Pamela's Blog 45

Published on Saturday, September 12, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The 4 R's: The Ruses Used To Rend Us...Race, Religion, Reason and Recognition - 1”

see OnTheRoadLog 27, Friday, 09.11.09

by Pamela Satterwhite

“Recognition” – foots all the others in a class society.

A “culture of invisibility” creates the need to feel ‘unique,’ ‘special,’ ‘chosen,’ ‘better-than.’

We strive to stand above the hoard yet never stray far from the herd.

By dividing us up between them that got and them that not, we're forced to feverishly invent strategies (consciously and unconsciously) for making sure our butts (and our children's) are the ones that get squeezed into the ‘first class’ seats, because those in the ‘first class’ seats...

...get seen.

And isn't “getting-seen,” “paid-attention-to” – “cut away all the nonsense” – what 'Power' really buys?

[Dustin] Hoffman recalls a dinner with an ailing Sir Laurence Olivier, shortly before his death, during which he aked Olivier why he became an actor.

“He said, ‘You really want to know?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and Olivier put his face up against mine and said, ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.’”

Hoffman laughs, “Cut away all the nonsense – that's why we want to be actors.” (San Francisco Chronicle, Datebook, October 4, 1992)

Previous iterations of our current selves had ‘tribes’ to back us, ‘cultures’ to name us. A living culture situates its people within a web of relations – relations of time, place and sentiment – that grow and evolve over the centuries, a many-faceted crystal that reveals our complexity. We may be many things in that culture, but ‘invisible’ is not one of them.

But when the web is shattered, the ancestors scattered, and life, our world, atomized...we’re left to our individual devices – as conditioned by families (representing for states / markets) – to find meaning. And families, under conditions of society-wide atomization, are as tyrannically multiplicitous as they are tyrannically homogenized...

...because the conditions – possibilities and parameters – for our creative accommodation are set by the state.

When the built world around us doesn't ‘see’ us, when ‘reality’ negates our ancestral memories, our biological inheritance, our essential nature (freedom) – what we are as living things –

...when self-definition is preempted by the state / market...

...the moment we try to define ourselves we're carefully herded back to the pre-approved routes (“when you got ’em by the short hairs you can lead ’em anywhere.”)

So we flee into the realms we think we've defined for ourselves – our ‘art,’ our ‘race,’ our ‘religion,’ – and via these means seek...

...to be seen...

But at the end of the route we generally find we're towing someone else's line...

...Round and round and round we go but not merrily...

...because true freedom is not an option....

“I feel trapped,” we say – because we are.

And the solution for this dilemma that most of us seek, instead of refusing to settle, instead of demanding real freedom, is to but pump more energy into the pre-approved routes...according to habit and the hope that ‘more’ might magically make ‘better’...

...cycling us down, down, down...

...further and further into the illusion...

...’til at the end of the race we remain displaced, stuck on our teeny, wee corner of space...

...when we once had the world, the earth...“our own things.”

...Capital has burned its proprietary mark...everywhere, leaving us to circle round and round our ‘private’ realms – impotently, restlessly, wanting...

... more...

– but forever denied it...

...Forever dissatisfied...disappointed...

...furious...

...at our inability to influence anything even the least little bit off...our tiny square...

Which we nonetheless defend, like a junkyard dog, the teensy turf left us, guarding...

– because some have nothing at all...

...or so we're told.

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Pamela's Blog 45

Published on Saturday, September 12, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The 4 R's: The Ruses Used To Rend Us...Race, Religion, Reason and Recognition - 1”