Sometimes it takes just one thought, one meme to trigger unexpected associations from within the conscious mind. What triggered this diary was Olbermann's magnificent "drop off the cliff of reality of the Sarah Palin porcelain doll" on tonight's Countdown. Shattered into a million small bits at the edge of my awareness, all that remained was a modern day version of the Ruby Slippers: Her stiletto heels. The rest of her was scattered across Ground Zero.
Points were made, salient, pertinent points about something cold, hard and brittle, without life, worse than any Chatty Cathy doll, even more inhuman than Barbie. A Stepford wife? A mere shadow of what Beauty Queens have always been, impossible examples of macabre imaginations pushed into cantilever underwear.
Women are not the only candidates for this treatment. Men too have been pushed into GI Joes, Joe six-pack (referring to a strong, tough set of abs by the way, not the damned beer), men who can fly a plane onto an aircraft carrier and still keep their day job. There's more below the fold.
Maddow's show brought forth a meme from Uncle Pat, of all people, that of Human Bondage. It hit me after the fact, as I sat there trying to digest it all. How had we come here? As usual Kent's pithy comments gave me a subconscious clue. Top Gun? Hardly. As he uttered "Highway to", immediately the thought flashed "Highway to Hell".
Letterman's show brought the Pretenders. Ferguson had Bette White and the Smothers brothers. Seeing Dick and Tommy again, going full bore forty years after the fact made me think -- so when did I realize we decended into national hell. I also had a sharp image of the Big Dick shriveling up into a small wad in an undisclosed location. Those two? Back again. Yes, I thought to myself. Still alive, still alive.
An uncomfortable ten minutes later, wrestling with depths of internal frustration I didn't realize I had, found me riffling through albums, wishing Frank Zappa was still around for counsel. Then, I found it. The album I kept, the one that has all the answers at least for me, about why we are what we are today. That album is Golden Earring: The Continuing Story of Radar Love, 1989 MCA Records. In it's own time it was way too obscure for the masses, yet within the lyrics of each cut more of the story unfolds. Memes are mentioned within, from stiletto heels to the Twilight Zone, and so it was, and so it is.
Radar Love, my own fascination with media, MacLuhan, resonance, Remote Viewing, and experiental unfolding impossible to describe to the uninitiated, perhaps bordering on obsessions, but genius has always been one small slip from insanity. I accepted both long ago. People like me are few, they too know exactly that of which I speak. Ce soir.
I fly on strange wings.
I can only recommend that if you have a copy, a quiet bit of time, and something very stiff to drink like gin, you listen to it front to back. The bullet did hit the bone, the patient has been dying a slow death ever since. Eternally deep coldness settling in the hearts and hands of America. As the infection drains, we are in triage unit, in the comfort of each other only. There is nothing left to do now but hold one another tight, as tight as we possibly can, through the mediums at our disposal, and hope to come out the other side a whole people.
I will be anchoring back even more in the coming days to that music which ties me to myself. Meanwhile I leave you with whatever love song speaks to your heart. My own is vibrating from the very hydrogen bonds in my DNA, oscillating, being stretched and compressed, altering lengths and probably their oscillation frequencies. The group of the hydrogen bonds form a harp, and it's playing loud and clear for the working figments of my imagination. And for you.