DATELINE–The South

1997 is just around the corner – but from the perspective of South to the Future, so is 1996. Awakening to the sobering reality of mortal life, we realize, if only for an instant, that our moral life will also continue to haunt us as anonymously as the Ghosts of New Years Never to Come.

For every day of every old New Year, the “Networks” will work overtime to assure us all that we are headed North; indeed, that we are all due North as payment for our obeisance to the myopic maxims and social mores of our times.

But we are not headed for the future, children of America, we are headed for our end. Like a lonely dog chasing its own tail, forever driven by the purely theoretical reward of being one with itself, the consumer is consumed by consumption, not collection agencies. So, too, do we slouch towards an ahistorical Bethlehem of electronics, telematics and prosperity for all who are alike.

Looking backwards illuminates the past in our midst: 1997 is the year of the Bermuda Triangle, as were the years before and as will be the years to come. We are stuck dancing the Time Warp to a tune not of our own choosing, and as long as we insist upon our fantastic Northern trajectory (the North Pole, perhaps) we will continually spiral southwards towards the fate of our factories, fruit and facsimiles.

There is but one dramamine on this ship of fools: accept the past and its presence in our future. Where have we been going? That is where we are headed.

Now is the time to “place” ourselves. Turn off the fog machine of mass-media, and take our hand. Together, let us drift down the backroads of our bustling memory lane.

At South to the Future, where we have come from is the South itself, that mythical compass point that indicates all that is backwards and slow, that which is colored, that which is hot and sweaty, that which is possessed of tainted blood. A region in which communications break down, in which workers often go on strike, where the hum of electronic devices cannot compete with the shrill, whirring pulse generated by cicadas at dusk.

The South employs a form of time which does not allow meals, or the siestas that naturally follow them, to be pierced by the interruption of a ringing, vibrating personal communication device. In the South, time, like distance, is indeed linear, it is what is called “real time,” and must be experienced as such.

For these reasons the South is considered a quaint analog of the past, a natural museum exhibit which invites its sophisticated, professional visitors to gawk at the folk history, art and desire displayed openly within its shadowy confines.

Incapable of being other than itself (for it already plays the other to our collective self), the South professes an exquisite and abiding allegiance to the broadest sense of Place. Left and right and high and low merge on the endless, omnipresent horizon of the South. For in the Place of the South, time runs out of space runs out of time. For Southerners, memory and imagination serve largely the same function, satisfying an impulse that is simultaneously creative and historical. And Place, in these southern memories and imaginings, is inextricably bound to the land and to those who work it.

So be it that Place also refers to a strict social and economic hierarchy, once again determined by land and work, that provides the necessary shackles of class rule which have always organized the Southern way of life. Hence, understanding place and knowing your place in the South are conflated in one broad social and political stroke of fate and fortunes. The South is literally held in place by our all-too American perversion of class. Inherited poverty is the bedrock of America’s prosperous heritage, and nowhere are the chains of Place more securely anchored than in the Deep South.

Indeed, the bloodiest of America’s Wars have been fought in The South over social and physical place. In the 1860s, many who fought to break the contract of federal union in North America stated that they would follow their home states into the battlefield whether or not they, as individuals, believed in the causes of that great, Civil war. We read in history books that the destiny of Mississippi would preempt the will of a certain Jefferson Davis, that the fate of Virginia would come before the will of one Robert E. Lee.

A century later, the second of such Civil wars fought in the South drove another generation of generals to cross their own Rubicon, this time called the River Jordan. They were looking to be carried home to the very banks on which they already stood. Now, three years prior to the year 2000, Medgar Evers’ filmic ghost appears before us, refusing to abandon Mississippi amidst the danger and strife of the riotous 1960s, claiming “I don’t know whether I’m going to heaven or hell, but I know I’m going from Jackson.” Be it a tract of land or a rung on the social ladder, Place has always mattered in our South: for better or for worse, in times of slavery and of legal franchise, in economic sickness and in prosperous health.

These words, these stories – you remember. We all remember this Place, our own Place, within the South.

Note this moment. Take stock of where you are right now.

There is then, this is Now, Now, Now. Close your mind, and open your eyes: high technology, stock market speculation, news and weather channels, credit cards, entertainment ventures, violent crime, Race Jam, Aunt Jemima, The Atlanta Olympics, The Future Now Available on AOL.

Technology is speed. Speed replaces space with time. The management of time is the ultimate aim of technology. We are overthrowing ourselves in the name of time; installing a tyranny of time in the charismatic form of speed. 286, 386, 486. 120 MHz, 160 MHz, 200 MHz. Efficiency, Equality, Liberty. If only we could completely destroy our free time, then we might be truly carefree.

“Where do you want to go today?”

Today (i.e., the show that is Today) takes us further and further away from having, being, living within sight and earshot of a Place we might grow to call our own. The fantasy of our times is that the very real Place where we are born (and reborn) can and should be eclipsed by the fluorescent fantasy of where we want to go.

Freeways, flightpaths, and telecommunication networks are real, whereas state boundaries and pledges of allegiance are but imaginary lines on a map, archaic lines of prose, outdated proselytizing.

How did we get here, this nowhere, this no Place? On the plastic-tipped metal wings of our holiest of holies, our highest of high technologies: the Future.

Remember, the Future will allow every American to escape his or her origins. In the Future, we will all live in the same, EPCOT Center Place, or, perhaps, a few miles down the road, in a town called Celebration. The Bridge to the 21st Century begins there, in the nowhere of Future as supernatural presence, unstoppable force, ineluctable drive: “Go west, young man, GO WEST.”

At the end of the pyramid scheme known as the Western Expansion emerges the river Denial. We have stumbled–out of breath, portable office at hand–into a Place filled with Aliens and Stargates, celebrities and cellular phones, entertainment as leisure time and communication as commodity, credit as money. The Personal Computer, the Internet, the World Wide Web–There’s no Place like the Future. There’s no Place like no race. There’s no Place like no sex. There’s no Place like no public assistance programs. And there’s certainly no Place like no politics.

Where does South to the Future want to go today?

A billboard: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU WOULD BE HOME NOW.

Our directive: WOULD THAT YOU DIDN’T LIVE HERE. THEN YOU WOULD BE FREE TO GO HOME NOW.

Car windows rolled up tight on the Great American Highway. The suburban jungle surrounds us, soundless as the mute Natural backdrop of a thousand car commercials.

Today’s citizens may not know whether they’re going to heaven or hell, but they know they’re going in their sport utility vehicles…there, where the Internet is still growing, there, were the “Networks” are expanding, there, where J. Crew, Polo and Tommy Hillfiger’s America overtake Land’s End, there, where cellular networks are free and millions of prison inmates sleep quietly at night, there, there, there.

That is the Place where and when we are going. South to the Future.

Happy New Year.

DATELINE–The South Pole

ON THE FIRST DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: at last an affordable e-mail and http browser without a keyboard, see?

ON THE SECOND DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the option to buy a keyboard at almost 100% the price of the initial “receiver” unit doubling the total cost to almost one thousand dollars, U.S. currency.

ON THE THIRD DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: television advertisements spoofing the remotely controlling finger exercises the Web-TV Internet Commander™ will inspire in couch potato-fied Americans like you and me.

ON THE FOURTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the ability to “receive” information “broadcast” over the Internet by “transmitters” like Sony, Pathfinder, Microsoft, Yahoo and ZD – making the Internet a whole lot like standard TV!

ON THE FIFTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the expensive “option” of typing in information and messages of my own making, and “sharing” these ideas and feelings with those other people – like you and me – who use the Internet to communicate instead as a one-way conduit for watching even more commercials or choosing between even more commercial-driven “entertainment,” yippee!

ON THE SIXTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a condescending insult in the form of a little black box that presumes with so much circuitry and silicon that Americans are too lazy or too stupid to produce the so-called “content” available on the Web today but, rather, are only willing to sit down during their rapidly diminishing leisure time hours in front of another big monitor and receive spoon-fed reports of their favorites stars’ opinions, their favorite teams’ statistics, their favorite anxieties’ scapegoats – yes, that’s Web-TV!

ON THE SEVENTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a Web that’s even more like TV and another incentive for the Big Boys to truncate news stories, screen opinions, censor trends, turn down alternative news reports, accept more advertisements, place more scrolling titles on the screen, hire more palatable mulatto™ and mulatta™ spokesmodels to deliver the “news,” concentrate on such meaningless variables as the weather and the stock market, give more free advertising time to featured products and/or whole companies under the sheep’s clothing of “review,” and build bigger! better! search engines to churn the above-mentioned regurgitated info-vomit in a stupefyingly pointless exercise of POINT & CLICK idiocy!

ON THE EIGHTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the sobering realization that most “professional” journalists will sell out the vocation of writer for the bright and shiny title of producer (even Executive Producer, oh my!), and don’t care to recognize the deepening divide between those for whom the cell-phone bell tolls and those for whom communication and higher education is becoming too expensive a “commodity.”

ON THE NINTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a simple equation with which to understand how modern-day poverty and wealth is written into technology to afford some entertainment and others opportunity.

ON THE TENTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a play station, a personal computer, and, thirdly, Web-TV – why, we wonder, not one with all three?

ON THE ELEVENTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: another domestic appliance to keep me happily isolated inside my carefully-monitored cell-block domesticity.

ON THE TWELFTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a read-only VCR for the 90’s.

DATELINE–Washington, PC

The management of English (the language) have entered into final negotiations with the board of directors of the United States of America^TM to make English the official language of the U.S.A.^TM.

U.S.A.^TM stocks (NASDAQ: USSA, NYSE: UsSA) have risen a combined 56.7 points in the last two days alone and are expected to almost double in value by the end of the week. The final contract between the owners of English (the language) and the U.S.A.^TM will make that vocal and written communication currency both exclusive and exclusionary. Earlier this week, a competing bid by the fledgling Arizona State Supreme Court (ARSSC, not publicly traded) failed pathetically to match the overly generous leveraged buy out proposed by U.S.A.^TM directors. Industry analysts note that though there is no historical precedent for an official U.S.A.^TM language and little practical use for such an isolationist tactic in the increasingly multilingual global market, the overall brand-name value of the U.S.A.^TM will increase significantly when the rights to English (the language) are finally transferred.

Marketing strategies for the U.S.A.^TM will now own total and unrestricted use of English (the language) in any and all future campaigns. The stock market’s rumor mills have already begun to turn out such potential post-buyout slogans as: “America – Where only English is spoken.” and “The U.S. of A.^TM: What a difference a national language makes!”

The antiquarians in the audience will note that German (the language) was defeated by just one vote as the official P.R. language of the U.S.A.^TM when the latter was first incorporated in the late 18th Century – doing government as (DGA) the Thirteen Colonies^TM.

Speculators have indicated that yet another industry giant, Microsoft^TM, has already begun to investigate the possibility of buying English (the language) from the U.S.A.^TM and changing its name to Visual Basic (the language). If and when this hostile takeover should take place, it is forecast that marketing Visual Basic (the language) as the proprietary tongue of the U.S.A.^TM will have little or no impact on this country’s increasingly stupefied, shamed, and otherwise silenced citizenry.

DATELINE–Mountain View, Calif.

Sample “Deja-View” free of charge at http://www.SttF.org/english/action/cable.html

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For information contact:

Mr. Aunqule Jemima
South to the Future
holler@SttF.org

SttF LAUNCHES AGGRESSIVE NATIONAL ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN
“Deja-View” Campaign Invites Web Users to Make the Obvious So

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - December 1, 1996 - South to the Future (NASDAQ: SttF), today announced its first comprehensive national advertising and marketing campaign, launching the SttF brand of award-winning Internet navigation services into the thick-with-hype ether.

SttF’s entry into the Online Publishers’ Whorehouse Sweepstakes is titled “Deja-View: The Web As it Happens,” serving up rotisserie Web listings modeled on Cable TV’s Preview Channel (We’re What’s On!). Deja-View strengthens SttF’s best-of-breed position among seasoned Web users, while posing a compelling invitation to prospective television audiences to discover the Web through the slanted eyes of SttF. “The Web As it Happens” mimics the soothing flicker of vertical hold run amuck, and will be integrated throughout a broad mix of television, online, radio, outdoor and print advertising. Strategically-placed African-American (Black) celebrities will also be used to dissimulate the predominantly White, middle class and straight male values of the Web into a more palatable, “urban” and “progressive” product image.

“The conception of the Preview Channel was one of the most stunning debuts in cable television history,” said Hollis Abel, Development Director of SttF. “It made history, and enthralled millions, not unlike the Internet itself. SttF has already established itself as the best way to start one’s virtual journey of global re-discovery, making perfectly good sense of the Web’s limited possibilities. With this campaign, we’re not just going for brand loyalty - we want brand enthusiasm.”

The SttF “Deja-View” television commercials are designed to inspire viewers to discover, settle and master the Web with Deja-View as their home base. The images are energetic, hip, fun, and convey the essence of sophistication.

In response to the National Association against the Abuse of Celebrity Minorities’ (NAACM) boycott of Excite’s (NASDAQ: XXX) kajillion dollar “Are you Experienced” campaign, Deja-View ads noticeably eschew the words “direction,” “control,” “focus,” “master,” and “heil.” While the Excite campaign is reminiscent of the National Socialist party’s legendary international marketing success, neo-fascists and libertarians have not been identified by SttF’s marketing division as the organziation’s target demographic.

“We been brainwashed to believe that advertising can convey a sense of adventure, world domination, and a healthy amount of cool that speaks to users currently or soon-to-be exploring the Web,” said Carolyn Bessette, special fashion and class aesthetics consultant to SttF. “The message is not only relevant, it’s also meaningful, because we fulfill a brand promise with a product that delivers: with SttF, you don’t just get more out of the Web, you get out more.”