So from a very early age, American youth are taught that they are essentially helpless without the benevolent intervention of the auto industry. The idea of a 15-minute walk to school becomes unthinkable; this translates to an “enforced dependency” which makes the child feel inadequate without access to the products of major corporations — a kind of emotional indebtedness that will soon become a financial debt. And, of course, the same process is now taking place with communications technology — where in the past, a child could relish his or her freedom from the social world, it’s now more or less required that children have cellphones or smartphones, and that they’re continuously jacked-in to the matrix. Increasingly, this is so they can be tracked or otherwise monitored by parents or authorities.

What a different kid’s world it was forty-five years ago when I got my first bicycle! And then, before that, when we always walked to school, free to take any detours we wanted to, free to explore whatever excited our attention. But it was the bicycle that was the real education in freedom — we would ride in groups of three or four all over the surrounding landscape — cut loose from the adult world and its restrictions. I remember the exhilaration of summer nights, coasting through the hot fragrant air and feeling that anything was possible in this vast, yet navigable world. What power we felt in our legs and the gears of our bikes! I can’t imagine how cramped and stifled kids must feel today, when the entire culture seems to want to swaddle them in electronic diapers and rob them of the use of their bodies.

But this change in children’s existential condition does certainly go a long way in explaining the malaise I see in my college freshmen — half of whom are on some type of psychotropic medication, half of whom are overweight, and the majority living in some sort of electronically mass-mediated fantasy world. Childhood — previously the period when one learned how to exert one’s natural physical abilities — has been transformed into an education in consumerism — in abject dependency. Like so much of the American proletariat, children have been deskilled and are now beholden to corporate culture, even for their imaginations, even for the use of their limbs.

Obviously, this “different set of values” — aggressiveness, selfishness, vindictiveness (to name a few) — are not the type of values one would want to cultivate in a densely populated metropolis, and yet this is precisely what American AutoCulture does. Which leads me to believe that, perhaps, we are not quite honest with ourselves about just what our values are — maybe we are a much more bloodthirsty, petty, evil-minded culture than we like to believe.

Another possibility is that this technology — the automobile — has its own set of imperatives, and that the American “love affair” with the auto has entailed a sort of “cyborg” fusion wherein drivers involuntarily adopt the behaviors the technology calls for. For instance, cars “want” to go fast — they  “want” to accelerate to the limits of their capabilities. Anything less feels constrained, inhibited, repressive.  Unfortunately, the average car is capable of speeds that are utterly impossible on streets shared with pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and so in such situations the driver is in a continuous state of frustration and barely restrained anger — exhibited as rage and annoyance at the things that impede his or her speed. And all-too-often this “road rage” will lead drivers to risk-taking and carelessness — or simply blithe disregard — for those on foot or riding bikes.

Like the contradictions of economic class, this contradiction between fossil-fueled cyborgs and pedestrian/cyclists is one that American society cannot “solve” without severely limiting the “rights” of those with the upper hand — drivers: banning cars from cities, restricting speed and horsepower, imposing stringent licensing requirements, enhancing law enforcement, etc. But the automobile is a sacred cow in the U.S. — utterly enmeshed in our economy and lifestyle — and so pedestrians and cyclists will continue to be assaulted and killed with impunity, as in the story below:

No Charges Filed as Six Are Killed by NYC Drivers in Seven Days

by Brad Aaron

Today’s top story on Yahoo was Celine Dionne’s new image makeover—she’s apparently abandoned her demure look for a more vampish persona—but more compelling—to me, anyway—was the report that the Obama administration has now admitted that the War on Terror is expected to last for another decade or two, if not longer—in effect, that we’re in a Permanent State of War. That’s right, and even though we already spend more than the rest of the world combined on the military, we probably have to increase that (even if granny must eat cat food because her Social Security is cut.) Yes (so the story goes), even though master evildoer Osama bin Laden is “sleeping with the fishes” deep in the Indian Ocean, his malevolent spawn continue to proliferate all over the planet, and so Good Cop America must hunt down and eradicate all these threats. Especially now in Africa, with its rich mineral and energy resources. Lucky for us, the Pentagon is quickly moving to recolonize that continent.

What has been so remarkable about the past decade is the increasing absurdity in the operations of the U.S. propaganda machinery—the way that it’s so easy to see through all the justifications and rationalizations for military intervention. Take the invasion of Iraq, for instance. It was obvious to millions that this was about oil—but you simply couldn’t say this on any mass market news venue. No, it was about Saddam’s WMD and liberating the Iraqis from tyranny. LOL.

And, hence, the growing disillusionment of the American populace. While there are still, of course, huge pockets of ignorance and obedient yahooism, I would dare to say that a majority of Americans are on the verge of utter disbelief, if not utter hatred of Washington, DC. Poll after poll has shown that more than a quarter of the nation’s population believes that 9/11 was, in some form or another, an “inside job”—either through an intentional failure of the Bush administration to heed warnings, or through a more direct conspiracy. In fact, because of this vast failure of propaganda, officials within the Obama administration (see Cass Sunstein) have even called for “counter-intelligence” operations to disrupt and discredit the “9/11 Truth movement”—using tactics such as placing agents provocateurs within local organizations and staging psyops campaigns on the Internet.

To their credit, Americans continue to abandon the official narratives in droves. On what might be called the “far right,” the Libertarian movement catalyzed by Congressman Ron Paul has proven the equal (if not the better) of the “far left” in its debunking of mainstream imperialism and the “War on Terror” abridgement of civil liberties. Ron Paul’s outspoken anti-war, anti-imperialist platform completely embarrassed those on the official Democratic “left” who had placed their faith in Obama; so threatening was Paul’s message that the media essentially blacked him out, even though he won or placed second in several primaries. But this exclusion of a genuinely popular candidate only served to alienate millions, and to further radicalize those who see no future in the present system.

What’s clear is that this is an empire in decline, if not free fall, and that we are following the historical trend of all empires, which have always tended, in their final days, towards militaristic fascism. Between the Bush/Cheney regime and the Obama regime we have seen an extraordinary concentration of wealth in the One Percent, and an equally extraordinary concentration of police and military power within the domestic realm, which has no other purpose than to repress uprisings within the citizenry.  Although the outward trappings of a fully fascist state haven’t arisen yet, all the ideological and police state apparatus have been implemented. Consider the way that the Occupy movement was summarily quashed in one fell swoop, on a coordinated national level.

Was the collapse of the Twin Towers a controlled demolition?  Perhaps we will never know. But the anomalies, evasions, and lies of the government about this, the justification for Permanent War, should convince all Americans that they live in a State that has cut itself loose from all Constitutional governance, and in fact, the rule of law. We are in the endgame now.

Time Out's death sentence, May 2007

Somebody needs to get a message through to the Times that Williamsburg long ago lost its cachet as the epicenter of what marketers call “cool,” and that the “hipster” as a cultural icon is dead—that, in fact, the hipster was already embalmed and buried six years ago when Time Out New York pronounced his death sentence (see left). Then, perhaps, the Times would spare us—we who actually live in Williamsburg and must pay the rents this newspaper helped inflate—spare us yet another cutesy/snarky trend-piece like Henry Alford’s “How I Became a Hipster” (Weds., 5/1/13). Hasn’t the Times done enough to ruin this neighborhood? Must it rub salt in our wounds? And can’t its writers even get the facts straight anymore—or was the Judith Miller WMD fiasco its truth-Rubicon? (Ooops! A million dead Iraqis? So sorry—our bad!)

The hot story, according to Alford, is that “Brooklyn” is now “a byword for cool from Paris to Sweden to the Middle East.” So readers can expect that if the Style section sends him to Williamsburg to spend “a long weekend trying to educate himself, canvassing Kings County’s artisan-loving, kale-devouring epicenter” to fathom the secrets of “cool”—that, well, this will involve a lot of shopping. Because shopping, apparently, is the only language Times readers can understand.

Of course, it turns out that becoming a hipster for the New York Times is pretty fucking expensive, something close to $2000 for a three-day weekend—so hipster wanna-bes are forewarned. First, coolness required Alford to spend three nights at the Wythe Hotel—which he describes as “a beehive of instrument-bearing musicians, nose-pierced locals and twentysomethings who use the word ‘ridiculous’ in nonpejorative contexts”— and which likely cost upwards of $1500. Then there were the appropriate hipster accoutrements, for instance, “a $225 short-sleeve, plaid, navy jacquard shirt” from H. W. Carter and Sons—a shop “full of flannel and cardigans and work boots for the younger set.” Then the food and beverages, the bike rental, the visit to a barber, and for some reason (perhaps to ridicule “artisanal” food), a “three-hour, $69 class called Knife Skills, taught at 3rd Ward, a continuing-education center in Bushwick that is heavy on classes like chicken raising and rooftop gardening and cardboard furniture-making.”

“O, bohemia!” moans reporter/humorist Alford, oozing yet more irony into an article already awash in the stuff. And herein lies the essential problem: how does one signal irony in an era where irony is as thick as Brooklyn air in late July? How to avoid the “infinite regress” problem of heaping irony on top of irony on top of irony? How to mock outmoded cultural stereotypes—hipsters, boho Williamsburg—when these are already buried under mountains of sarcasm and cynicism? Doesn’t the project become like fracking, pumping poison into the ground to eke out every last bit of fossilized energy? Don’t diminishing returns begin to set in as irony gets cheaper and increasingly pointless?

“O, late capitalist strip-miners of culture!” we moan in response, must everything be monetized and for sale?

Hipster Zombies and the Bohemian Undead

Six years ago, writing in Time Out, Christian Lorentzen got the story right with his diagnosis of the parasitic nature of the postmodern economics of “cool”:

Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn. [emphasis mine.]

And in the passage that follows below, it’s as if Lorentzen—like one of the “Pre-cogs” in Minority Report—has had a pre-vision of Henry Alford’s “How I Became a Hipster”:

Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.

Of course, hipsterism being originally, and still mostly, the province of whites (the pastiest of whites), its acolytes raid the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity in the pot. Similarly, they devour gay style: Witness the cultural burp known as metrosexuality. As the hipster ambles from the thrift store to a $100 haircut at Freemans Sporting Club, these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod.

All isms seek dominance of human affairs, and in this, hipsterism in New York City has proved more virulent than any of its forebears. (Punk, after all, never really broke—except in the form of hipsterism.) At last there was nothing left for hipsters to do but to convert the squares, take them to the bar and let them pick up the tab. Secrets were shared. The hipster hooked up with the common consumer; he woke up a zombie.

The Right Bank Café -- New York Magazine, June 22, 1992

Ten years ago, on April Fool’s Day, 2003, the Right Bank Cafe served its last drink and, for the final time, closed its doors to business. Some eleven years before, New York magazine had featured this legendary watering-hole on its cover as an icon for “The New Bohemia” — a reputation which would soon curse Williamsburg with an invasion of  real estate developers and other such predatory creatures. Indeed, future Brooklyn historians may well mark the closing of the Right Bank as a key moment in Williamsburg’s transformation from a low-rent, multi-ethnic haven for working-class artists, anarchists, and other misfits into a “bohemian” theme park for New Age yuppies and twenty-something IT workers. Another “temporary autonomous zone” was about to be smothered by the machinations of Kapital.

Two years after the Right Bank closed, Mayor Bloomberg’s rezoning plan for the neighborhood opened vast swaths of the Brooklyn waterfront to redevelopment and gentrification, aided and abetted by generous tax breaks. A boom in condo building gathered steam as rental prices in the neighborhood skyrocketed. As in so many earlier episodes of gentrification — Soho, the Upper West Side, the East Village, Park Slope — both the original inhabitants of the neighborhood and the newer “bohemians” found themselves besieged by rising rents and a crackdown on living spaces that were suddenly found “illegal” by the authorities. The skin complexion of the neighborhood changed virtually overnight; the average income bracket was soon to follow.

In hindsight, it’s clear that the gentrification of Williamsburg is only the latest front in an ongoing war to rid central NYC of its last vestiges of ethnic and cultural diversity, and to convert the city into a theme park called “the Urban Experience.” What is planned is a sort of cultural wax museum wherein an upscale clientele can have the vicarious sensations of partaking in the authentic culture that this city once produced (but it does no longer). The international bourgeoisie can send their children to NYU where they can re-enact moments in the cultural history of the West and East Villages: the “Folk Era,” “the Punk Era,” etc. Sensitive yuppies can affirm their “colorblindness” and “post-racial politics” by moving to Harlem and enjoying museum-quality jazz in high-priced nightclubs. Investment bankers can live in Soho and imagine themselves as patrons of the arts, while mingling with fashion models. Young neoliberal capitalists can find a home in lower Manhattan, where the Ground Zero theme park reinforces their beliefs in the supremacy of American capital. In Williamsburg, young yuppies can feel “edgy” — indeed, there is a high-rise development called “The Edge.” And everybody will be “safe.”

But “back in the day”, what a madhouse of misfits and malcontents and wild-eyed visionaries filled the Right Bank! This was a crucible of creativity, much of it insane, but all of it critical of the Powers that Be. And as crazy and disjunct as we were, the solidarity of being united against the juggernaut of Kapital made us all friendly equals, and happy to spend some relaxed time in drunken  joyousness, celebrating our momentary freedom. This was a bar of slackers, where slacking was a political statement. Imbued within the bar was a working-class consciousness that neccesarily scoffed at anybody’s  pretensions.

What I remember most is swimming in the East River — the incredible astonishment of being in the water at night with the whole skyline of Manhattan spread before me. One or two summers, it was a regular thing for people at the bar to go across the street and swim in the East River. I can’t imagine this happening anymore. Are there hipsters with the courage to swim in the East River? What we’ve lost is inexplicable.

Cyborg Spy Model wearing Google eyewear

How sexy are eyeglasses that transmit your location and everything you see and hear to a Google server? Glasses that automatically recruit you as a cyborg spy for  anybody with access to this information (i.e., the NSA, FBI, CIA, DHS)? Of course, to Google’s managers and shareholders the money-making potential of vast new streams of personal information are incredibly sexy. But will consumers buy into the game? Already there’s growing resistance — after all, nobody likes to have their picture taken without consent — but can people really say no to what will surely be promoted as must-have cutting-edge technology? Is there a limit, beyond which we will refuse to pass?

Google Glass Cyborg Prototype: Star Trek's "Seven of Nine"

According to the “hacktivist” group, Anonymous, only full-spectrum countermeasures will prevent Google from further shredding our privacy protections under the Bill of Rights. That’s why rebel computer scientists are now developing what they call “internal feedback devices” or IFDs that turn the brainwaves of Google Glass users against themselves. “People who wear these things are essentially drones,” one young researcher told me over coffee recently. ‘They’ve relegated a large part of their brain function to remote control by Google technicians. That’s why it’s a fairly simple matter for us go in and override their programming — to hack their brains, in effect. They’re essentially defenseless, having turned off their critical thinking faculties. So with the right codes we can make them shit in their pants, if we want. Watch this.”

My informant tapped a few keystrokes on his laptop, then turned the screen to show me video of a Google Glass user’s face suddenly filling with dread and shock as she swiveled to examine the dark patch spreading across the seat of her pants. With a sardonic chuckle, the rebel “hacktivist” continued:

“Most American teens begin adult life crippled by 12-15 years of heavy media brainwashing — a sort of electronic lobotomy. Consider that the average child today begins watching TV at two or three years old, and then quickly progresses to the Internet and then the smart phone — what we are seeing is a re-wiring of children’s brains, one designed to make the children more malleable and suggestive to indoctrination. First, for several hours a day, they are removed from their parent’s sphere of influence, which is replaced by corporate media that impress within their young minds a fascination and love for corporate consumer products, while in the background there is a constant drone of imperialist, militarist, and fascist messaging.  Once they’re old enough for a so-called ’smart phone,’ they’re ready to spend the rest of their lives on the hamster-wheel. It’s sad, really, but we don’t have time for pity — these people are the enemy.”

“The American public loves drones,” chirped reporter Chris Cilliza at the Washington Post recently, citing figures that 8 out of 10 of those polled approved of Obama’s use of unmanned drones against Islamic militants  — “with a whopping 59 percent strongly approving of the practice.” So you can forget those namby-pamby Senate confirmation hearings about “kill list” author John Brennan taking the helm at the CIA; as Cilliza intoned, “Minds are made up on the matter. And, if the public has anything to do with it, drones are here to stay.”

Unsurprisingly, the American public also hates and fears Iran; a new poll published by Gallup found that 99 percent of Americans think Iran’s [nonexistent] nuclear weapons program is an important threat, no matter that nearly every high-ranking official in the Obama administration has affirmed that Iran is not building a nuclear bomb. Just shows what drumming misinformation into the American mind for 30 years straight can do — the miracle of modern propaganda!

That’s why hardly anybody blinked the other day when it came out that Yale University, one of the nation’s most august institutions of higher learning, may be soon launching a program to instruct Special Operations forces in the finer points of interrogation. Turns out that the little “torture” problem at Abu Ghraib — remember Lynndie England and those piles of naked Iraqi men — well, it turns out the problem was the low educational levels of the white trash recruits who got nabbed. Luckily, the smart people at Yale have stepped to the plate to offer world-class expertise and instruction.

Who knows? Soon this may turn into a degree program — a major! Think of it: “Stress Positions 101,” “Intro to Waterboarding,” “Advanced Humiliation,” “Intro to Sleep Deprivation”… all of it supervised by board-certified psychiatrists under rigorous, sterile conditions. And did I mention realistic? Program director Dr. Charles Morgan, noted for previous research in monitoring the stress in heartbeats of interogees, has proposed recruiting “Moroccans, Columbians, Nepalese, Ecuadorians and others” from surrounding ethnic neighborhoods of New Haven to serve as “authentic” test subjects for Special Ops interrogation — their dark skin obviously adding immensely to the learning experience. After all, we’ve got a tradition to uphold; as a recent poll tells us, “most Americans say that torture is justifiable at times.”

Bow to me and I will grant you small favors. Or not.

Hissoner has recently given his victory speech, The State of the City (at Barclay Center), announcing to the world what an amazing job he has done as mayor. (Ask yourself: Are you better off than you were ten years ago?) This was no holds barred bragging, but it was more frightening than that. It was a warning to all those who might try to oppose him.

Here are a few highlights:

“But not us. And here we are. Against all the odds, despite all the legal challenges, despite all the naysayers and NIMBYers, here we are. And as we speak, the first residential tower at Atlantic Yards is rising, and it will have nearly 200 affordable apartments. Marty — Mr. Brooklyn — and Bruce Ratner, who made it all happen, stand up for a well-deserved round of applause.

“Over the past eleven years, we have beaten the odds, and the obstructionists, over and over again, not just here in Brooklyn, but in neighborhoods all across the city. For instance, back in 2002, we were told that you couldn’t bring crime down any further without locking up more people. But today, murders and shootings are at new record lows — and, so are incarceration rates.

“But as far as we’ve come, our work is not done. We have unfinished business — and only 320 days to complete it. As the countdown clock in City Hall says: we’re going to Make Every Day Count.

“Our goal is not to spend the year cutting ribbons. It’s much bigger than that: Our goal is to advance projects — and start new ones — that will keep our city on the right course for decades to come. And to do that, we’ll take on the toughest jobs — and the most politically difficult jobs.

“The special interests and campaign donors have never had less power than they’ve had over the past 11 years. And this year, we’re going to show just how true that is.

“So let’s all get back to work. City employees: this is not a half day. We’ve only got 320 days left and we’ve got a lot to do.

He has also provided a whole list of records that he is responsible for.  Here’s one of the specific “Records” that Bloomberg is bragging about.

Record Number of Rezonings – With more than 36% of the city now rezoned to increase investment and protect neighborhood character.

(Maybe some of you have been a victim of such rezoning.)

In any case, if you listen (or read) closely or not even very closely—Bloomberg is basically saying that he accomplished everything that he did accomplish despite all the opposition: and that means opposition from citizens, unions, advocacy groups, etc. In other words, despite democratic process and/or the will of the people.. In fact, when democracy gets in Bloomberg’s way, he pays someone to make it disappear.

In his victory speech, he has vowed that he won’t let “the people” or the unions, or the naysayers, or any body for that matter, get in his way in the future. He will bulldoze his will into the public domain and he doesn’t care what people think. He even doesn’t care what you think, dear reader.

He made this quite clear in his run for a third term. (Well, run for a third term is misleading: rather his buying of a third term) He has told people that he has a right to tell you what to eat and how to behave. He has a right to pursue the most racist of policies.  He has the right to tell you what to eat and drink. His police dept. WILL NOT be subject to civilian review.  And you better not say a word about it or he will crush you.

It will interesting to see what Bloomberg does, after leaving Gracie Mansion. He has greatly enriched himself via his guidance of the city, making the markets profitable for his own enterprises. Hopefully the American people will prove less cowed than New Yorkers have been and they will not let this man run for president.

We all know there are words for his personality disorder(s).  Napoleon Complex, anyone?  Caesar-o-mania?

Where is Brutus when you need him?  Hell where is Jimmy Stewart?

I danced for them all night long.

Recently I happened upon a review of Michael Apted’s new film 56 Up. It was in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago and it was written by David Denby. 56 Up is the seventh installment on the original 7 Up documentary that sought to compare to a varied group of British citizens from different classes. Apted’s main goal was to examine the British class system and how it affects the lives of citizens over time. Denby’s main goal is to analyze how Apted’s concept has held up over time.

Denby notes that as the British citizens grow older they do, in fact, end up being in some sense prisoners of their class. The subtext here is that Americans do not have this problem— for one thing America is a “classless” society. For another, we have the freedom to cross those class boundaries (the ones that don’t exist) and that is an American freedom. We do, however, pay for that freedom with risk. Risk and freedom go together in capitalism.

While the reality of that free social mobility is highly questionable, one has to admit that it is in fact possible. As mentioned this is the seventh installment of the 7 Up franchise and the people studied have grown from childhood to late middle age. We get to see what they have become and how they feel about themselves. Denby seems to hint that the British citizens tend to be somewhat happier with their lot than Americans in general. Which is to say: unburdened by the pressure to constantly be improving one’s lot in life, the pressure to constantly be striving, the pressure to constantly feel bad for not having broken the barriers of class, these British people can relax into their position and enjoy the life they actually have.

Americans are not happy in this way because the possibility of doing better is constantly thrown in front of them not just as a possibly, but as an accusation. The American is constantly questioning his/herself. Why didn’t I succeed? What’s wrong with me?  My lack of success is a lack of character and any lack of character is a failure on my part. This string of associations and accusations can go on and on.

I’m not going to get into this argument in any detail because it is complicated and loaded with thought-mines, political and otherwise. What I do want to address is Denby’s comment that the British, though “saner” are “less colorful” than Americans.

The British class system has its protections at every level but also (at least to American eyes) a kind of built-in inertia. None of the participants have become alcoholic or drug-addicted, but none have attempted to remake themselves in their forties or fifties, either. None have become entrepreneurs; none have married up or savagely down in class. In all, they don’t have the seething ambitions and restlessness of so many Americans. They’re saner and perhaps happier than we are, but also less colorful. Of course, by “63 Up,” all this may have changed. — David Denby

What he must mean by this statement is that Americans of our various (non-existent) classes are somehow more “interesting”; they are more colorful characters, and thus have greater “entertainment value” for the observer, observers such as you or I or Denby himself, who, as a film reviewer no doubt appreciates outsized characters. But we are all in this together, hyped up as we are on a constant sugar diet of exaggerated characters on TV and in the movies, when we are “free to be you and me,” that “you and me” is somehow assumed to be, by definition, “colorful” and exciting.

It worked for me.

I’m not even going to argue as to whether Denby’s observation is true. What I want to highlight is the assumption that: 1) this is a good thing, i.e. that we should all be “colorful characters” and, 2) and that being “colorful” is a product of the American system: i.e. one needs to be subject to all kind of economic and (non-existent) class injustice, plus the perpetual risk of absolute and catastrophic life failure, in order to have this treasured “entertainment value.”

This is not available to the sad sack British, apparently. Are the British really less colorful than Americans? For that matter, are the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Peruvians, less colorful? Who cares? Isn’t this elevation of “colorfulness” really just a form of class prejudice in and of itself, in which people of the “monied” or “creative classes” feel they have a right to be entertained by the lower classes?

We see this in the attitude of New Yorkers all the time, who seem to feel that the value of other peoples, (whom they mostly look down upon) lies primarily in their entertianment value. People from the south for instance are accepted in new York if they can play a guitar or have some gothic tales to entertain us. People from the Midwest or other hinterlands must live up to certain stereotypes that allow us to be amused.

Denby may simply and innocently think entertainment value is somehow integral to the American personality. Or maybe, being American, he is just not able to appreciate the entertainment value of other cultures that do not align with his own. But the more important question is, how does your own entertainment value, affect your personal life and development?

Is your entertainment value, a quality of your life (does it enhance your living experience), or is it a quality of other people’s lives, i.e. those who observe you. And what do we owe those who observe us. What is surprising is that we have come to the point in American society that we can assume, even demand, that we should be entertained by our fellow citizens (if not by our entire environment). In fact it’s almost a silent amendment to our Bill of Rights: “I have a right to expect you to be entertaining.”
One way of looking at it is that the need to be “colorful” is a product of our market economy in which each individual has value according to the market. In the post-industrial world, entertainment value is high on the list, especially for those with little capital. Note the vast number of entertainers on YouTube. Thus being “colorful” being “fascinating,” is really a quantification of your use value to others, especially those who can exploit it.

It’s a cliché now that we are all artists. But since the 19th century it has not been enough to be an artist one must be a colorful character as well. Walter Benjamin wrote that the artist ventures into the masses looking to sell himself, which is why we’re all putting on the clown make-up and speaking in exaggerated cadences and saying whatever we think will bring us some attention. The craven need for attention that drives most people these days is a poison. It propagates consumerism, waste of all kinds, lack of sympathy and lack of community.

Modern chimney sweep. Where's Julie Andrews when you need her?

Perhaps the truly radical statement today is to reject that demand. Refuse to be a performing dog for the masses. The entertainment industrial complex can’t make you do it. But then sadly most of us do it anyway. In this hyper mediated age, there just isn’t any other way to be.