America—Everything Earth (“EE”) Addendum 30, vol. 35
Dr. Aazort’s Advanced Earth Studies Group – Multiversity of Artaxia
Greetings to Artaxia froesteemed professor continues to masquerade as a human on this wonderful planet where “human” is so loosely defined that quite a wide variety of creatures are passing. Of course, understanding “human” remains my reason for having regularly visited here for several thousand years compiling your handy, dandy “Everything Earth” (“EE”) reference. Remember, these are potential space-faring beings. You don’t want one showing up at your door without ready access to your EE. Order yours today! (NOTE: Owing to the Federated System’s “no official contact” embargo of Earth, “Everything Earth” cannot be shipped m exotic Earth! Your to Earth.)
You may have noticed that the United States of America looms large in Dr. Aazort’s picture of Earth. I confess to a personal bias, but I don’t think any responsible observer could fail to be impressed by the country that invented modernism, aka “the future.” This Americanized future has been arriving all around Earth since the US was founded nearly 250 years ago – but especially during the last century.
Each country makes it their own, of course, with often-brilliant modifications to suit local tastes. But the animating spirit of modernity on Earth begins and ends with human rights as spelled out in the first ten amendments to the American Constitution of 1787, called the “Bill of Rights.” Basically, America took personal liberties once reserved for the elites and gave them to Everyman, an astonishing, and – for the elites – disgusting development.
The idea that any idiot could choose his own religion or none at all, speak or write whatever he/she pleased; assemble with other idiots to change the laws! And all that was just the First Amendment. The government’s founding document basically went on to tell the government where to get off, to the extent (a matter of continued argument) of guaranteeing firearms for the people should any revolutionary violence be required.
America is too big, its impacts too many to address in a library, let alone one posting. But its energizing notions of personal sovereignty are what most impress visitors from other planets (who can still learn a few things). And locally, human rights have terrific staying power.
The appeal of freedom kept other nations (and America itself) in the modernity game when indispensable components – capitalism, industrialization and rationalization – went into discomforting overdrive. Citizens are naturally alienated by the pitiless friction of “free markets,” the dislocating demands of industry, the upsets suffered when science disputes religion. It’s just too much change, too fast. But the “Made in America” promise of liberty, and the improved quality of life liberty alone makes possible, nearly always prevail over such “Future Shock.”
At present, “Made in America” is mourned in the US itself as a relic. With the arrival of the global economy many all-American companies have essentially become stateless “multinationals,” competing with other, “foreign” multinationals. For several decades they have outsourced jobs and entire industries, sheltered profits from taxes and “lobbied” (a form of purchase) their own legislation. This has created a terrible identity crisis in the nation that for so long seemed to own and even be owned by capitalism.
And yet, while its economy and law need remodeling, the true power of America today may rely less on economic or even military strength than on cultural dominion – most basically the energy of human rights as applauded above. This most valuable of American values reaches beyond money and empire into the hearts of the human species. Arguably, jazz music and blue jeans have subverted more autocracies with less “blowback” than all of America’s military-industrial exploits.
At this stage of Earth’s evolution, some violence and intrigue are still needed (though not nearly so much as actually occurs). But nothing teaches like example. On this front the United States has a padlock on history.
The US represents the fulfillment in the New World of the Old’s greatest cultural achievement, the Renaissance. America’s discovery in 1492 took place smack in the midst of the West’s Renaissance, awakening from the intellectual confinement of established religion. Renaissance thinkers essentially demanded that assertions be subject, not to the irrational declarations of kings and popes, but to a logical scientific method well within the grasp of Everyman.
The Renaissance-Age of Enlightenment-Age of Reason linkage took about 300 years to vegetate, reaching full bloom in the Industrial Revolution. And, at just that moment, about 1750, the American colonies were stirring, with the Northern states slowly overtaking the Mother Country, Great Britain, in building an industrial base. After achieving independence from Britain, Americans wrote their Constitution and set up shop (with companies firmly in the hands of Everyman) becoming the great engine of Industrialism for the entire planet. And just 200 years after that, from the end of World War II until just recently, Americans ran the world.
“The Future” was up for grabs all this time, but the various competitors simply did not grasp the animating spirit. Religious movements posed alternatives. Fascists boasted “a 1000-year Reich” and Communists built their own version. But all failed because, to the extent they were interested in progress at all, they had to resort to autocracy to get it. Today’s Chinese, with their challenging state capitalism, only “progress” by trampling human rights, leaving citizens yearning for their own Bill of Rights. The fatal consensus everywhere and always: without personal freedom there is no personal stake in any future.
Most significant for Americans today: the competition has all looked backward, starting with autocratic rule and despite futuristic sloganeering. “A bright tomorrow” will arrive if we can only “bring back” this or that imaginary Golden Age: before religion was corrupted, before the Treaty of Versailles, before capitalism exploited the workers. America worked from the imaginary, too, but it put the Golden Age where it belongs, in the future.
America developed a talent for anticipating and adapting – even if it did mean discomfort. The smartest saw that change was always uncomfortable – but inevitable. When the time came to follow through on human rights by ending slavery, giving women the vote, etc., they took up the challenge, even at the cost of war. Those who resisted such changes were left trying to stop the clock.
I’m only a tourist (who isn’t?), but I see Americans toying with this heritage at their peril. In the midst of uncertainty aggravated by the current “decline and fall” pressures of globalism, many Americans, too, now want to “go back” to this or that imagined past when “everything was better” – depending on who you were.
But time will not stop, and no tampering with nostalgia will help. Nor does this seem the moment to be chasing anachronistic measures of power and status even as roads go unrepaired and children untaught. This reaction turns “American Exceptionalism” into embarrassing bluster, a Future Shocked denial of just the sort of change this country once originated and then managed so well.
Americans call their country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” And, despite foibles and missteps, free and brave they remain. But the advancement of any fear-driven agenda obviously contradicts the latter and will eventually debase the former. This could mean decline and fall for an entire planet that still, to a remarkable degree, takes the US for a model.
Dr. Aazort’s Film & Video
As my mentor, Prof. Spode Hardratt said: “If you really want to study humans, you gotta watch TV.” Since so much human TV is so very bad, I’ve limited myself primarily to movies and their other long forms.
Very Good: Little Miss Sunshine (2006) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449059/ Don’t let the title scare you off. On the surface this is the story of a barely-functioning Albuquerque family getting to know one another as they road trip the youngest member, seven year-old Olive, to the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant in Redondo Beach, CA. So far, so predictable.
But the story and its characters deliver a most enjoyable movie about finding one’s true center in a world of “correct” choices. Olive (Abigail Breslin), destined to be a great beauty in maybe ten years, is currently barely cute, bespectacled and plump. She only got a slot in the pageant due to a forfeit. She’s adorable and hopeless. Dad Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a loser yearning to sell self-help books and a lecture series on success. Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin – amazing yet again) has been kicked out of his retirement home for using and selling heroin, but he has a hidden knack for Olive’s choreography.
Mom (Toni Collette) is the frazzled center of this centrifugal brood, with her gay brother Frank (Steve Carrell) on the mend from a suicide attempt, and a son from a previous relationship, Dwayne (Paul Dano), a bleak, gothic type embarked upon a vow of silence, his nose buried in Nietzsche. This idiosyncratic brew is well-shaken in an old VW camper with a busted clutch that serves effectively for light slapstick. The story only skirts the edge of predictable at the pageant proper, but even here we get some twists.
“Little Miss Sunshine” marks the directorial debut of husband-wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, with the screenplay also a first for writer Michael Arndt. It was nominated for four Oscars in 2006, including Best Picture, and scarfed up over $100 million. Not bad for what began life as an independent production costing only eight million dollars. The result is funny and bright, but grounded, with characters authentically rendered as individuals rather than types. The dysfunctional American family has provided rich territory for some very poor films. This is not one of those.
Very Good: Danny Deckchair (2003) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337960/ In July of 1982, “Lawnchair” Larry Walters flew from San Pedro to LAX in a deckchair hoisted by 42 weather balloons. One year later, a wonderful Australian team under writer/director Jeff Balsmeyer did Larry proud by turning a stunt into an enjoyable comedy/romance.
The Australian Danny (Rhys Ifans) is a workaday sort in suburban Sydney, a cement truck driver whose long-awaited vacation is spoiled by Trudy (Justine Clarke), his unlikeable girlfriend. Danny and his deckchair, powered by flimsy yellow helium balloons, survive a thunderstorm that dumps him in Clarence, an idyllic little town where he crash lands unnoticed. Danny starts building a new identity and a new relationship with Glenda (Miranda Otto) the town meter maid. By the time his old life, including Trudy with her gang of tabloid paparazzi, catches up with him, Danny is transformed.
The Australian POV has just enough “not Hollywood” going for it to avoid some of the sugary pitfalls too common in American productions of stuff from “real life.” This one’s sweet enough as it is.
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America-Everything Earth Addendum 30, vol. 35
July 10, 2011America—Everything Earth (“EE”) Addendum 30, vol. 35
Dr. Aazort’s Advanced Earth Studies Group – Multiversity of Artaxia
Greetings to Artaxia froesteemed professor continues to masquerade as a human on this wonderful planet where “human” is so loosely defined that quite a wide variety of creatures are passing. Of course, understanding “human” remains my reason for having regularly visited here for several thousand years compiling your handy, dandy “Everything Earth” (“EE”) reference. Remember, these are potential space-faring beings. You don’t want one showing up at your door without ready access to your EE. Order yours today! (NOTE: Owing to the Federated System’s “no official contact” embargo of Earth, “Everything Earth” cannot be shipped m exotic Earth! Your to Earth.)
You may have noticed that the United States of America looms large in Dr. Aazort’s picture of Earth. I confess to a personal bias, but I don’t think any responsible observer could fail to be impressed by the country that invented modernism, aka “the future.” This Americanized future has been arriving all around Earth since the US was founded nearly 250 years ago – but especially during the last century.
Each country makes it their own, of course, with often-brilliant modifications to suit local tastes. But the animating spirit of modernity on Earth begins and ends with human rights as spelled out in the first ten amendments to the American Constitution of 1787, called the “Bill of Rights.” Basically, America took personal liberties once reserved for the elites and gave them to Everyman, an astonishing, and – for the elites – disgusting development.
The idea that any idiot could choose his own religion or none at all, speak or write whatever he/she pleased; assemble with other idiots to change the laws! And all that was just the First Amendment. The government’s founding document basically went on to tell the government where to get off, to the extent (a matter of continued argument) of guaranteeing firearms for the people should any revolutionary violence be required.
America is too big, its impacts too many to address in a library, let alone one posting. But its energizing notions of personal sovereignty are what most impress visitors from other planets (who can still learn a few things). And locally, human rights have terrific staying power.
The appeal of freedom kept other nations (and America itself) in the modernity game when indispensable components – capitalism, industrialization and rationalization – went into discomforting overdrive. Citizens are naturally alienated by the pitiless friction of “free markets,” the dislocating demands of industry, the upsets suffered when science disputes religion. It’s just too much change, too fast. But the “Made in America” promise of liberty, and the improved quality of life liberty alone makes possible, nearly always prevail over such “Future Shock.”
At present, “Made in America” is mourned in the US itself as a relic. With the arrival of the global economy many all-American companies have essentially become stateless “multinationals,” competing with other, “foreign” multinationals. For several decades they have outsourced jobs and entire industries, sheltered profits from taxes and “lobbied” (a form of purchase) their own legislation. This has created a terrible identity crisis in the nation that for so long seemed to own and even be owned by capitalism.
And yet, while its economy and law need remodeling, the true power of America today may rely less on economic or even military strength than on cultural dominion – most basically the energy of human rights as applauded above. This most valuable of American values reaches beyond money and empire into the hearts of the human species. Arguably, jazz music and blue jeans have subverted more autocracies with less “blowback” than all of America’s military-industrial exploits.
At this stage of Earth’s evolution, some violence and intrigue are still needed (though not nearly so much as actually occurs). But nothing teaches like example. On this front the United States has a padlock on history.
The US represents the fulfillment in the New World of the Old’s greatest cultural achievement, the Renaissance. America’s discovery in 1492 took place smack in the midst of the West’s Renaissance, awakening from the intellectual confinement of established religion. Renaissance thinkers essentially demanded that assertions be subject, not to the irrational declarations of kings and popes, but to a logical scientific method well within the grasp of Everyman.
The Renaissance-Age of Enlightenment-Age of Reason linkage took about 300 years to vegetate, reaching full bloom in the Industrial Revolution. And, at just that moment, about 1750, the American colonies were stirring, with the Northern states slowly overtaking the Mother Country, Great Britain, in building an industrial base. After achieving independence from Britain, Americans wrote their Constitution and set up shop (with companies firmly in the hands of Everyman) becoming the great engine of Industrialism for the entire planet. And just 200 years after that, from the end of World War II until just recently, Americans ran the world.
“The Future” was up for grabs all this time, but the various competitors simply did not grasp the animating spirit. Religious movements posed alternatives. Fascists boasted “a 1000-year Reich” and Communists built their own version. But all failed because, to the extent they were interested in progress at all, they had to resort to autocracy to get it. Today’s Chinese, with their challenging state capitalism, only “progress” by trampling human rights, leaving citizens yearning for their own Bill of Rights. The fatal consensus everywhere and always: without personal freedom there is no personal stake in any future.
Most significant for Americans today: the competition has all looked backward, starting with autocratic rule and despite futuristic sloganeering. “A bright tomorrow” will arrive if we can only “bring back” this or that imaginary Golden Age: before religion was corrupted, before the Treaty of Versailles, before capitalism exploited the workers. America worked from the imaginary, too, but it put the Golden Age where it belongs, in the future.
America developed a talent for anticipating and adapting – even if it did mean discomfort. The smartest saw that change was always uncomfortable – but inevitable. When the time came to follow through on human rights by ending slavery, giving women the vote, etc., they took up the challenge, even at the cost of war. Those who resisted such changes were left trying to stop the clock.
I’m only a tourist (who isn’t?), but I see Americans toying with this heritage at their peril. In the midst of uncertainty aggravated by the current “decline and fall” pressures of globalism, many Americans, too, now want to “go back” to this or that imagined past when “everything was better” – depending on who you were.
But time will not stop, and no tampering with nostalgia will help. Nor does this seem the moment to be chasing anachronistic measures of power and status even as roads go unrepaired and children untaught. This reaction turns “American Exceptionalism” into embarrassing bluster, a Future Shocked denial of just the sort of change this country once originated and then managed so well.
Americans call their country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” And, despite foibles and missteps, free and brave they remain. But the advancement of any fear-driven agenda obviously contradicts the latter and will eventually debase the former. This could mean decline and fall for an entire planet that still, to a remarkable degree, takes the US for a model.
Dr. Aazort’s Film & Video
As my mentor, Prof. Spode Hardratt said: “If you really want to study humans, you gotta watch TV.” Since so much human TV is so very bad, I’ve limited myself primarily to movies and their other long forms.
Very Good: Little Miss Sunshine (2006) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449059/ Don’t let the title scare you off. On the surface this is the story of a barely-functioning Albuquerque family getting to know one another as they road trip the youngest member, seven year-old Olive, to the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant in Redondo Beach, CA. So far, so predictable.
But the story and its characters deliver a most enjoyable movie about finding one’s true center in a world of “correct” choices. Olive (Abigail Breslin), destined to be a great beauty in maybe ten years, is currently barely cute, bespectacled and plump. She only got a slot in the pageant due to a forfeit. She’s adorable and hopeless. Dad Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a loser yearning to sell self-help books and a lecture series on success. Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin – amazing yet again) has been kicked out of his retirement home for using and selling heroin, but he has a hidden knack for Olive’s choreography.
Mom (Toni Collette) is the frazzled center of this centrifugal brood, with her gay brother Frank (Steve Carrell) on the mend from a suicide attempt, and a son from a previous relationship, Dwayne (Paul Dano), a bleak, gothic type embarked upon a vow of silence, his nose buried in Nietzsche. This idiosyncratic brew is well-shaken in an old VW camper with a busted clutch that serves effectively for light slapstick. The story only skirts the edge of predictable at the pageant proper, but even here we get some twists.
“Little Miss Sunshine” marks the directorial debut of husband-wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, with the screenplay also a first for writer Michael Arndt. It was nominated for four Oscars in 2006, including Best Picture, and scarfed up over $100 million. Not bad for what began life as an independent production costing only eight million dollars. The result is funny and bright, but grounded, with characters authentically rendered as individuals rather than types. The dysfunctional American family has provided rich territory for some very poor films. This is not one of those.
Very Good: Danny Deckchair (2003) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337960/ In July of 1982, “Lawnchair” Larry Walters flew from San Pedro to LAX in a deckchair hoisted by 42 weather balloons. One year later, a wonderful Australian team under writer/director Jeff Balsmeyer did Larry proud by turning a stunt into an enjoyable comedy/romance.
The Australian Danny (Rhys Ifans) is a workaday sort in suburban Sydney, a cement truck driver whose long-awaited vacation is spoiled by Trudy (Justine Clarke), his unlikeable girlfriend. Danny and his deckchair, powered by flimsy yellow helium balloons, survive a thunderstorm that dumps him in Clarence, an idyllic little town where he crash lands unnoticed. Danny starts building a new identity and a new relationship with Glenda (Miranda Otto) the town meter maid. By the time his old life, including Trudy with her gang of tabloid paparazzi, catches up with him, Danny is transformed.
The Australian POV has just enough “not Hollywood” going for it to avoid some of the sugary pitfalls too common in American productions of stuff from “real life.” This one’s sweet enough as it is.
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