I can’t believe this, but I just ordered those DVDs, based on Bruce’s recommendation!

this stuff is so on target to what is happening in the U.S. of A.

Yule, I have a suggestion for your DVD player: Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi series.. In the trilogy, each film has a subtitle: Life out of balance, life in transformation, and War as a way of life. You are probably familiar with these works, but I recently received the trilogy on DVD as a b’day present, and they have very interesting interviews with Reggio. And some of what he says is that we, the “advanced” civlizations, are in uncharted territory — life divorced from nature, the natural rhythms, nature as our source, now lived instead in the 24/7 technological environment. His films are his attempt to allow the viewer some distance so he or she can see it.

Oh, and the tagline on the last in the series Naqoyqatsi is “America is test driving the future.”

I think Cassandra is an apt archetype to conjure these days. Most of the time, I feel content to just go along and keep going along, but that pack of lies, that propagandistic garbage that Bush spewed forth on Friday was one of those “I can’t believe this is happening” moments for me. And everything snaps into focus in a weird sort of way, like the visual hallucinatory aftereffects of certain acid trips. On a loop, endlessly repeating. Brrr…

And I will check out your blog to see your take on this — I have been a non-existent reader as well as hasty writer in the blogosphere lately, haven’t been visiting anywhere, too much to do in other spheres, so my apologies for that. Don’t hesitate to post your links here, it’s a historical record, too.

Yule, this a thought-provoking post … and along the lines (but far more inclusive in perspective) of what I was trying to write about in my post when I was listening to that speech (I made myself listen to the whole thing!), as well as reacting to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, which, with the help of a few rhetorical turns tried to make the IRA and Democrats into one and the same (my post was called “the Dean-monization of the Democrats,” just for reference … not for self-promotion).

Reading your words on Cassirer (whom I “knew” mostly for his work on Kant and then on his work on the philosophy of symbolic forms), brought back even more long-lost associations and musings on the political engine that generates those rituals and new “words” in the service of the controlling myth … except these associations have to do with the particular versions of Stalinism practiced in the Eastern Europe of my childhood. I can’t tell you how liberating it was to get away from all that when I came to North America … and I can’t tell you how Cassandra-like I feel nowadays, alone and speaking in a shrill voice as that wooden horse gallops around the streets of Troy and I see that old engine cranked up, once again, this time, on these shores, pumping out ammunition for the weapons of mass DISTRACTION.