transparency

i sit here on a friday night, missing my long-distance girlfriend terribly---wishing nothing else but to invent the killer app machine to conquer time and space...gosh, while i'm at it, i'd get creative and splice, dice, mix and sample her anachronistically into parts of my life she didn't make it into the first time around...i enjoy the endless possibilities to myself...

of course new media technologies find new ways to put us 'in touch'....these said technologies, made mostly by men [female tech designers, engineers, developers speak up now to prove me wrong!], seem to be remarkably conducive to pornography [one can, here, cry the end of civilization as we know it with xbox's 'kinect' which responds to player gestures---what a great porn medium!]...if even a simple generalization about the male sexual psyche is true----that men need to 'see' what's going on to get turned on----then it can be said that males are 'hardwired' [sorry!] for pornography and, by association, advertising. joseph campbell called anything pornography that induces a desire for an object whether it be a car, fridge or flesh and blood; so, according to his elegant formula, all advertising is pornography, since advertising's only job description is to generate desire! in fact, all celebrity-fed media is pornography! to consume media is to be flattered that one's eyeballs [attention] are the coveted prize, though, in the end, your eyeballs are attached to your wallet by a long chain...

during the past week, while consuming my political pornography, i've reflected on david mccullough's mammoth biography, 'truman' about----surprise-----president harry truman and how i'd like to throw it at president obama, not in order to physically injure him [though it would, weighing in at a whopping 996 pages!] but in order to show him how to face a mid-term elected opposition congress: with pluck and toughness. even in 1946-8 the republicans were the party of 'no', their smear campaigns working public opinion polls against the president despite a booming post-war economy, which refused to devolve into the economic disaster the naysayers prayed for. [apocalyptic fetishism is yet another form of pornography---live and well----- which, in my mind, is akin to the fad of jerking off while attempting to strangle oneself---in order to have more intense orgasms] even then, conservatives wanted to cut people from the social security roles, deny relief aid to a freshly-devastated europe [leaving them wide open for soviet take-over in the process], and ignored truman's push for low-cost housing for veterans and....[gasp] a national health plan....sound familiar? read the book now, barack!

on the phone---another great porn medium, invented by a man---a friend and i wondered about the theory of efficient markets, rational actualizers and the decision-making process during political contests [like we do]...sounds fancy, but the take home was this: how can a voter ever hope to make an informed, rational decision for a candidate when there is absolutely NO transparency in the available information about the candidate, where in fact, lots of money is spent to produce the exact opposite effect, opacity?

what with our sex buttons frantically pressed constantly on top of the need to make decisions without any tools with which to do so...NO WONDER WE'RE CRAZY!!! insanity is the only sane response to the cruel experiment in which we're the subjects...

more transparency, please! with everything....so i can, with my male psyche, glare at the pubic [turned public] hairs of politics, marketing, the medical establishment, media, paranoid alarmists, etc...well, no...i already know they all have no clothes...