The exchange of our personal facts is too free and too easy. The kind of information exchanged today is the kind we kept close or offered only to our kin. Now we open the book to those who are not kin and a lot less than kind. But then facts are in themselves things made, thus fictions of a kind. The truth of us is not in our facts, is it? Then bureaucrats disagree, and will always help police to use them against us. The Patriot Act is one more heinous attempt by police agencies to circumvent the Bill of Rights. If businessmen only agree on one thing, the restraint of trade (think about it and figure it out), then police come together in agreement only on the violation of the four freedoms. Not very many men who want to wear a uniform and a badge and carry a gun can respect the Bill of Rights, even if they think they do. And all of them would balk the second the screws were put to them, of course. But he lives by the sword, by the usurpation of the people’s rights a thing a lot less than beautiful, a de-formation of Beauty, of Truth.
We are convinced that beauty has no part in truth, but that’s because we have no idea what beauty is. In fact, we have no belief system to sustain the idea that Truth is valent. We’ve debased Truth and in turn have de-formed Beauty. We have made it common, perhaps in order to be less elitist, whatever that might mean to the mind who thinks its valid and valent to think so. It has become less than common; our new rhetoric of beauty champions the ugly in order to advance political programs rooted in resentment and the vindications of new hegemonies. We have no idea that this effects all notions of Truth, which have come under a like intellectual assault. We did miss the point when these intellectual maladies have affected our politics and our socio-economic well-being. Our media advances the base in order to control the debased populus, turning free thinking selecting people into a new Pavlovian consumerist public. Popularity always become publicity in any campaign to undermine the people in favor of monied elites. We have given up on ever perfecting this special acumen as We the People of the United States in favor of All the Public of the United Oligarchy of Monied Corporate Capitalist Power. Hollywood is no longer of any use, not that it ever really was; very little of Hollywood did otherwise than sell escapist fantasies for Americans during the Great Depression. It remains grotesque for the set of values it sells, power creates subversion in order to control it.
We are subject to too much permeation, infiltration, from institutions wanting information about us, on us–always on top of us. I’m not so certain today we even know what exchanging information means, anything akin to a philosophy of beauty would be lost on us. Aesthetics has long-lost its influence in the academies of learning in America, somewhere now in an intellectual graveyard with philology, words, words and more words we do not think of words, the form of words, the sound of words, deeper sound in words, the way the Word is beginning and how all things in the beginning come from the Word . . . with our acumen and with our love being what it is, how could we hope to love language in the way too much in order to love it enough? We do not love anything enough, unless it’s a prepackaged notion of who we are, what we could be, always ever-living in the conditional.
The Falling Leaf Review 