DATELINE–The PC Revolution

Our culture is twin sibling to technology.

But this pairing is becoming parasitic and, quite soon, will mean the death of the half that we call culture; i.e., human culture.

But division is our national past time. Wage work is now the law of the land. Work is never begun nor is it ever finished. Time is simply marked in arbitrary intervals which correspond neither to the harvest nor to the season, but to the steady microbeat of production and consumption, of suppliance and exploitation. During some of these artificially created increments, one must earn a living. During the rest, one must kill time.

The Walkman™ brought a spring to its users’ steps. Individuals in headphones marched to work imagining that the beat driving their bodies was theirs alone. Automatic Teller Machines, or ATMs, put the girl from the bank out on the street. Tammy the Timeless Teller was an automated lady of the evening, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. She waited ever ready for customers to insert their cards and conduct their transactions within the protection of her anonymous but available embrace.

Technology in those days was easy to recognize. We could call it by name. Sociably enough, it even possessed a gender. But like a master criminal who has taken pains to obscure and rearrange his identity, technology has digit by digit obliterated its own fingerprints and other identifying marks.

Technology is fading into the simulated grain that serves to remind us of what woodwork once was. Once upon a time we could read a machine like an open book, its very design would speak to us about how it might be used, repaired, even customized. The pursuit of miniaturization, surpassing even the cult of speed, proved an irresistible aphrodisiac with its frenzy of fission and guarantee of unending progression. After all, while utility and efficiency may have thresholds and limits, “smaller” is a simple mathematical operation.

“Our aim is miniaturization of everything … Technology is endless.”
Akio Morita, Chairman of Sony Corp. In a fraction friendly world, every unit is divisible.

We receive our dividend in the forms of planned obsolescence, specialization run amuck, and indeed the personal computing revolution. On rare occasions a remainder will creep into our rounded and conformed results. We catch a glimpse of the smooth operation of antiquated machines, the life of the renaissance man, revolutionaries and minstrels heading back to the land. Remainders, reminders, outliers.

So divide, personal technology has. And it has dispersed itself widely with a drive for survival reminiscent of the transmission of seed-heavy spores or rapidly metastasizing cells.

No longer can we roll up our sleeves and find out what makes machines tick, for the machines have been replaced by silent, and often hidden electronic devices. We cannot fix technology in time or space. We cannot fix technology in our garages or workshops. In an age of mechanical means, the ends –outlines – of body and machine were easily discernible; written in skin, metal, stone. In an age of electronics and, now, personal computers, the borders between tool-user and tool are being eroded, permanently erased.

In the place of this most basic distinction between humans and their inventions emerges the nebulous third term of the “interface". Computers have exploded open the possible meanings and uses of the interface. Today, the “object” that we call the (computer) interface is clearly half-machine half-human in both design and logic. We are not talking about the interface in terms of labels and markers: there is a radical difference between an engine part being labeled “oil gauge” and an icon which – somehow, invisibly, fantastically – corresponds to the liquidation of a family’s bank account or the pictorial representation of a sick person’s so-called genetic structure.

The interface blurs the line between machine and man precisely in its purpose as “go-between"; as an automated version of a human action or a moral decision-making process. In this late stage of the game, it is possible to buy so-called “software” that will allow a manager to better manage his or her employees. Likewise, a “blocked” writer can come to another “piece of software.”

The well-known Java™ revolution began as an effort to insinuate programmable logic boards into household appliances. The goal of this project was to render the pliable technology of the computer invisible by hiding it underneath layers of convention rather than plastic. The inexplicable drive towards smaller and smaller electronic components is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg: our fetish for miniaturization can only be realized, ultimately, with devices “small” enough to fit within the most obscure crevices of human consciousness; within the shadows of our social and personal, political and emotional lives. Our overt fascination with so-called nanotechnology is nothing but a ruse, a wild goose chase. “Smaller” is simply a more palatable tag than “closer.” We are more happily diverted with an interface the size of a television set than we would be with a cell-sized circuit board. The physical or hardware shell around “closer” technology is mere residue; a very technical, existential remainder. The least common denominator is, nonetheless, the interface. That nebulous, amorphous, shifting device most true-to-itself when left to its own devices.

We desire a world of rules and regulations incarnated neither in juridical law nor the long arm of the law; instead, we seek the science-fiction of a world ordered by the concealed techno-logic of ATM’s and surveillance cameras; televisions with sufficient “programming” to suit your least articulated fantasy and telephonic equipment that ensures you are never alone, never elsewhere, never lost, never past. When computers have disappeared into the habitual (i.e., the habit-forming), the interface will take the place of human interrelations: that is to say, the mirrored screen will take the place of the open door or window. The “closer” machine will become the arbiter of our personal will just as “personal technology” is already being marketed in terms of “personality” (e.g., translucent beepers, sport walkmen, business laptops, chic cellular telephones).

But it is the P.C. revolution that most deserves to be revisited, reevaluated. The personal in “personal computer” is by no means solely an indication of ownership or utility. It is, instead,a hint of things to come. The era of weight loss “systems” and debt management services has us all locked in to the same signal: the body is a machine to be studied, medicated and “worked out” while the policies which govern human beings are dictated by the logic of spreadsheets and algorithms.

We are enveloped by technology only large corporations can design, build and repair. The only hope for the survival of human culture – whereby life is lived in the company of fellow human beings – is to resist the insinuation of companies into our everyday life.

Say no to the company-made personal digital assistant unless you want to say yes to a life of solitude… …a life of solitude, that is, shared with your personal computer.

DATELINE–South California

There is but one promise, one ideal, one hope lodged like a nugget of gold within the pan-filtered rhetoric of the Republican National Convention: We will save You Money, We will give You Money, We will be Money for You.

This is not democracy, this is not autonomy, this is not self-determination. The Puritans were not searching for a better bargain on candles and linen when they boarded the Mayflower and crossed unknown waters to settle in an even more unknown land.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let us refresh our random access memory: the phrase that fomented the Revolution of 1776 was “Taxation Without Representation.” That is to say, “representation,” the political articulation of our hopes, fears and creativity, mattered more to the early American colonists than “taxation.”

How is it, then, that we have come to value “taxes” more than “politics"? What numbing slumber is this that we have just begun to shake off like a nauseating coma? How many candy bars does it take to make the modern day American citizen recognize the existence (let alone the needs) of fellow Americans?

The man who nominated Bob Dole spoke of the American Dream as if it were a great discount, a generous loan, a short-term lease, a gold credit card. Prosperity, affluence, riches – what ever happened to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Hello? Earth to Americans, is anyone breathing? Happiness is not a mortgage, happiness is not a minivan, happiness is not a mail-order outfit. Liberty is not the opposite of poverty, life is not just a prefix for “lifestyle.”

How dare these vapid bozos in drab suits and ties sell out the America of ex-slaves and servicemen, riveters and visionaries for 15% of anything.

Freedom does not come in proportions – a noble death is no percentage sign.

DATELINE–South California

South to the Future sat at the feet of Bob Dole last night, basking in the tubescent glow of the twinkling pixels that constitute a man whose body was broken for you.

Even the book upon which the movie that is the 1996 Republican nominee is based must address this larger than life reenactment in the third person.

We gasp in our living room as the camera alights on Robert Dole’s shoulder to deliver us the view that brings tears to the eyes of the plausibly alive televised audience. We see a man not to be contained in a single screen. We see a man standing taller than a figure made of dross flesh can ever draw himself up to be. Through the eyes of a fly we watch him deliver the speech of a lifetime. And from behind that Hollywood square of a hundred screens, the transubstantiation is completed, and a Republican president is raised again from the dead.

Bob Dole has been born and born again. A constant mantra of the Dole origin myth, springing forth in that small town on the Kansas prairie, cannot divert our attention from other births, other reconstructive surgeries, other television gala productions.

Bob Dole has crossed over to another shore, to the other side of the screen. There, a secret government, operating as the self-appointed guardian of technology, has rebuilt him–stronger, faster, better than he was before.

But where is democracy? Surely it does not lie in a members-only bohemian grove on the distant shore across the Republican river of forgetfulness.

Where is freedom? Do not tell us that it is at this very moment crossing this river on the prickly back of a double-talking reptile who gives his alias as the “free” market economy.

Who can be citizens? We fear they will only number those willing to swim in the amnesia-inducing waters. We see those allowed to call themselves citizens exchanging the legacies of their own mothers for read only memories of Susan Molinari’s granddad and Colin Powell’s papa.

We found the 1996 Republican National Convention a religious experience. A Triumph of the Will worthy of following in the footsteps of our dearly departed Olympia.

But Bob Dole has not abandoned us, as Kerri Strum, Michael Johnson and Bela Karoly have. Bob Dole lingers in the ether that runs through our veins. When we eat his body and drink his blood, we become both rulers and ruled. We are absolved of the duties and sins of exercising our remaining rights and responsibilities. We too can talk about ourselves in the third person. And we too can call ourselves Bob Dole.

And in our words as Bob Dole, of Bob Dole and for Bob Dole, we will fall asleep imagining…

as my voice echoes across darkness and desert …
as it is heard over car radios on coastal roads …
and as it travels above farmland and suburb,
deep into the heart of cities that, from space,
look tonight like strings of sparkling diamonds,
I can tell you that I know whose moment this is:
It is yours.

DATELINE–South California

On the opening night of the Republican National Convention, vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp issued the “ich bin ein” one-liner of the 1996 political season.

The former Buffalo Bill was speaking to the PBS-MS-NBC anchor at South California’s San Diego Convention Center, a commercial bulwark entrenched a mere 25 miles north of the Borders Bookstore separating the U.S. from Mexico.

Kemp, who has in the past criticized Republican attacks on immigrants, has reconsidered these “stands” in the light of his new position as the “Number Two” man on the ticket. PBS-MS-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw queried the candidate about the plank in the Republican party platform that would deny all but dire emergency services to “illegal aliens.”

Kemp angrily replied, “I would never call any human being an alien.”

Staff grammatologists at South to the Future have posited several plausible translations of Kemp’s ambiguously phrased claim. According to experts, the sentence can be parsed in a manner which would suggest a sentiment roughly equivalent to the following: “Immigrants are not aliens, they are human beings.”

However, another plausibly correct translation of Kemp’s words is the shocking revelation: “I’ve seen aliens. I was kidnapped by aliens. Tom, these immigrants are no aliens.”

But yet another equally valid reading of Kemp’s statement, in accordance with grammar’s commutative property, is quite a different message altogether: “Immigrants are aliens, and, therefore, I do not consider them to be human beings.”

Shocking yet true. What could this mean?

Where the experts do agree, is that the structural schemata and voice wave analysis conclusively prove that in Kemp’s moral universe, “alien” and “human” are mutually exclusive categories.

Gauging by his blanket endorsement of the Republican party’s 1996 platform, including the call to create a permanent stateless caste of “legal” aliens in this country, we can only infer that Jack Kemp does in fact believe that millions of extra-terrestrial life forms are living within the walls of Reagan’s shining gated city-on-a-hill, the modern American Jerico.

And if Kemp’s vision is true, we can predict that under a Dole/Kemp administration, July 4th celebrations will no longer be marked by a friendly game of horse shoes and a patriotic flag raising. Nein, meine Lieblings. A republican Independence Day will soon be commemorated by shoving a lighted firecracker up the ass of the off-the-books domestic help or playing pin-the-bombing on the neighborhood bodega owner.

But lest you worry about the injured alien, do not fear. For both Kemp and Dole will agree that an exploding suppository constitutes a “clear need for emergency intervention.”

Even when it’s E.T.’s ass on the stake.

DATELINE–South California

“It made me proud to know that he was on our side,” beamed a white Republican in Illinois.

He, Colin Powell, African-American, had appeared on prime time television so that our sins against colored folk might be forgiven.

We have reached a familiar turning point: it is only a matter of minutes before race, history and, even, live reality, is transformed into a spectacle of glorious harmony. Leni Riefenstahl would be proud.

Thanks to the awesome power of our not-for-hire television networks, almost all of the 54 black delegates present at the Republican convention were invited to fill our screens for the entire duration of the retired general’s speech.

Amazingly, no digital wizardry was involved in converting a 2.7% black audience into 50% of all audience reaction shots.

Believe it or not, it was the human beings who direct the cameramen who were actually responsible for this feat of fantastical focus.

Rhythm, order, symmetry. Cue, teleprompter, cut. Bring on the dog and pony show. Parade the very people you seek to veil under a mantle of demagoguery and affected sentimentality.

But should you allude to hard-working immigrants in San “No More Wetbacks” Diego, make sure to restrict your allusions to a dead and buried great-grandfather1. The future of our new, common sense American dream must be built on an ancient past.

Let us forget the present for it alone is neither pre-scheduled nor over-produced. Coverage. Coverage. Coverage.

DATELINE–Boston, Mass.

It was on the 52nd anniversary of the nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima which claimed the lives of 70,000 that Steve Jobs, the spiritual leader of Apple Computers, announced Microsoft had won its 13 year long campaign against the Macintosh.

Speaking to a gathering of industry luminaries and Macintosh faithful at the influential Macworld Conference, the prodigal son announced he was selling the family farm for a handful of magic beans and a pocketful of empty promises. The Hogan’s Heroes of the high tech world had finally struck a deal with their not-so-hapless captors.

Before a booing crowd and skeptical media representatives, the balding and bespectacled Jobs announced Apple’s unconditional surrender to Microsoft’s unyielding expansion into the occupied territories of the electronic frontier.

Behind Jobs, projected on a giant video screen, the smirking visage of Bill “Der Kommisar” Gates lorded over the festivities via satellite.

The scene was eerily reminiscent of a stage set almost 13 years ago when the charismatic Jobs personally proclaimed the beginning of a Macintosh revolution against the monopolistic behemoth IBM. Way back when, in 1984, Apple was literally depicted as an athletic and female David who, throwing hammer in hand, could shatter the looming Orwellian telepresence of IBM.

Today, the Goliath is clearly Microsoft but a high-tech David is nowhere to be found.

Could Apple’s surrender be anything more than a signal to Microsoft’s global partners that the age of self-determination and democratic individualism has finally come to an end? Does a single, uncontested Operating System differ significantly from a Fourth Reich?

The mainstream media stutters to describe with any degree of accuracy or perspective the fundamental shift that took place yesterday at the Macworld Expo. Meanwhile, MS-Apple plans to introduce co-authored software to Mac users as early as next year. In contrast, Vichy France started to speak German after only a few days of occupation.

Preparations for the dismantling of participatory democracy will not be televised. Even the fabled CNN will only report the catastrophe only as it unfolds – sui generis. Likewise, we can expect to be inundated with good news in a few years, as the media finally discovers that Microsoft, the triumphant Philistine, now benevolently controls the world’s access to information.

DATELINE–Suburban Virginia

A technology splinter group calling itself South to the Future has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s blackout of America Online, the world’s largest commercial provider of online services.

The event, popularly billed as “The Day the Online World Stood Still,” took millions of subscribers “offline” for a period of approximately 16 hours. In an attempt to regain technological credibility and ostensible digital control, AOL engineers attributed the problem to a losing battle with the online giant’s system upgrade software.

Posturing itself as an Internet David to AOL’s Goliath, South to the Future has issued press releases claiming that the blackout was a “SCUD-style surgical strike” against what the organization derides as the “pasty white underbelly of the Internet’s bulging middle.”

“America Online may have lost the battle, but we will not lose the war!” was the rallying cry of the neo-utility’s commander-in-chief, Will C. Encourt.

But if you dismiss SttF as simply a loosely organized group of dissident hackers, think again. The sophisticated infiltration of the AOL’s “main brain” was not accomplished by the expected avenue of code-busting shenanigans, but by the installation of a unique, never-before encountered virus. The virus, SttF boasts, owes its origins not to a computer program, but to Santeria.

Although not explicitly stated by the techno-terrorists, industry insiders expect the blackout is a response to AOL’s recent policy of “whiting out” posts submitted to the service in Spanish and Portuguese. These media insiders point to a recent wire story the group published titled “America Online OnCrack? or, the Claim to Imminent Domain over the American Right of Way.”

What SttF will say is that the AOL “offlining” is not a freak occurrence. The group’s spokesperson asserts that the action is the opening salvo in a holy war waged by the technologically dispossessed against those who stand for the twin evils of enforced cultural colonialism and white digital supremacy.

“America Online should change its name to Americans Stand Inline. That’s why we had to tell them that we would not ‘git in line’ as they demand. In fact we issued a counter demand that AOL was out of line and that the company must consequently get offline. You see this obsession with lines is linked back to the Biblical invocation of the Mark of the Beast. Inordinate attention to lines is, of course, a textbook symptomatic of fascism. As you can see by our anti-fascist design aesthetic we have an aversion to lines. We go so far as to ban lions from our site. We even block access by people named Neil. Our business is destroying lines. Soup lines, inline skates, line art, the thin blue line. You name it. With our Santeria virus invoked against lines, we have the mystical powers to back these threats up. So there.”

Despite the rambling tone of the terrorists’ statement of responsibility, their message is clear. As the group claimed in a more lucid moment “AOL may be a juggernaut, but South to the Future is a zeitgeist.”

And indeed in the opinion of industry stylemakers and trendsetters, the buzz about SttF confirms that indeed they are the “Spirit of ‘96.”

DATELINE–Headlines

Martians. The discovery was made on a Tuesday – are we surprised? The Roman calendar week retains the name of Mars – aka, the personification of war – so why shouldn’t the mass media make offhand allusions to a planetful of (potentially hostile) brethern?

Andromeda Strain? AIDS?

After being prepped for Independence Day, are we shocked that the published ETA for NASA’s Martian probe is July 4, 1997? Most astonishing of all, the news of extra-terrestrial quasi-cellular organic life several million years ago most often comes with the following header: “Are we alone? Nasa scientist have discovered…”

“Hi God, it’s me, MassMedia.”

I think we’re alone now, Nietzsche once sung. But contemporary alien life has adopted a Janus-faced incarnation. More than just a nouveau Deus, the Alien is associated with Unconscious Arrest ("I was alone at night when a ship of kind, child-like aliens abducted me and probed me sexually after which I was able to remember a slew of repressed, traumatic memories;” the Apocalypse ("The end of the world will descend from the heavens and the rivers will turn to blood and only the just – or the just in time – will be spared from their almighty and inscrutable wrath;” and Quiet Infiltration ("Aliens are here, now – we are being invaded by aliens from unknown lands with unknown tongues and habits").

Alien cultures have indeed cropped up all over the land. Alien gods are being worshipped right smack in the middle of our amber waves of grain. Even portions of the mainstream are succumbing to a pox of New Age spiritualism. (Let’s say nothing of John Travolta’s phenomenom.)

We must open our third eyes to these close-up photographs of meteorite-bound Martian protoplasm. There, brothers and sisters, there is our new Question for a time of self-propagating answering machines.

DATELINE–Headlines

“If they can do it,” the President remarked, “then we can do it, too.”

The subject is the computerized classroom, the technological tutelage now deemed necessary to enter the world of the 21st century with a fighting chance. But this visionary torch is no invitation to the huddled, pre-PC masses. If anything, the Silicon Studies program smacks of fatalistic resignation – an exclusionary ultimatum tantamount to a “monkey see, monkey do – or monkey die” maxim.

The naked apes have to get a grip on this Techno situation. If we, as a race, are unable to reverse engineer a refrigerator, what sense is there in memorizing the taxonomy of file types? Let’s stick with what we don’t know. Take refrigeration, for example.

The Western world was carved out of the spice trade. From nothingness surged the everything we now call home, modern, history. But spices in the 14th and 15th century were hardly flavah-enhancers; spices preserved food, without which our ancestors would have died of starvation during the winters – and the summers. Refrigeration not only made microwave dinners possible, it paved the road to the modern city. Urbanism, highway federalism, shipping and handling, the global village.

But what housewife or househusband can repair a refrigerator? What earthquake survivor can rebuild a broken radio? What stranded motorist can jumpstart their computer-controlled luxury vehicle?

Forty years ago, public education included “shop” and “civics", “typewriting” and “cooking", grammar and history and Superman was a superhero. Five years from now, will “shop” be replaced by “troubleshooting” and “civics” with “netiquette"? Is MacGyver really a superhero or is he just a well-educated fellow? In a co-ed educational environment where girls can be gearheads and boys can be cuisine queens, wouldn’t it be wiser to insure our present level of technological know-how than banking on such circuitous and vaccuous “knowledge” as Windows-literacy or the Science of Spreadsheets?

Computers are hip, computers are hot, computers are now. But computers are still waiting for a killer app (look at that stock market, ladies and gentlemen; study it well). The automobile had the highway, the highway had the automobile. Your kitchen has your stomach, your stomach has your kitchen. If your computer has you, it has you and nothing less.

We must not shackle our precocious young with the technophobia of the Baby Boomers. A 7 year-old can figure out the desktop faster than she can learn the timestable. By all means (and any means necessary) make computers accessible to the working class majority in America, but don’t call that high-tech education. Remember, that’s spelled e-q-u-i-p-m-e-n-t, not e-n-l-i-g-h-t-e-n-m-e-n-t.

STD’s, armed violence, teen-age pregnancy, psychic hotlines, phone sex, layoff’s, plant closings, downsizing, the Gulf War. Human-to-human contact is steadily slipping out of our society. Let’s not mend our neighbors’ walls with a compound of cheap gadgetry and empty promises.

DATELINE–The Western States

I dreamt that the world we live in was being reduced to a towering grid.

The ground was still thick with moist grass, the loam was fertile underneath, but the area all around us was divided up, suddenly, as if by force of earthquake, into tiny, square towers of land. It was as if the world had become a video game grid: we were all Q-Bert; cyborganic chess squares.

These ever-expanding circuits of land left people in a panic, jumping with both legs from one narrow patch of refuge to another. The air was filled with the sounds of a dozen languages all struggling to communicate simple but impolite intentions. A quiet river rushed through this apocalyptic world of earth toothpicks. Then the constant movement of individuals hopping across yawning gaps, standing anxiously atop narrow confines, speaking in their native tongue to no one in particular (save, perhaps, their own and only gods) began to take on an almost nationalistic order.

I could sense that groups of especially motivated jumpers were calling out to one another and occupying squares in conjunction, as would armies. They began forcing stragglers out of their way. They were becoming a brutal wave of movement.

Being forced off the ground, finally, by the spread of one particularly noisy Japanese technology company, I wondered what would happen to the local cultures that once settled and developed at their own pace across the great, undivided expanse of our natural geographies. Would they, too, be forced to leap into the ether only to barely miss the edge of their next destination, falling blindly into an unknown river of time? That was my fate and I recall that the waters underneath had no temperature of their own but were, nonetheless, crystal clear.

After struggling to shore in a land that resembled the Vietnam I’ve come to know in Hollywood pictures, I set upon a retroactive effort (I was dreaming, after all) to keep this land from being divided out of existence, geometric piece by piece. I gave a stirring speech in a brightly-lit auditorium to what seemed like a crowd of multi-colored Olympic athletes. I talked about this and that, but, in the end, when the meeting had been adjourned, I confessed to my dispersing audience that what was really necessary in order to prevent another apocalypse of vertically extruded and horizontally colonized grids of land was some semblance of cultural homogeneity.

I WAS DRIFTING OUT OF SLEEP AT THE TIME. I knew that homogeneity had to be some sort of a symbol or stand-in for a world where people not only understand one another’s habits and tendencies but also adopt some of the same for their adaptation to an ever-changing environment. What I have come to realize is that the future of this planet and its human inhabitants is tied up with the life of border towns all over the world and throughout history. In short, the Global Village is nothing but a border town, filled with all the strife, all the noise and all the special perks of border towns elsewhere; places like Tijuana, Berlin, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Miami, Morocco and Los Angeles.

WE NO LONGER NEED TO “MAKE A RUN FOR THE BORDER” as the border has already made a run for us, to us and at us.

WHEN I AWOKE THIS MORNING, THE POWER HAD BEEN RESTORED to California. The lines are back up. According to a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), power companies learned a valuable lesson from the total blackout which paralyzed New York City over two decades ago. Were such a catastrophe to occur today, as it did yesterday, power would no longer have to be restored to the entire grid all at once. Instead, certain subdivisions (there are 18 per local zone) would have power restored almost immediately whereas others in the same community would have to wait an indefinite period of time. Last night, half of my city block had power, the other half did not.

WE, TOO, HAVE A VALUABLE LESSON TO LEARN from yesterday’s blackout. However, our lesson will not be derived from the suddenly silent absence of power, but rather, from its equally subtle reappearance. For a brief interval of timeless time and formless space, the lines of power which constitute the invisible geometry of our daily experiences came into focus; briefly, they drew themselves out into the darkness of night, the bright contours of our increasingly grid-like society.

WHAT SECRET ORDER COULD BE DISCERNED from their meandering approach – why was this streetlight off but the next one on?

WE LIVE IN A THOROUGHLY ELECTRIFIED WORLD. We surround ourselves with the sounds of machines left to their own devices. Lights flicker and buzz, refrigerators purr and, sometimes, groan. Telex terminals dispatch information, ATM’s dispense both good fortune and poverty. Yesterday, we took down the power lines in California and for almost eight hours, the world we live in relaxed its shoulders and put down its heavy hands.

DATELINE NBC–

“I cried,” said Periquito Perez, waxing rhapsodic on Sunday night’s closing ceremonies, “I knew the honeymoon was over…I could see the flame inside my own television fading…dead.”

The wedding was short and crowded but the guys with the video cameras made sure it all looked quite lively. The techno music, the scrolling titles, the dive-cam, the Command Center, the Coca-Cola commercials, the biographical vignettes, John Tesh…a seamless web of previously recorded fact and digitally composited fiction – all the world a stage, every single event an instance of History. Who can forget such brilliant programming, who can forgive such brazen romanticism? Who can you turn to now?

The irruption of such relentlessly driven television might very well leave a greater cavity in the hearts of screen-agers than even the gradual implosion of Mr. Clinton (who went to Washington). Americans who “journeyed” to Georgia virtually re-discovered the power of television, it’s allure and fishhook-like lure. Day after day, event after event, NBC’s coverage of the Centennial Olympics reassured because it persisted; not unlike a glam CNN or an Oakie Mtv.

In consistency there is security, in security there is trust, in trust there is room for asserting that clearly dramatized performances are, in spirit, “PLAUSIBLY LIVE” – which, in a manner of speaking, is only a few frames away from being “PLAUSIBLY TRUE” or “PLAUSIBLY RIGHTEOUS.”

The lesson for media producers: synthesize, lyricize and, above all, rephrase and repeat. Employ the same tools, apply the same filters (human and digital), rework the same lingo on and off the televisual stage – only then will your programming approximate the timely timelessness of television, this Fountain of X,Y and Z in the midst of an increasingly frightening suburban jungle. Lions and tigers and legal aliens…oh my!

We can only wonder what “lessons” from Atlanta will be applied to NBC’s coverage of the upcoming Republican National Convention in San Diego, California….

A demagogue-cam that plunges into the audience to document a splash-less soundbyte? Flashback sequences shot lovingly with Vaseline on the lens – John Tesh sentimentally quips, “How this young spirit learned the value of perseverance, sacrifice and hard work as a middle class white man growing up in the 50’s…” Computer generated images “scientifically” diagram the impact of the Brown Tide on traditional family values like the third-generation immigrant’s xenophobia and a modest resurgence of Cold War paranoia.

Let us embrace this vision of digitally distorted reality. Bring on the Webification of the Mass Media – bring on the trite techno titillation, the sacharrine sentimentality, the assumed air of intimacy and false sense of familiarity.

No matter that the Olympics have ended. The mass wedding between corporate America and American information culture must resume! This show of bumbling, multi-million dollar persistence must go on.

DATELINE–South California

In the spirit of the current legislative push to make English the official language of the U.S. government, let us pause and reflect on the specific origins and functions of this quirky American neologism (and malapropism): the “legal alien.”

As Welfare Reform fanfare circulates through this country’s increasingly sclerotic mass media channels, the term “legal alien” has made a rather bold (though subtle) entrance into the American political scene.

For within the rich political tradition of the U.S., the almost hi-tech invention of the term “legal alien” marks a true revolutionary advancement in the cause of linguistic alienation.

No longer are hysterical demagogues restricted to such bland instruments of separation as “resident” vs. “citizen” – terms that have become well nigh meaningless to a population for whom citizenship is now patriotically fused and celebrated with a Coca-Cola and a Tommy Hilfiger sweater.

No need to consult your Constitution, don’t reach for those Federalist Papers – ladies and gentlemen of the Press, leave your Emersonian tomes at home. We are all quietly incorporated into American civil society by nature of our consumption, our expenditures, our tastes and brand loyalties. But one of us has secretly chosen the wrong path, one of us has blatantly decided to reject the brand we all know and trust, one of us has chosen to remain a resident of the United States rather an than American Citizen™. One of us has sinned! God Bless this Black Sheep for the wrath of a hi-tech lynch mob will now be upon her.

These nebulous “residents” must be destroyed! The lines must be clearly defined – no matter if they fall outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. political tradition. The Masons and the Jeanne Dixons have spoken in crisp, sharp words: “LEGAL ALIENS.” These clandestine wetbacks – that is to say, turncoats – must now now be branded as LEGAL ALIENS. Yes, indeed, legalized ALIENS. ALIEN visitors from other worlds legally permitted to co-exist with us humane Americans.

Creatures from the blackest lagoons of the war-torn Third World, extra-terrestrials from lands beyond the known Earth (or, the 50 states of America), these aliens, ALIENS, will be permitted to roam our streets only on the condition that they not grow old or become sick in our pristine communities. ALIENS who become elderly while in the U.S., ALIENS who show the impudence to develop debilitating medical conditions, ALIENS who are incapable of finding work while caring for their children (who are no longer aliens by virtue of the magical powers vested in our laws), these ALIENS ARE NOT OF *THIS* EARTH AND MUST BE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY.

Resident – what is this word? This word is a mask – this word is subterfuge. One cannot just reside in the United States, labor in U.S. industries and pay U.S. taxes. No way, Joses. We must all become one with the holy Union of American States – we must become CITIZENS.

A land of nothing but citizens is on the horizon. A land of one people, one nation, one destiny. Americans, we are AMERICANS OVER ALL!

DATELINE–Not in my backyard

Welfare legislation on Bubba Bill K-K-Klinton’s desk strips U.S. residents who are not naturalized citizens of their eligibility for Supplemental Security Income.

The ban on SSI payments to non-citizens with U.S. residency status highlights the nation’s increasing hostility towards immigrants, particulary southern Americans, living legally in the U.S.

The term “legal alien” is an official classification of the U.S. government used to denote “…an individual who has lawfully entered the United States of America and who has, with the permission of the sovereign, taken up residency on U.S. soil. [The legal alien] pays federal and state income and sales taxes into national and local coffers, but receives in return neither the right to vote nor elibility for tax-supported benefit payments.”

The SttF legal department predicts an onslaught of “out of this world” legislative and publicity wranglings as the U.S. attempts to avoid the inevitable reshuffling of ethnic hierarchies that will accompany anticipated demographic shifts.

“It’s going to take more than a village to keep the dream of white country alive in the next millenium,” SttF intern Jamie Pirtiggen-Boyle has suggested. “What’s the next genocide? AIDS? CRACK? Intentional starvation of children via the termination of AFDC?”

But the U.S. prescription for its perceived immigrant ills may backfire. Applications for citizenship from eligible legal residents are expected to rise in response to the cancellation of benefits. Many who would have in less vitriolic years remained legal residents indefinitely will be prodded to claim their rightful roles as citizens, stripping the government of lucrative subscribers to its policy of taxation without representation. The newly naturalized citizens will be able receive SSI payments and elect government representatives to boot.

Under current U.S. law, legal immigrants who will be denied SSI under the new welfare regulations will be eligible for welfare benefits as well as electoral enfranchisement after five years of residency when they can apply to become naturalized citizens.

DATELINE–Not in my backyard

Welfare legislation on Bubba Bill K-K-Klinton’s desk strips U.S. residents who are not naturalized citizens of their eligibility for Supplemental Security Income.

The ban on SSI payments to non-citizens with U.S. residency status highlights the nation’s increasing hostility towards immigrants, particulary southern Americans, living legally in the U.S.

The term “legal alien” is an official classification of the U.S. government used to denote “…an individual who has lawfully entered the United States of America and who has, with the permission of the sovereign, taken up residency on U.S. soil. [The legal alien] pays federal and state income and sales taxes into national and local coffers, but receives in return neither the right to vote nor elibility for tax-supported benefit payments.”

The SttF legal department predicts an onslaught of “out of this world” legislative and publicity wranglings as the U.S. attempts to avoid the inevitable reshuffling of ethnic hierarchies that will accompany anticipated demographic shifts.

“It’s going to take more than a village to keep the dream of white country alive in the next millenium,” SttF intern Jamie Pirtiggen-Boyle has suggested. “What’s the next genocide? AIDS? CRACK? Intentional starvation of children via the termination of AFDC?”

But the U.S. prescription for its perceived immigrant ills may backfire. Applications for citizenship from eligible legal residents are expected to rise in response to the cancellation of benefits. Many who would have in less vitriolic years remained legal residents indefinitely will be prodded to claim their rightful roles as citizens, stripping the government of lucrative subscribers to its policy of taxation without representation. The newly naturalized citizens will be able receive SSI payments and elect government representatives to boot.

Under current U.S. law, legal immigrants who will be denied SSI under the new welfare regulations will be eligible for welfare benefits as well as electoral enfranchisement after five years of residency when they can apply to become naturalized citizens.