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Spirits in the Material World
SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD
There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution
The Police – Spirits in the Material World
As I was driving home from work last week, an almost forty-year-old song began emanating from my radio. I’ve always appreciated the music of The Police, but was never a huge fan. Spirits in the Material World was a relatively minor hit from their 1981 Ghost in the Machine multi-platinum album. I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times over the last four decades, but the lyrics struck me as particularly apropos at the end of a week where lunatic left-wing politicians staged a battle royale of ineptitude, invective, and idiotic solutions, in front of a perplexed public in a Vegas casino. Sting wrote the lyrics to this song in 1981 at the outset of the Reagan presidency. It is less than 3 minutes in length, but says much about humanity and the world we inhabit.
The interpretation of Sting’s (Gordon Sumner) lyrics depends upon your position in the generational kaleidoscope of history. As a boomer, Sting came of age during the 1960s and 70s. He was thirty years old in 1981 as the Second Turning (Awakening) was winding down and Reagan’s Morning in America was about to launch the Third Turning (Unraveling) in 1984.
His passionate idealism and search for spiritual solutions to the problems of the day had not been extinguished. The raging inflation of the 1970s had led to the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Cold War was at its coldest. Politicians had been discredited as criminal (Nixon) or incompetent (Carter). Sting and many others of his generation had lost faith in the political system. His viewpoint fit perfectly into the Strauss and Howe assessment of our last Awakening period (1964 – 1984).
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Roger Waters Stunned At Assange’s Plight: “Orwell & Huxley Were Both Right”
Roger Waters Stunned At Assange’s Plight: “Orwell & Huxley Were Both Right”
Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters has been an outspoken advocate for Julian Assange, but the most recent sight of the reporter’s physical and mental health, at his recent court appearance, has Waters stepping up his criticism of the establishment’s slow-assassination of the exposer of US war crimes.
Referring to a UK judge’s decision on Monday to deny the WikiLeaks founder a delay in US extradition proceedings, Waters proclaimed:
“Orwell and Huxley were always arguing about who had the closest view of what dystopia might look like in the future… I think we got a lot of both.”
As RT summarizes, the world described by George Orwell in ‘1984’ was one of mass surveillance and paranoia, where anyone could be snatched off the street by the state and made disappear for ‘wrongthink’. In ‘Brave New World’ Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, described a future where mass entertainment and the easy availability of pleasure-giving drugs made dissent virtually impossible.
“We have the ‘Big Brother’ Orwellian dystopian nightmare, it happened two days ago in that magistrate’s court,” he explained to RT.
And, exposing our ‘Brave New World’-isms, Waters points out that:
“You only have to look out in the street and see the people, the walking dead going by… and taking absolutely no notice of the fact that this journalist is being murdered by our government.”
“And we walk by with our earbuds in… clicking away on our iPhones as we walk unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring through our lives, and allow this bullshit to take place in our names, in our courts,” Waters concluded.
Together with veteran journalist John Pilger, the Pink Floyd frontman hosted a rally for Assange in front of the British Home Office in September, that went unreported by every single British newspaper.
You Are Well Inside the Matrix
Berthe Morisot The old track to Auvers 1863
NATO demands an enemy, and their chosen enemy is Russia. This has nothing to do with anything Russia has done or is doing at the moment. We can only hope that people are willing to accept that simple fact. And not passively go along with the flow of badmouthing and smear that decides what our picture of the country is.
Russia ‘invaded’ Crimea? Russia ‘downed’ MH17? Russia sent two hapless and inept blokes to kill the Skripals? Russia launched an unprovoked attack on three Ukrainian vessels in the Sea of Azov? Russia colluded with the Trump campaign against Hillary Clinton? And collaborated with Julian Assange to make that happen?
What all these allegations have in common is that there is no evidence any of them are true. Oh, and that nobody’s really trying to prove them anymore. Because you’ve already accepted them as gospel.
90% or so of Crimeans voted to be part of Russia, after the west had tried their hand at regime change in Kiev, with John McCain and Victoria Nuland opening the gates for various neo-nazi groups to enter government.
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Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism
Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism
While Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively separate notions of a future dystopian society,[1] I believe that the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell’s prescient dystopian fable 1984 as well as Huxley’s Brave New World in light of contemporary neoliberal ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing each other, especially at a time when to quote Antonio Gramsci “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”[2]
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