Our State of the State: Faith, Hope and Charity

There are those even in our own government now, who wish us to be ignorant, misled and misinformed for their own benefit. We need to stop and create an environment that is toxic to those types and to those types of behavior,

I read a great book that expanded my mind when it came out. "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century" in 1978, by the brilliant and persevering, Barbara W. Tuchman. A seminal book on how to write a history book and not just copy from previous history books. She also wrote before that, "The Guns of August" in 1962. Not the main consideration of that book was, in fighting one war, both sides believing absolutely that the knew what the other side was willing to do and capable of. But it was only after the fact, when it was all over, they all realized that they were basing their analysis on a previous world war.

We are in that place today. And most of us do not know it.

We have people attacking other people with new technologies while fully incapable of understanding how it all works, just knowing it will work. Not understanding the social dynamics, the meta and cyber dynamics, the historical dynamics. The other side (US basically), then needs then to try to understand it all, why they did it, what they did, how they did it and what the foundation was for it to be functional, as well as all of what it entailed, and why.

The problem there is just that. They didn't much need to understand it all in order to attack. But we, or whomever the attacked party is, who they may be, or will be... has to. They have to understand it all in order to properly counter it in the correct way. Other than through war, or ignorant other responses. And that is how our leaders are addressing all this. Through ignorance. Both in attack and in response.

We live in interesting times. Too interesting. Far, too interesting.

Hope

Russia attacked America through cyber activities in our 2016 election and before, and after. They are gearing up to alter our 2020 election. We need to more fully understand their actions and our assimilations and therefore our misdirected activities. Russia acted on something they thought would work, and it worked far better than they ever expected or projected. They do not understand fully well what happened either, but we have to. Far more then they do. Because to affect something is easier and requires less information and understanding than actually understanding that affect in practice in order to protect oneself. It is far easier to appear greater than, in destruction, than it does to appear great than in construction.

Faith

Repeating a lie will not fundamentally alter the truth, or change the reality that the lie was and remains, a lie. But it can and will alter people's beliefs, even when it goes against their beliefs. This can be countered by deepening one's ability at thinking, centering oneself in reality and facts, and being aware of one's world and environment, as well as utilizing compassion.

Charity

Regardless what our beliefs are, if we adhere to fundamentals in dealing with other human beings, and lifeforms, and our environment, all with due care and respect, even toward our enemies, much of our disrepair and responsibility in our mistakes when later realized, will be greatly softened by the fact that we were acting all along as decent beings, regardless our mistaken beliefs. Also, we may find along the way in acting on mistaken beliefs in such a way, that those beliefs are indeed mistaken. W|e will at least have the potential to find in the moment, that we are headed in an incorrect direction. We will increase our potential for becoming correct amidst our incorrect actions.

Finally, quality shows abound in the video wasteland. Great! Right?

Do you have a favorite TV or cable show? Have more than one? A few? Many? More than you can watch? Have you had trouble recording shows on your DVR  (digital video recorder) because there are more shows to record in one hour than your machine can handle? Recording on a second DVR in another room maybe? Feeling at all frustrated, even minimally, that you can't record (or watch) all of what is now available to you?

Remember when cable and TV were "video wastelands"?

But now you can watch on your DVR, stream shows, even watch on your cell phone!

I've finally hit a saturation point. I never thought I'd see the day. For years it was a video wasteland out there. Then Cable hit. Horrible, horrible cable TV that I told people would some day be great.

Things like tape (VHS, BETA) were wonderful and we could record off TV, buy or rent tapes and could finally enjoy a film straight through without commercial interruption.

Then, pay per view and pay cable channels arrived.

Then came TiVo and the DVR came to be. Awesome.

Now I could record shows and movies to watch as I spent increasingly too much time viewing as the amount of quality shows to watch grew and grew until today (see, I told them we'd get here, it just took nearly 30 years). I became concerned that I was watching too much video.

Then it happened, it came out of the blue. One day I realized that I had more video to watch than I could ever conceivably handle. And when you hit that saturation point, after worrying that you would be forever frozen to the screen (a thing which grew out of a long term sparseness of quality shows), finally, you could simply...let it all go.

Why?

Because. Since you have way more shows than you could ever conceivably watch, your internal responsibility checker, that software in your mind that tells you that you can't miss good shows because there are so few of them; you have to see them all. Finally we have passed through that now fictitious barrier to catch all the interesting stuff to watch and has led to opening the flood gates to reality.

Now you have got to let it go. You can finally back away. Away from too many shows to watch where you are watching all the time. Now you don't have to watch as many shows and that my friends, allows you to cut it down, to only a few of the highest quality shows, or the ones you are most attracted to. You can go out and breathe fresh air again, go visit friends, see something live and in person, music, plays, libraries, the sky's the limit!

And so here we are back again to where we all started. Except that now we do have more quality shows to view, when we are in the mood. Of course there is still the pablum out there available to when you feel like being mindless. Or for those who like remaining in that state, day in and day out.

Only, then you notice other shows that you feel compelled to watch, and so you again you increase your viewing till it gets saturated and then, one day, you realized it's too much again.

So you comfortably cut it back down, to reality and reasonableness. And so it goes, over and over....

Unless, you get a handle on it, adjust your lifestyle and lock yourself into only a few hours of only the most special shows per week. Just like we need to learn to limit our intake of luscious foods so we don't become morbidly obese, so we have to limit our intake of luscious and addictive shows and movies, so our life doesn't become morbidly obese with sitting and staring at the screen watching one after another after another, after another show.

So we have finally made it to where the video wasteland is filled also with very good shows and within that situation, we have a trap. Now that finally TV, cable, YouTube, Netflix and other DVD and streaming companies can supply us with  all we could ever want and then some, it is time we catch up to them and restrict ourselves and build our lives so that we are enhancing our human experience and learning, and not just watching, watching, watching.

Even if we only watch the best shows or the best documentaries, we still need to consider and limit our viewing behaviors, otherwise we face the prospect of some other countries whose interpersonal relationships are suffering from all this technology and media. And their population is decreasing because of it. Something that in the overall context is good, but only up to a point. Countries where it is too much trouble to interact and make intimate relationships do to fear of rejection, or a lack of desiring drama we can get elsewhere and prefer superficial relationships as we have all those needs taken care of elsewhere.

Like in Japan where you can go and for a price have two cute girls smother you in attention for the rented amount of time, bolstering your ego, eliminating the need to deal with the fears of the drama of real relationships, social diseases, monetary issues and loss from things like divorce and familial situations. And women have the same options to purchase beautiful young men, sans sex, sans guilt, sans negative aspects so apparent in most romantic relationships.

Are we losing the emotional toughness required through having relationships?

So the next time you turn on that next great show after hours of viewing others, ask yourself if you couldn't be doing something more real and useful. Or if this is your solace after working long hours, or because you can't afford to do real things, ask yourself why that is too.

Is quality viewing now the new drug of the masses? Not that the concept is new but the availability of so much good viewing certainly (and finally) is. Is this excess of quality viewing becoming the new Soma, as in the novel, "Brave New World"? The drug that calms the masses so the leaders of the country could do whatever they wanted.

"..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..."

and

"the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was!" From Brave New World - 1932 by Aldous Huxley

Sounds kind of like TV, doesn't it. Have you ever taken a "staycation" because you couldn't afford to go to a real location and so you stay home to "relax" and work around the house or just watch and catch up on your viewing habit?

Perhaps this is all just more complicated than you ever realized? But how is it you haven't noticed?

Film or digital?

Technology changes. It advances. But not all change, not all advances are good; are they?

When electronic drums came to be years ago, many purists, especially old time drummers (which isn't to say, old people who drummed, but professional drummers who were "old school") as well as audiophiles said that to make the drum sound electronic was to literally take the heartbeat out of the production of music. When you run an electronic drum in a song, you code for it, you adjust settings, it's rhythmic, it's "perfect" in a way. But when a drummer drums on a drum kit, you have a human drumming, you have a, heartbeat. That random element that is produced from the organic being, the emotion, the musician; something you cannot code for.

Because of that human musician, that organic element manipulating the sounds, the music produced is based upon the strikes of the drumsticks on drum head, cymbals, and yes, any "cow bell" or whatever else may be in the mix, like chimes, etc. Behind that drum stick is a hand, a wrist, an arm, muscles, tendons, and a heartbeat, a brain, whereupon sits the musician's mind with its history and emotions. All these things add up to that performed drum beat. It's something that you can feel it when you listen to it. The musician is communicating a real "feeling", an emotion, they are conveying a message from that performer's life to the listening (and feeling) ear of the audience. The musician emotes a very primal, base communication to the listener.

When you take that human element out of the mix, you lose something. There is a complexity that is missing. An electronic drum set built of electronics and coding is not as sophisticated, as complex. For that you would need to have Artificial Intelligence and even then, you would be missing something; you would be mimicking a human element in the sound production and you wouldn't actually have a human being behind it.

We have a similar situation now with film and HD video. It's not quite as direct as the music paradigm, but there is a loss of complexity, of traditional filmic history, of an obverse concept that further breaks down the fourth wall between the audience and the filmmaker. There is, and you can easily see it in viewing the difference between celluloid film and digital HD video, a feeling of watching something "real". Many people are noticing that it is almost, "too real", too immediate and at least for now in the beginning of this format it is breaking the element of "suspended belief" for the audience that is so necessary to filmic storytelling. It is like you are sitting on the set of the production watching the story play out. Which, is kind of cool in its own way. But you are also losing something. The "texture"of the film is now gone.

As with the digital drum kit, you can add artificiality to it, to the video experience. You can give it that "texture" with a digital "grain", you can "slow" down the image within the frame, to make it have that "Hollywood" look and feel. But it's not real. It's still a simulation. Anyone younger may come to believe it is real, but it's not.

There is a great difference between the digital drum kit and the real drum kit played by a human; and there is a between real and simulated film; though it's not even simulated, it's just outright HD digital video. I'm not trying here to draw a direct connection between the situation of drumming and HD video, I'm just trying to point out the kind of loss involved. It's a qualitative kind of loss. Almost to some anyway, like real milk or powered milk. It may seem real to some but it's not, there is a lack of quality involved. And at least some of of know it.

There is a certain loss of "materiality" as Keanu Reeves recently put it in saying that we are losing many things in life now a days, losing a certain "haptic" quality of contact. Keanu has produced a new video called, "Side by Side". From the web site: "Movies were shot, edited and projected using photochemical film. But over the last two decades a digital process has emerged to challenge photochemical filmmaking. SIDE BY SIDE, a new documentary produced by Keanu Reeves, takes an in-depth look at this revolution."

I've had a 42" Sceptre HDTV for some years now, but recently my TV went out. So I bought a newer technology LG HDTV and it's lighter, has a smaller footprint, and a far better image. I am now seeing for the first time, real HDTV. Painfully clear images with colors that will "make your eyes bleed". Okay, not really, but it has an immediacy, a clarity that is almost too much. I hated it at first. I watched some of my old shows like "Firefly" and they were clear in a way I had never seen them before. It was, disconcerting.

I even bought a new set of Firefly disks and it was so very different to watch. It lacked that certain quality that it used to have. It put the actors right there in your face, or, it was more like you were right there on the set watching them act. Where was that distance between the set and audience? That Hollywood feel? I wanted to feel like I was watching a dream, not actors on a set, a fantasy that too me out of my reality and into that fun, produced world. I did fine that by turning down the power levels on  my new TV screen, that I could return to how it used to look, though it was still clearer than before, which is cool. I thought it was interesting that the "power level" was somehow what was giving me that super clarity that was taking me out of the fantasy and too much, perhaps, into the reality of the production.

I started to realize that this is a new technology (for me) and that I would have to adjust. I realized that younger people would come to see it as normal; maybe even not liking that old "Hollywood feel" that I love so much. I remember years ago when you would see a TV show shot in video, it was obviously different, harsh looking. It had a cheaper look and feel to it. Sometimes, depending on the show it was cool, and sometimes it detracted from quality of the show. Sometimes it pointed out how little money they had to produce the show.

But this is something new. Yes, it is cheaper than film, but in some cases they are shooting in digital HD video and transferring it onto film anyway. Which is a huge money saver since you don't waste miles of footage of expensive film media and the ensuing film processing and only use in the end what you really need to.

So are we losing something special? I don't know. Perhaps as in many things we are seeing now a days, we are merely gaining a technology and not losing one. But in the way that corporations and studios are always trying to save a buck, we could be losing something here, and never realize it. Corporations love to do that, to make the cereal box the same size with less weight within it, the candy bar smaller but the price remaining the same. Is this just another example of the consumer being fooled? Maybe. Maybe not. The audiences still do set the pace and if audiences find it displeasing, sales will drop off and we may go back to using film. But at this point, I just don't see that happening. I fear they will fall complacent and accept the digital tricks to make it look like film and eventually, no one will really be the wiser.

It also makes me think of the current book revolution. Do you read books on a Kindle, Nook or some other eReader device, or do you read a book in paper form? Should we continue to kill trees for paper? There is something very pleasing about holding a book in hand, turning real paper pages, with that special paper and printing smell I have such a history with and which many younger people will not. Now that I own my own Kindle (I felt that if people are buying my works in digital format I had best learn it myself), I find that I enjoy both now, the ease and volume of content that I can carry with me in my Kindle, and the weight and feel and smell of a real paper based book. Though I mostly only read books now at home and my Kindle is my go to device for carry and read, out and about in the world.

Either way, society and life march on whether we wish to keep up or not.

When asked what Keanu shot his documentary on, he had to smile off to the side and answer honestly saying, "Digital," and then made it clear that he really wasn't against digital, he just saw that there were two different things to consider here (as I have been trying to point out here) and that he hoped as I do, that digital will be an adjunct in "film"(?) production that will enhance our movies and not simply kill film, completely.

But then again, didn't video kill the Radio Star?