Highbrow Helicopterfest: #2 Hughes XH-17

 

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Paul Klee - Hand Puppets

Grotesque, surreal, comic, menacing, absurd, whimsical...  A farrago of psychological types and emotional aberrancy.

Culture Studies with Yuri Bezmenov, 1984

According to Mr. Bezmenov, the stages in the process of subversion are four:

1. Demoralization

2. Destabilization

3. Crisis

4. Normalization

Raising our eyebrows with ironic bemusement, we might also consider these stages as being part and parcel of a typical advertising campaign selling one innocuous consumer product or another: laundry detergent, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, energy drinks, exercise club memberships, vocational counseling, model trains, cosmetic surgeries, tennis shoes, degrees in basket weaving, tickets to see a charismatic music superstar...

An inquiry into "ethical decline" presents a range of challenging problems. To what degree are Bezmenov's four stages actually resulting from programs advanced by various leaders in education? Too, we are wont to draw distinctions concerning domestic and foreign influence. To what degree is "subversion" advanced by domestic actors, and to what degree is subversion a policy of foreign economic and political forces? Distinctions regarding state vs. private (or corporate) policies also are matters of interest. 

The analyses of these questions suggest advertising, education, social engineering and subversion can overlap. Identifying rubrics to characterize and gauge the overlap can be complicated in a host of ways, of course.

I am not sure where this leaves us; as a matter of historical description, I question where we might find ourselves along the career of decline described by Mr. Bezmenov.  

Here, meanwhile, is related highbrow material worth the attention of those who do not skip it: Fatidic Television. 

Be seeing you.

Soviet tank rams into a building, Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968

Trivia note:

According to a correspondent from Germany, East German troops didn't participate in the "special measures." However, members of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry of State Security) were on the ground supporting with intelligence collection.

The Wizard of Oz accurately described

It has been forty years since I read The Wizard of Oz, but the following discussion matches what I remember.

Regarding a host of issues, the video is most apt, and the allegorical interpretations are sound or otherwise useful.

 

Note: In the novel it is not Glinda but rather her sister (called Locasta or Tattypoo the Good Witch of the North) who meets Dorothy at the beginning of the story and puts Dorothy on her journey down the Yellow Brick Road. As the video explains, in the novel Dorothy meets Glinda the Good Witch of the South near the end of the story. Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the film is a composite character incorporating both Glinda and Locasta from the novel.

Cosmology Unbound and Speculative Endeavors: we have curious data, fascinating mathematical models and impressive computer simulations, but what remain most important (and perhaps most viable) are descriptive examinations, conceptual clarifications and uninhibited analyses of the distinctions among institutional contexts, science, and the language used to describe and conduct that science

When finely conceived commercial art informs other aesthetic parameters, other communities of appreciation, other realms of stimulus and response, and other markets--can other politics be far behind?

 Art by Richard Powers ca 1965-66

NASA Archives: Satellite Images of Earth

NASA Earth Observatory: a project of the EOS Project Science Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Landsat Science: the NASA/USGS Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence. Landsat data give us information essential for making informed decisions about Earth’s resources and environment.

NASA Visible Earth: a catalogue of images and animations of our home planet

U.S. Geological Survey LandsatLook: online tool for recent information by address or place name, and to track changes in different light wavelengths

Timeline of the Landsat program, beginning with the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. Landsat Next, consisting of a trio of satellite observatories, is expected to launch in late 2030. As the tenth Landsat mission, it will continue the legacy of the Landsat program. Source: Landsat Science

"The Psychedelic Puppets String Theory Gang and the Cyberdelic Dream Pen"

Highbrow talk about Cicero and the problem of defining the place of law and reason in a Republic

True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect upon the wicked. It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.

                                         Cicero - On the Republic

These stimulating statements are perhaps too worldly insofar as Cicero places reason and natural law over those useful skeptical and apophatic views conducive to a deeper spiritual, and thus more comprehensive, insinuation of happiness and justice throughout the lives of men and women, and so throughout government and the social order. Here we see the case of a philosopher of Skepticism drawing too close to the erroneous pagan convictions we associate with the Stoics. And I think this might be verified by St. Augustine's criticisms of On the Republic;  St. Augustine properly challenges Cicero, observing the book fails to define a Republic.  

Cicero is applying broad brushstrokes that draw our attention to the consideration of what St. Thomas Aquinas calls Natural Theology, which is very well and good. But in order to understand the full range of possibilities for a good (happy) Republic, we must bring into our conversation the consideration of what Aquinas calls Revealed Theology, appropriately centering our considerations at the focus--as upon the microscope stage--of a skeptical-empirical method.

Above, my use of "skeptical" and "apophatic" are necessary approaches for elevating Revealed Theology to the status of an anthropological understanding, which is a discussion that is philosophical rather than an exercise of the mythography and poetry which are the subjects of that inquiry. 

The study of scripture and myth--and importantly the study of the history of our commentary regarding these subjects--define the formulations yielding the "Revealed" understanding that 1) return Cicero to the school of Skepticism, and 2) yield the elusive (but not too elusive) definition of a Republic that St. Augustine calls for. Thus, we seek to include unworldly understanding (and hopefully unworldly solutions) in our essay of very worldly problems.  Here we might imagine Wittgenstein calling for a synoptic examination of unworldly possibilities (and indeed he would call for a long list of such possibilities), framing the language of these possibilities in the human context--in the "stream-of-life." 

Framing his political science and his history as an inquiry into a Revealed and Natural understanding of the world, Locke has some useful things to say about these matters, and he advances many happy suggestions for proceeding in peaceful, inclusive, informed, wise, productive and profitable directions. 

Finally, we would be remiss were we to fail to view these suggestions as matters of aesthetic impression. Thus, I am wont to evoke something of a Japanese manner and call Locke's suggestions "pleasant," moreover encouraging visions of a harmonious community.

Marcus Tullius Cicero 

 

Philippe Halsman & Jean Cocteau - “The Blind Poet believes that he is the Emperor of China” (1949)

Dudley Moore and John Lennon play the avant-garde card for higbrow laughs, 1965

Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe, January 19, 1809

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty - Percy Shelley - read by Vincent Price

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

         Floats though unseen among us; visiting

         This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

                It visits with inconstant glance

                Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

                Like clouds in starlight widely spread,

                Like memory of music fled,

                Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate

         With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

         Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

                Ask why the sunlight not for ever

                Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,

                Why fear and dream and death and birth

                Cast on the daylight of this earth

                Such gloom, why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

         To sage or poet these responses given:

         Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavour:

Frail spells whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever,

                From all we hear and all we see,

                Doubt, chance and mutability.

Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,

                Or music by the night-wind sent

                Through strings of some still instrument,

                Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart

         And come, for some uncertain moments lent.

         Man were immortal and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.

                Thou messenger of sympathies,

                That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;

Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,

                Like darkness to a dying flame!

                Depart not as thy shadow came,

                Depart not—lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

         Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

         And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;

                I was not heard; I saw them not;

                When musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

                All vital things that wake to bring

                News of birds and blossoming,

                Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;

   I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy!

I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers

         To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?

         With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers

                Of studious zeal or love's delight

                Outwatch'd with me the envious night:

They know that never joy illum'd my brow

                Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free

                This world from its dark slavery,

                That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,

Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene

         When noon is past; there is a harmony

         In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

                Thus let thy power, which like the truth

                Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

                Its calm, to one who worships thee,

                And every form containing thee,

                Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Not exactly keeping with the more knowledgeable and wise understanding that informs the ethos of the Highbrow Commonwealth, but some of the language is interesting. In a reasonable discussion of the poem, it is evident the best strategy should be to enlarge upon Shelley's conceptual errors and misunderstandings, while not neglecting to explore the texture of the involving but also flawed music, which provides matter for much philosophical criticism and appreciation, albeit a very mild appreciation that should properly "pass like clouds in starlight widely spread," indeed.