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Re: distortion
John Pastore (venture@CANCUN.RCE.COM.MX)
Tue, 21 May 1996 07:41:08 +0000
On 21 May 96 at 15:13, mike shupp wrote:
> Okay. History (and "scientific" means for
> discovering/encountering/
> deciphering/evaluating the objective past) is giving way to
> ideological or emotional or just-plain-deranged mythmaking.
> Is this just normal social evolution, meaning nothing much?
> Abnrmal
> social evolution, possibly portending something? An academic
> reprise of the religious currents that have impelled so many
> non-academics into evangelical protestantism or Islamic
> fundamentalism? A sign of forthcoming social breakup, or what? Why
> is the State or its organs failing to defend orthodoxy? Is the
> modern state too weak to defend orthodoxy, too disinterested, or
> co-opted by the proponents of new myths?
>
Co-opted? Hardly. The State (?) or, at least, the far right has not
been taking the defense, but only the offense, since, at least,
Regan's visit to Jimmy Swaggart's ranch to party during Ford's
acceptance speech. The monumental mythmaking of the far right is not
only defending so-called orthodoxy, but is also inventing a new
pathos. Having successfully convinced today's college students that
it was Nixon and Kissinger who had not prolonged the Vietnam War for
political leverage, but, in fact, ended the war, the neo-mythmaking
has also gathered steam with the celebration of the so-called "Desert
War" by "Storm Troopers" who were never there. All such pales in
comparison to the greatest myth of them all: "The Liberating New-Age
of the Internet via the Information Highway".
While private investors and scientists, permitted and driven by a
political agenda, compete to create and control ever larger and more
pervasive parallel mining machines, the rhetoric of the new myth has
now passed even their imposition of their fundamentals of science as
a new fundamentalism for science to include no more thinking (as
there are now machines properly programmed and amendable for
thinking). They are now also preparing the way for would-be users of
the internet to buy a whole new generation of diskless work-stations
connected to the internet, and storing their information, and even
puny thinking, there --apparently within internet information banks,
to make the mining of information -of power- that much easier. Why
not, after all, when a CD disk the size of Beethoven's ninth
mysteriously costs 1000% more when placed within a PC tower?
Vance's joke is very much a joke -especially when considering the
conjecture that Anthropologists will be required for such a business
as he proposed in lieu of the new breed of mining operators trolling
the net for the information that is already there, or will be put
there by the first Anthropologist, or whomever, who has any new
information.
Co-opted? I think the whole of the net has already been co-opted.
Ka Xiik Keech Ya Utzil,
John Pastore
Writer/Guide in 'El Mayab'
("The Mayan Homeland")
venture@cancun.rce.com.mx
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