“Most advertising is schlock because most people have bad taste, not because of who pays for it. For that matter, most attempted art is schlock too.” —Harold Henderson, November 1
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Maybe what it takes to diminish this kind of destruction is for groups of people to try to band together to find alternatives to the capitalist greed that is negatively impacting all of our lives. Who likes to have such infinitely valuable things, such as their every human interaction, their thoughts, their art/culture, and natural resources co-opted to make more money for someone that already has enough in the first place (and who probably has little, if no regard for the intrinsic value of these beautiful things)? Perhaps punk has been a failure at that resistance in some respects, as any counterculture that buys into (or is co-opted by) things it hates would be a failure. However, I don’t think that anyone can fault a person or a group of people for trying to find a new way to live without such greed, manipulation, and disrespect in their lives, even if they aren’t able to do so 100 percent. And I don’t think that anyone can fault Anne Elizabeth Moore’s disgust with the subversion of an anticapitalist movement by greedy capitalists. Can’t wait to read that book.
Ryne Ziemba
I particularly liked the point S. Haake made with regard to people of mixed race. In a scenario in which people would either pay or not pay, depending on their race, how should one treat people such as Barack Obama, who (judging by his family ties to Dick Cheney) is as white as he is black? If reparations are ever enacted as national policy, do racially mixed people get prorated benefits and/or tax breaks based on how subjectively dark their skin is? If that’s the case, how exactly does one measure such things? To say that implementation would be difficult and contentious is the understatement of the century.
I was always troubled by the imagery and symbolism of Blade Runner [November 1]. Isn’t it essentially Wagnerian and quasi-fascist? Replicants are presented as Aryan supermen. The Nibelungen, in this case, are not Jews but smallish Asians crouched over their work. Isn’t Tyrell supposed to be like Wotan? And, the Hauer character is like Siegfried with a touch of Christian imagery thrown into the mix. I suppose his being a slave throws in some leftism-a-la-Spartacus into the mix, but the aesthetics seem to be lifted largely from the Teutonism of Lang—who was ironically Jewish and admired by Nazis—and the monumentalism of Riefenstahl.
