About the Election

So I suppose, I should take a break and address the dreaded election results, since they will most likely AFFECT all artists (pun intended). I will do so, but with the following qualifier: DIEBOLD.
Could the names of the people involved in this disgraceful (mis)administration get more Orwellian?
Ahh…Since we will probably never know the real numbers in Florida let’s work from the premise that the Sunshine State wasn’t involved in the national consensus. Am I ignoring reality? Most likely I am ignoring a lie; something which I have never heard anybody complaint about. You can read Greg Palast's excellent article on this issue complete with Harvard University's US Civil Rights project at:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=392&row=0
So let’s look at what everybody seems to be the most concerned about: the Red and Blue States. Somebody just told me the other day that we shouldn’t be so shocked, because “just look at the map and all those red states in the middle. We’re just two bands on each coast.”
There’s just one small problem with that observation: LAND DOESN’T VOTE: PEOPLE DO.
A reminder about how the Electoral College is composed: “The number of delegates shall be equal to the number of representatives that each state has in congress.”
So far it sounds fair enough, right? Wrong. Go to that same red and blue map and do something for me: Look at the size of Hawaii and look at the size of Alaska. You could very easily fit Hawaii inside Bristol Bay, yet Hawaii has 4 electoral votes and Alaska has 3! Before you say “Hey, that’s not fair Alaska is much bigger and it only has three.” You have to consider the fact that congress is supposed to be a REPRESENTATIVE democracy, and if Alaska only has 626,932 inhabitants and Hawaii has 1,211,537 inhabitants, then Hawaii’s representation in congress should be twice that of Alaska, yet they are only off by ONE representative. The ‘2 senators per state rule’ was designed to give each STATE equal representation in the upper legislative branch because States in reality are almost autonomous territories which are federated for their common good, but by attaching the Electoral College to it, big landowners effectively trump the power of city dwellers (many of which may not even own land, but who power industry through sheer numbers).
So now that we have settled the matter of democracy being leashed to the post of capitalist interests, let’s address the matter of why the Chimperor is able to fool so many bipeds. You have to go back to the philosophers of the industrial era. In particular the ones hailing from the Weimar Republic and the dichotomy of thought prevalent in pre-WWII Europe.
People like Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno lost the battle of influence over Academia because of the rise of fascism in Germany. At the same time, their respective nemeses, Nietzsche and Heidegger, won the same battle THANKS to the rise of fascism. Fascism drew most of their fervor and thought from the anti-conceptualists and anti-rationalists working in Germany during and before the 1920s (Heidegger was even a card-carrying member of the Nazi party for 12 years. Bet you didn't know that did you?). After allied forces dismantled the Nazi movement many of these nice fellows continued to exert great influence on Western academia, now scared out of their pants by the Warsaw pact. Just try Googling "Operation Paperclip." The problem was that in separating their “bad politics” from their “good philosophies” later philosophers allowed the same anti-rationalist thought that gave us such a lovely movement to fester in the Western mind for far too long, and now this monster is coming back to bite us.
Allow me to explain. According to the Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and this school which has exerted enormous influence over all of OUR minds (whether we realize it or not) the noble search for thought is one of searching for some sort of “authentic thought," a thought which comes before we conceptualize things into "car," "blue," "mother," etc. Intuition is seen as a guide to this “now-lost primordial thought process,” and should be trusted above rational thought, which depends on formed, or agreed upon concepts and charged words. like "car," "blue," "mother," etc. In essence, they negate the whole history of Western thought. History and science are suspect, and even Derridas said that he was not interested in the "personal biographies of philosophers" and that "their thought legacy could operate removed from their personal lives." This thought pattern is rooted in the land, or soil, and it's "true" or "authentic" occupant: the volk. It lends itself to powerful figures, pomp, ritual, romanticism, and elitist tendencies (the elitists being the ones who live the most “authentically” because of their disinterest on the mundane).
Rationalist thought, on the other hand, tends to lean towards concrete (as opposed to abstract) thoughts, which are viewable here and now, and which facilitate systematic thoughts and processes. According to Benjamin “that which is unutterable is false.” Things are what they are. Mystery elicits suspicion, “real” experiences are those of the mundane and the everyday, and all interactions are analyzed within this empiric context. Progress is palpable, and the show of it would most likely have a material expression. Empirical and objetctive methods are seen as substantially "truer." This pattern lent itself more readily to councils, politbureaus, and the desire to adjust nature, but mostly society, to what is perceived as good. In the words of John Berger “mystification is to explain away what would otherwise be evident.” Religion is immediately trumped by this thought process, because it can’t really show much in terms of progress. Science is supposed to lead the way, and technology should be used for the benefit of humanity. Is it any surprise that during the modern period the West gravitated towards abstract art, while Eastern Europe chose realist art?
I find myself agreeing with many aspects from both sides, although I have to admit that Nietzsche leaves a really sour taste in my mouth, and I just can not disagree with many socialist critiques of Heideggerian thought.
How does this relate to the election? And more specifically how does this relate to man-or-monkey and his cult followers? Well my dears, it is Nietzsche’s fault, it is Heidegger’s fault, it is Derrida’s fault, and most importantly it is OUR fault, because us “city-dwellers” are hard wired into anti-rationalist thought, by way of these fellows. How many times have you heard Nietzsche’s name dropped on a critique? They may not necessarily quote him, they’ll just mindlessly drop his name to look smart, or to justify certain aspects of their art without realizing that they are enshrining a man whose thought process itself was hard wired for fascism. Derridas, himself a secular Jew who experienced great anti-semitism from the French goverment in Algeria, went to great lenghts to dismiss Heidegger's Nazism as a "flirtation," and this is the same type of apologetical discourse that Hanah Arendt indulged in.
As artists, and "liberals," we come from the Walter Benjamin side of the fence, but as existentialists we readily buy into Heidegger and Nietzsche without thinking about it, and where do rural people go for their education? To the city. So even though our communal living gives us a palpability of the necessity of tolerance and cooperation (a socialist tendency), our tastes and musings are more Nietzschean and inward looking, sending us in inward searches that can even manifest itself in indulgence and excess, due to the flow of goods that come in and out of our shores, ports and stations. To the rural dweller who may come to the city to learn a trade for a short period and then go back to the land, his inward search manifests itself in the volk. He will have a bigger tendency (and more opportunitty) to root himself in the soil, in intuition, in ritual, and ultimately in the totalitarian tendencies that claim to order time and space for us. On top of that, the American country side is not densely populated, so there is not much need for tolerance. Nobody will bother the rural dweller much, and most people will prefer to conform with local custom, rather than being singled out by a large portion of their few neighbors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how does this even relate to the election? OK. Here it goes:
Only in a Niezschean society can a world leader say that he just has a "hunch" about another country having weapons of mass destruction, or that a god is giving him messages, and get away with it. In an EMPIRICAL, RATIONAL, society that would be unacceptable. May I remind you that most of the press that has been accepting and encouraging this type of behaviour resides in the so-called Blue States?
So, the vote you saw, my friends, was a rebuke against RATIONAL THOUGHT, which (in their intuition-based world) is not rooted in the land, is irreverent towards power figures, and fails to conform to their world view. But most of the fault lies with us, because when we regurgitate these ‘volkish’ tendencies without stopping to think about their context, meaning, and history, we are hard wiring them, AND OURSELVES, for this search of the so-called “true form” which is unhindered by the distractions of technology, progress, un-rooted people’s (i.e. immigrants) tendencies, etc. This form of "authentic" existence allegedly predates rational thought.
The problem with this view is that, as developmental psychologist Jean Piaget already showed, children go through a pre-cognitive stage in which the axioms of our common-sense view of the world have yet to emerge. Truths that we take for granted because of their supposed “immediacy” are actually acquired over a protracted period, the result of a process of interaction between the child and the world around him. Those who identify the common-sense view of the world with “primordial truth” are guilty of ignoring an even more primitive form of perception: learning. Simultaneously, they are turning their backs on the higher forms of mathematical relations to which common sense must give way in interpreting the natural world.
The division in the United States is not the one they would have you believe. It is not so much one of thought (we are both infected by these tendencies), it is one of habit.
Urban habits trump certain aspects of Nietzschean philosophy (even Nietzsche himself mistrusted modern living) because of the need to coexhist in a limited space. But in the countryside, these tendencies can run unchecked quite easily. If you don’t believe me, compare the vote in Franklin and Cuyahoga counties with that of the rest of the state of Ohio, or that of Miami with the rest of Florida. This is not about conservative or liberal, the truth is most North Americans are far from liberal. It is about our own creations coming back to bite us in the ass. Derridas is said to be the most influential thinker of our time. But when people say that like its a positive thing, they don't stop to think that he worshiped Heidegger! And Heidegger was a Nazi!
THE SHORT-TERM SOLUTION:
Secession. There is no reason why three nations can’t live symbiotically in what really is more of a continent than a country (and let’s not even get into the Imperial aspect of it). They need us for commerce and culture, and we need them for bread and raw materials. The federalist system is starting to hurt the people that it is supposed to benefit just because of the schizophrenic tendencies of the founding fathers which were landlords who happened to find themselves with the sudden possession of what were essentially European trading outposts on the East Coast of the North American continent. The problem with this is that secession would not happen without a stagering, and senseless, loss of life. So, there is
THE LONG-TERM SOLUTION:
Reject Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derridas and the whole bunch of them AS FAR AS SOCIAL APPLICATION goes. Post-modernist thought can help create great gurus, artists, and mystics, but they make awful citizens. In the same manner Benjamin, Adorno, and the rest of them can help create good communities, but they short change you in terms of introspection and spirituality. You can’t seriously believe that either school was perfect, can you? So let's discuss them, and more importantly TEACH them, in terms of METHODS and TOOLS with LIMITED (yet useful) applications. The Judeo-Christian tendency to unify everything, and to adhere to schools of thought with the fervor that befits a religion keeps us embracing and rejecting knowledge in a succession of enshrinings and cruciFICTIONS that could be compared to hugging a cactus because it has water inside, or throwing out the baby with the bathwater. So let's pick and chose a little, shall we? Wisely of course...