Full Moon Edition September 2025
Perspective. It’s a hard thing to sustain. So many things come at us so quickly and persistently these days that we tend to lose sight of the way things once were and what has changed. Do we remember the dawn of this century and this millennium? It came to us despite the panic over Y2K and the belief that this world of digital magic we were newly adapting was certain to come undone when 99 became 00? ‘Twas not the case. We rolled on in to the year 2000 without a hitch. The ethers were sustained.
What did undo our world came 24 years ago this month when a clique of upper-crust Saudis brought down the World Trade Center, took a slice out of the Pentagon, and killed thousands of American citizens in the most horrific fashion. In the first of our many seemingly illogical responses, we attacked Iraq. Whatever else we can say about the mad perpetrators of 9/11, they did achieve their goal. They brought about permanent and disquieting change in what Americans accept from their government in the name of keeping them safe: many steps toward authoritarianism.
Nothing gives greater license to government than a pervasive sense of fear among the governed. Hence the Department of Homeland Security, nominally our protector but essentially an agent of diminishing liberty and eroding freedom in the name of getting the bad guys. Safety is given a theatrical production with a ever changing cast of terrorists heroically if barely kept at bay. Speak up and you may be designated one. The price of admission to the play is doing what we’re told, increasingly bizarre and distinctly infringing on our liberties as those dictates become. That light at the end of the tunnel of fear we’re looking to assuage may be the train coming at us.
One grouchy thing follows another. What about those tech titans who’ve been so fervently flogging their whiz-bang technologies and unimaginably dazzling apps for longer than this century to date? Perspective reminds us of all the marvels they’ve promised were just around the corner – lives of leisure, cures for cancer, freedom from mortality, enlightenment of every sort at the flip of a switch – and yet, here we are … waiting, while a barrage of advertising and propaganda batters our senses.
The science writer Philip Ball, a Brit who’s kept a close eye on Silicon Valley for lo these many years, walks us through the syndrome of oneiric technologies and the similarities of the Once (nanotechnology) and Future (artificial intelligence) Kings of techno fantasy (HERE). Their dreamsicles lift off from science and rapidly rise into Promethean flights of show business. What they have convincingly demonstrated over time is that they believe their own con and act on it.
What they sell us though beyond the chimera is rampant capitalism of a sort that scales from simple retail transactions into something very much like owning our soul. The day we bought a computer, took on an email address, lit up a cell phone began a near complete surrender of our privacy and any chance to be other than another mark in the reservoir of targeted consumerism. They read our eye movements, eavesdrop on our conversations, sell every bit of information they collect to whomever is willing to pay for it. The use of all that technology became nothing more than a commercial.
Being somewhat spiritually inclined, we try to rise above the morass of life and focus on the bright side of this complex and fascinating world. “Don’t bum me out, man!” Right? But complaining has a worthwhile place in our deliberations (HERE). We’ve (d)evolved a world of relentlessly positive reinforcement where criticism is an artifact of former times when people were inclined to say what they thought and sometimes it was not praise. It was even believed to potentially have value. Now we say only very nice things so everybody is encouraged to feel good about themselves.
When everything has equal value nothing has any value. The term is meaningless. If an ounce is the same as a pound, what is being measured? That often comes to mind in our little theater town where every single performance receives a raucous standing ovation (HERE). What difference would it make if the audience instead just quietly filed out and went home? There’s nothing to differentiate the quality of one show from another in the way the audience responds, so why bother to respond at all? Maybe it’s merely the aerobics of applauding that appeals after sitting for so long.
Praising effort is one thing; praising the result of the effort quite another. In a time when charlatans posing as political leadership and ethical business people ply their propaganda and peddle artificial proofs, critical thinking and discernment should be more important than ever. Henry Miller said you can’t hope to be an artist until your ego has been crushed like a grape. Who’s squeezing these days? The arts have been a place where alchemy is attempted and sometimes the truly exceptional is extracted from the common. At its best, it opens our eyes and gives us a clearer perception of our world. That’s worth big applause. But first we have to recognize the difference.