Technology and the Little Bears

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The soundtrack above is playing on Bimmer’s toy radio when the glass door slides open. “There’s no airbag in real life, boys. You just go right through the windshield, split your head wide open and die!” Old Bear Roger has been listening to their storytelling the whole time.

“Roger, you scared my fur right off!” gasps little Bimmer.

“Well, I must be going on home now,” chugs the old bear. “I really like how you integrated wiki articles into your little story, lads.” And off he goes into the frozen air, back past the Climate Institute, avoiding the oil mercenaries on ANWAR hill.

“I’m sort of scared, Range,” adds Bimmer. “Maybe we should go downstairs and play with the girls’ barbies just to calm down. I’m not gay or anything. I’m just kinda nervous.”

“I used to find barbies sort of faggy too, Bim, but if it’ll help you sleep, why not. I’m confident enough in my bearhood that I think it can withstand the occasional fashion drama.”

They head to the girls’ room and quietly sneak out with a nice set of tastefully-attired dolls.

Ten minutes into a mediocre round of How do you like this outfit?, Bronc’s doll has a flash of doll-playing brilliance. “I just discovered an amazing new technology, Rangina. Want to try it out? It’ll revolutionize your life…”

“Why sure, Nurse Bella!” Ranger walks his Chanel-knock-off-cloaked Barbie over towards “Nurse Bella,” Bronco’s nurse-uniform-wearing counterpart.

Bronc whips out a can of industrial varnish and gently sprays a few wisps onto Rangina’s hard, round cheeks. Putting on an exaggerated high female voice, he says: “I am not endorsing or soliciting anything, but I just know that this product will give you a lively complexion and a glow that Ken will love!”

He empties the entire can into the trendy doll’s smiling face.

“I LOVE my new look!” shrieks Rangina in a faux-excited  Barbified voice. But then, the doll’s plastic hair catches fire from combustion with the varnish fumes and Ranger drops the glamorous melting clump of plastic onto the snowy tundra.

“Oh, I think my face is melting, Nurse Bella!” Ranger giggles. “Maybe you should have tested your product a bit more.”

“I’m not really a nurse. The nurse outfit is just a way of branding my technology. It gives it a science feel.”

And on that note, Nurse Bella hops into her convertible and  drives quickly to the next town where the local Barbies have never heard of her or her “revolutionary” product or service.

Towards A Gay Homeland

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Why a homeland?

Gays have been discriminated against since the beginning of organized heterosexual religions. Forced to live scattered among the world’s violent heterosexualites, a diasporaed Gay Nation has nonetheless thrived by cultivating enriching international relationships and by setting up parallel societies within the hetero cultures in which the Gays find themselves trapped and repressed.

But if the Matthew Shepard Tragedy/Iranian Hangings have show us anything, it is that the time has finally come for a Gay Homeland – a nation-state where Gay culture and values can thrive and evolve with the needs and desires of its loyal Gay citizens.

Why this amazing piece of beachfront real estate?

The traditional Gay lands of Sodom and Gomorrah have been inhabited by members of the Gay community since before the age of religions and nation-states. Throughout the region, there are stone-age cave drawings depicting Gay acts which pre-date the Sodom/Gomorrah period by over 400,000 years. There have actually been Gays living in the area continuously for over 6 billion years, long before the Akadians, the Sumerians, the Arabs or the Zionists.

The biblical story of the tragic genocide of the Sodomites demonstrates the extent of state-sanctioned persecution the Gays have been subjected to since the beginning of heterocentric religions and nations. The events of the last few years in Wyoming and Iran point to a pressing need to provide a safe haven from homophobianism, and the Levant is the most significant region on earth for Gay History. With a thriving and successful Gay nation in the Holy Land, Gays all over the world will benefit from the presence of a pied-a-terre at the center of world politics and oil production.

Our phones are standing by

It is time for the Gays to return to their Ancestral Homeland (as has been recently promised in an email signed by Barack Obama). The current heterosexualist “states” of Lebanon and Palestine are their ancestral home. The current inhabitants are opportunistic heterosexualites who could live comfortably in any other part of the world. There are over 200 heterosexualite nation states, and NOT ONE Gay state. The absence of a Gay political entity is the reason for Gay suffering, and the Gays will only know freedom when this situation has been remedied – when the earth has at least one rock-hard Gay nation state.

Lubeland and Phallus-stein (their original names) are the natural provinces of the Gay Homeland. Together, with Sodom and Gomorrah as their undivided capitals (one for gay men, the other for lesbians), this new state will be a beacon for Gay Culture that shines out all over the world – a safe place to live out the Gay Dream. It will also provide a model of what can be accomplished when the earth’s crust is divided into various thematic tribes, when some of them just have more fashion sense and irony than the others.

1-888-gayland

It’s time for the Gay Nation to rise to the occasion in the beauty pageant that we sometimes call civilization! It’s time for the Gays to return to their Gay Homeland!

Prophet Air

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…

FMJ nonchalantly balances a Kool Menthol between his ear and euro-gelled hair.

Tracing a line in the dust of the bulletproof window with a finger, Judas looks puzzled: “But Jeez, you already own 400 learjets. Why buy another one you’ll never use?”

FMJ: “Why not buy one more is just as good a question, Judas Buzzkill!“

Jesus doesn’t like it when Free Market Judas tries to interfere with the natural rhythms of His Shopping. This is a crisis, and with all the celebrity trials and union mutinies, it’s no time for Consumer Interruptus.

FMJ: “Look Jude, if I don’t buy a learjet every few months, I get depressed. And when I get depressed, entire continents can starve – the entire economy can come down with me. So stop biting the invisible hand.

You’re supposed to be my press attache at this staged confrontation between me and the union-president, Free Market Earl – my second cousin. I’m not paying you to tell me how to live my life – what to buy and sell.”

FMJ rolls his eyes and pops a yogurt-covered date into his gaping mouth.

Judas: “I just think you ought to put off buying photogenic big-ticket products until your trial is over, Jeez. Think what Moe or Bernie Silverberg could do with a pic of this. It could make you look like a bit of a prima donna.”

Free Market Jesus inhales deeply, flaring his nostrils as he exhales.

FMJ: “I haven’t bought any private lakes or polo fields in five years. Jude, I’m not sure I want to live in a world where it’s not safe to buy a learjet when you’re feeling under the weather.”

A tinny electronic remake of Daft Punk’s One More Time blurts out of Judas’s white leather belt as he lifts a razor-cell to his ear.

Judas: “Mary, I have to take this call.”

Jesus flirts with his reflection on the metallic gas cap of the plane as he applies organic lip-balm to his collagen-laden lips. Finally, he finds himself face-to-face with tangible proof of his value as a human being in the form of a gift to himself from himself.

Amen.

…

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Greed: It’s the original ideology !

Aqua Phoenicia vs. FMJ

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Stubbing out a half-smoked cigarette on the wall, the judge reads aloud the first charge:

Judge: “Free Market Jesus, you and your mother corporation – 107844 Nazareth Inc. – are accused of polluting the groundwater in Central Phoenicia with waste products from your organ-disposal installations. This is a class-action suit being filed by Aqua Phoenicia on behalf of a million Phoenician plaintiffs. How do you plead?”

Jesus has just applied organic aloe-hazelnut moisturizer to his hands and is in no hurry to answer. This particular charge seems like a trivial affair better suited to non-designer-wearing working-class lawyers – in the kinds of no-holds-barred trials that the families of murdered labor organizers are always staging to spin their insignificant stories into conspiracy theories.

FMJ: “Your Honor, before I answer this proletariat lawyer’s questions, I’d like to have five minutes to consult my astrologists and color consultants.”

As far as FMJ is concerned, it’s always the right time to look your best, and that means astrologers and the right colors. His new collagen lip injections aren’t going to go unnoticed at his own celebrity trial.

The prosecuting attorney – Abdul Bouq Emmisayar – furrows his brow and flares his nostrils as he crosses the court to approach a nonplussed Jesus, grinning with his already-open Versace cellphone clamped to his surgically-enhanced ear.

Abdul: “Your Honor, I would ask the defendant to please put down his cellphone.”

He turns toward FMJ and his attorney:

“I would like to remind Ms. Popovic and her client that this is a very serious charge. There have been over 1000 deaths directly attributed to one of Mr. Christ’s organ-disposal factories in Sidon. And this is to say nothing of the various cases pending against him for suspicious organ purchases involving children as young as three.”

The glamorous courtroom goes silent and Moe Silverberg – sitting behind the huge pink wig of a drag queen to hide from arch-nemesis FMJ – types something into a no-name laptop with a library sticker on the back.

Blinking for half a second, Jesus rolls his eyes, and crosses his legs as he begins:

FMJ: “Oh please. Those selfish orphans all signed legally-binding contracts. Those who couldn’t write their names were assisted free-of-charge by my legal staff. It’s all perfectly legitimate.

And Phoenicia’s water problem is a government problem, nothing to do with me and the Free Market, may it continue to thrive. I pay my corporate taxes to the Phoenician government just like any other respectable numbered corporation.

If Aqua Phoenicia can’t keep its water clean, then they are the ones who need to change. Not me. Passover Organs has been around longer than most of the plaintiffs have. Your Honor, my representation and I feel that Aqua Phoenicia is just another citizen action committee looking to make a quick buck by attacking a celebrity.”

Abdul leans into the judge and speaks to the entire courtroom:

Addul: “But didn’t another one of the defendant’s affiliates – 87553 Nazareth Inc. – buy the government in a hostile takeover only a few months before the organ-disposal site was approved?”

FMJ stops filing his nails and asks an ungrateful world a little question:

FMJ: “And how am I supposed to know what all my little baby Free Market children are doing? The big picture: they got a lot of jobs out of the deal, and I contribute hundreds of shekels in taxes. Even more than I collect in subsidies, some years. It’s win-win for everyone, and trickles down like mercy from the market’s rain gutters.”

The jury are awestruck by the beauty of his prose as his hair glistens with the special celebrity lighting that was a pre-condition of his personal appearance at the trial

…

Why People Buy Luxury Brands

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At some point in your adult life, you realize you’ve sacrificed most of your personality in the name of economic considerations whether these considerations are real or constructed – biological or status-seeking.

It’s at this point in your lifestyle-and-career that you begin to need inanimate objects that seem to have a personality – just the thing you lost over the course of your Consumerist “life.”

So I posit that the “need” for BMW, Prada, Disney, Iphone and Haagen Dazz is created by people who’ve lost their souls to Consumerism, and are aggressively trying to buy it back.

Sadly, I’ve never seen this strategy succeed in replacing the real personality that a consumer drone lost in himself. You can’t buy back a lost soul. You can only stop being distracted by snake-oil salesmen mythology and wait patiently as it (hopefully) grows back.

For many people, luxury items like cars and mansions are a “need” that they have, though it can’t really be logically demonstrated how the possession of these objects really helps improve their lives. Most owners of automobiles – for example – spend a quarter of their waking lives driving, parking, or paying for their life-improving object.

Hard to believe humanity is willing to sacrifice most of its free time in order to buy the “luxury” of spending time listening to CDs in traffic. It may be true that leather is more “luxurious” than cloth upholstery, but it’s also true that free time is far more important to anyone’s happiness than leather upholstery.

All of this identity-seeking-via-products is constructed via marketing and branding. These products have little to do with relieving any craving that people just naturally have. Cavemen didn’t sit around pining for the day they could tear around corners at 120 kmh in Corinthian leather. They were just happy being able to eat food, hang out, and live out of water.

Of course, some would say we’re so much more sophisticated now because of our sudden attraction to brands and machine pedigree. Others might ask, “Why do we have to leave our homes because of the floods?”

…

:: Capital, Volume One
:: Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
:: A lively PoFo discussion on this essay