by LJ Frank
Minutes before sunrise I dipped my face in cold water, combed my hair with my fingers, took a deep breath, retrieved a glass of water, walked to my home office, turned on the computer, perused the Internet reading various international news and literary publications and doubled-checked a few sources.
So called liberal news and literary publications are not significant in number compared to the conservative leaning. Most publications need money to exist including non-profits. It’s about advertising dollars, donations, grants, and bequests and so forth. Alternative news with alternative facts emerge consistently from the far-right extremists. In the United States the far-right holds the lead in the deceptive spread of disinformation. Lies about the January 6, 2001 insurrection and about fraudulent voting practices remain rampant. Reality appears to be in the mind of the beholder as alternative truths are offered to confuse, distort, divide, and conquer. Digital magazine covers like book covers hint at deviseness with the intent of encouraging the reader to delve further.
The poetic aspect of the conversation is increasingly extraneous, perhaps its half-naked body is walking or laying on some beach in the Caribbean, Mediterranean or other simulated paradise, with photographs covering augmented body parts. Celebrityhood is alive and well, even when it’s your real estate agent or enterprising connoisseur of artificial intelligence.
The machine permeates the human psyche and daily life.
The word fatigue* comes to mind as I review the news and social media. The word not only denotes weariness, but expresses the languor and melancholy birthed by the monotonous tonality of sameness while fooling the consumer that she or he has free choice. Personally, I try non-traditional variations, but the drumbeat of authoritarians, oligarchists, the avarice of extreme capitalists, the avidity of religious nationalists, and the lingua franca of fascists takes its toll.
As a sidebar, fascism is real and has existed below the skin of society since the 1920s like a virus ready to spread when conditions are ripe for cultivation and growth. Preemptive seeds of deception are planted by the far-right in the United States. What is new under the sun? This was bound to occur since the 1980s or so it appears when it was announced that government was the real problem. It struck an old chord. It was intellectually and politically simplistic. Democracies are anything but simple or simplistic. Totalitarian and fascist philosophies are simple, direct and destructive of the humane.
Democracy whether representative, direct or parliamentary, etcetera, was and is fragile. Finality has never been the vernacular of politics. Today there’s been a paradigm shift towards authoritarian politics rooted in extremist’s divide and conquer tactics. Fascism is viewed as acceptable and anti-fascists are denigrated and dehumanized. Inflammatory speech is not new and was feverishly utilized in the 1930s by dictators and we are seeing its combative rise around the world. (Inflammatory speech is in fact ancient with colorful characteristics reflective of the times.)
Repetitive propaganda is effective and deception is easily spread through social media. Money through architecture, infrastructure design, laws, rules, policies and programs is used to separate if not isolate people and empower various “actors”. The crowds get caught up in the game, especially through the advancing of conspiracy theories. Evidence is in want. Still in a world where it’s easier to believe in the duality created by an invisible deity and an invisible satan how hard is it to make the jump into conspiracies? It’s in our genetics. Our desire to believe that there is something more to what we are experiencing. Something deeper and more profound.
Each morning from 5 a.m. to about 8 or 9 a.m., I read and write. Afterwards, depending on a number of factors, I generally drive to the coffeeshop as part of the morning routine, get some beverage like Matcha or regular green tea, light ice, no water, unsweetened. I taste and then meditate on the day ahead. I return to my car, check my planning notepad that includes a longer-term plan of driving to the Pacific Coast. One-way? I’m still in want of a Muse as a co-pilot. I think I know who it is.
I turn on the radio and listen. On this particular day – OPEC effecting inflation was being discussed, along with coverage of war profits, violence and its motifs and metaphors, ultra-nationalism, homelessness as a felony in some places, debtor imprisonment on the rise, the increase prescription prices (that I can vouch for), banning abortion across the USA, the future of Social Security & Medicare, extending tax breaks to billionaires, increased costs of education, market accounting to make it look like a company is doing something about climate change, small arms deals, dark money buying judgeships, and surveillance capitalism on the rise and the censoring of books while intimating it’s about budget restraints. Who is placing their hand on the another’s back looking for the soft spot?
I switch satellite channels and listen to some music, sip my drink and open the windows to breathe in the dusty air.
Thoughts: From the very beginning of “time” the artistry of the initial cosmological chaos and explosion imbued the dust spewing through space with creativity in which humans evolved. We were birthed with the genetic material and disposition of the poetic so we could say the sun rises in the East and showers the Earth’s dewy, morning landscape, and bequeaths its inhabitants with the gift of a favorable circumstance for survival. Reality varies with the poetry of perception. Paradigms shift as do people. What a person will do to obtain greater power and money is being revealed each day in a starker fashion than the previous day. Our internal cellular structure is being tested as it evolves.
The ancient question of meaning continues to haunt humanity.
*Fatigue. Etymologically the word is rooted in 17th Century France though the idea of tiresome and weariness extends to ancient Greece and much older among the oral traditions of primitive cultures.
