cait Sith in real time, much like an MMORPG avatar, is just plain hilarious. I’ve always imagined him as the kind of guy who rolls up to his 9-5 office job, pops open a spreadsheet to look busy, and boots up Cait Sith in the other tab. He’s the OG Aggretsuko, the guy making Jim Halpert faces at the camera every Shinra board meeting.

And I get you, Reeve. Really, I do.

The Tears

Cait Sith’s sacrifice was a cop out for killing off a real character. Why didn’t Reeve just die instead of the plushie?

First of all, how dare you.

Second, not all deaths need be literal.

A pervading theme throughout FFVII is the concept of identity. Are we born into an existence we have no control over or can we choose who we are day by day? It’s easy to want to be someone else, the First Class Soldier who sweeps in, keeps his promise, and saves the girl. Our reality is often less of a fairy tale and riddled with our own failures.

By the time the party reaches The Temple of the Ancients, the line where Cait Sith ends and Reeve begins is blurring. Reeve speaks more often as “himself” through the plushie and the nuances in their speech and mannerism are blending. It’s no accident that this shift happens as Reeve becomes more at ease around Avalanche, ultimately switching sides.

I’ve heard a lot of criticism on the seeming lack of motivation to Reeve’s redemption. If we examine the cognitive dissonance theory that governs his character, the switch is far less sudden.

Cait Sith’s death is necessitated by Reeve’s accountability. The innocent plushie alter isn’t working anymore. It’s not enough to keep him from recognizing the horrors he’s been complicit to. Sacrificing this part of himself is the ultimate acknowledgment of culpability. It’s arguably a more important death than if Reeve actually martyred himself. Like Cloud, he no longer needs to be “someone else” and has started down the path of doing what only he, and not Cait Sith, can; stopping Shinra.

There will be more wonderful, fluffy moogle-cat plushies, but the need to disassociate completely is gone. He’ll confront whatever comes without a crutch – or in this case a teddy bear. Reeve reminisces that the original doll was “special” and we end with Cait Sith reminding him(self) not to forget this.

The Silence

In 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer was denied all security clearance and effectively blacklisted by the McCarthy administration for his strong opposition to nuclear warfare.

Sometimes we find ourselves in a place we never hoped or expected to be in, surrounded by people we despise, and convinced the world is going straight to heck. We can either get out of dodge or stay.

If Reeve had indeed sacrificed himself rather than Cait Sith, this would simply have been yet another escape. He stays. He works. He gets Marlene and Elmyra out of Midgar. He spies on Shinra. He finally tells Gyahaha to stick it. He goes on to head the WRO and never stops advocating for the people.

Reeve’s not a fighter. He can barely get by with a handgun in Dirge of Cerberus and Cait Sith’s megaphone is no Masamune. Despite this, he takes a big risk by being the only insider on the team. We’re pretty sure Shinra doesn’t share Reeve’s opposition to capital punishment either.

Maybe this is why I’ve always loved Cait Sith/Reeve. I’m intrigued to see if Square Enix will add any further insight into our favorite plush moogle-cat-spy, but if they don’t, that’s alright too. Cait Sith is still a pretty solid character. After my brother spoiled one of the game’s major plot twists for me, I ended up reading the player’s guide for myself. And he was right. But he was also wrong. I recall marching proudly into the living room to declare that while yes, Cait Sith was a traitor, he was also a hero.

So fight your fight. Fail and fall. Hurl some Phoenix Downs and get right back up again.

[johnnymundano]

Suspiria (2018)

Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Screenplay by David Kajganich

Based on the screenplay Suspiria by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi

Music by Thom Yorke

Country: United States, Italy

Running Time: 153 minutes

CAST

Dakota Johnson as Susanna "Susie" Bannion

Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc

Tilda Swinton as Mother Helena Markos

Tilda Swinton as Dr. Josef Klemperer (as Lutz Ebersdorf)

Mia Goth as Sara Simms

Angela Winkler as Miss Tanner

Ingrid Caven as Miss Vendegast

Elena Fokina as Olga Ivanova

Sylvie Testud as Miss Griffith

Renée Soutendijk as Miss Huller

Christine LeBoutte as Miss Balfour

Małgosia Bela as Mrs. Bannion/Death

Fabrizia Sacchi as Pavla

Jessica Harper as Anke Meier

Chloë Grace Moretz as Patricia Hingle

Jessica Batut as Miss Mandel

Alek Wek as Miss Millius

Vincenza Modica as Miss Marks

Vanda Capriolo as Alberta

Brigitte Cuvelier as Miss Kaplitt

Gala Moody as Caroline

Anne-Lise Brevers as Sonia

Sara Sguotti as Doll

Halla Thordardottir as Mascia

Olivia Ancona as Marketa

Mikael Olsson as Agent Glockner

Fred Kelemen as Agent Albrecht

(The Waltz of Guilt: I was so enraptured with Suspiria that I failed to screengrab. IMDB is where I went.)

Nu-Suspiria vs Ur-Suspiria

Suspiria (2018) is a stately paced, grimly hued, intermittently gore drenched and impressively disciplined dance through generational guilt, the abuse of power and how monsters gestate within the everyday. It is the gloriously impossible cinematic bastard lovechild of The Red Shoes (1948) and Possession (1981). Fun stuff, bring the kids! Actually don’t, they’d only be bored and there’s also some proper rough stuff on show. Hoof! Oh aye, Suspiria is also an arthouse refurb of Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s 1977 original. I loved the original sumptuously coloured frightmare, but I also adored the dourly garbed melancholic dancetastic update. Judging by the reception of Nu-Suspiria I am in a minority, luckily Nu-Suspiria has the courage of its convictions and dances like nobody is watching anyway. Nu-Suspiria dares to be different; it dares to be a Suspiria for the 21st century, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. Nu-Suspiria pays Ur-Suspiria the massive compliment of taking its skeleton and fleshing it anew with a vibrant, dark energy poached from history itself. Ur-Suspiria turned its back on reality with magnificently fanciful results. Nu-Suspiria faces reality full-on and the result is equally glorious, just… different. Vive la difference, yeah?

Follow That Dream (Into a Shower of Guts)!

It’s 1977 and young American lass Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson; impressively limber) follows her dreams of the dancing life from her insular, artistically repressed Mennonite community to the insular, artistically uninhibited dance community of the Tanz Academie in Berlin. The Tanz Acadamie is a dance academy (obviously) and also a female commune, run by a number of mumsy figures. One of these, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton; icily precise), immediately recognises something special about the trembling ingénue and begins to prime Susie for a very special purpose. Whether that purpose is to dance up a storm for some OAPs at a Wednesday matinée or something far, far darker isn’t ever really in question. Pretty much everything else is in question; will Susie succumb, what happened to Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz; doomed), can good come from evil, can you accept Tilda Swinton latexed up as an old man, why do good people go bad, why isn’t there more dancing in horror movies, and what’s with all this terrorism stuff anyway? 

Every Skull Wears a Smile.

Fans of old timey musicals and just plain old timers will note that in Suspiria, like many a waif in many a musical, Susie starts out with only her dreams and the shoes on her feet, but her untapped and untrained talent blossoms and astonishes her peers and tutors alike. Yes, superficially Suspiria shares much of the structure of lighter dance fare, with everything leading up to a climactic dance where Susie shows everyone just what she can do and steals the show. Just what Susie can do and quite how she steals the show, however, will come as a real eye opener, I think. Suspiria certainly flabbered my gast harder than anything starring Ginger Rogers ever did. Given the meaty sequins of horror stitched into the dark leotard of Suspiria this structural similarity can safely be taken as satire; it can definitely be taken as the closest Suspiria gets to comedy. Which is fair enough, Berlin in 1977 wasn’t exactly laughtertown. It being rife with terrorism and terrorism being a bit of a downer.

For One night Only: The Red Army Faction Dance Troupe!

That’s two mentions of terrorism so far, because it’s fundamental to Suspiria is why. The spectre of ‘70s terrorism saturates Suspiria and initially this is a bit puzzling. It’s as though every TV and every radio only carries reports of the seizing of a plane by the RAF (the Red Army Faction, not the Royal Air Force; I admit I was initially puzzled too). A few posters on the girls’ walls aside, the world of Suspiria is free of time specific pop culture references; all there is in the world of Suspiria is the terror within the Tanz Academie and the terrorism without.  It soon makes sense though. After all, as Jesus didn’t say, the terrorists will always be with us. They were with us in 1977. They were there before 1977 and they are with us still today. Different terrorists, but still terrorists. Evil evolves.

The Matryoshka Dolls of Evil.

And Suspiria, it becomes apparent, is all about how Evil may well evolve but its most reliable trick is to hollow people out and replace their essence with an adulterated doppelgänger. The mechanism for this, usually, being the abuse of power, and with the doings of the Tanz Academie matriarchs we see this in eerie action. What appears to be an egalitarian utopia is quickly revealed to be riven by factional infighting and, worse, the apparently benevolent den mothers are in fact parasites gorging on their wards’ youth and energy. The young are infected and corrupted from within until they echo the evil of their elders. As it is for satanic dance troupes, so it is for terrorists. As it is for terrorists, so it is for fascists.

Fake Face, Real Heart.

Yes, fascists, those massive arseholes without any redeeming features whatsoever. For in addition to terrorism, Suspiria is about the psychological scars marring Germany’s populace post WW2, that is, obviously, those who survived. Where there are survivors there is also guilt, alas. Dr. Josef Klemperer (Tilda Swinton in a wrinkly mask) is one such survivor. Now, it could be argued that Tilda Swinton made up like an old man is a bit too literal a personification of Suspiria’s core theme (basically: appearances are deceptive, yah?) to be anything other than laughable. But in Suspiria’s defence Tilda Swinton’s performance as an old man is kind of magnificent. Everyone else in Suspiria just seems (deliberately, I think) more like a symbol rather than a human being, except Tilda Swinton in a wrinkly mask. Klemperer’s search for the fate of his love, Anke (Jessica Harper; cameotastic), his acceptance of her fate and the price it extorts is Suspiria’s bone bleachingly sad illustration that only the good feel guilt. Evil couldn’t care less; that’s why it’s Evil. 

Fake Gore, Real Horrors.

Despite being a horror movie Suspiria isn’t about cartoon Evil. Bravely it takes on real world Evil; how it can happen and what it costs. There’s a lot of red meat on Suspiria’s bones, too much for some. Me, I suggest you get stuck right in and fill your boots. Somewhere in its unapologetically self-indulgent sprawl Suspiria baldly states one of its core propositions - that folk are all too eager to believe the worst is behind us; unless we learn from the past we should fear the future. And we never learn from the past. But the human dance isn’t over yet. In amongst its gore, pain and horror Suspiria dares to suggest we might just surprise ourselves before the final curtain falls.

TL;DR: Suspiria (2018) was awesome.

[abyssal-depths]

Führer Hitler’s Empire

“I felt like that little boy who wanted to save the world, but as we returned, I understood that I am part of the evil that I wanted to save us from.” 

Napola (2004) provides its viewers a perspective of Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler through the eyes of the Germans themselves. Behind Germany’s modern erudite society filled with intellectuals, resides a dark past. Indeed, the remnants of World War II has left German Society to undergo numerous ramifications. Plenty might have been able to move on, however voices from the past somehow find a way to echo through the halls of modern German society.

Today, Germany could be subconsciously compensating for the mistakes of the past. During the Third Reich, Hitler held the Jews responsible for Germany’s failure in World War I. This led to his hatred for the Jews, and his efforts to wipeout the entire religion and each member of it, which is why it aimed to prevent views of anti-Semitism from spreading. Sadly, anti-Semitism is still somehow evident in modern Germany. 

Since the traumatic event in history that we all know as World War II, Germans made various efforts to make amends with the irreversible effects of the German Nazi regime in 1941-1945. The large-scale upheaval caused the death of millions. Years past the Third Reich, the concept of power is still a bit shaky in a psychological sense because of the past. Germany continues to overcome guilt and struggle from the emotional damage as they are now responsible for reconstructing Germany into a better society.

Skillful, hardworking, and prosperous, Germany remains to be the most influential member of the European Union. Power and dominance have always been Germany’s prevailing themes, and it is still evident today as they are overseeing the European Union while trying to maintain their control. Despite its undeniable progress, leadership turns out to be a continuous emotional battle because of the failures of the past. On the brighter side, the leader of the European Union is female. Chancellor Angela Merkel continues to bind Germany together.

Given the life-long emotional ordeal since the aftermath, this, then, leads me to think of certain themes present today that tried to make its way in German society back in its most harrowing events in World War II. I will attempt to discuss my views on themes of individualism, equality, freedom of expression, compassion, and sensitivity.

The Aryan race

“Today, Germany. Tomorrow, the world.” Adolf Hitler viewed Germans as a superior race. This promoted superiority over equality which led to the eradication of the Jews. Hitler wanted to create a master race which consisted of people with blonde hair and blue eyes. They held “Aryan girls” in captivity and bred them with SS officers. This draws me into thinking about what could have been if Germany won World War II? Would we still be here today? It is difficult to imagine a time that was oriented towards world domination and the elimination of “impure” races.

Individualism over collectivism

Adolf Hitler, being one of the world’s most notorious leaders, held dictatorial power and was the man behind mass annihilation. Where interests were expected to lean towards the nation and not to oneself, the abuse of power led to a totalitarian society where one no longer belonged to himself, but to the nation and ultimately, to Hitler. This structure took over personal wants and needs, and only allowed communal views leading to collective decisions. Anti-individualism was an effect of Nazism, and thus, emotions, and personal needs were dismissed and ignored as these were unacceptable.

As a point of reference, in spite of Hitler’s numerous followers, surely there were individualists such as Albrecht Stein who thought otherwise; that things should not have been they way they were. Friedrich Weimer, the main character, sparked my interest in a sense that he embodied an opposing, dominant force; a force conflicting to that of Albrecht but in accordance to the Third Reich. This persona, however, became some sort of a magnet––a force that attracted that of Albrecht’s. Drawing the two characters together, I am given a view of both perspectives. Indeed, Nazism was extremely faulty in numerous ways now that we look back on it. However, despite its wickedness, it happened because of a certain mindset.

The totalitarian point of view dominated Germany, and this way of thinking focused on patriarchy and the future of the nation. Siegfried’s death was recognized and glorified because he “saved” his comrades. On the other hand, Albrecht’s death was dismissed and not tolerated because it was viewed as selfish as it was an act of suicide––individualistic and not collectivist. Individual needs did not matter because one must owe his life to his nation and to those who are yet to come. I see it as a reconstruction of the already-successful present for the further advancement of the future. However, Albrecht Stein’s character falls under the question that came upon me: At what cost?

Individualism, in my opinion, was a theme that tried to penetrate the walls of totalitarian German society. As it is evident in modern Germany, it was a theme that struggled to emerge because of the fear and terrorization brought about by the Nazis.

Sensitivity in the midst of brutality

Toughness and ruthlessness were qualities that were expected of the Nazis. For those who grew up to be naturally cunning, having these qualities was commendable. However, we then think: What about those who are far from the possession of these qualities? How were they able to live in a society that did not tolerate poetry, music, art, and literature? How does an innate writer, or better yet an artist, exist in a society that does not allow him to express himself? One that restricts him from being the person he wishes to be?

Freedom of the press was also abolished. Blind obedience took over. Artists and rationalists were the nonconformists who were restricted from self-expression unless they praised Hitler. In spite of cold-hearted beings, there existed those who chose to think otherwise. Unfortunately, these thoughts were kept to themselves, else they were punished and ostracized; the faint of heart were not stomached. Was compassion asleep during these harrowing times? Or was it intentionally put to sleep?

Self-reflection prior to obedience

Immorality was a prevailing theme in World War II. What could have possibly led to the fanaticism that took place in the Nazi regime? It was all clearly madness. How could almost an entire nation succumb to tyranny? This all leads me to to things: fear and hatred. I find it fascinating and at the same time disturbing to think that millions were blinded by the evils of Hitler. As horrendous as it may have been, the tragedies of the past are now unchangeable. Hitler’s power, in my opinion, was sparked by his ability to communicate; he was able to win the hearts of millions because of his charisma, strong will, and impressive capacity to persuade. Somehow, he was able to find a way to trigger the fears of Germany, and took advantage of that to foster hate and let it spread throughout society.

Taking man’s design into consideration; how man is always drawn towards the good, I ponder on whether the Nazis ever went through careful discernment before their doing of immoral acts. Looking back, I am given the impression that they probably did not because people who pledged allegiance to Hitler became pawns who did not own themselves, but were already subject to blind conformity. Of course, opposing Hitler might have meant one’s life, but it is still completely astonishing how many were immediately manipulated. 

I personally think that no matter how cruel a person might be; he is not completely evil. There must be some goodness inside of him. If we think about the nature of man, did they not have moral conscience? Self-reflection and the need to do the good must have been underlying themes that failed to emerge and take over Hitler’s abuse of power.

Of course, not all people suffered during that time. These privileged people could possibly add up to the people who comprised the millions of Hitler enthusiasts. Perhaps life was good to them, however, the comfortable life caused them to turn a blind eye. What about those who were excluded by the Nazi state?

Ultimately, man does have a choice and it is devastating to think that Hitler along with the Nazis chose to do the evil that should have been avoided. As a person who was not able to live in such a time of immense cruelty, it is difficult to wrap my head around such a series of events.

A collective memory

Many efforts have been made to rebuild broken, divided Germany. The war is indeed over, but the history of World War II and the Holocaust must not be forgotten. Today, there are plenty of museums, documentaries, memorials, books, and all sources of information to keep the horrors and heartaches of the past embedded in the roots of our growing society. I believe that it is our responsibility to study the past and learn about it in order to understand the present, and thus, make way for a more progressive future.

Knowledge entails responsibility. We must not only think of our well-being as humans for we must also think of the good that will benefit the rest of mankind. Our failure to teach ourselves and future generations that the violence in the past must not ever take place again, might result to World War III; probably the last thing our world needs. Third Reich Germany possessed so much immorality, and thus, as morally responsible human beings, we have the capacity to prevent it from ever happening again. Today, the themes of individualism, equality, freedom of expression, compassion, and sensitivity are now evident in modern German society. The positive effect of the fall of the Third Reich is the birth of a better society. Today, Germany is enjoying a democratic, federal parliamentary republic.

Führer Hitler’s Germany is now a haunting reality. Despite man’s innate ability to move on, progress, and develop, the stories of opportunities taken away, hearts broken, and lives taken will forever resonate and find its way back not just in contemporary Germany, but the rest of the world as well. As many still try to reconcile with the past, may it never be forgotten to ensure a better future.

Man and history

The datable events of World War II and the Holocaust are events that are undeniably notable. Man is distinguished from all other living things because of his autonomy; we have the capacity to give meaning to our life. In a sense, the kind of person man becomes is a result of his repeated acts. These men in power who were involved in the catastrophic events in history had a choice to become what they wanted to be, and clearly, they chose to become the evil that penetrated and dominated society. Perhaps we can take into consideration that they did not know any better; or that they turned a blind eye. Nevertheless, the damage done had been an effect of their actions.

We have the capacity to choose what kind of person we want to become which is why it is important for us to make use of our freedom responsibly for the betterment of society. These are events that served as major turning points in time where one can say that man did not simply undergo history, but clearly made history through his acts. Now, it is up to us to make use of that same freedom of choice to create our own in the hopes of becoming better human beings.

[nebris]

The Simulacran Republic

December 24, 2005 JL Bageant 

The hologram ripples with the cry of a thrush

"It’s a world of appearances… packaged to the showroom specifications of a sit-com.  She asks her hairdresser for ‘tinted highlights’ he mumbles something about going to the gym. He feels he should do something that requires him to clutch a bottle of mineral water and wipe his brow with the firm conviction that he’s accomplished something more than providing the illusion that his presence in his own life is necessary. They believe in nothing as fervently as their own goodness. When she’s asleep, he absently gazes at porn sites, before he checks out his stock portfolio online."

—Writer and social critic Jennifer Matsui

By Joe Bageant

A while back it was announced that a Japanese inventor had successfully created an invisibility cloak using a material made of thousands of tiny beads called "retro-reflectum." I found this so amazing that I told six friends, three men and three women, about it over the next two days. Not a one of them found it even interesting, much less amazing. Two of the men subsequently showed mild interest when I pointed out that it could be used to mask tanks and soldiers in combat, and one speculated on its terrorist implications. Our techno hyper-reality has so gutted and rewired the brains of Americans that ordinary intelligent people are not even capable of amazement at such a thing as invisibility! To me, this is an indication of a near-total death of the individual mind and imagination caused by our over-technologized, effects glutted sensory environment.

The pure miracle of invisibility is uninteresting unless it can be linked to, say the rumbling terror of an armored tank — made perhaps even more attention-grabbing by squashing the bloody guts out of an Iraq under its tracks? It’s the sensory effect that matters, the simulacrum, not the reality. It’s the kind of thing about America that drives me to thoughts of emigration daily.

Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through, simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America’s heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics … politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and "freedom of choice" within the hologram. America’s citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state’s culture producing machinery.

We no longer have a country — just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information. Sure there is flesh within the machine, but its animating force is a viral concept, a meme run amok. Free market capitalism. We got to move them refrigerators, got to sell them color teevees.

Meanwhile the culture generating industry spins our mythology like cotton candy. We all need it to survive, Hollywood myths, imperial myths, melting pot myths, the saluting dick male myths. They keep the machine running. And when the machine is running correctly, it smoothes its own way by terrifying uncooperative people into submission in prisons and torture rooms, where we do not have to look at the corpses on ice and the naked hooded bodies handcuffed to the bars. We are innocent as long as we keep our eyes taped shut. And only with our eyes shut can we keep seeing the hologram. And with duct tape over our mouths, we can recite its slogans with one hand over our heart with the other one resting on the trigger.

The average American spends about one third of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television creates our reality, regulates our national perceptions and our interior hallucinations of who we Americans are (the best and only important tribe on the planet.) It schedules our cultural illusions of choice, displays pre-selected candidates in our elections, or types of consumer goods. It regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons, which are now governed by the electrons of the illusion. We live within a media generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall to the faceless legions of within it.

Our civilization, our culture, in as much as it can be said to exist in any cohesive way, is based upon two things, television and petroleum. Whether you are a custodian or the President, your world depends upon an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil. As in all produced illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what passes for reality, and real people performing for television. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, grappling over the feeding tube on Terri Schiavo; real actors portray non-actors in "reality shows." Michael Jackson shows up for court in pajamas and Jeff Weise shows up for class with a gun. The demand for "newsmakers" is relentless as the empire’s corporate cultural machinery weaves the warp of consumer illusions that make up our notion of individualism, and the weft of democratic mythology that constitutes our political system. This is by no means a free country and given the intense luminosity of the hologram, we cannot even see freedom from here, and probably would not recognize it if we could. Moreover though, we cannot tear our eyes away from the great flickering glow of the hologram.

As my late friend Timothy Leary put it, "An enormous industry, similar to the national projects of pyramid-building in Egypt, cathedral-building in medieval Europe, and prison-camp building in Stalinist Russia has emerged in America — the production of political martyrs, fallen heroes and concept outlaws. … The essence of ‘news’ is, of course, the modern version of Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats." And like clockwork, there is the nightly ritual bloodletting through televised wars and domestic murders, with detective Lenny Briscoe finding the corpses at seven, eight and eleven PM weekdays.

The hologram that is our cathedral of consciousness and our national mind is an ever-darkening one. The average American, if he even thinks about the mind, thinks of it in the obsolete "mind-contained-in-the-brain" way. A few intellectuals and a handful of old dopers like me understand that reality is consensus based and is an interconnected network consisting of many minds operating along a theme. And the theme seems to be pathological.

America suffers from a psychosis, a psychosis being nothing more than an insistence upon staying in an untenable state of consciousness, despite the normal modeling of those around you. This is not out of meanness, but rather an indifference so profound as to be a sickness. The hologram IS the psychosis made manifest. Psychotics love to play ominous games with those around them, just as America does with the world today.

It always comes down to the one thing we never study in school, the one thing we cannot learn about in this country without a great deal of personal extracurricular effort — consciousness. As we have known at least since the Sixties, the core issue of our existence is consciousness, which our corporate state is compelled to control at all times. That’s why drugs are illegal; that’s why we have hundreds of television channels; and that’s why you will never find anything much resembling the truth in U.S. newspapers and magazines. But there are still those of us who remember our consciousness experiments in the Sixties. Remember what it is like to peer into other realities, not to mention observe the inherent folly and frequent horror of our own war-profit-driven, animal murdering, death-and-sex-without-love obsessed culture. There are those of us who know that when a thrush cries out from the branch it echoes throughout the galaxy. All things are connected and ownership of things is meaningless. The purpose of life is to know this. Lao-tsu knew it, just like Einstein knew it. But you and I are not allowed to. It would shatter our revered hologram, the one that threatens to shatter the world.

To even begin to dissolve this dangerous hologram we would have to examine the biggest lie of all — that technology is neutral and that people determine its ultimate effects. What divine horseshit! Consider what even the best use of nuclear energy leaves in its wake over the long haul an uninhabitable planet. No matter who is in charge we end up with millions of tons of waste with a half-life in the tens of thousands of years. But the hologram we revere asks us to judge the technology at its heart in strictly personal terms — cars, vacuum cleaners, and digital amusements. Pay no mind to the toxic rivers and a sky turning red. Science and technology are our religion and all philosophical decisions are made in the corporate world whose function is to sell commodities. Easily the most terrifying aspect of the industrial/media/political hologram is that we are trapped. There is no way out of a technological industrial machine where you need at least a car, a phone, etc. to function, to participate at all.

Thanks to the hologram, American culture, as such, is nearly over. It is not sustainable. It is not reformable. Not only are TV and all digital media unreformable, but they are sure to accelerate our demise more rapidly because of the technological capitalist paradigm of growth at all cost. We cannot eliminate the generators of the hologram, television and electronic media. They are the glue of the hologram, the mediators of our human experience. We will all die without them, now that they have replaced all other previous forms of knowledge, the ancient forms, and have colonized our inner lives like a virus. The natural world is not only boring but does not even exist, as we sit mesmerized, while the hologram sells our very feelings back to us. Are we adequate? How are we supposed to act? Did you phone someone you love today? What and whom are we to fear? You are rendered numb by a hypnotic medium, react to your own feelings which have been stolen and doled back out to you, and pay money to do so. Brilliant! The commodification of human consciousness is probably the most astounding, if ghoulish, accomplishment of American Capitalist culture.

Meanwhile, there is the omniscient "one voice that speaks out to the many," the disembodied military/corporate voice, that all but guarantees an authoritarian political scenario. Unlike the humans who constitute their living innards, the corporations animating the hologram are themselves deathless. The citizens cannot harm them. Under U.S. law corporations have all the rights and protections of individuals, and they cannot be regulated because corporations are "fictional persons" and have the same right to free speech as persons. Of course, given that the media are corporations, their speech is a helluva lot more impactful and significant than any one person’s. "But," as the brilliant author of In the Absence of the Sacred, Gerry Mander puts it: "They have none of the commensurate responsibilities. Communities cannot control them because they can always move to other communities. They do not have corporeality; they can’t be executed. You can imprison certain people within a corporation if they engage in criminal acts. The corporation itself, however, lives beyond the people in it."

The light of the hologram plays on material reality and remakes it in its own image, destroying all connection with the natural world. Malls and suburbs and hyper-real surfaces and speed — meaningless but dazzling technology. The earth gets a makeover in the image of Disneyland and becomes inhabited by humans who are commodified versions of themselves.

It is difficult for people to grasp that we are in an age of corporate dominion just as we were once in an age of domination by royal families, kings and warlords. Somehow it is hard to equate our tribute rendered to the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the IRS, the power cartels, the mortgage banks, with the kind of bondage it is. Yet we must do these things to be allowed to live in society. The only other choice is to sleep under a bridge. And these days, whether due to an on-setting depression or creeping wisdom, I often contemplate just that. I really do. Of course I understand that even under a bridge one cannot escape the hologram’s blue flicker issuing from a hundred million encroaching suburban windows. But like I said, there are still a few of us old bastards out here who remember. And we can still hear the cry of the thrush echoing, still out there shattering galaxies. Freedom is possible.

https://www.joebageant.org/2005/12/24/the_simulacran_/

[cover2covermom]

Happy end of March bookworms!

After my ridiculous reading month in January when I read 11 books, I really thought I had peaked in 2017.  That was until I read 14 books in March.  #NailedIt

My blogging month was also not too shabby.  All around, March was good to me.

Let’s recap shall we?

*Book titles link to Goodreads

What I read in March:

 » A Gathering of Shadows by V.E. Schwab

Summary of feelings: This book.  I thought A Darker Shade of Magic was great, but this book knocked my socks off.  If I am being completely honest, reading these books gave me similar feelings that I had as a child reading Harry Potter.  I know once I finish this series, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

» Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Summary of feelings: I know this is often everyone’s favorite Ann Patchett novel, but it was just ok for me.  I actually enjoyed State of Wonder more.  That being said there were elements that I really liked about this book: the focus on music, the blurring of lines between captives and captors, and the intense ending.  I would have liked the pacing to have been a little more steady throughout the book versus the snails pacing for 95% of the book, then the big rush to the finish for the last 5%.  That ending though!  Patchett foreshadowed throughout the novel, and I was anticipating a crazy finish, but not to that extent.

*Part of my SOKY Book Fest TBR

» Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Summary of feelings:  Neil Gaiman.  Why are you so damn brilliant?  I don’t think he could do any wrong in my eyes.  The man writes pure gold.  If you asked me which of his books has been my favorite, I really couldn’t tell you as I’ve loved them all.

» My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt

*3.5 Stars

Summary of feelings: My Father, the Pornographer is more about the author Chris Offutt, then it really is about his father, Andrew J. Offutt (the pornographer).  While many parts of the book were slow going and mundane, I found parts of this book absolutely fascinating.  It definitely was darker than I was anticipating.  If you are interested in psychology at all, you would find parts of this book very appealing.

*Part of my SOKY Book Fest TBR – Unfortunaly this author canceled and will not be attending :(

» Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan

*4.5 Stars

Summary of feelings:  Echo was a beautiful middle grade book that blended fairytale, history, and music together.  I did not realize when I started this book that it was going to start off as a fairytale, but eventually turn into a WWII historical fiction.  I thought the way the author took multiple story lines and  wove them together was very clever.  I also liked how each story ends on a cliffhanger, but you don’t really find out how they all end until the end of the book.   I cannot stress enough that if you are able, audiobook is definitely the way to go with this one.  Not only is each section of this book narrated by a new narrator, but the music is also played out.  I would recommend this one to any music lovers, and especially any of you that are musicians yourselves.  I think the author really captured the essence of the love that musicians have for creating music.

» Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris

*3.5 Stars

Summary of feelings:  Now I don’t typically reach for thrillers, but I do enjoy throwing them into the mix every once in a while.  Behind Closed Doors was selected as my book club’s March book.   If I am being honest, I have yet to read a thriller that has knocked me off my feet.  I don’t know if I am just not reading the right books, or if my reading tastes just do not include thrillers… Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this book, but would I want to read it again?  Probably not.  I will say this was a very quick read and at least kept me interested until the end.  I think this book could have been much better if the author would have told this in a dual perspective of both Grace and Jack.  I wanted to know more about Jack… his thoughts and motives.  I did really like how everything panned out in the end.

» Paper Wishes by Lois Sepahban

Summary of feelings:  I read this book in one sitting.  This is a middle grade historical fiction, but I would probably say the target audience is on the younger age range of middle grade.  Maybe 7-10 year olds?  This book tackles a topic that we don’t hear about much in school here in the U.S: the relocation and incarceration of Japanese-Americans in the U.S. during WWII.   This would make for a great book to use in a classroom setting (maybe 2nd-3rd grade?) as this book has themes of family, loss, friendship, etc. along with the historical context.

*Part of my SOKY Book Fest TBR

» The Shadow Queen by C.J. Redwine

Summary of feelings:  The Shadow Queen was a solid read, but it didn’t blow me away by any means.  The thing I liked the most about this book was how the author spun this retelling of Snow White.  I think she did a good job staying true to the story while giving us some new elements: dragons and more magic.  If you are a fan of YA fantasy and/or fairytale retellings, then I would recommend this book to you!  I think my biggest issue with this book was the characters.  They didn’t feel real to me and were lacking emotion.  I think if the author had slowed the plot down just a tad and focused a little more on character development, this would have helped me to form more of a connection to the characters.

*Part of my SOKY Book Fest TBR

» East by Edith Pattou

Summary of feelings:  I loved this book and I can’t really put my finger on why exactly.  It may have just been the right book at the right time.  East is very fast paced read with short chapters and multiple perspectives.  Despite the fact that this book is just over 500 pages, I was immersed in the story from beginning to end.  This book feels very much like a fairy tale because it is based off the Norwegian fairytale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.”  I am not familiar with this fairytale, so prior knowledge of it is not a requirement to enjoy East.   This book also gave off an epic journey vibe as well.  So, an epic journey fairytale?  Whatever this book is, I loved it.

*Part of my Ohioana Book Fest TBR

» Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story by Caren Stelson

Summary of feelings:  Wow.  What a heartbreaking and horrifying story, yet also uplifting and hopeful.  The author weaves Sachiko’s story with historical context throughout the book, which made for an emotional and informative read.  We are given a personal account at what it was really like to survive the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Honestly Sachiko’s account reminded me of pictures and media coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.   It felt many of the same feelings I did as a 14-year-old kid watching the coverage of the terrorist attacks on TV: horror, fear, anger, and sorrow.

This book also questions the decision of the United States to use nuclear weapons before really knowing the effects the bombs would have both short and long term.  Truman rationalized his decision by saying that dropping the atomic bombs saved hundreds of thousands of American lives we would have lost if we would have sent troops to Japan to fight a war in the east.  HOWEVER there were most likely other motives in play here as well.  Was it worth the instant death of 120,000 Japanese people?  How about the countless number of Japanese people who died in the aftermath from injuries, radiation sickness, and years later – cancer?

Sachiko definitely gave me a lot to think about.

» A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

Summary of feelings: Another thought-provoking novel.  A Long Walk to Water is about the war torn country of Sudan, a country in northern Africa.  The majority of this book is about one of the “lost boys” of Sudan, Salva.  I must admit, before reading this story, I knew practically nothing about the hostility in Sudan that went on for YEARS (conflicts are still going on today), nor the very real problem that it’s people face: access to clean water.   A Long Walk to Water is also about a girl named Nya, whose job it is to fetch water for her family.  She spends 8 hours EVERY day fetching water for her family.  The book is told in alternating perspectives and timelines, but the connection between these two stories isn’t made clear until the end.  This book really opened my eyes to how privileged I am to be able to walk to my kitchen and turn on a faucet.

» The Girls in the Garden by Lisa Jewell

Summary of feelings: No one is more shocked then me that I actually really enjoyed this book.  If you have followed me for a while, you know that thriller novels are not my go-to books, but I kept throwing them into the mix.  Girls in the Garden is one of those books where you learn about “the incident” first, then go back in time leading up to the incident.  I thought the author did a great job of holding my attention the entire time.  I really liked how Jewell introduced all kinds of characters/scenarios to thrown the reader off the trail.  The conclusion wasn’t exactly a huge shocker, BUT it was definitely more involved and complicated then I was anticipating.  Typically I don’t like when the author leaves things un-resolved, but Jewell does leave a few things up in the air.  I think it worked here.

*Full review to come

» The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

Summary of feelings:  I am going to venture to say that The Animators is going to be the biggest surprise of 2017 for me.  This book is so much more than I was anticipating.  I was anticipating a light hearted contemporary novel with friendship being a central theme.  While friendship is a major theme, The Animators is NOT a light hearted read.  It is very gritty and raw… definitely more of a darker novel.

I also thought this book was young adult, and it turns out that this book is very much an adult book.  I think it was because the cover gave off a YA vibe to me?  Anyways, The Animators has a lot of adult content that is not suitable for a young audience.

*Part of my SOKY Book Fest TBR

» Loving Vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case by Patricia Hruby Powell (Illustrated by Shadra Strickland)

Summary of feelings:   Loving Vs. Virginia is the Supreme Court case that legalized marriage between races.  In this book, we learn about Richard & Mildred Loving, the couple behind this infamous case.  Told in verse, Loving Vs. Virginia is very much the love story of Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred, a biracial woman.   I was anticipating a little more historical content, but overall, this was a very well done YA book.  I must admit, I have never really read a book about interracial marriage before.  The challenges that the Lovings faced was heartbreaking to read about.

I listened to the audiobook version, but I am waiting for a copy from my library to see the illustrations.

*I am definitely interested in reading a book that goes a little deeper into the history of interracial marriage, as well as challenges that interracial couples face in today’s society.  If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know.

Challenge Updates:

» Goodreads Challenge 

» Diversity Bingo 2017

Since I am more focused on reading for my upcoming book festivals, I was only able to knock out 1 square for #DiversityBingo2017.  This isn’t to say I am not reading diverse books, just that the ones I read didn’t fit into any of the categories for this month.  I am now a total of 11 squares down.  This month I completed…

• Displaced MC → Paper Wishes by Lois Sepahban

*Actually a few of the other books I read this month would also fit this category: A Long Walk to Water, Sachiko, and Loving Vs. Virginia all have characters who are displaced.

Here are the squares I’ve completed thus far…

• MC w/ chronic pain → Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo #OwnVoices

• MC w/ an under-represented body → 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

• Diverse non-fiction → Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

• POC on the cover → Stella by Starlight by Sharon M. Draper

• Non-western (real world) setting → Listen, Slowly by Thanhha Lai #OwnVoices

• Immigrant or Refugee MC → Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai #OwnVoices

• Black MC (Own Voices) → Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson #OwnVoices

• MC of Color in SFF → When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin #OwnVoices

• Own Voices → The Crystal Ribbon by Celeste Lim #OwnVoices

• Free Choice → Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin (Gender Fluid MC)

*Not sure if this challenge is like traditional BINGO where you only need to get a line to “win,” but I’m going for a cover-all

On the Blog:

Book Reviews:

 Book Review: Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Book Review: And I Darken by Kiersten White

Kids’ Corner: Diverse Children’s Picture Books in Review (March 2017)

Other Posts:

February 2017 Wrap-Up + Book Haul

March 2017 TBR

Book Event: V.E. Schwab’s A Conjuring of Light Book Tour

Dream Loot Crate: Bookish Crate (Theme: A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab)

Blogging Babble: Blogger/Follower Expectations

Top Ten Tuesdays

Top Ten Tuesday: Spring 2017 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Met & A Few I’d Like to Meet

Top 5 Wednesdays

Top 5 Wednesday: Favorite Fantasy Books

 March Book Haul:

Follow Cover2CoverMom on Instagram @Cover2CoverMom

» A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab *SIGNED*

*I picked up my copy when I attended V.E. Schwab’s book tour, which you can read about here → Book Event: V.E. Schwab’s A Conjuring of Light Book Tour

» The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

*Won from a giveaway hosted by Crystal @Lost In A Good Book.  Huge thank you to her for hosting this giveaway!

» The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel

*Via Blogging for Books

» The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

*I already have a copy of this book, but when I saw a gently used hardback copy at my library for $0.50, I wasn’t about to pass it up.

» The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier

*Another used copy I picked up at my library for $0.50.  I really enjoyed Girl With a Pearl Earring by this author, so why not.

How was your March?

Which books did you read?

Did you buy any books? Which ones?

Comment below and let me know :)

I #NailedIt in March by #Reading 14 #Books! See which ones in my #WrapUp. #BookBlogger Happy end of March bookworms! After my ridiculous reading month in January when I read 11 books, I really thought I had peaked in 2017. 

[nebris]

“The Simulacran Republic”

The hologram ripples with the cry of a thrush

“It’s a world of appearances … packaged to the showroom specifications of a sit-com.  She asks her hairdresser for ‘tinted highlights’ he mumbles something about going to the gym. He feels he should do something that requires him to clutch a bottle of mineral water and wipe his brow with the firm conviction that he’s accomplished something more than providing the illusion that his presence in his own life is necessary. They believe in nothing as fervently as their own goodness. When she’s asleep, he absently gazes at porn sites, before he checks out his stock portfolio online.” — Writer and social critic Jennifer Matsui

By Joe Bageant (A reprint from December 24, 2005)

A while back it was announced that a Japanese inventor had successfully created an invisibility cloak using a material made of thousands of tiny beads called “retro-reflectum.” I found this so amazing that I told six friends, three men and three women, about it over the next two days. Not a one of them found it even interesting, much less amazing. Two of the men subsequently showed mild interest when I pointed out that it could be used to mask tanks and soldiers in combat, and one speculated on its terrorist implications. Our techno hyper-reality has so gutted and rewired the brains of Americans that ordinary intelligent people are not even capable of amazement at such a thing as invisibility! To me, this is an indication of a near-total death of the individual mind and imagination caused by our over-technologized, effects glutted sensory environment.

The pure miracle of invisibility is uninteresting unless it can be linked to, say the rumbling terror of an armored tank — made perhaps even more attention-grabbing by squashing the bloody guts out of an Iraq under its tracks? It’s the sensory effect that matters, the simulacrum, not the reality. It’s the kind of thing about America that drives me to thoughts of emigration daily.

Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through, simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America’s heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics … politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and “freedom of choice” within the hologram. America’s citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state’s culture producing machinery.

We no longer have a country — just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information. Sure there is flesh within the machine, but its animating force is a viral concept, a meme run amok. Free market capitalism. We got to move them refrigerators, got to sell them color teevees.

Meanwhile the culture generating industry spins our mythology like cotton candy. We all need it to survive, Hollywood myths, imperial myths, melting pot myths, the saluting dick male myths. They keep the machine running. And when the machine is running correctly, it smoothes its own way by terrifying uncooperative people into submission in prisons and torture rooms, where we do not have to look at the corpses on ice and the naked hooded bodies handcuffed to the bars. We are innocent as long as we keep our eyes taped shut. And only with our eyes shut can we keep seeing the hologram. And with duct tape over our mouths, we can recite its slogans with one hand over our heart with the other one resting on the trigger.

The average American spends about one third of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television creates our reality, regulates our national perceptions and our interior hallucinations of who we Americans are (the best and only important tribe on the planet.) It schedules our cultural illusions of choice, displays pre-selected candidates in our elections, or types of consumer goods. It regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons, which are now governed by the electrons of the illusion. We live within a media generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall to the faceless legions of within it.

Our civilization, our culture, in as much as it can be said to exist in any cohesive way, is based upon two things, television and petroleum. Whether you are a custodian or the President, your world depends upon an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil. As in all produced illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what passes for reality, and real people performing for television. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, grappling over the feeding tube on Terri Schiavo; real actors portray non-actors in “reality shows.” Michael Jackson shows up for court in pajamas and Jeff Weise shows up for class with a gun. The demand for “newsmakers” is relentless as the empire’s corporate cultural machinery weaves the warp of consumer illusions that make up our notion of individualism, and the weft of democratic mythology that constitutes our political system. This is by no means a free country and given the intense luminosity of the hologram, we cannot even see freedom from here, and probably would not recognize it if we could. Moreover though, we cannot tear our eyes away from the great flickering glow of the hologram.

As my late friend Timothy Leary put it, “An enormous industry, similar to the national projects of pyramid-building in Egypt, cathedral-building in medieval Europe, and prison-camp building in Stalinist Russia has emerged in America — the production of political martyrs, fallen heroes and concept outlaws. … The essence of ‘news’ is, of course, the modern version of Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats.” And like clockwork, there is the nightly ritual bloodletting through televised wars and domestic murders, with detective Lenny Briscoe finding the corpses at seven, eight and eleven PM weekdays.

The hologram that is our cathedral of consciousness and our national mind is an ever-darkening one. The average American, if he even thinks about the mind, thinks of it in the obsolete “mind-contained-in-the-brain” way. A few intellectuals and a handful of old dopers like me understand that reality is consensus based and is an interconnected network consisting of many minds operating along a theme. And the theme seems to be pathological.

America suffers from a psychosis, a psychosis being nothing more than an insistence upon staying in an untenable state of consciousness, despite the normal modeling of those around you. This is not out of meanness, but rather an indifference so profound as to be a sickness. The hologram IS the psychosis made manifest. Psychotics love to play ominous games with those around them, just as America does with the world today.

It always comes down to the one thing we never study in school, the one thing we cannot learn about in this country without a great deal of personal extracurricular effort — consciousness. As we have known at least since the Sixties, the core issue of our existence is consciousness, which our corporate state is compelled to control at all times. That’s why drugs are illegal; that’s why we have hundreds of television channels; and that’s why you will never find anything much resembling the truth in U.S. newspapers and magazines. But there are still those of us who remember our consciousness experiments in the Sixties. Remember what it is like to peer into other realities, not to mention observe the inherent folly and frequent horror of our own war-profit-driven, animal murdering, death-and-sex-without-love obsessed culture. There are those of us who know that when a thrush cries out from the branch it echoes throughout the galaxy. All things are connected and ownership of things is meaningless. The purpose of life is to know this. Lao-tsu knew it, just like Einstein knew it. But you and I are not allowed to. It would shatter our revered hologram, the one that threatens to shatter the world.

To even begin to dissolve this dangerous hologram we would have to examine the biggest lie of all — that technology is neutral and that people determine its ultimate effects. What divine horseshit! Consider what even the best use of nuclear energy leaves in its wake over the long haul an uninhabitable planet. No matter who is in charge we end up with millions of tons of waste with a half-life in the tens of thousands of years. But the hologram we revere asks us to judge the technology at its heart in strictly personal terms — cars, vacuum cleaners, and digital amusements. Pay no mind to the toxic rivers and a sky turning red. Science and technology are our religion and all philosophical decisions are made in the corporate world whose function is to sell commodities. Easily the most terrifying aspect of the industrial/media/political hologram is that we are trapped. There is no way out of a technological industrial machine where you need at least a car, a phone, etc. to function, to participate at all.

Thanks to the hologram, American culture, as such, is nearly over. It is not sustainable. It is not reformable. Not only are TV and all digital media unreformable, but they are sure to accelerate our demise more rapidly because of the technological capitalist paradigm of growth at all cost. We cannot eliminate the generators of the hologram, television and electronic media. They are the glue of the hologram, the mediators of our human experience. We will all die without them, now that they have replaced all other previous forms of knowledge, the ancient forms, and have colonized our inner lives like a virus. The natural world is not only boring but does not even exist, as we sit mesmerized, while the hologram sells our very feelings back to us. Are we adequate? How are we supposed to act? Did you phone someone you love today? What and whom are we to fear? You are rendered numb by a hypnotic medium, react to your own feelings which have been stolen and doled back out to you, and pay money to do so. Brilliant! The commodification of human consciousness is probably the most astounding, if ghoulish, accomplishment of American Capitalist culture.

Meanwhile, there is the omniscient “one voice that speaks out to the many,” the disembodied military/corporate voice, that all but guarantees an authoritarian political scenario. Unlike the humans who constitute their living innards, the corporations animating the hologram are themselves deathless. The citizens cannot harm them. Under U.S. law corporations have all the rights and protections of individuals, and they cannot be regulated because corporations are “fictional persons” and have the same right to free speech as persons. Of course, given that the media are corporations, their speech is a helluva lot more impactful and significant than any one person’s. “But,” as the brilliant author of In the Absence of the Sacred, Gerry Mander puts it: “They have none of the commensurate responsibilities. Communities cannot control them because they can always move to other communities. They do not have corporeality; they can’t be executed. You can imprison certain people within a corporation if they engage in criminal acts. The corporation itself, however, lives beyond the people in it.”

The light of the hologram plays on material reality and remakes it in its own image, destroying all connection with the natural world. Malls and suburbs and hyper-real surfaces and speed — meaningless but dazzling technology. The earth gets a makeover in the image of Disneyland and becomes inhabited by humans who are commodified versions of themselves.

It is difficult for people to grasp that we are in an age of corporate dominion just as we were once in an age of domination by royal families, kings and warlords. Somehow it is hard to equate our tribute rendered to the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the IRS, the power cartels, the mortgage banks, with the kind of bondage it is. Yet we must do these things to be allowed to live in society. The only other choice is to sleep under a bridge. And these days, whether due to an on-setting depression or creeping wisdom, I often contemplate just that. I really do. Of course I understand that even under a bridge one cannot escape the hologram’s blue flicker issuing from a hundred million encroaching suburban windows. But like I said, there are still a few of us old bastards out here who remember. And we can still hear the cry of the thrush echoing, still out there shattering galaxies. Freedom is possible.

https://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/the-simulacran-republic-from-the-archives-of-joe-baegant/

[nebris]

The Simulacrum Republic

The Hologram Ripples with the Cry of a Thrush by Joe Bageant

December 22, 2005  

"It's a world of appearances.... packaged to the showroom specifications of a sit-com. She asks her hairdresser for 'tinted highlights' he mumbles something about going to the gym. He feels he should do something that requires him to clutch a bottle of mineral water and wipe his brow with the firm conviction that he's accomplished something more than providing the illusion that his presence in his own life is necessary. They believe in nothing as fervently as their own goodness. When she's asleep, he absently gazes at porn sites, before he checks out his stock portfolio online." -- Writer and social critic Leilla Matsui A while back it was announced that a Japanese inventor had successfully created an invisibility cloak using a material made of thousands of tiny beads called 'retro-reflectum.'  I found this so amazing that I told six friends, three men and three women, about it over the next two days. Not a one of them found it even interesting, much less amazing. Two of the men subsequently showed mild interest when I pointed out that it could be used to mask tanks and soldiers in combat, and one speculated on its terrorist implications. Our techno hyper-reality has so gutted and rewired the brains of Americans that ordinary intelligent people are not even capable of amazement at such a thing as invisibility! To me, this is an indication of a near-total death of the individual mind and imagination caused by our over-technologized, effects-glutted sensory environment. The pure miracle of invisibility is uninteresting unless it can be linked to, say the rumbling terror of an armored tank -- made perhaps even more attention-grabbing by squashing the bloody guts out of an Iraqi under its tracks? It's the sensory effect that matters, the simulacrum, not the reality. It's the kind of thing about America that drives me to thoughts of emigration daily. Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America's heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off, with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics ... politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacrum republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and 'freedom of choice' within the hologram. America's citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state's culture producing machinery. We no longer have a country . . . just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information. Sure there is flesh within the machine, but its animating force is a viral concept, a meme run amok. Free market capitalism. We got to move them refrigerators, got to sell them color teevees . . . Meanwhile the culture generating industry spins our mythology like cotton candy. We all need it to survive, Hollywood myths, Imperial myths, melting pot myths, the saluting dick male myths. They keep the machine running. And when the machine is running correctly, it smoothes its own way by terrifying uncooperative people into submission in prisons and torture rooms, where we do not have to look at the corpses on ice and the naked hooded bodies handcuffed to the bars. We are innocent as long as we keep our eyes taped shut. And only with our eyes shut can we keep seeing the hologram. And with duct tape over our mouths, we can recite its slogans with one hand over our heart, with the other one resting on the trigger. The average American spends about one-third of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television creates our reality, regulates our national perceptions and our interior hallucinations of who we Americans are (the best and only important tribe on the planet.) It schedules our cultural illusions of choice, displays pre-selected candidates in our elections, or types of consumer goods. It regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons, which are now governed by the electrons of the illusion. We live within a media generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall to the faceless legions within it. Our civilization, our culture, in as much as it can be said to exist in any cohesive way, is based upon two things, television and petroleum. Whether you are a custodian or the President, your world depends upon an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil. As in all produced illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what passes for reality, and real people performing for television. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, grappling over the feeding tube on Terri Schiavo; real actors portray non-actors in 'reality shows.'  Michael Jackson shows up for court in pajamas and Jeff Weise shows up for class with a gun. The demand for 'newsmakers' is relentless as the empire's corporate cultural machinery weaves the warp of consumer illusions that make up our notion of individualism, and the weft of democratic mythology that constitutes our political system. This is by no means a free country and given the intense luminosity of the hologram, we cannot even see freedom from here, and probably would not recognize it if we could. Moreover, though, we cannot tear our eyes away from the great flickering glow of the hologram. As my late friend Timothy Leary put it, "An enormous industry, similar to the national projects of pyramid-building in Egypt, cathedral-building in medieval Europe, and prison-camp building in Stalinist Russia has emerged in America -- the production of political martyrs, fallen heroes and concept outlaws". The essence of 'news' is, of course, the modern version of Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats. And like clockwork, there is the nightly ritual bloodletting through televised wars and domestic murders, with detective Lenny Briscoe finding the corpses at seven, eight and eleven PM weekdays. The hologram that is our cathedral of consciousness and our national mind is an ever-darkening one. The average American, if he even thinks about the mind, thinks of it in the obsolete 'mind-contained-in-the-brain' way. A few intellectuals and a handful of old dopers like me understand that reality is consensus based and is an interconnected network consisting of many minds operating along a theme. And the theme seems to be pathological. America suffers from a psychosis, a psychosis being nothing more than an insistence upon staying in an untenable state of consciousness, despite the normal modeling of those around you. This is not out of meanness, but rather an indifference so profound as to be a sickness. The hologram IS the psychosis made manifest. Psychotics love to play ominous games with those around them, just as America does with the world today. It always comes down to the one thing we never study in school, the one thing we cannot learn about in this country without a great deal of personal extracurricular effort -- consciousness. As we have known at least since the Sixties, the core issue of our existence is consciousness, which our corporate state is compelled to control at all times. That's why drugs are illegal; that's why we have hundreds of television channels; and that's why you will never find anything much resembling the truth in U.S. newspapers and magazines. But there are still those of us who remember our consciousness experiments in the Sixties. Remember what it's like to peer into other realities, not to mention observe the inherent folly and frequent horror of our own war-profit-driven, animal murdering, death-and-sex-without-love obsessed culture. There are those of us who know that when a thrush cries out from the branch it echoes throughout the galaxy. All things are connected and ownership of things is meaningless. The purpose of life is to know this. Lao-tsu knew it, just like Einstein knew it. But you and I are not allowed to. It would shatter our revered hologram, the one that threatens to shatter the world. To even begin to dissolve this dangerous hologram we would have to examine the biggest lie of all -- that technology is neutral and that people determine its ultimate effects. What divine horseshit! Consider that even the best use of nuclear energy leaves in its wake over the long haul an uninhabitable planet. No matter who is in charge we end up with millions of tons of waste with a half-life in the tens of thousands of years. But the hologram we revere asks us to judge the technology at its heart in strictly personal terms -- cars, vacuum cleaners, and digital amusements. Pay no mind to the toxic rivers and a sky turning red. Science and technology are our religion and all philosophical decisions are made in the corporate world whose function is to sell commodities. Easily the most terrifying aspect of the industrial/media/political hologram is that we are trapped. There is no way out of a technological industrial machine where you need at least a car, a phone, etc. to function, to participate at all. Thanks to the hologram, American culture, as such, is nearly over. It is not sustainable. It is not reformable. Not only are TV and all digital media unreformable, but they are sure to accelerate our demise more rapidly because of the technological capitalist paradigm of growth at all cost. We cannot eliminate the generators of the hologram, television and electronic media. They are the glue of the hologram, the mediators of our human experience. We will all die without them, now that they have replaced all other previous forms of knowledge, the ancient forms, and have colonized our inner lives like a virus. The natural world is not only boring but does not even exist, as we sit mesmerized, while the hologram sells our very feelings back to us. Are we adequate? How are we supposed to act? Did you phone someone you love today? What and whom are we to fear? You are rendered numb by a hypnotic medium, react to your own feelings which have been stolen and doled back out to you, and pay money to do so. Brilliant! The commodification of human consciousness is probably the most astounding, if ghoulish, accomplishment of American Capitalist culture. Meanwhile, there is the omniscient 'one voice that speaks out to the many,' the disembodied military/corporate voice, that all but guarantees an authoritarian political scenario. Unlike the humans who constitute their living innards, the corporations animating the hologram are themselves deathless. The citizens cannot harm them. Under U.S. law corporations have all the rights and protections of individuals, and they cannot be regulated because corporations are 'fictional persons' and have the same right to free speech as persons. Of course, given that the media are corporations, their speech is a helluva lot more impactive and significant than any one person's. 'But', as the brilliant author of In the Absence of the Sacred, Jerry Mander, puts it: "They have none of the commensurate responsibilities. Communities cannot control them because they can always move to other communities. They do not have corporeality; they can't be executed. You can imprison certain people within a corporation if they engage in criminal acts. The corporation itself, however, lives beyond the people in it" The light of the hologram plays on material reality and remakes it in its own image, destroying all connections with the natural world. Malls and suburbs and hyper-real surfaces and speed . . . meaningless but dazzling technology. The earth gets a makeover in the image of Disneyland and becomes inhabited by humans who are commodified versions of themselves. It is difficult for people to grasp that we are in an age of corporate dominion just as we were once in an age of domination by royal families, kings and warlords. Somehow it is hard to equate our tribute rendered to the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the IRS, the power cartels, the mortgage banks, with the kind of bondage it is. Yet we must do these things to be allowed to live in society. The only other choice is to sleep under a bridge. And these days, whether due to an onsetting depression or creeping wisdom, I often contemplate just that. I really do. Of course I understand that even under a bridge one cannot escape the hologram's blue flicker issuing from a hundred million encroaching suburban windows. But like I said, there are still a few of us old bastards out here who remember. And we can still hear the cry of the thrush echoing, still out there shattering galaxies. Freedom is possible.   

http://dissidentvoice.org/Dec05/Bageant1222.htm