A DUMBED-DOWN CULTURE DOESN'T KNOW IT’S DUMBED DOWN!

A DUMBED-DOWN CULTURE DOESN'T KNOW IT’S DUMBED DOWN!

Pyrite Mineral Crystals Specimen AKA Fools Gold

Some people have an issue with intelligence, they despise it, distrust it, fear and envy it, love and hate it; alas it is a scary and self-debilitating bonfire of the vanities.   Perhaps it is their upbringing, they were taught that simple is better; perhaps it is their fear of the unknown, perhaps they are just lazy, but for the first time in human history I see a trend where people who are intimidated by intelligence are actually vocal about it!  Now there is definitely something unsettlingly medieval about anyone being openly critical about the fact that anything is too intellectually lofty.  The classy thing to do would be to say nothing and let the big boys discuss their big things, but not anymore it seems.  This trend coincides with the widening gap in education not only among certain socioeconomic groups in America but also on an international level if one begins to compare the level of education between Americans and other countries; Americans are falling behind in education because our culture promotes mediocrity as a universal marketing tool. 

Pyrite Crystals embedded in limestone

Our culture has got so used to everything being dumbed-down for them that it gets down right combative when it encounters media that is produced for consumption by the higher end of the intellectual food chain.  Our media, largely driven by the retail interests of corporate America has cultivated a low-end of the intellectual food chain society consisting of generations of consumers who are invested in the perpetuation of a uniformly mediocre culture.  No wonder the SAT scores of American students are consistently plummeting.  The common American is being programmed to operate within a 5^th grade to 8^th grade comprehension level, if that which of course leaves no demand for a higher level of competency.  As the cliché goes, we Americans have, “Created A Monster”!

Pyrite Crystal

One of the residual and almost caracurturesque effects of dumbing-down our culture is that eventually people who lack the technical and intellectual expertise to comprehend and manipulate data forget that their comprehension level is dumbed-down.  I have seen people who have no degree or proven competency in a technical area openly challenge professionals and intellectuals in their celebrated field of expertise.  In my assessment this denotes a critical breakdown of the way our culture perceives that value and reliability of education and knowledge.  That is not to say that merely having a degree or certification makes one infallible, nobody is correct all the time.  I however will always bet my last penny on the man with an education when the bet is about something intellectual.  More than ever do I see the saying come more to life that, “The blind are leading the blind”. 

Pyrite embedded in Limestone

Many modern men challenge the dumbed-down theory of capitalism much preferring to exist in the esoteric realm of the academic, intellectual ivory tower but with a healthy dose of street-level realness!  They enjoy the loftiness achieved when the language they speak is elevated to an high, artistic form and not relegated to a 4^th grade level “This is how to put the puzzle pieces together children” instruction manual.  It just suits them as a refined and well-educated gentleman to have the ability to set themselves aside as extraordinary men who think on a level where most people want to be but pretend not to care about.  So unlike popular belief, the self-professed intellectual man is not the odd man out, he is at the front of the line, he is the provocateur, the innovator, the intellectual entrepreneur, he mover and shaker, the Avant Garde, he is, “The Bomb”!  But you will never hear anyone who is a member of the mediocrity club admit this; they are muted by virtue of their own lack of insight because a dumbed-down culture doesn't know it’s dumbed-down.

Pyrite Crystal

Written by David Vollin

Administrator: FOR THE BROTHAS INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL SALON

Visit us at: WWW.FORTHEBROTHAS.BLOGSPOT.COM  

A GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES:

HOW INSTANTANEOUS IS A REVELATION?

Antique Automata Circa 1880

HOW INSTANTANEOUS IS A REVELATION?

Antique Automata Circa 1920

In spite of the instantaneous nature of our culture no revelation is truly instantaneous although it may appear to be so.  Virtually every revelation is the painstaking result of billions or even trillions of bits of data, hours and conceivably years of psychical data, etc., that have completed their long journey after being processed in our minds.  

Antique Automata Circa 1920

One might argue, however that the principal element of revelation which makes it special is not its journey but rather the magical instant that the mind makes a conscious connection between elements which until that very moment were nothing more than random bits of information.  The point of truth, which we call revelation, is that same extraordinary moment remarkably different from the moment before and the moment directly after.  

Renaissance Automata Antiquity

Again, one might argue that were it not for the string of elements that build a revelation acting as nodes of connectivity or as a sort of learning continuum, then revelation would never be able to occur.  On the other hand re-mixing, adding or subtracting any of the contributing elements of knowledge that would otherwise have evinced themselves as a certain distinct revelation might cause the revelation to actualize in a different way similar perhaps but not identical or completely different to the extreme that no revelation might result at all.  

Automata

But because revelation is like a crystallized form of the entire spectrum of knowledge upon which it is built we must consider if it is to be credited as an instantaneous brilliance or as a brilliance that is incontrovertibly and inseparably the sum of its parts. 

Written by David Vollin

A GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES:

The gallery images are of various automata from man antique periods.  

Aside from the fact that they are visually handsome object's d'art

these antiquities share a metaphorical relationship with 

the subject matter of this article.  

Automata are typically powered by clockworks

so they must be wound up and expend their power to

get to their final destination.  

"POST IMPERIAL DELIRIUM": A COPING MECHANISM FOR THE RAPIDLY DECLINING AMERICAN ECONOMY...

A cotton gin

"THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FINDS AMERICANS ENAMORED OF WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED, POST-IMPERIAL DELIRIUM"

The economic robustness of what had been a tumultuously divided cluster of English colonies only 74 years earlier became the legendary Industrial super-power by the 1850’s.  Even so, young America was poised to thrust itself forward into another period of political unrest manifested in the Civil War which spawned a virtual technological supernova firmly establishing the U.S. as a leading innovator of design combined with the manufacturing muscle to fight with global impact.  The defeat of the south marked a fundamentally groundbreaking transition from obsolete means of production that had existed since ancient times.  America, drunken with new wealth and the nouveau riche vanity of manifest destiny had forgotten how it so very recently shed the fetters of imperialism and set about the task of founding a global empire to market its products. 

A slave originated the idea of the cotton gin  in the 18th century and it revolutionized early industrial production of cotton turning America into an industrial superpower after the raw cotton was processed in textile mills in the north.

Today nobody wants anything that is American made except weapons and the confusion that has become Popular Culture.  

America, the country that dominated the automobile industry until the late twentieth century has failed to innovate and capture the new green market for vehicles
in the twenty-first century.

America has become purveyors of weapons along with the associated violence and sexual desperation of a culture that is terminally infected with a socially, economically and ethically and morally degenerating disease.  The American culture has no immune system, it is doomed to a death far more rapidly consuming than civilizations in the past.  America is no Egypt or Rome, Nor will if slowly fade away like its English counterpart.  The economic death of America will be likened to a heart attack, a catastrophic, instantaneous system failure!

A  cotton gin

Today, Americans who lived through the 1950’s and 1960’s remember a stable, prosperous America which appeared to have recovered from the ravages of The Great Depression but it was to be a short-lived revival.  The more the world followed the sterling example of America, gaining their freedom and self-determination the smaller the world became for American greed and exploitation, suddenly, just like southern slave owners who had to share the wealth with those they had formerly enslaved, America had to share the wealth of the world with those who had once been in awe of our countries industriousness.  Not only did they want and deserve to be given back their piece of the pie, they wanted a share of America’s international pie as well.  Each time a country gained independence from American financial interests they took a healthy chunk of business away until finally America woke up to discover it was no longer the great technological innovator, manufacturer and global distributor of commodities anymore, in fact the reverse had happened, it became a country of perpetual consumers living off of the hoarded fat of only 150 years or so rather than hundreds of years as compared to the dimming brilliance of Great Britain.  The companies that had helped build the American economy for the past 150 years abandoned America relocating the most profitable portions of their business that had once represented jobs for Americans to other countries.  Furthermore, these companies gradually lost control of their own businesses having to sell stock to foreign interests who naturally preferred to relocate a vast portion of operations to their own side of the world to enrich their own economies with jobs and opportunity leaving the carcasses of these businesses to die a slow ceremonious death in the states.  During the mid nineteenth century America became involved in the Opium Wars with China in an attempt to sell American made commodities there.  It was one of our first international attempts at imperialism.  

American slaves using a cotton gin

Most twenty-first century Americans are still psychologically riding the long subsided wave of their economic past.  It’s like a magic show where the magician has moved so fast that the audience is left in a state of awe.  Everybody saw it coming, nobody saw it leave but with a surety what used to be known as American prosperity has literally been evanished seemingly at the tip of a wizard’s wand.  What is more, the magicians act does not include the part where economic prosperity is restored.  It is really the end of the show and the beginning of what might be called, “Post Imperial Delirium” a condition where socioeconomic decline occurs so rapidly from a place of former dominance that those who are on the side of loss, unable to cope or understand the phenomenon fall into a dramatically unrealistic state of denial.  What else could explain the virtual silence with which Americans watched congress seize control of the Government literally shutting it down and threatening the economy and what might have been left of the reputation of the nation.  People who are encapsulated in a state of delirium are not aware of the things around them in the sense that others are.  They remain obsessively focused on the surreal alternate realities that haunt their altered consciousness responding to variables in the normal world merely because it is an unavoidable obstacle in the way of addressing the hallucinations that captivate their minds.

A black man using an automated cotton gin

The symptoms of Post Imperial Delirium are a behavior that suppresses logical survival instincts to the obviously volatile economic climate creating a false optimism prone to excessive consumerism leading to hopeless indebtedness.  Such things can be quantified as entering into mortgage agreements that far exceed the owner’s ability to pay within their reasonable lifetime, layering of indebtedness with credit even under the most extreme conditions of high interest rates due to credit that has been evaluated as bad credit.  Attempting to approximate the same lifestyle as ones parents during a time of great economic stability is central to the psychosis.  All of these and many more are symptoms are typical of Post Imperial Delirium.  The idea that one has to make substantial purchases right now before the commodity becomes so expensive literally doubling or tripling overnight even thought everyone agrees it is already far too overpriced in relation to its real value is the classic example. 

A cotton gin

A norther textile mill processing the cotton into fabric

Americans cannot face the reality that America is not the stable cow it used to be and in all probability will never again be that animal.  They watch hopelessly, listlessly waiting for some magic act to restore economic prosperity in the form of jobs and opportunity, education and such and somehow, some way, I fear Americans are looking to congress and the white house to conjure up these elusive deliverables… Most of all they do not visualize themselves as having the power to effect positive change to save the American dream.  They have relinquished their power to corrupt politicians and the mind they might have spent do fight back is otherwise occupied or enslaved to a meaningless job inadequate to do anything but keep them under an economic lock and chain.  Twenty-first century Americans are no better of than medieval serfs bound to the land of their lords… but todays lords are corporations which have sucked up everything leaving nothing to compete with them.  The twenty-first century has painted a hopeless landscape for most Americans who cannot break free from an economic spiral that leaves them struggling for breath!  Their coping mechanism has been denial.  Apathy has been the morphine of Americans who find themselves enamored of what can be called, “Post Imperial Delirium”.

The grave of Eli Whitney credited with the invention of the cotton jin but who actually got the idea from a slave who had invented a cotton-comb for removing the husk.  Eli mechanized the slaves invention and patented it in 1793.
Many inventions made by slaves were usurped by their masters who considered them and their ideas
to be their own property the same as modern corporations who employ engineers and industrial designers
to innovate new products for them.  The difference, of course, is that slaves did not get compensation or credit
for their contributions to American technology.  The slave who truly invented the concept of the
cotton gin is known today only as "Sam".

Written by D. Vollin

FOR THE BROTHAS CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL SALON

The optimism of the 1950's could not have anticipated such a rapid decline in
American manufacturing and importation of machinery and other products.

A GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES

THE COTTON GIN REVOLUTIONIZED AMERICAN AGRICULTURE BELOW ARE IMAGES OF VARIOUS TYPES OF COTTON GINS 

A modern automated cotton gin

Scene depicting a northern textile mill

A cotton gin

A primitive cotton gin

Retail sales ad for a cotton gin

A Cotton gin.

THE OBJECTIVE OF THE FIRST AND SECOND OPIUM WARS WAS TO COMPEL CHINA, JAPAN AND OTHER ASIAN INTERESTS TO OPEN TRADE WITH WESTERN COUNTRIES. ORIGINALLY CHINA AND JAPAN HAD NOT INTEREST OR NEED FOR WESTERN COMMODITIES SO OPIUM WAS SMUGGLED IN CAUSING GREAT CULTURAL UNREST AND POLITICAL UPHEAVAL...

Summer Palace burnt by British in the 1st Opium War

18th Century ad depicting Chinese Opium addicts after Britain and France began to smuggle the
drug illegally into the country

Second Opium War Ad showing Western powers dividing the trade interests
of China, America is shown in the lower right

Chinese Opium addicts

12 YEARS A SLAVE: 

The Story Hollywood Could Not Tell...

READ ONE OF THE MOST CANDID REVIEWS OF THIS FILM IN "THE STORIES OF BLACK MEN" 

http://thestoriesofblackmen.blogspot.com/2013/10/12-years-slave-story-told-as-hollywood.html

GOOD BLACK CINEMA VS BAD BLACK CINEMA?

GOOD BLACK CINEMA VS BAD BLACK CINEMA?

As a black male intellectual I have been disquieted by the proliferation of culturally retrogressive black cinema and have chosen to boycott them as an act of solidarity with those who desire to see a better quality of film.  The burning question, "Who decides what stories get made into film", and the burning reality of what ultimately gets made into film are the drivers behind this long running conflict.  In truth, there is such a richness of material from which to choose that no excuse can be made for the lack of more substantive films other than apathy and even perhaps ill-intent.  After all, nearly anything can be marketed for success but in a country where sex, violence and institutionalized racism are best sellers one must be far more analytic when attempting to determine the difference between good black cinema and bad black cinema...

There are two schools of thought circulating in the mix of contemporary cinematic consciousness.  The first school says patronize the retrogressive films in hope that eventually someone will be inspired to do better.  The second school says no patronage for media of every kind that fails to portray black men in positive and non-stereotypical roles.  Clearly I am a student of the latter school! 

The first school of thought is one of blind hope and faith, but not one of action.  It is a school that has waited languorously, lugubriously on the conscience of a world that has never and will never see them!  It is a school that waits patiently, earnestly, hungrily for castings of bread crusts from the o’erflowing, cornicopic table of the big house.  It survives as it can and because its expectation level is maintained always at a point of critical subsistence this school of thought always appears to be the most realistic in its grasp of the real and of the possibility of what might become reality.

The second school is no less blind in its quotient of hope and faith, but it is one of action, and that is what makes it fundamentally different!  It is a school that is impatient with what the world will offer and serves as an agitant to those who have accepted the narcotic of providence over preemptive action.  Not that it ever unwisely refuses crusts of bread when sustenance is an issue for the body but it is ultimately what it does to transform those crusts much in the line of its idealistic insistence in effect to use those crusts for the production of their own bread.  Unrealistic as the means might be, a product, if only intellected has been manufactured from the merest wisps of imagination and desire! 

In the primordial battle of human survival, desire has always been a far better broth than despair.  Strange, that the struggle to establish something as superficial as “Image” would cook down to a soup of such elementary truths.  The black man has fought during his entire existence in America against the corruption of his image.  His power to paint and frame it removed, he has had to define himself within himself whilst defending against the external slander and perversion of his image by those seeking to justify the evil behind the denial of his beauty.  And what would this black man accomplish if he were to refashion himself as a handsome and wise, industrious and essential salt of this precipitous world?  T’would be vainglorious if not for the mere task of balance!  Then what would happen after these scales were balanced, how much would enlightenment weigh? With men it is never only about image, image is always a difference quantified within a hierarchy between the un-celebrated and the very Gods themselves.  So through the medium of film would the black man reclaim his image as a man or paint himself as a God?  The point having been made for the variable of human vanity let us say only that there is much reconstruction that is needed for the image of the black man and for him there can be no greater tool outside of his own ethical fortitude and deeds than to aptly personify himself within the iconic cloud of global virtuality and not in the ephemeral streaming of music videos but within the classic permanence of film!

Digression is often a comforting mirage effective at introducing the richness of other points of view.  But there are some very straightforward, one might say sobering realities to why we see the types of films we do and why the images and in particular the representation of black men continues to fall so far from where many feel it ought to be and that reality is often linked not only to prejudice but also to money.  There is one magnanimous control variable which looms in the omnipresent horizon of every film either conceptual or real... Capitalism!  We are all witnesses to the fact that capitalism does not work in reverse! In order for something as costly as a film to be produced and distributed there has to be a demand for it.  Film financing will claim that it wants to make culturally progressive media but that ultimately the good stuff doesn't sell at the box office.  In the film industries defense, it can be argued that after decades of conditioning the consumer public into expecting, paying for and being entertained by bad cinema they are justified by financing only those films which fall in line with the usual lucrative garbage.  The first argument puts black actors to work but in degrading films so it might be opined, by followers of the latter school, that such actors are putting nails into their own creative coffins.  But the first school would contend that being paid to play negative roles is better than not being paid for any role.  Does this argument support the perpetuation of negative stereotypes for black men simply because it is lucrative?  You bet your bottom dollar it does!  So there is a great deal of profit in the perpetuation of racist stereotypes whether they reflect real life or not.  Nobody held a gun to any black American’s head during The classic Blacksploitation Film Era of the 1970’s, indeed it was not necessary because Black Americans were so eager simply to see faces that looked like them on the silver screen they would have paid many times over to see what are now looked down upon as culturally dysfunctional films.  That is the legacy of the first school, its students so desperate for image they never challenged it’s context because seeing black faces in films filled a void that everyone thought could be tweaked later down the line… The problem is that later down the line never happened; we are still hoping to tweak the problem fifty years later. 

The first school is a hand that cannot touch its own nose; it merely exists at the behest of those who find it convenient to get rich off of the talent of actors and the ignorance of consumers. The second is a hand that can touch its nose but only when nobody is looking.  The second schools' argument would require black people to raise the bar by creating their own bar; owning and producing their own quality films and gradually cultivating an audience.  There is a real financial gamble involved in the assumption that black patrons will pay to see the "Better" films as opposed to the "Garbage" films they are used to, as assessed through the eyes of the second school of thought. 

So in conclusion, it might be a more idealistic philosophical argument to say that cinema with more substantive and intellectually progressive material is a better way to upgrade the consciousness of black filmgoing audiences but a more financially sound and therefore realistic argument to say that filmgoing audiences might not patronize "Better" films if they considered them too deep or high-brow or simply because they just don't like the subject matter.  This is not to say black people are not intellectual but rather that their history of patronage shows greater interest in other genres. 

Right now what is commonly viewed as the black community is largely massed on the demand side of the economic curve rather than the supply side!  Simply put, black owned film production and marketing businesses are not yet plentiful or powerful enough to offer a home to what would certainly be an entirely new world of black actors, screenwriters, technical and marketing staff who would operate the machine of a global black cinematic empire.  If ever it gets to a point where this untapped market becomes robust enough to support the production of higher quality films with more intellectual subject matter matched with an audience that will pay to see these films we might be surprised at the kinds of magnificent black cinema that can be made. If that time ever comes, and it will, the argument over what constitutes good black cinema vs bad black cinema can be made within a far more robust, ethnically and economically well-grounded climate.  The idealist and the realist must combine forces in order to create conditions where this argument is even plausible and that must serve to become the catalyst for realizing this dream!

Written by David Vollin

Administrator: FOR THE BROTHAS INTELLECTUAL SALON

AMERICA ON ICE

THE WHITE HOUSE DURING THE WAR OF 1812

AMERICA ON ICE…

Picture if you will a lovely Saturday afternoon, a typical Urban Arena and thousands of families emptying from automobiles to see the long awaited extravaganza, “AMERICA ON ICE”!  the parking lot spreads out like an ocean of color in all directions and eventually everyone passes into the arena grabs bulging bags of popcorn, nachos, French fries and chicken tenders, candy floss and just about every imaginable food and beverage that can be had in an all American event such as this. 

THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER THE WAR OF 1812

No sooner is the audience seated then the entertainment begins, the sound is mesmerizing the colors are brilliant, cannon fire sparking streamers of red, white and blue into the heights of the arena, a big band of over 100 musicians begins to play a medley of familiar Americana and then the main stars begin to come in.  Why if it isn’t every member of congress on ice skates! Their state is printed in big golden letters in an antique style upon their red, white and blue top hats.  In their hands they carry large tokens representing their state’s most important contribution to the American economy.  The crowd cheers as they begin to throw free products, cell phones, notebooks, t-shirts, gift cards into the crowd as the cannon begin to hurl them into the crowd as well with a huge plume of red, white and blue smoke!  The building shakes as if there had been and earthquake with the cheers and excitement of the audience. Then the congressmen go back to the fringe of the ice rink and pull desks away which are replicas of the desks in the house of congress… they come together in a great ring as if they are going to vote on the  most important bill that has ever been voted on in the history of America.  The crowd is insatiable they cheer and roar and the cannon roar and the congressmen roar on their ice skates and then the congress men freeze!  Everything comes to a grinding halt, the music the fanfare and the audience becomes so quiet that one can hear his own heart beating eagerly in expectation of some new marvel!  But nothing happens!  The performers remain fixed in their positions and eventually the crowd begins to leave, the ocean of automobiles recedes like low-tide and the parking lot is a deserted vastitude of asphalt once again…

BRITISH SOLDIERS BURN WASHINGTON, D.C. WAR OF 1812

There was never any reliable excuse for bizarre mishap.  Patrons who tried to get refunded were simply told that there was no refund available.  The arena was closed down, boarded up and for many, many years until it was finally demolished it lay vacant and derelict.  There was and has never been any reasonable explanation for what happened there but years later when the real congress in Washington, D.C. threatened to shut down the United States government, to bring the slowly recovering economy to a grinding halt endangering the National security and the economy by precipitating condition’s that would surely spell its imminent demise the people of this region stood by and watched again.  They did nothing, just as they had done nothing before… They watched and waited while congress put on its grandiose show as if they had something amazing to reveal to the American people, something worth the creation of a National pause but instead of enlightenment all congress did was make a hopeful situation hopeless.  They killed America. Not since the criminal rebellion of 1861 which ignited the American Civil War had such a dangerous attack upon the sanctity of freedom and the American Nation itself been waged.  And they simply watched, like the totality of the American peoples, they all watched and did nothing! 

Decades later when America had failed as a nation, Washington, D.C. lay in ruins sacked and ground into the swamp by successive conquerors.  No flag sailed in that one time city because it was still being fought over by several competing nations.  When the Government was shut down its national security lay wide open and certain opportunistic interests pried open the gates of what was once a strong nation.  The twisted heaps of what once was the very gates of freedom lay buried beneath the swamps that gradually took over what was once the capitol city of The United States of America…

A CULINARY ICE FOLLY FEATURING AN ORNAMENT OF THE US CAPITOL BUILDING

Written by David Vollin

For The Brothas Intellectual Salon

GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES

US FLAG RELIC OF THE WAR OF 1812

SCIENCE FICTION DRAMATISATION