Deja Vu 2.0: Back To The Future All Over Again

Hopium patrol

There is a growing circuit in our cultural amygdala that confuses positive thinking with hopium, and conflates "steady as she goes" with intransigence.

We American's like to think of ourselves as "the best that we can be."

That nuanced saying contains the spectre that we may in fact just be the best that we can be.

Which is not good enough for the predicament we find ourselves in, assuming we want out of it:

America’s energy-related carbon pollution rose 2.5% last year despite President Barack Obama’s efforts to fight climate change, according to new federal data.

The rise in emissions from burning coal, oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels was one of the steepest on record in the last 25 years, according to the Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Energy Review.

The increase in carbon pollution is a setback for Obama, who has been heavily promoting his progress in cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama told 120 world leaders at the United Nations climate summit last month that America had done more under his watch to fight climate change than any other country.

But the EIA figures show that America’s greenhouse gas emissions are now rising again after several years of decline during the recession.

(U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise). This song and dance is actually the one from the hit album "saying one thing but doing another" (e.g. "Save the planet, get frackin' !").

So, in the video I found and placed at the bottom of today's post, you can watch some interpretive dance to (like poetry, song, and novels) explain what is going on, but rather quickly and quite succinctly.

Yes, "explain" it in a simple but revealing, artistic way.

But first let's translate and define:

Interpretive dance is a family of dance styles that seeks to translate particular feelings and emotions, human conditions, situations, or fantasies into movement and dramatic expression combined. It can also translate major characteristics of any traditional ethnic movements into more modern expressions through exploration of the origins, cultural influences, rhythms, movements, emotional manifestations, and intonations, as well as the stories inherent in the dances themselves.

(Wikipedia, emphasis added). When government evolves into politics and politics evolves into an exclusively getting-elected game of thrones, honesty is one of the first victims.

Propaganda is the new standard of honesty in the Big Brother NSA military-establishment-controlled culture.

Regular readers may remember a Dredd Blog post about authoritarianism:

Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders

The cultural amygdala

cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want -- which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal. In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars both hot and cold. But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I'm going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.

(Authoritarianism: Past And Future Is Now). That post was substantially about a book you can still download for free ("The Authoritarians").

A book which detailed how there is not much difference between Big Brother government (The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 8) and the Bully Religion (On The Origin of The Bully Religion).

What other religion could or would a bully choose?

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"Moonwalk" (the dance) explains current political culture (back to the future) ...

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Now the song explains it some more ...

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