Best summer video for Second Superpower enthusiasts: Rebel Music: The Bob Marley Story, from Palm Pictures/Island Records.
His life has many of the Second Superpower themes in rich microcosm: Dedication to the creation of a “constructive campaign” (Gandhi’s term) to inspire and encourage and give voice to an alternative culture of engagement, happiness, and freedom and personal choice. This rather than trying to directly to reform the government or one or another of the political parties. The use of media to engage the community. The centrality of personal transformation—of life, of life style, of consciousness. The grass-roots campaign to help people join together and to deepen and enrich community connections. All of this promoted mainly through very sophisticated music and the embracing of the electronic media of the time, combined with personal gatherings.
A small rant: I’m sick of all these “noosphere” books that imagine that just because we are more and more connected, things are going to go well for the world and for collective global decision making. The fact is that we do more or less have a global mind, but that mind is pretty messed up. And has lots of toxins being pumped in by interested parties. There is a struggle for the memes that will lead in the global mind. That, by the way, is what Bob Marley realized as he simultaneously became a global star, and–more interestingly–a quite sophisticated global witness and commentator.
