John, > I love Garrison. I'm reading his latest novel again, "Love Me" - about a > writer's relationship with his wife, and New York City. A competitive love > triangle. > I just finish "Liberty" centered around a 4th of July parade that is the last one to be overseen by a 60 year old Lake Wobegon mechanic. I grew up close friends with a large Norwegian family. His cultural take on their peculiarities is spot on and I think sheds light on RMP too. > > And how do parents respond? Plop 'em in School and in front of the tv.
Again this is a social myth. Do some parents do this? Sure. Just like some parents are single, do crack, and sell themselves to buy it. But conflating some to most is buying into a cultural myth that is just not true in my experience. Most parents are as responsible and want the best for the children as you and I do. And if there is a problem it is not some outside cultural force such and TV or the Internet that is damaging that effort. It is poor behavior and parenting of individual parents. And that poor behavior is just as likely to be in a penthouse as it is in a ghetto. >Thus IF there is an intellectual pattern, > trying to take control of the future culture, all it has to do is grasp the > reins of these two institutions. I capitalized the operative word IF. As long as cultures runs in parallel this if remains just that. > > >> Press the reset button. Blast everyone back >> to the stone age and start over. Sure your kids might not make it through >> but anything is better than all devouring HIVE-MIND. Sounds like a remake >> of the 1938 film "Reefer Madness." >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness >> > I don't quite get the logical connection, but it's been a while since I saw > reefer madness. > The logical connection is that they are both hysterical myths. Both in the "laughing out loud" and the "quick get the men and the white suits" sense. I think your right in that "community" integral to the problem. But it is not because some outside source is going to take over and control all of them. But rather that it is darn near impossible to establish and maintain one in a meaningful way. In this country both the ease and desire for mobility both economically and culturally make the whole country like one big national park campground on the Fourth of July. A quick picnic with a thrown together group of family and friends and move on down the road tomorrow. Here's the reverse take on the hive-mind. One that I think that is more closely corresponds to reality and is the real source of angst. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8 The comments on the clip are just as enlightening as the clip. RMP touches on this in his comments on NYC. No single individual in the whole city has a clue how it works. Or in other than a very general way who does what. This is specialization to a degree that has never been before. It is both the power that got the human race where it is now and is also scary because it makes everyone dependant on a long chain of other people they have no relationship with, other than economic. My guess is that you, like I, consider yourself a "do it yourselfer" in the sense that if something needs to be fixed or built on your piece of dirt you can pretty much do it. But this is a myth. Take everything out of our shops made by others and we would be darn near helpless. Imagine being given two piles of stuff. One all the individual pieces and parts of a disassembled chainsaw. In the second all the raw materials, like iron ore etc, to necessary to build the tools to assemble the chainsaw. Nothing else, Would we ever get it done before we died? I doubt it. Even though we know what a screwdriver, wrench, hammer etc are, we do not have the skills to build them from scratch from basic raw materials. And even if we did we could not do it alone. Making steel from iron ore requires the cooperation of many people with specialized skill sets working together. That is what I think is the source of uneasiness in everyone down deep. Dependency on primarily economic relationships with strangers can tend to isolate one from community particularly in tough economic times. Dave Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
