An Annual Report

1/11/11

Today marks the one year anniversary of our blogolaunch, so welcome to y(ear) two at the Department of Homeland Inspiration! Art Ranger sees reasons for blogging onward.  Lots of range to nurture art on.  As her chewing gum package purchased in San Francisco actually says: "Resolve to Evolve"! 

For today's post, we've accidently chewed on a more lengthy subject for reflection and ranting. So fasten your seatbelts.  As 2010 and its decade made its exit (and 5000 blackbirds dropped out of the sky in one fell swoop) The Art Ranger was trying on a cliché that fits:  

 Truth is stranger than fiction

Please take a drive with us, and let’s sample that past decade together:

You remember that Y2K thing around the millennial shift? All the glitchy paranoia, revealing already that machines were taking over our lives and some people were getting worried about it.  They knit buses together to bury underground with canned food and bottled water, horded until the next crisis or armageddon. Others were trustful of the tech revolution acquiring more and more buttons to push.

Early in the decade, our cellular phones were still as big and hard as turtles. Most computers were beige. A lot of cords were still curly. Art Ranger was a dial-up gal who didn’t know what LOL meant. Siliconry was taking hold.  We got dot.common.  We were becoming collections of matter just skating over microchips. One bubble burst into another.  Our worldwide web webbed and webbed and http://eed, entrepreneured and interprenetrated our brain capacities with hardware and software.  A lot of our failing memory and cluttered dusty mis-filed stuff, besides old shoes, could be squirreled away and compressed through wires and fiberoptic cables and cookies. Now it is all about "the cloud".

Shortly after the world didn’t end because of the mix up of ones and zeros, a man with a thing around his head and a long beard helped organize the meltdown of two of our big towers to capitalism-ismisms. Suckerpunched, with hurt pride and feelings, we stoked the defensive xenophobic anger stuff.  We knew the retaliation was going to be worse than the big deed; we knew we were falling for it and getting terrified indeed.  America got a new Department of Homeland (not inspiration) who recommended duct tape. Now when you fly, random persons might see your underwear, which used to be saved for the day you die.

As the man with the thing around his head proves so elusive (not a clean a story arc like Al Capone) they try to pretend they didn’t even care about him. They decide that instead, the King is making nucular weapons pointed at us, so we can go blow up another country, vacuum the power and give ourselves the job of pretending to rebuild it.  They make a lot of made-for-tv-movies – with heroins (hmmm) and heros cast in the proper light and wearing jaunty hats to bolster their ratings.  They hide the dead and work the stats and cook the books.

 “Other” didn’t go for the jugular, but the slowleak, waterboarder technique.  They do war with “one thousand slashes” to gradually cause frayed, vulnerable feelings. Exploiting the vast quotient of nothing-left-to-losers available, they try to create enough small explosions to weaken.  Thereby getting us to waste countless resources and integrity on a scattering of our offensive obsessive defensiveness business.  In so doing, we help his operatives transfer the desire that stirs the angry hungry boys and girls. They dial a number and blow themselves up with plenty of collateral, meaning more they ever could have dreamed of.

Meanwhile, the American counterpart, the budding adolescent boy, is numbed by the thumb and the omni-present bloat of electronically linked, digitized confirmations of 3-D existence. They are playing their own war games in their own homes, wearing a headset, using a “controller”.  Soon breakfast will be microwaved.  Today, a large percentage of U.S. Army recruits are weak and tubby, needing extra training, plus yoga.  Someone is still yelling at them.

The man with the thing around his head, son of a wealthy man, who might still be living inside a mobile cave inside a movable mountain disseminating himself, did have the goal all along to cause us economic collapse. (And no, that didn’t/isn’t really happening, is it?)  Implosion is the model, not only by how the towers collapse and burn their insides out, but how our bubbles burst from the insiders out.

In pursuit of happinesses and eternal youths, America passed out candy and pamphlets about democracy along with paletteloads of cash to try to buy out the tribal affiliations, in the Theaters of War.  Googles and oodles of humvees with human flesh inside of them, can not do much to ward off such viral angers and extreme thrills.  But with all the new machines, they can now go further and further with the surveillance of surveillance, while at home getting botox treatments to hide the stress marks.

During this entire time, people of all ages have gotten more and more hypnotized by the handheld objects with touch screens; humans everywhere have bowed to them and glued down their eyes and fingers. Becoming wirelessly wired and hotspotted, weaned from the cord.  They are like all mobile-like.  Giving and getting instantaneous media uploads about anything and everything.  Privacy no longer private and personhood exponentially exploded itself to the evolutionary wilds again while the random chatroulette rolls on with Truths and Consequences.

As many more people push little rubberized buttons or screens almost all day long, we get more and more of an overlapping, interlacing of the word Global. Village Not. Community now has no need for physical boundaries. Lines on Paper “borders” and people “borders” (tweet tweet) are re-drawn in elastic tension all over the stratasphere. People have gotten leaps in search engine, server capacity, and bandwith, that catapult to insta-“knowledge” and yet, nobody knows what to do about anything.

People in our country noticed that using plastic monies was easy and smooth to swipe, that wanting was having a self here in America. Some were soon floating on a new partybarge bubble of babble pumped up by invented credit. And packets of people signed paper after paper after paper and nodded their heads at the bank or the escrow office. Selling their thumbprints to the “american dream” and the slavery of the mortgage which gauges your mortality in its doling out of your daily bread and stress.  A house to fill with goods and services to consume sume zoom. The plastic extending and distending its economic belly.  Buying big flat more horizontal new tvs and throwing out big fat square tvs and pouring fat interest dollars down slow drains while buying three car garage triple xxl venti carmel soy nonfatlatte powerwasher portersteak golfbag chemlawn existences.  Sitting in front of screens, while touching a screen holding a remote while drinking ROCKSTARS with achilles heels! 

Meanwhile, there is this election that lasts for four years plus forever and ever. A lady who can shoot mooses and has nice spectacles (but no vision) and a shrill voice begins to say “you betcha” to the peoples.  They eat it like soft icecream.

The black man who has an astonishing smile wins! !  It brings tears to a lot of peoples eyes. Which then starts to get all the weirdness to fester.  Soon, the man with actual communication skills, is tangled in the morass, while the money who handles the hands and strangles the action dangles the agendas.  All feeling the dwindle, which further pressurizes and dilapidates as we await to see how many baskets he can make in this game.

(insert song sample: "We’re off the see the wizard – the Wonderful Wizard of Oz … because of the wonderful things he does.)

Somewhat sneakily during that decade, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac had a grand affair while owning 70% of our homes. With those cute names, it’s hard to remember that they belong to your government instead of Sesame Street.  Some suits, they set up a gambling casino in the ether. With their creditfaultswamps and hedges run by computer algorhythms of derivative postcapitalist bliss, they skim the “giant pool of money” that just a few people even know exist. While the Normals keep working and working with their hands and their backs and their brains, the ones in the casino of ether are sucking money from a thick straw, until the manmade dam breaks.  In a few moments, years of life "savings" get siphoned into the giant pool whose Gold Man Sacks and other too-fat to-flail operators vacuum and erase it.  Laughing all the way to the bank, with billions of your zeros in their pockets, they then take out a (no interest) loan from us so they can rename the game and keep on robbing. (Currently by bundling and purchasing craploads of debts, and marking them up).

China loaned us back to ourselves, so that we could could plug up the hemmoraging and stimulate ourselves in the attempt to get back, as soon as possible, to buying more stuff from them.  But worry not too much because Big Pharma and Big Insurance and Big Ag and Big Oil and Big Shoes and Big Ships and Big Coal and Big Weapons is still walkin’ tall here in America.

(insert song clip of N Sinatra’s:  “These boots are made for walking …gonna walk all over you”

Have you noticed this expression proliferating lately?  It carefully punctures conversation with extra ironic dismay and simply goes like this:  “really?”

Okay okay - may the absurdity though, keep us all just sane enough from life-threatening pessimism and may we be relieved and anchored and inspired by the amazement of actual freedom of speech.

(on the back of Noah's Science notes)

Thank heaven that a lot more fine humans are actually trying to care for the planet in how they eat and produce things.  And the Youtubification of everyone allows “talent” to come from any place, any old coffee cup, any teenage bedroom, creating an outrageous blossoming and decentralization of art and the art of power. 
thats so totally random
Democracy has been taken to a whole new level.  And yet, is it working?  Or, are we still just “working for the man” ?  or the machine ??

And to leave traces of our existence -  a photo, a tweet, an upload.

 How now shall we evolve, my dears?  Hold on to your h(ear)ts, your eyes, your thinking caps, and please, let’s do some good deeds in 2011!

Bibliography: Naomi Kline, The Shock Doctrine, Matt Taibi's articles in Rolling Stone Magazine, Gretchen Morgenson's columns in Sunday New York Times, Business Section.  CNN's AC 360, Norm the Weather Man, The Farmers Almanac, etc.  Things to read next:  Alexis de Toqueville, Montaigne

Phew, You made it!  We hope you will join us often here at The Department of Homeland Inspiration, where once or twice a week, a post is served for your enjoyment or bafflement. Consider contributing to Found Art Fridays where noteworthy (by you) images can be shared at: FAF@homelandinspiration.org