My Left Winger robertdfeinman recently posted a fine article titled Pulchritude in which he commented upon the changing visions of male and female beauty in America over the past 50 years or so.
He wrote:
At some point in the movie some of the wimpy looking men get turned into hunks. The men used were all obviously body builders, with the classic Charles Atlas look. As a contrast, last week Victoria’s Secret had a televised “fashion” show. In this case the “look” was thin, anorexic appearing women with over emphasized busts.
We see the same change in other areas. Most of the soap opera TV shows (including the new series on prime-time) feature only one type of person. The semi-androgynous pretty boy or girl.
—snip—
Are we breeding new subtypes of people like dog breeds? Are people afraid to look like themselves? What does it say to a society when 99% of the people are made to feel that they are subpar in some respect?
I started a reply that grew WAY beyond the proper boundaries for such an effort, and so now I present it as a stand alone post.
Read on.
What do you expect from a society that feels the need to broadly advertise drugs so that its men can be reasonably sure of achieving erections?
Hell, folks, in most parts of the world over the history of humankind that has been the LEAST of our problems. Too damned MANY hardons, if you get right down to it. Testosterone poisoning on a HUGE scale.
But America is guilty; its guilt has made it weak, and it is presently…to put it country simple…fucked.
Fucked.
On a GRAND scale.
End of story.
More precisely, white, Northern European-descended America is fucked, as is any part of any minority culture that aspires to cultural integration within said white America.
Listen…a reasonable yardstick for the mental, physical and emotional health of a society is how well its members do in high level sports activities. Sports at their highest expression require the same effective combination of mind, body and soul as any other real human activity, only they are easier to score.
Well, white America’s score is headed down, down down, as are the scores of the minorities who live within that system and wish to become part of it. Who are being dragged right down along with it.
If you had listened closely to sports news and criticism over the last 60 years or so…and that’s all sportswriters really are, sports critics on the same levels (High AND low) as drama, book, art and film critics…you would have heard furtive whispers and hints about African superiority because so many black athletes had such great success in pro sports in America during that time. (Only whispers of course, because the BIG money lies in not acknowledging such an idea.)
From Jack Johnson on, really.
From the beginning of the 20th century.
Well I am here to point out that this is sheer bullshit.
This is NOT a racially-based phenomenon short of the undeniable facts that:
1-Those Africans who were shanghied to the New World were generally hand-picked for physical strength.
and
2-Those who survived the depredations of America for more than a couple of generations damned well surely had some undeniably great strength of both character AND mind.
But the real fact is that power breeds corruption, and ultimate power breeds ultimate corruption.
Look at American sports today.
Baseball is a Latin game. Bet on it. With a growing Asian population as well. And when I say a “Latin” game I mean mostly players who were born outside of the borders of the U.S.
What is the racial heritage of a surprising number of up-and coming dominant players in basketball and boxing?
People from ex-Communist Europe.
With South America and the rest of Europe coming on strong.
With U.K.-based boxers doing damned well too.
How “African” are the several truly international sports? Soccer, track, tennis and bicycling?
And how American are they?
Answer to both?
Not particularly.
The fact is, this country AND its culture…countries and cultures being essentially inseparable, really…are both headed down, down, down.
On the evidence of its sports successes and failures. (If one actually needed any more evidence than a cursory look at the headlines.)
And there is not a damned thing that we can do about it except to try to separate ourselves and our loved ones from the mainstream culture as much as we practically, survivably can do so and continue to fight for some kind of honorable lives, either by staying here and fighting or by going elsewhere.
To the ideas of NEWSTRIKE!!! and MEDIASTRIKE!!! I would like to add one more.
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
Black, brown or beige.
Get the fuck OUT of Viagra America, any which way you can.
Do not take its drugs.
Do not eat its food.
Do not consume its propaganda.
Do not partake of its usurious financial system any more than you must to survive.
Drop the fuck OUT!!!
As far and as fast as you can.
Listen…that recent set of headlines that you may have seen about how John McCain wants to fuck up the internet?
Co-sponsor of that little effort?
Charles Schumer.
Bet on it.
Please…READ THE ARTICLES!!! (A BooTrib one here and the Schumer connection here.)
Corruption on this level is the ONLY “bi-partisan” activity in America today.
It has been said by some wise people that there are three forces at work in the universe. The Constructive Force, the Destructive Force, and the strongest force of all…everything else. The NEUTRAL Force. On any level you care to examine, this holds true.
A competition between two humans? Between two cultures? The destruction of the dinosaurs? A star going nova?
The rest of the universe is basically uninvolved.
Neutral.
When constructive action is limited or essentially impossible and one refuses to engage in destructive action, it is often best to emulate that third force and simply step away from the conflict as far and as fast as you are able.
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
Sorry…fresh out of other ideas.
Tune in, tune out and fucking LEAVE!!!
I’ll see ya there.
Where?
Wherever.
See ya somewhere, though.
Bet on it.
AG
AG
ick that poor woman is starved-looking! You lost me with your sports analogy: wouldn’t a better judge of societal health be how it treats its children, elders, etc.? Or how many people own homes (it’s high in some poor countries)? But sports?
I do agree dear heart that we are fucked though-that’s purty obvious. And anyone who thinks the onslaught of media bullshit isn’t worming into their brains no matter how smart and hip they are is delusional. I join with you in asking people to do a mass media fast for a couple months-they may realize they’re OK after all.
That picture looks like a person near death… Just a skeleton in cloth. I remember BostonJoe giving up his favourite NY Times for an entire month… He actually wrote some pretty interesting diaries in that time. And he was no less informed given the fact that the information is all out there in diaries nowadays.
A better anaogy?
No better, no worse.
Just harder to score.
As above, so below.
Everywhere and always.
Bet on it.
AG
that has always like to throw away our seniors that is changing too isn’t it? Think about it.As a woman, If you look a day over 50 these days forget about being noticed UNLESS you can afford all the poison they want you to put in your body like botox or can afford that face lift or laser treatments, new boobs, body sculpting by sucking the fat out of your belly and thighs. Woman as young as 16 are getting boobs. Plastic perfection is what they are pushing along with all those little white antidepressants to make you numb and pliable. What a bunch of crap. Don’t buy it!!
Every age and society has its own peculiar sense of fashion and beauty. Ours is bizarre but no more so than the Victorian’s fascination with the bustle and tiny waist for women. And yet America managed to survive through it.
You lost me on the sports thing. Most teams are a mixture of race and ethnicities these days, as it probably should be. My problem with sports is that an individual is paid $8 million to throw a ball while a teacher, largely responsible for the molding of young minds, recieves a pittance. Priorities.
Does your idea of a culture strike include boycotting music?
Bad music?
Which comprises about 99% (No hyperbole there whatsoever.) of what is available on the mass media?
You BETCHA it does.
AG
Sorry AG, but you’re wrong on this one. Music is in the ear of the beholder. Your personal tastes, or critiques as a professional musician do not a good song make or break. Music, or bad music as you put it, isn’t so much a threat to a society as bad politics or the media who push bad politics. Let the world sing their own songs.
Arthur can certainly hold his own on this topic, and undoubtedly soon will… While we’re waiting, I have to say I think you’re the one who’s dead wrong here, super.
There is music that stimulates and music that stupefies.
There is music contains originality and music that is nothing but thoughtless repetition of simple cliches.
There is music that calls for (and rewards) full, active engagement and attention on the part of the listener, challenging and enabling the listener to become more discerning, and music that does none of these things and does not even aspire to.
There is music that has depth and complexity and subtlety and richness of texture, and music that has none of these virtues.
Just as with literature, movies, television shows…
Finally, of course, there is music that is part of a total package whose purpose is to keep us voracious and uncritical consumers of this week’s “hot” pablum … and in other respects, basically, amoebas. A large subset of which is the music whose function is to make countless girls and women not only yearn to look something like the cadaverous wretch in the picture above, but to make this their highest aspiration.
I call this a threat to society.
Gotta run, but I’ll get back to you :o)
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Cheers!
Good morning,
I agree with everything you’ve said above except for the threat to society part. Rock and roll was once considered a threat to someone else’s society too. We know how that turned out. It’s one thing to expose so much of what passes for music these days as empty repetitive noise, and it is, but it’s music to someone else. I don’t want my daughters to aspire to be a walking skeleton anymore than I want my daughters to aspire to being some gangsta’s ho. But I’m not gonna denigrate or boycott rap music or techno dance pop or emo, grunge, jazz, because I have a low opinion of it or think it’s message is dangerous. That’s all I’m saying. Music, good and bad, comes and goes. If it’s truly good it will last. If not, it eventually fades away. Just like disco :o)
I am not talking about “rock ‘n roll”.
i am talking about lame rock ‘n roll.
Neither is no3reed, if I am reading right.
You mistake the cup for the water here. Or you think that is what we are doing, at the very least.
And that part about “Music, good and bad, comes and goes. If it’s truly good it will last. If not, it eventually fades away.”
That used to be true.
Until the advent of a truly hypnotic media system.
Now…the music is preserved. Like food. Forever. Unchanged. And GOOD music does not suffer that sort of preservation very well, either. No good art does, Shakespeare to Mozart to Ellington to Howlin’ Wolf to Cream to Randy Newman. It has to be kept alive. Performed. Aired out. Developed. So just like the lousy hothouse tomatoes, the bred-for-shelf-life bananas and steroided-out meats in your local stupormarket, similarly produced music…similarly produced art of all kinds…is POISONOUS TO YOUR SYSTEM.
You can get by on it, but eventually you are going to weaken and die.
Spiritual cancer.
Sexual lassitude.
The works.
And then the Viagra pushers gotcha.
The Prozac people.
Which is where we are at right now.
Today.
Right here, with our artificially produced and preserved Preznit.
Bet on it.
Preznit In A Can.
Freeze dried politics.
Bud Light/Miller Lite political parties.
The works.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Americans will spend nearly 10 hours a day watching television, surfing the Internet, reading books, newspapers and magazines and listening to music this year, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Friday.
My own personal census finds that 99% of what is available to them is pure shit.
Twirl that dial and see.
Take your OWN media census.
They also EAT shit.
Fat in mind, body and soul.
The very picture of a failing society.
I am a musician, so I can best be “expert” about the musical aspects of this mass poisoning
Were I a psychologist, nutritionist, cultural anthropologist/historian, or any OTHER real, not-the-99%-bullshit perfesser of ANY studies from cowflop to metaphysics, I am sure I could make the same point.
As above, so below.
Like no3reed’s Mickey Rivers sig suggests…
What we need is a whole new everythin’.
Yup.
Soup to nuts.
Politics to music.
A whole new everythin’.
Bet on it.
Before it’s too fucking late.
Later…
AG
Arthur is reading me right. I didn’t disparage any genre of music. I attempted to articulate some of the things that make some music better than other music, and suggest why those things make music that possesses them better than music that doesn’t.
So, let’s get rid of the genre stuff, okay? Really, that’s pretty cheap, and beneath you, super. (As is the point about rock and roll’s having been believed to be a threat. I was sad to see this from you, because it’s so facile and your writing has led me to expect better of you. But this part of your response is similar to the familiar conservative tactic of discrediting warnings about global warming by pointing to the warnings of an impending ice age that some issued in the seventies.)
Let me try to cut this short and ask you this: are you willing to “denigrate or boycott” McDonald’s “because [you] have a low opinion of it or think it’s [sic] message is dangerous”?
If so, why do you think music is different from food?
There’s a Mos Def rap from a few years back that I still like: “Kenny G ain’t got no soul/John Coltrane is rock and roll”.
Speaking as a non-musician with absolutely no musical training, it all comes down to something my dad used to call lasting value – do I find myself wanting to listen to it more than once; even better, do find myself digging out that old recording years and years later and still just can’t stop grooving on it?
My thing with a lot of what’s being generated in the recording studio is that it just leaves me flat – once is more than enough just because the tunes are numbing or seem like pale immitations of something done 30 or 40 years ago. Disposable entertainment for a disposable society. Not especially surprising.
Ok. My youngest daughter beckons. 🙂
Peace.
I disagee, super.
Bad pitch, bad time, ignorant harmony, fake (faked…technologically altered) singing…all detune the listener.
Literally.
And we are now a TERRIBLY out of tune sciety.
As far back as Greece…probably further back…the idea that a change of music can affect a culture negatively OR positively was understood by real thinkers.
I am not talking idioms, here.
I am talking MUSIC.
And by some divine concidence, when the pop music of this country was at its musical peak…the jazz/swing/Broadway era, when genuises like Gershwin and Elliongton were creating American “pop” music and real singers like Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were singing it…this country peaked.
Hmmmm….
Now? In the post Milli-Vanilli era?
Lookit where we are.
Hmmmm….
AG
No fair using Milli Vanilli dude! ;o)
Why not?
Thery were pioneers.
Prophets.
No Milli, no Vanilli.
No Beyoncé, no Madonna, no Britney, no Snoop Dog.
ALL fakers.
No MTV pop culture whatsoever.
They were John the Frappe-tist, crying in the wilderness of no talent.
“Let us IN!!! We are the future!!!”
And like all prophets, they paid the ultimate price.
Hanged by the neck until rich.
What shit this all is!!!
Later…
AG
It is true that some people cannot tell good from bad. That is unfortunate, but that is their problem, and one should not take it on oneself.
It is also true that music depends a great deal upon its context.
Allowing for that, the difference between good music and bad is as absolute as the difference between truth and lies.
Like them or hate them, baseball and other professional sports provide an actual way out of poverty for minorities both here and abroad. Are they totally ethical? No. Are sports corrupt? Yes. But why, pray tell, would a pitcher from La Dominica want to give up a multimillion dollar salary to simply return to poverty?
I’m sure this isn’t what you meant, but the way I read your argument about sports, it sounds like “Don’t come to play professional sports in this country” which is like saying “don’t go on a boat if you want to catch fish.”
That was not my point at ALL.
My point in using sports in the first place was to make the point that the entire mainstream (read white, Northern European- influenced) system has gone down the tubes.
Just like the lifeless mannequins who serve as its so-called “sex objects” (Male AND female), it is not producing people who are functioning well enough on all cylinders to be able to compete in sports either.
It seems clear enough to me when I re-read it…
“But America is guilty; its guilt has made it weak,…”
“…white, Northern European-descended America is fucked, as is any part of any minority culture that aspires to cultural integration within said white America.”
“:…a reasonable yardstick for the mental, physical and emotional health of a society is how well its members do in high level sports activities. Sports at their highest expression require the same effective combination of mind, body and soul as any other real human activity, only they are easier to score. Well, white America’s score is headed down, down down, as are the scores of the minorities who live within that system and wish to become part of it. Who are being dragged right down along with it.”
That’s about as clear as I can write.
AG
OK, that makes more sense. Although I disagree, to a point.
I think that the rise of other nations’ citizens in sports is more of a statement about the globalization of a few American sports (basketball & baseball) than it is a comment about white people in general. And still, the vast majority of the NBA is made up of African-Americans, and the NFL is almost exclusively made of people from the US, simply because the sport hasn’t caught on. In other words, I think there are plenty of signs of a “rotten core” of America, but I don’t really think the make-up of sporting teams is one of them. The American obsession with sports, perhaps.
I am in total agreement with much of the rest of your arguments on sexuality/desirability.
Just a brief comment here: having spent most of my time this past decade in rural isolation, with access to mainstream media-culture only via internet, my environment is now urban & absolutely inundated by mainstream media-culture. The difference in basic perception, regarding matters & means of existence I’ve experienced would likely be completely unfamiliar to most folks, unavailable to them as an experience of similar contrast may be.
Quite frankly, it’s like living in an asylum, a madhouse. What I see & experience as my ‘new normal’ is truly & completely insane beyond measure. I see nothing, with regard to this complete societal immersion, that could possibly contribute to individual health, well being, or development, in any aspect. This is the rape of integral personhood on a truly massive scale; what health (of any sort) individuals can forge in this societal environment is a testament to human resilience, heart & spirit — small victories against the ongoing domination of human beings by insensate, immoral & faceless entities with profit their blood & blood their profit.
Honestly, folks, what we have here really sucks — & this is the best our nation can offer the world community.
As outre’ as concerns of single-source societal control may seem (given our current entertainment ‘options’), the best thing we can do for ourselves with regard to our sanity is the rejection of broadcast television.
A more effective, ‘friendlier’ means of the control of individual sensibility & behavior has yet to be devised, folks; additionally, for many of us (if not most), it provides the only experience beyond that offered by our immediate daily environment & therefore, stimulating & satisfying the natural, human impulse to expand, engage, comprehend, participate & imagine on a communal scale. It provides our dreaming, our language, our sense of place, all of which shape our very nature.
The market controls this, folks. Nothing but the market.
The main product, as I’ve said before, is you.
Is this what you want?
You do not have to have lives in the wilderness to be able to see this, ww.
The Bronx will do very nicely.
AG
No doubt! It’s just a matter of detachment.
Detachment.
Yup.
Easy to say, hard to do.
Easier if one detaches onself from the media, though.
AG