the image age

I have spent the better part of the past several months doing exactly what I said that I was going to do: I listened. I listened and sought out across the entire spectrum of the internet all of the opinions, idea, concepts, complaints, conundrums, mysteries, allusions, problems, quandaries, oddities, eccentricities, coincidences...you get the point. I watched as much of the web as I could and just observed. The patterns. The what is here and what is there and who is saying what and how loud and how long and where and to whom and who published this and that...again, you get the point.
The problem is that there is so much to read. There is so much to absorb and if you do how to catalog it and organize it and find a starting point, a place where we can at least identify the key log.
Individual human endeavor continues relatively unabated in this strange new age we are in. The Image Age. What matters is what we see, how often we see it, what context we see in it and what we appear to be is more important than what we actually are. There are many who revolt against this ingrained belief but they do so without realizing it. It's part of the key log: we are in a jam and no one even knows that the river is blocked--the logs continue to build, not having reached the mill no one realizes it. As far as the eye can see all anyone can see is essentially clear horizons; even though we acknowledge the few storm clouds, we see them, we, as a society, accept them. Part of life. Pat Buchanan writing today the essential realist/paleocon argument against intervention in the Middle East in the name of the war on terror: the fear that an uninformed electorate there will quickly place Islamist parties in power and expand the jihad, rather than diminish it. This is a legitimate argument and ought to be considered but it ignores the reality that we are there. When the Romans wrote England off, how long was it before Hadrian's wall was completely abandoned (despite an abortive attempt to actually build a wall further north)? I ask the question that has continued to haunt me: do Americans want to remain a Great Power? Or are we satisfied to just be another state among states, neither superior or better, that the freedom we enjoin to every adult man and woman, the privileges we bestow upon our children, the security of old age, that these things are not good things and that we should not be proud of them?
It seems nonsensical to have to suggest that we should not be afraid of what we have achieved in America. But we are. And we are ashamed of it, we are ashamed that we have it so much better than the rest of the world, we are ashamed the way that it seems to me many wealthy people are ashamed of their wealth, despite maintaining a lifestyle that seems at odds with every moral sentiment they express--again, the Image Age, where the pronouncements you make are far more valuable than what you actually do. And nothing is more important in the Image Age than maintaining the illusion of perpetual youth. Have you seen Dick Clark or Bob Barker--they both appear as if they haven't aged a day in the past thirty years. It's terrifying, to think that perhaps Futurama had it right when civilization would face the perpetually animated head of all the major celebrities of the 20th and 21st century. But this desire for perpetual physical youth is only a symptom of the larger desire for the permanence of the status quo. No change. The United Nations is the most corrupt institution ever created, where two thirds of the declaration approved by the General Assembly concern Israel and its' aggression against the Palestinians or other peoples of the Middle East, UN peacekeepers engage in all manner of unspeakable actions, the Oil for food scandal has been buried by the MSM but all told it encompassed more than ten years and billions upon billions of bribes and illicit trade--all this, but no, the UN must stay. Or perhaps NATO, a defense organization that is essentially incapable of independent action because the council structure gives each nation a vote and all nations must agree. Thus, in Afghanistan the bulk of the actual fighting force is really only America, the British, the Canadians, the Aussies, and the Dutch. The other 20 some odd members won't allow their troops to be placed in situations that might actually require them to fire their weapons. But should NATO be dissolved and a new organization built around action, not deterrence, nope. The list goes on and on: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, a hole host of corrupt NGO's, the illusion of the nation-state in the Islamist world--we want the way we remembered the world to stay exactly the way that it is, and we are unwilling to face facts: images change.
But the Image Age won't end when everyone stops buying anti-wrinkle creams and hair transplants and soon total organectomy (a future surgery whereby all your internal organs are replaced with new ones, you're vascular and lymphatic systems are thoroughly cleaned and your brain is upgraded with both the latest software and hardware and you are then placed in hibernation for six months to allow your body to heal and you wake up 22 again). The Image Age will come to an end when the American people accept the mantle that history has thrust upon them, time and time again, whether it be to liberate ourselves from British tyranny, to the forging of a nation through Manifest Destiny, abolitionism, suffrage for all adult citizens, regardless of gender or ethnicity...we may not have achieved it all at once, we may have taken longer than necessary, but we're here right now and I like what we've done. I hate what we're doing to it. I hate that everything has become political. I hate that unfortunately for America, historically it has taken a great big wallop for the country to unify and act. And that's where the key log comes in.
I, as many people have, mistook the acquisition of information as the equivalent of the creation of information. Absorption is only part of it--the part that I didn't get was interaction. I still have a hard time with it, going to someone else's blog and posting a comment, emailing my favorite bloggers or writers in general and asking them to take a look...I haven't posted here for months, what would they see when they got here? Thoughtful commentary? Or the same old tired hawkish position on the war on terror...aren't we all so tired of it. Six years now. Can't it just end?
All I can hear are children screaming in the car, "Are we there yet?" They probably don't do that anymore, now that they're hypnotized with DVD players and ritalin. Part of the key log is finding a way to show the Left that they have the most to lose by unconsciously allying (and perhaps some consciously allying with the Islamists. But to the Left this is anathema--the enemy is clearly George Bush and the Republicans--perhaps someone was right over at the Corner that the only way to get the Left onboard is to make sure that they win it all in 2008 and they can see the seriousness of what we face--although that may be as bad as electing Jimmy Carter to office again--if Hillary could be as vicious to the jihadis as she is to her political enemies then this war would be over before you could say, the First, snicker, Gentleman. I doubt that she can though, and that's part of the problem of the Image Age, too. There's no sense of proportion, no sorting, no marginalism, no trade offs.
If I had an olive branch to offer one third of the country I would gladly do so, if only to find a way out of this mess together so that we can argue about all those bicycle paths you all want to build later and whether or not we should build hundreds of bird killing wind power stations and so on and so forth. But just put it aside for a moment, a brief flicker in not just the span of human affairs, but in our own lives. Come together on the one issue that matters the most, our survival. And do it so that we can have those arguments, so that we can enjoy the rush of the political atmosphere, the electricity on election night, so we can continue to practice this great experiment in representative democracy that we ought to proudly call our Republic. Put down the Image Age, and join me in the Age of....