A Response to John Ebert’s Review of Cloverfield
By William Irwin Thompson
As always, John, an interesting spin on the ordinary. Yes, catastrophes are coming our way, which is why I feature them so strongly in my essay on “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature.”
But another point is that our culture has been kept in arrested development by the media at the stage of the 13 year old–the age of the comic book for my generation–witness the recent acne outburst of comic book movies. The 13 year old is not a child and is not yet an adult capable of dealing with threats. So it imagines itself to be a superhero in the same way Piaget once noted that 13 year olds generate life histories of fame for themselves and already see their statues up in the park. So the superhero is a preteen mythic unconscious projection.
Teenagers now sense the imminent age of catastrophes and are scared to grow up. When I look at the skateboarders on my Portland streets, I do not just see thirteen year olds but young men in their twenties. I am told that high school kids do not now have girl friends in a process of learning how to pair-bond with the needs of another human being; instead, they hook up and get their rocks off through oral sex, much in the same way that they get rid of their hunger with fast food take outs.
For my generation, the reading of comic books at 13 was the sunset-effect of childhood. At 14, I read Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, then at fifteen Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, then at 16, Thomas Wolfe, Emerson, and Whitman. At 17, I shifted gears into third and started reading the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and Moby Dick. At 18, I was reading James Joyce, Whitehead, and all of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Now that we are no longer living in a literate culture, that process of intellectual maturation no longer occurs. But our hormonal maturation is still triggering the development of the frontal lobes–the seat of higher judgment–so our American culture’s blockage of intellectual development is creating monsters of cancerous fundamentalisms. Fundamentalism of all kinds– from Christian to scientism– is a metastatic carcinoma of consciousness.
And yet, in spite of the media trying to block the process of our lntellectual maturation, we cannot avoid growing up. Superheros cannot be expected anymore to get us out of this fix; no wonder Bush has been incompetent and the worst President in the history of the United States. We will have to do it ourselves. So philosophers such as I re-vision government and call for tricameral legislatures and present very specific New Enlightenment moves. Obama is part of this appeal to become adults, whereas Hillary and McCain are still trying to appeal to a puerilized working class through their invocations of cultural banalities. It is what McLuhan would call the cliche rather than the archetype.
It looks like Obama is going to lose and that McCain and Hillary and Rev. Wright have united to bring him down and preserve the political status quo mentality. Through slickness and in stealth, the political ad serves as an impediment to the marriage of true minds. Democracy takes street smarts, but the Godzilla creating havoc in our streets is the monstrous transform of our own stupidity.
Yours,
Bill
–Thompson’s website and blog can be found at: williamirwinthompson.org
Regarding the last comment Bill, I certainly hope you are wrong. It seems MSNBC is trying their hardest to reverse this debacle, but Keith Olbermann is probably preaching to the choir. While Obama cannot possibly be the savior my Generation X and younger think/hope he will be, this election seems more important than any I can remember, whether in personal or historical memory. I dread to think of what sort of world this will be in ten years if Obama doesn’t win. Clinton seems to want to lead us to a kind of World State, while McCain seems dead-set on World War 3 in the desert.
That said, we are already amidst Cloverfieldian catastrophes, even if the Big Monster hasn’t yet arrived. Who knows, maybe it will simply be a series of smaller monsters, many of which we won’t even recognize until it is too late.
Dear Jonathan,
Yes, we will have a series of rolling thunder catastrophes and not a big bang apocalypse. And some of the catastrophes will not be visible and have already happened. You are not old enough to remember the last sentence of my second book, AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY (1971), so I will retype it here: “But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.”
I too shudder to think of our country under McCain or the Clintons. Since Bill Clinton has made over a hundred million dollars as an ex President, imagine the business he will be able to do on the back porch of the White House as First Laddie. The corruption of a Clinton regime could rival the worst sort of Latin American presidential dictatorship. I hope Obama can recover, but the Republican hate and attack machine hasn’t even started to work him over. People are going to have to be really smart this year and look through all the Rove tactics and swiftboating. Are we Americans capable of this?
WIT
Jonathan, I wish to correct the last paragraph of my first remark. I have now had time to hear Jeremiah Wright’s address in full and other postings on the Web. Obviously, Rev. Wright is not uniting with Clinton and McCain against Obama; rather, it is the news and political ads that are being used to quote him out of context that are being joined to Clinton’s and McCain’s campaigns so as to damage the perception of Obama in the eyes of white working class voters. There is nothing abhorent or unpatriotic about Jeremiah Wright’s remarks, and it should be allowed in a full range of political discourse and not categorized as “radical” or the ravings of a cult leader. The New York Times and Salon.com brand Wright as a narcissist, but do not address themselves to the substance of his remarks.
I wish our elections were limited to 60 days, to true debates on CSpan without questions from shallow network reporters, and that political ads were not allowed at all.
Bill,
Actually, I just finished At the Edge of History (and Passages about Earth) just a few days ago, so the quote was fresh in my mind. It is interesting to note how resonant your almost four decade old speculations were today, yet it somehow seems that we have continually put off a significant breakthrough to a higher level of consciousness through the Borg-like dominance of corporate media and our own desire to be numbed. I am often struck, when I read speculations from the past, how the year 2000 came and went and we’re still stuck somewhere in the late 20th century, as if we got lost in some mid-90s virtual reality movie and have just been circling around, winding down, waiting. But the oil is running out, and I suppose, as is usually the case, we will be forced to change at the last moment or perish. It may be that these breakthroughs will come, are coming (and came), in a similar fashion to the catastrophes: rolling thunder rather than big bang. But I’m still looking for that noticeable critical mass effect…
To respond to your perhaps rhetorical question, unfortunately I don’t think Americans as a whole are capable of the relatively moderate degree of subtlety of cognition to see beyond the black-and-white vision stimulated by Rovian tactics, Republican morality, and mass media. A small percentage will, but not enough. However, I’m hoping that enough people vote for Obama despite of that, if only because he is hipper than Clinton or McCain. If Obama takes the reins in Chocolate City because enough college students fawn over him, I can live with that.
Jonathan
Bill, my response was written before I saw your addendum. I certainly agree and have seen Wright taken continually out of context. I find it sadly amusing when Patriotic America becomes apoplectic over such statements as “Rich white people control America.” One perspective would be to look at Wright as Obama’s shadow, that to accept Obama–and everything he represents–we also have to re-visit, and embrace, our country’s terrible history of bigotry and racial suffering. Of course to really do this we need a Lakota or Tsalagi vice president, which won’t happen for the next couple centuries.
Jonathan,In 1980 Jerry Brown would attend some of the Lindisfarne Fellows meetings and he appointed some of our folks to positions in his administration: Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, Sim Van der Ryn, Rusty Schweickart, and Ty Cashman. Then Brown got hammered as “Governor Moonbeam” and his efforts toward a Green architecture and alternative energy were ridiculed. Governor Reagan and not Governor Brown became America’s beloved. Through lobbies, think tanks, and ownership of the media, the corporate directors and donors to campaigns used issues like abortion to deflect America’s attention from their hostile take-over of the country. It was a three card Monty street scam. America fell for it, and is still falling for it. Obama is trying to bring in a new and different energy-field, but notice how he is blocked by all his staffers and advisers. I think he should not have repudiated Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but shown how the media were quoting him out of context and trying to make any idea that wasn’t ABC-Disney based dismissed as “radical.” We will see if Obama loses Indiana to see just how effective this media destruction of Obama and Wright is.
Bill
I’m mixed on this. On one hand I wish Obama hadn’t done the politician shuffle and tired to patiently point out a subtler level of consciousness to the American mob-mentality. On the other hand I can see the need for it, given the average level of comprehension in the US. It is so patently absurd how the media has blown some of the things Wright has said way out of proportion; whenever I hear a Wright quote after I’ve heard the media backlash, I have the same response: “That’s all he said? Are you kidding me?” Yet because of the absurdity it seems Obama has to sanitize himself, dumb himself down even. Yet no matter what he is saying, his wavelength seems to come through.
Interesting note re: the possible Jerry Brown administration. Yet another instant of what could have been, if things had went a different way (Or are you saying that Lindisfarne is indirectly responsible for Reagan’s presidency by adding to Brown’s patchouli-scented patina?). It seems history–personal and collective–is littered with such instances; on a personal level it is easier to see the “greater good” that can come from what seems like a bad experience at the time, yet on the collective level it seems more difficult. Didn’t we think that things would change and people would rise up after living through eight years of Ronald Reagan? What about eight years of Bush? Do we need eight years of McCain/Rice/Huckabee?
My hope is that given the last eight years, and the fact that Obama is the first politician that most people born after John and Bobby Kennedy have actually been inspired by, enough slacker Gen-Xers will crawl out of their basements to vote. To quote your blog, Obama inspires us to “hope that there really is hope.”
Jonathan, that is funny about patchouli! Jerry Brown kept Lindisfarne a good secret. He was tarred with the brush of San Francisco Zen Center, where the Lindisfarne Fellows would meet two or three times. That is why he was called the Zen Governor.
As for Obama, I hope he can win in Indiana, but it is more likely to go the way of Pennsylvania. But let’s hope. We, at least here in Maine, lined up the falling snow in a queue four blocks long to vote for Obama. And Maine is not a rich state; it is very working class.
Bill
Obama is BO, has been BO, and will always be BO, and for the most basic, non-hating, appreciation for framework while NOT ignoring the fish in the bowl. The republicans play on the fish while negating the fish bowl, for what that is worth. The system, itself, is corrupt, and BO has absolutely no immunity, and never has. The concept of a fish in a fish bowl is not the separation of these themes. Having no sense of distinction between the Republican war criminals in the White House to the accessories of the same, like Clinton in his Democratic seat making the wheel-of-time spin in this perfectly schizoid framework, it has been very very distressing to me to see the world’s best folks at ‘waiting for it,’ you two, help turn this all into the TV (or web technology) tuning knob it has become, fostering the agendas that have ensued from this presidency, and everyone before. That aside, I look to you both for direction whilst I waste away for the complete loss of the fishbowl having seen this coming from the start, BO that is.