Friday, August 17, 2012

SURREALISM IN AMERICA 2012

      photo by diane arbus

This particular election year has really been boring, and it's getting worse as it goes along. Romney is even more boring than the guy Obama beat so soundly in 08. Romney's running mate is even a male version of Sarah Palin--big mouth, not much brains. I suppose he's got some kind of smarts, Obama called him the philosopher of the Repubs, the title I thought Limbaugh owned. This guy must be about the equal of Limbaugh. Like I would say Limbaugh doesn't have much brains, except he's generated his stupid mouth into a $4million commodity pumping up white men to hate everything not white male. I hear on NPR now quite a lot of attention given to republicans. It's because the repubs have been breathing down NPR's neck since Reagan, taking money away from them, reducing them to syndicating BBC. Each repub administration threatens NPR a little bit more. And when we have a democrat administration they do nothing to help NPR. The most recent threat is include more news about republicans or lose more money. So they put on news stories about Romney and it's funny how much like dead air time it is when Romney is the subject. When he talks, he takes insincerity to new heights, or lows, whichever.


It seems like Obama is sitting back letting Romney & Co talk and get as much attention as they can, because they're so boring they make Obama look interesting. It's like they're playing Whiteman's Last Stand again. That's all the repubs are doing these days is playing Whiteman's Last Stand. All for the white man, nothing for anybody else. Freedom for the white man, bondage for everybody else. That's been the way of the USA from the start, so who's to say it's going to change now? It won't be long before white man in America is just another minority, albeit the most arrogant minority, the one the others allow the delusion of power because it's so important to white man to be number one. Every time I see Romney it's the same pose, same face, same expression, like the image of George Washington on the dollar bill, always the same any way you look at it. Or like a face on a postage stamp. It's a face. It's always the same. A bland American whiteman face gazing into the distance like in Soviet and Maoist "realism." Like the new Martin Luther King statue in Washington DC designed by a Chinese sculptor who evidently had his foundation in Maoist realism where peasants and soldiers gape at the rising red star.


It's hard to even believe this is an election year. A little bit of bland talk about Romney, then a little bit of an example of his bland talking that goes round and round like a roulette wheel without a marble. He's totally upper middle-class suburban country club, only the best, Mr Niceguy with a benign smile for all. He has the authenticity of Al Gore, the reason nobody much cared that the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta used the Supreme Court to take the election away from Al Gore, the winner despite Ralph Nader making it difficult for him. I have a feeling that people generally get as enthusiastic about Romney as they did about Al Gore. Gore was a bland suburban Ken doll to the soulless max, as is Romney. In the Sixties they'd have been called Plastic People and Nowhere Men. They both were created by the political image machine from the time they were little. They play the role required of anyone in politics in America, a mask with a smile, nothing else. Whoever might be behind the mask has no relevance. Image is everything. Appearance is all. As seen on tv. And I'm told by people who want me to think they know what they're talking about that television is not having any kind of effect on people who watch it. I wonder if we'd have had these random sprays of rapid-fire bullets into anonymous crowds of people before television. No I don't wonder. It did not happen before tv.


Except: Paris in the time of Surrealism (1920s and 1930s); one of the Surrealists, possibly Andre Breton, envisioned the idea that the ultimate Surrealist act would be to walk into a crowd of people and fire a revolver randomly. It was held up as a kind of idea of the ideal, until one day somebody did it and it wasn't funny. I hear on the news about a whiteman taking an AK47 or something into a kindergarten classroom of Vietnamese immigrant children and blowing away the kids, the teacher and himself. How Surrealist is that? Kids shooting up a school. Surrealism. Suddenly, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, not even out of conception, a couple of guys start shooting in the cafeteria, in the library. Son of Korean dry-cleaners walks into a university classroom with an automatic pistol, shoots professor, several kids and self. The ultimate American statement. Maybe this is to say we are in a Surrealist time. When 98% of the population goes around during the day with last night's commercials, sit-coms and sports on television in their heads, there aint much going on but keepin on keepin on. Pantene for chlorine damaged hair. It's a riot how television leads us by imitating us; following the lead of a parrot, another word for the say-what-you're-told politician and reporter.


If you want to see mastery in lying with a straight face, check out Lyndon Johnson on YouTube telling the television audience about the patrol boats shooting at American ships in Tonkin Gulf, knowing it had not happened, that it was a fabrication to fool the American people into believing it was a justified war action taking place to start killing farm families in Vietnam. Before the March on DC in 1968 Johnson called a press conference and told the press what to report, a made up press release that was nothing like the event itself. They all had front row to the event and reported as told. Free press? Free to report as told. Only the Village Voice told about the press conference and told about the event as it happened. Later, Rupert Murdock bought Village Voice to shut it up. Too liberal. Politicians have to be good at lying the way a rock star needs to be good at screaming. I look at Obama when he is talking in so convincing a manner, the come-along-with-me appeal, and I think, What a good liar. He came out of his couple weeks briefing after the election with the FBI and CIA and the other top secret places of dark ops with deer-in-the-headlights in his eyes, up to and including the inauguration, where he so famously made a blooper. From then on, he's been a really good liar. The only reason Bush was busted for lying so much was he was not a good liar. He was just a dumb guy that lied all the time. Obama would be good on Broadway playing America's First Black President. The black man that lies as good as a white man. Electable.


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