Election season fun (and semiotics!)!

            I’m excited that the election will be this year.  A feeling like the future hangs in the balance.  Who will get to steer the American ship?  Which guy will be more badass in an apocalyptic scenario?  Yeah, that last thought, that is really how I think of things.  God, in a prior post about Romney I referenced Martin Sheen’s The Dead Zone president.  Just picture Romney’s frozen rictus/smile as he explains why we are in WWIII. 

            But what of the figure of the President?  A President does hold a position of power.  But the first thing that comes to mind is how people ascribe too much power to the position.  When people get mad at the President it is like they are getting mad at god (God).  Have you heard someone do this?  Mad at god. Mad at a being invested with unimaginable power.  Similar to those that are mad at the world.  Impersonal forces run their lives.  Arggh!  What are you going to do?

I’m going to have to resort to semiotics here. Why talk about this position?  How do we talk about it?  When thinking of things on the big stage, the President seems to be someone who gets results, whose policies can change the world.  It is definitely an important position.  But, as a professor of mine once said, let’s unpack this idea.  What’s behind it?  Who do we refer to when we speak of the President?

First of all, when faced with a problem, it is nice to know what problem one is facing.  Know thy enemy.  Even better if the problem can be given a single word.  The more meaning you can cram into a word the better.  When people resort to vocabulary they want ultimate descriptors.  The connotation of the denotation “The American President” has diffuse meanings.  It is as though you went to Subway and told them one name that they understood to mean your sandwich and all the specific veggies and sauces you want on it.  One quick word and they know what you mean.  A sandwich in a sound-bite.  One word loaded with meaning.  It becomes code – aren’t codes rather handy?

And it is a known word.  The President is the boss of the country, the position of which we all learn about in school.  Better yet we learn about the word by hearing parents and friends say it, in good and bad ways.  In the sense that it has currency it is easy to say it.  It is a capitalized word.  It is well known – a verbal arrow that you know will fly true and hit the recognition part of any listener’s brain

And this gets back to its code.  When someone says “The President” they are invoking a person that has agency and that represents a certain way of using this agency.  People are serious about what the President means.  He can be their ally or foe.  If only the president thought as they did then things would be better.  If he would do this or do that, invade there or withdraw from there.  When someone is happy with the president’s policies he becomes one’s friend.  When he draws one’s ire he becomes an impossibly wrongheaded agent of doom.

My interest lies in the gap between what the President represents – in people’s heads – and what he actually is.  It must be difficult to sort this out since common epistemological ground is hard to find.  Nevertheless, I think there are some limitations that the President’s agency faces.  Also I think people go overboard in finding words to overload with meaning.  There are more forces at play that affect one’s life than just the President’s policies.  This makes the hoopla surrounding the upcoming election perplexing, too.  It is easy to get caught up in it and it is fun.  However, there are more forces at play that should be part of anyone’s understanding of the world.

The Obama Conspiracy

            For the sake of entertaining my paranoia – do people have some information about Obama, a source of blackmail that allows him to be manipulated?  Or does he feel the need to maintain power, no matter the cost? 

            Let me start by saying these possibilities are actually metaphors.  Why has Obama not been totally awesome?  Why not brush aside the economic woes with some amazing policy?  So I retreat to metaphor: what could cause him to so blatantly ignore the wishes of those that elected him?

            The latter idea first.  He is willing to burn bridges, destroy trust, just so he may stay in power.  Bernanke and Summers and the attack on medicinal plants maintaining continuity between Obama’s and Bush’s terms.  And of course our country went down a path unforeseen at the time of his election.  And Republicans play hardball.  Still, just the fact the big Larry Summers is still an operator in government.  Does Obama know he has to appease certain groups to continue to get their support?  The banks support him.

            So there is the realpolitik version.  What of, and remember this is allegorical, what of the possibility that someone or some group has something on him?  That they’ve recently told him his birth certificate could have vanished if they had been displeased anymore?  Or some photos of some indiscretion are only an email away from a tabloid’s front page?  Well, just entertaining this, this tangent, the President doesn’t seem like he has anything to hide.  Which is what makes the grasping for power theory seem untenable as well.  And wouldn’t any decisive dirt have already been dug up and presented before he was elected? 

            In the real world, not the world of metaphor, now: I think a set of circumstances conspired against Obama if anything.  Since Summers et al. had experience (getting us into this mess) perhaps it makes sense they may know how help us (out of the mess they helped create).  Who knows?  Who knows how much worse things could be?  Just to wrap my head around some things I must resort to metaphor.

The Qnexa qcontradiction of personal freedom

I’m against the regulation of certain drugs, especially diet pills.  It’s not that I’m against regulation though.  It is because I question why the government accepts the premise.  Diet?  Yeah, for sure.  Doesn’t this contradict having a food pyramid?  Why does the First Lady condone exercise for kids?  Why not just say never mind and have a diet drug solve the problem later in people’s lives?

            Okay, the government should regulate things effect health – this is their reason the FDA exists.  Make sure ibuprofen and Tylenol pills have the right dosage – some runs or bike rides mandate this.  But what gets approved can go by a case-by-case basis.  Does regulating something like diet pills condone them?  It is a free country, right?  In this sense the government should allow any drug to be sold regardless if it has been tested or not.  This is a bad idea, I guess.  There is personal responsibility but then there is having enough information to ask responsible questions.  Really, true personal responsibility should contain this within itself – one should be responsible enough to ask questions that are important in one’s life.

            This can go the other way, too.  Should one associate with dubious entities?  Deal with companies that operate with dubious moral standing?  It comes down to people’s own definitions of things.  People’s own understanding of what is bad and what is okay.  But when private drug companies ask the government to say whether or not one of their products is fit for consumption, who decides what the government’s moral stance is?

            Can you lose weight with diet drugs?  Yes.  But you can lose weight by eating healthy and getting the right amount of exercise also.  Not just also, but – and this is my personal view – good diet and exercise should be the only way someone loses weight.  All drug companies are doing is trying to get a share of the billion-dollar-a-year diet industry, an industry that is driven by fads and shams.  I guess you can get some low-level speed in some of the products sold within this cultural tradition.  Might be some better quality speed in Qnexa, if that is the culprit of the drug’s increased risks of "cardiovascular events” (http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-qnexa-20120221,0,6936550.story). 

            Would this be the government telling us what to do?  They are giving the drug another chance, letting the manufacturer clear up some issues.  The government is not against the idea of diet drugs.  What would the perception be of government opposition to this idea?  Should the White House Press Secretary come out and say that diets are fakes?  Um, here – for better or worse – is a food pyramid.  Cut down on the television.  Such a statement would go against the culture, the zeitgeist.  Unanalyzed, unsaid.  Something to question.

Ramble about The Authenticity Hoax and Mysticism

After reading the Authenticity Hoax I thought a bit more about globalization.  If your frame of reference is limited geographically, like many people in the past, then if you start trading with another country is that a cause for concern?  No it is about trade, people staying present and working and trading.  Interesting that there is a class that is transnational, a group of people whose business interests take them across borders.  Well I guess when I think of that class I think of people that make enough money from international trade to be able to fly transnational whenever they want, for business or otherwise.

I’m sure, and I’m not being sarcastic here, that well-to-do people still have ties to local areas.  Is that right?  Think of people that do not travel far in their lives, aboriginals in rainforests, etc.  Seems like they cultivate a greater appreciation for everything local.  I think in our world the modern economy is mapped over everything, sort of a veil.  Never mind those that fly overseas for fun.  The people that are geographically trapped in an area, poorer people, still relate to the local world through the medium of the automobile.  And chain stores, suburbs, etc.  Potter’s foil is James Howard Kunstler: I refer and recommend you to his work. 

But Potter argues that people in local situations (authentic situations) want to get to live like we do.  They want out because the dysfunctional ways we live in the west are still much safer and pleasant than their conditions.  And this must be qualified by saying that they have no choice.  Sure, initially people in other countries would prefer to live in their own ways.  And perhaps we should leave them alone.  But the market won’t have it and everyone gets to live connected to everyone else.

So are we (I am) right in criticizing the rich?  I agree with Potter that how we live becomes difficult to rate on any objective scale.  The idyllic past was more often than not rife with violence.  Crappy jobs.  After reading the Authenticity Hoax I did think differently.  I do approach Kunstler’s work a little differently.  Not to be a relativist but the simpler/local/sustainable way of life espoused by Kunstler is just one of many ways to live a life.

            But just because that’s the way it is doesn’t mean it has to be that way.  There is still the aesthetic critique.  I am annoyed by a culture of overweights driving everywhere they need to go.  Maybe I’m just a jerk but I think that things would be different if . . . There I go prescribing something for everyone.  If I just don’t like it that can be reason enough.  Convincing people using (that bastard!) arguments was Potter’s game.  Got me to think differently.  But still his thought was out of touch with any mystical understanding of the world.  Just belief is the currency of the mystical in this sense so sorry arguments.  I’ll try and build foundations with that.  It would still be cool to be mystical and fly anywhere whenever.

Ethics and psychomyth: US version.

If anyone has read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, have you applied it to the contemporary US?  Here is a plot summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas

Give it an eye.  For whatever (surely complex) reason I am compelled to compare this story to our lives in the United States.  This is the instinct that lends an ear to those who criticize the US and the USs foreign policy.  Well, and domestic policy at that.  At an extreme these voices say the US had 9/11 coming.  I know, that goes a little too far.  But I see the metaphor that they are takings to the limits: some of the stuff the US does, in the name of its citizens occasionally, does harm others.  So can we turn this metaphor into a psychomyth, as Ursula describes her tale?

            Who is the child kept in filth?  In our world who stands in for this metaphorical child?  Well, as critics (whom I’m hiding behind) say, there are numerous actual real children in our world.  But these, as many real things do, become immaterial in a way.  No government official goes around and imprisons children then reports back to us that that is our toll.  Nothing so blatant in our country or outside of it.  To critique the critics, you have to regard it as a matter of perspective, to say that any country has been a victim of our policies.  We supported the Contras in the eighties, assisting in the killing of families that opposed them.  But were we defending our freedom, attacking on the front line of a communist threat?  Or were we just being cruel and unable to respect other’s sovereignty, taking away a poor people’s path to self-support?  What is your perspective?

            Really interesting and related to the previous, perspective-based idea is how the Omelian coming of age announcement is made.  In the tale when one comes of age they are told of the poor child that is the sustenance of their otherwise happy realm.  Most stay, some walk away.  If you don’t think there is an announcement to be made (here in the US) then of course you don’t make the announcement.  No one hears it.  The critics have the task of not only creating the perspective but of also delivering the announcement.  That makes me think of the biblical (?) quote about sowing ideas on a receptive, fertile field.  Speaking of things biblical, that is another source of my disenchantment with the church: the fertile field of compassion and caring for the poor had been cultivated.  That is, the soil was conditioned.  Then ideas of justice were sown.  But growing up certain compassion-stalks were deemed unacceptable, not worth letting grow.  

            Another metaphor, I know.  What does it take to believe that we need to convince ourselves of things?

Google+ snubs and Obama's "Change"

                Although it happened last week, the grounds for a new metaphor are too great to let me pass it up.  President Obama was on Google+ doing a web town hall meeting or some such.  Requests for questions were submitted beforehand.  Issues around marijuana (legalization) were number one on the topic list.  And the Prez did not answer a one.  Fair enough.  One of those topics I know.  But what of metaphor?

            I want to say that it is one of those issues that define our culture.  Other issues may serve this purpose as well but not with such a spark of illegality.  What one’s views on marijuana are may place them, define them.   Do you or don’t you support government involvement, regulation?  Does government need to regulate morality and, if so, in what ways?  So what of the president?

            Marijuana rules are one topic that he may not want to broach because of what is at stake in maintaining the status quo.  Think jobs.  He is trying to create jobs.  Legalize It! and quite a few prison and law enforcement jobs are gone.  While many people may breathe a bit easier during their recreational activities, many will be looking for a job.  The cops and robbers game over, those that supply this plant to America would also be out of work.  More pressure on the job market.

            But never mind that.  Let’s take this metaphor further.  Why do we have a country that makes this plant illegal?  At the level of metaphor the plant becomes symbolic.  It becomes “a thing to be kept illegal”.  We can then say that our country keeps certain things illegal.  By extension that means that the populace allows things to be illegal.  Indeed this is the front put up by politicians and law enforcement.  This is the social contract which means giving some freedom up in order to get more.  Careers in politics are made being tough saviors of society. 

            Change is tough.  Change was an Obama campaign concept but I’m not sure he imagined the bind it could put him.  He may have not imagined the economic downturn either.  Not following up on one’s campaign’s promises is basically required in American politics so whatever on that point.  And whatever the reason may be I think some realpolitik decisions are being made by the president.  Not talking about marijuana in a one-off web chat can say a lot.

            But the last thing that marijuana may stand for is the inability to talk.  Uncommunication.  It needs a neologism.  This in-communication exists, rampant everywhere.  Families and relationships: the things unsaid.  It enables ruts to form and then mire.  At the countrywide level I would say that there are things that we just don’t talk about, the plant in question being one of them.  It is painful to broach some subjects.  If some post-apoc scenario became manifest (overnight, of course) some of these questions would quickly come to the fore (then retreat into the background).  In some such now-only-hallucinated future we would perhaps crave a government hand to hold a defending sword over our heads and in front of our enemies.          

            Questions of what our personal relationships to government are tough to ask.  They are part of the structure of our culture.  Everything is together.  To pull on one string may compromise the whole.  Metaphorically speaking.