There is a similar architecture of doom, a destructo-politics at work here, descending into such tribalism that voters would rather support a pedophile than (shudder) a Democrat. Moore is perfect for Trump’s America where the goal isn’t actually to win or make America great again. The goal is actually to lose …
why American culture is tragically obsessed with violence, and the ways which Americans fantasize about using violence personally, socially and politically as a prime principle of cultural power. At question is how we imagine the heroic implementation of violence, and how this implementation of violence has become the bedrock of the American national identity. It reveals what Americans care most passionately about.
It’s a dangerous tactic played by the conspiracy-minded, at worst it rattles the saber for war against another nuclear power, fueled by hawks on both sides of the isle. And at least it perpetuates a cynical politics of blame and externalization, a politics of blindness as harmful as McCarthyism, and uses Kremlingate as a cudgel against the alienated populist progressive left.
Will there ever be a time when we see nature in its living vital essence
Rather than mere scenery for a human adventure?
What strikes me about this is that mass media society has total domination of our cultural memory. We scarcely have any cultural memory from before film or television.
Contrary to the cry for myth of Rollo May and Joseph Campbell who prescribed myth as a panacea, America really is drowning in fictions, myths and fantasies, and is ever more engulfed in an entire simulacrum of illusions. We’re not starved of myth so much as we’re starved of grounded Reason.
A lot about our culture is about displacement, distorted around the contours of power and privilege which warp the social fabric. It’s enough to make people feel really crazy.
I think it was Martin Scorsese who said that film directing was about choosing what to show and not show. That pretty much describes the fault lines between the public and private in Hollywood.
We no longer even have a vision of the future. Things that are futuristic too belong to the past – like Blade Runner, Tron, Robocop, the music of Vangelis, Wendy Carlos and Kraftwerk. Futurism is an activity of the past, and tragically spells out our inability to imagine our own future from a culture disjointed from cultural time.
A Fragile Dignity 