HEROES ARE HARDER TO FIND THAN YOU THOUGHT

 In my last blog entry, I briefly mentioned how, in some ways, I'm a little like Lebowski, the character in the cult favorite, "The Big Lebowski".  Lebowski's the aging hippie in Los Angeles--or Lost Angeles, or even La Califusa--who gets caught in a creepy, paranoid meatgrinder involving vying forces over, well, what exactly?  

Oh right.  The "other Lebowski", a wealthy man, is trying to get kidnappers to return to him his wife.  

Likely story, right? 

After all, after getting "rednecked" by a group of powerful "paleo-conservatives" at a local newspaper over my involvement with the core of an antinuclear coalition in 1980, I sometimes laugh about it; but other times, I like to dream I was actually so important a figure that--yes!--I had to be stopped by any means possible.  The CIA.  The FBI.  The DHA.  The Secret Service.  Who else?  Savik?  The NKVD?  How about the Gestapo while we're at it--or as the nutty Representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, put it. . . 

The Gaspacho.

Yup, that's who's after me.  A vast vast conspiracy of "epic proportions" that is out to stop me--a kind of Lebowski character--from, um, what exactly?  

No!  Stop him!  

Sure.  I'm sounding facetious here.  In fact, I'm illustrating a common mentality that tends to drive many on the far-out wing we should call the rightists.  After all, no matter how wrong they are, they're right.  Right?  

Years ago, as if to illustrate this phenomenon of being so important that vast vast conspiracies are afoot to derail whatever it is the people affected by this phenomenon seem to believe they're doing, I encountered an almost perfect example of ginned-up egocentric behavior combined with magical thinking--all embodied on a poor, stressed out woman in a trailer park.  During the previous night's storm, a tree had fallen onto the roof of her already-battered trailer.  Everyone in that trailer park already seemed to be on financial white-knuckle duty.  

The friend I was assisting managed the trailer park.  We surveyed the damage, and knocked on the door to inform the woman we were going to remove the tree.  She popped out the door in her nightgown and began shouting about Bill Clinton, the philanderer.  

Bill Clinton, of course, was a commie that morning.  For some, he's always been a commie.  After all, when he was safe at Oxford, across the Atlantic Ocean in London, he came out against the Vietnam war.  That was after he'd received his deferment.  Wasn't that brave and heroic of him?  Who was going to come and get him?  Eliot Ness?  

Anyway, Bill Clinton did this, Bill Clinton did that, Bill Clinton was shagging young girls in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton was a pervert, Bill Clinton thought he could get away with the murder of Vince Foster.  The poor woman with the crushed trailer roof: truly exercised.  In need of an exorcism.  

I looked into her trailer.  A mess.  Cluttered dishes in the sink.  Rotting food on the counter.  The television blaring...you guessed it: Fox Pretend News.  Loud.  Really loud.  There was so much stimuli "noise" in that place it's not surprising the woman was on the fritz like that.  

I nudged my buddy, and said, "It's amazing how some people believe they can solve all the world's problems yet never learned to clean their rooms." 

True that.

Enter our TV heroes.  NCIS.  Olivia Benson.  Hawaii 5.0.  Chicago PD.  These heroes--your basic "studio gangsta"--easily hunts down the bad guys, and then, to make the problem go away, they shoot and kill the bad guy.  Then everyone drops in on the neighborhood bar to celebrate with beer and chuckles.

Got a problem?  Shoot it to make it go away.  Problem solved.  

This is like Pavlovian conditioning: Over and again, the formula works on the human mind.  The excitement drives up a subject's adrenaline and cortisone, and the subject's hunting instinct is alerted.  What happens to the subject's reasoning capacity.  It's shut off.  

And what replaces it?  A bestial reaction.  

That works pretty good for marketing purposes.  When the commercial arrives with pretty people, happy music and offers to make viewers happy if they only purchase a product, the reaction mechanism has completely superceded the human reasoning capacity. 

What TV does is gear you up to react to the commercial.

Then, when a mass shooter slaughters a number of people, all the marketers probably stand around the water cooler, wondering what in the devil motivates the mass shooters.  Kill the problem to make it go away, and you can have a fancy car as seen on TV. 

Punishment, followed by reward.  The manipulation of brain chemistry simply to sell stuff. 

There's more.  Viewers, who are somewhat unconscious when they are passively reacting to a television drama, tend to heroize--idolize--the characters on the TV.  Everyone's seen this.  Suddenly the character is a sought-after star.  

Be a hero like Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIA.  And you'll be sought after and venerated.  

Commercial America has managed to inadvertently generate an army of reactionaries.  Fox Pretent News is taking full advantage of that.  And the hero / patriot / waving flag vibe is helping those propagandists mislead millions.  

Four hundred years ago, an empiricist and social and political philosopher, John Locke, observed that reaction is essentially passive.  And that a reactive human is like a billiard ball that does not move until it is hit by and active object or force. 

Passively watching television, the active force is altering viewer brain chemistry.  An apparently "highly sought-after meat robot" is contemplating some "shoot it to make the problem go away".  

Altered brain chemistry?  Mind-changing chemistry?  Why does this seem familiar? 

Of course.  Drug addiction.  Illegal drugs.  Heck, dude, you've got to be some kind of hero to "risk your life" by going to a dealer and getting some black market ganga or coke.  Yup.  Your adrenaline and cortisone levels are up, and there you are, approaching the dealer's house in your nice car, ready for the payoff: a rigged dopamine high, courtesy of the ganga.  

You've had a problem, and in a non-violent way, you've reacted to it, and are shooting it to make the problem go away.  Reactive like a bitch.

It could be--no one really knows this for certain--that drug addiction is actually an adjunct to the brain chemistry manipulation involved in television advertising.  It could be, that if you are now having to really get ginned up to get those rushes, you've got to resort to something more powerful: meth, coke, pot.  

More reactive behavior in other words.  

Back to that boring cafeteria scene from 1980, it's easy for me to see from over 40 years later that I had been accosted by self-aggrandizing and exceptionally paranoid "heroes".  I was "the commie we've been waiting for".  Questions--just like on TV.  I don't know if I passed the test.  Probably not.  At 25, I was about as politically conscious as a garden slug.  A Lebowski in the making. 

Lots of people believe they're lost in a wasteland where no one cares.  But the TV set demonstrates to them, or so they think, that they can be heroes.  They can defend themselves against the alienation.  And they're continually conditioned to take a nihilistic stance against the government.  But who really did whatever it is to them? 

Easy.  Capitalism, that big, vast force out there that exercises indifference and obliviousness so well most of us have come to believe this is normal. 

What does the store want for you?  All it cares about is whether or not it can use you in an exchange.  Your identity?  Your desires as a human being? Your interests?  Anything not carefully molded by the economic exchange is a matter of indifference to them. 

That goes for employees too.  Employees are only wanted for what they can do for the company or the owner.  A life?  On your own time, please.  

My own time?  To do what? 

To watch the "shoot the problem to make it go away" circus on the proverbial 57 channels and nothing on.  

That's right.  Shotgun Willie is sitting in his underwear.  Even though we know that "red headed stranger" is something that lots of low class men possess.  Think about it.  Really.  

How to get out of that sordid condition?  The TV says, "React.  Go for broke.  Be a hero."

And hence, no matter what bar you go to, there's always a Great Big Hero there to "enforce order" in the bar scene.  

If he's really good at it, the little hero isn't a buzzkill. Clint Eastwood, the proverbial maverick, is a reactionary meat robot.