speak out L.O.U.D!

I like Lou Dobbs; not his opinions so much as his style. The guy yells at the government all the time, he's terribly opinionated (in the name of discussion, I hope) and he wants a straight answer on the issues, like why are Americans dying in Iraq, supporting government troops who are fighting militias that are funded by Iran...does this sound like Vietnam to anyone else? I channel surf a lot, so I only caught a snippet of dialogue from the show but what stuck in my mind was this: Lou or someone else was bitching about the trade surplus with China, among other countries...I think a congressman was talking about how unfair it was that the Chinese wouldn't spend their money on our economy.

Look, you are absolutely right on that and I have no idea what I'm talking about here, I'm just free associating for the fun of it. To get developing economies to spend money on North America, they need to have some kind of cultural motivation, and we don't necessarily have to be equals with the rest of the world, but we can at least attempt to extend the cultural franchise, which is to say, we can take the rest of the world seriously, and the gravity of the decay in our own systems. The basic extension of the franchise would entail the sucessful exportation of capitalism married to liberal democracy. The Chinese government is capitalist, but not democratic; a lot of Chinese don't know the political realities in the country like those in the West, and vice versa I'm sure. If and when this happens is open to question and is perhaps a little besides the point here.

What I would suggest is this; social governance has to evolve. To me, that is input and discussion from all sectors of the society. Practically speaking, this means ending the war on drugs and the war on terror and allowing labor to be like capital and move freely across borders. Most of the problems in the world have some kind of global origin and a local solution, or vice versa, or some combination of the two. This is an incredibly complicated line of inquiry and I'm really only mulling it over because it's most of what I'm trying to write about; I'm trying to arrive at some kind of reasonably servicable distortion of the current time in the interests of entertainment and satire.

I'm going to suggest that it's a question of attitude. North America was built on risk and by theives in the form of robber barons. They ended up as philanthropists but not before social democracy also took root. We have gone over the edge of moral hazard in terms of the penalties associated with risk; it became too risky to be risky and in turn, people took even larger gambles with things that should never be on the table, like liberty. So, I think that if we are going to get ourselves out of the mess, we have to innovate our culture. We are saturated with consumer goods but the market for cultural goods is just beginning to be explored; most consumer goods come with some kind of lifestyle tag anyway, but we are just beginning to tap the potential of people and their hunger for, well, cultural goods like entertainment and catharsis. If foreign consumers aren't spending money on us, it's because we aren't marketing ourselves properly.

I have no idea how to do this; it's not the simple force feeding of rock and roll and democracy of the past; democracy has to re-prove itself by cleaning itself up and stop waging unjust wars and the last time I checked, rock and roll was more or less defunct. The good thing about file-sharing is that it will likely force musicians to find alternate routes to make a living other than selling massive amounts of albums. Further to this is the line between appropriation and genuine interchange (witness Gwen Stefani and her Harajuku girls who were far cuter than the real thing) and all the issues of racism. I don't really see how any of this can happen without expanding one's frame of reference. There is always connections to be had and money to be made, and I think cross-cultural interchange is the way of the future. That is why I'm writing the novel I'm writing to explore what would happen if the cultures of the world were foricbly combined by a gradual series of environemntal and political changes...

I think that anyone in the culture can occupy the necessary space to effect some of these changes. Drugs are defacto legal, there is probably an immigrant amnesty coming in the US and hopefully somewhere in the mess of the middle East, a moderate Arab opinion could be cultivated...it's the culture that's going to save us, and if I was a celebrity I would endeavour to take as many risks as possible...someone like Lindsay Lohan who really doesn't have anything to lose, or maybe just an unknown actor or actress...rock the fucking boat, take a risk, turn some heads because, for what it's worth, there could be a cultural gold-rush in the making. Or maybe not, but isn't everyone just a trifle bit, bored?