If yesterday was a fiasco of missed connections and efforts wasted, today was one of despair. For a few minutes anyway. I don’t know if this is due to what are now called “wobbles” (why New Age nomenclature must keep the Urban Dictionary busy I have no idea; I though it dealt with absolute reality) the metaphysical turnoil (which Christians mistake for the Adversary hassling them after committing themselves to God) must have been the result of a major reorientation on my part. Except I don’t recall making such a choice. After a bout of “idioscopic anthropurgy” (Bentham’s phrase for self-reflection, psychological repair and reconstruction) I realized that I had said good-bye to Star Trek. I had watched the final episode of Enterprise last week and felt a lot of pathos at the end. I had avoided the series because I didn’t like Rick Berman for Reaganizing the Federation in Deep Space Nine with his Ferengi. It was typical of Gene to let him have a go at it in spite of their differences. This is why Dems don’t fight the reactionaries that hard (for that and other reasons). Even embracing bad change is the irenicist way in hopes that future cooperation will be forthcoming. I had stopped being optimistic 30 years ago. I wasn’t ready to accept the darkness creeping into SF from other places however. The dystopias and militarized alien assaults and defenses of the Gothic future (Warhmammer comes out and says so) had its origins, I suspect, in the New Wave and the bitterness that showed up surprisingly in parts of the Counterculture. In the mainstream, among the “mundanes”, the anti-hero was popular. As for SF I can’t help but believe that the real point of origin was the United Kingdom. I was sour, but not that sour, and rejected cosmic pessimism. The punk zines were a great place to hone one’s edge but I wasn’t going to turn the edge on myself. Cyberpunk is an accurate and legitimate response to the Second Gilded Age which began with Reagan and the yuppies springing up like some odious mold. I frequently had the urge to drop my hands to my sides and let the monster robots get the last American family in the game Robotron. With what glee did the boomers reboot the 50s that I was convinced that the human potential movement had failed. (It was, in fact, suborned by Bernays et al. There were a lot of major subterreanean shifts in the econostructure back then but I can sum it up in 3: elites faced 3 problems, unions, environmental regulations, and underconsumption. The first two were solved by outsourcing (the priorities in the US were slightly reversed because unions did not have a party of their own the way British labor had). The important thing about profits is the profit margin. Keep costs low (including wages) and you can peddle your wares at reduced prices and still make a bundle. Advertising had to take up the rest of the slack, so it created a plastic-brained generation to ensure sales. Gen X members were quite explicit about the reasons for their discontent. The boomers had networked and hoisted themselves into cushy corporate positions. The new managers were not happy in aspic: the sauce had a pungent, even mordant tang. The pressure was on and productivity was the watchword. Thus the phenomenon of the Slacker also loomed. One anarchist named Bob Black articulated a complete anti-jobbism philosophy which was breathtaking, to say the least. (Personal note: I date my entrance into the 80s to the time I learned that a friend of a friend – a woman unabashedly in search of a sugar daddy – was dating a guy who snorted coke and jacked off to snuff movies. Otherwise I would have dated it to the dumbing down of cablevision; such was its promise after all the hoopla.) After the tall bright dreams, the 80s and the decades after were hard to take. My loyalty to Star Trek became rather strained. Sometimes Star Trek itself seemed to succumb to the darkness, or acknowledge it. I admit that Gene had been in a hurry when he produced the original series, proposing antimatter at first because he thought the light barrier could be broken with sheer brute force. Dilithium crystals had something to do with the power source but this had to be worked out painfully later. A place had to be reserved for subspace too (a concept based on the earlier subetheric communications of pulp SF) and a way was found to do this in such a way that you could still see stars even though you were going FTL. It was all handled extremely well. The Enterprise still ended up looking a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine. But hell, the space shuttle was one too, and I knew there’d be an accident one day. Aside from being designed both for military and civilian applications, like the camel being a horse designed by a committee, it was hideously complicated. This sort of obsession with complexity for its own sake is a symptom of a gilded age’s inelegance when the s-curve is pushed out as far as it will go, more and more subroutines added on (the hacker fascination with complexity was also a symptom) instead of rethinking the parameters of the problem and re-posing it. I suppose it’s the attitude of making the best of a situation but it’s really a failure of nerve and imagination. Individual heroism is wasted in such a context. The power of positive bullshit can get you maimed, which actually happened. So unnecessary. Things may be looking up, if California under Jerry Brown is any indication. the wave of the future always starts in that state. The ill-considered tax revolt set the parameters for the dismal gilded age. If another better future is being augured, the Lucille Ball’s gamble will pay off after all.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 21:20:17 +0000