i sat out on my balcony last night after watching v for vendetta to watch the sun set and i overheard a partying crowd somewhere else in my building talking about 300.  their shallow perceptions of the movie initially validated a thought that i’d expressed earlier in the week to my friend DB that our society has been stupefied, anaesthetized, castrated-maybe, by the myriad distractions that our civilization unloads upon us on a tonne-by-tonne, microsecond-by-microsecond rate.  i was momenarily disheartened, and then i thought how much better am i – being a consumer of these cosmopolitan distractions and comic fables, culminating in my most cherished of characters, superman?  i was told once that “medium was the message,” but i wonder now, does that have to be the case?  can’t we wrest back something of meaning from the message and … er … “disregard” (editorially replacing a four-letter expletive) the medium?

let’s start with “300” and the spartan culture. the story of “300” is a great and noble one, in which the pride and defiance of noble king leonidas and his small contingent of perfectly photogenic, computer-enhanced spartan elites withstood the onslaught of thousands upon thousands of malignant, bizarre and perverse invaders (or so the story goes).  our contemporary society pretends to embrace the virtues of courage, valour, dignity and faith in one’s countrymen and way of life – values worth sacrificing for and worth dying for.

but what if hollywood had cast a dozen or so blonde-haired, square-jawed, steely-eyed german hot-bods for the presentation of this particular legend, rather than the super-buff assortment of canadians, brits and scots that ended up representing hellenic man 2,500 years ago?  (in my mind, the casting of this entire film was a little like having the chinese opera performing porgy and bess; italian gino method actors performing noh theatre; christina aguilera performing buddhist chants.) would the spartan prerogatives been so unequivocally noble?  would it not discomfort western viewers to see the symmetry between the presentation of these spartan warrior-elites and the aryan master race hitler-jugend?  an old friend pointed out the fascist threads that were woven into 300’s tale of tragic heroism and in spite of my best efforts to discourage him, he had me methodically dismantling the themes of this story and left me asking myself why this culture that would throw its own children and elders and infirm into the wilderness to allow only the strong to survive should be considered worthy of my admiration.  in the end, sparta grew to preeminence and subsumed the more intellectual and contemplative athenian culture… mastering and uniting the hellenic world, only to be overthrown by the romans.  the sun set on the greeks and social darwinism proved to history that the spartan (cast as fascist by a revisionist, future perspective) model of elitism was not scalable, and it could not survive the test of time.  but it also demonstrated the lamentable pattern that strength and force can overcome a superior ideology.

after the roman empire eroded into the holy roman empire, an age of monotheism entered the picture for over a thousand years.  the story of a single man who was also a god and who could perform miracles allowed most of the entire world to be controlled, manipulated, and brought the eviolution of human potential to a virtual stand-still.  it pains me to write these things, because my personal motivations, my individual mythology, my “religion”, is so closely tied to the story of a solitary outsider who is sent into a flawed world, where his shining example might inspire others to improve themselves in spite of their own sense of limitation.  it has always been my hope and belief that through faith, strength and will of convictions, an individual can change the world if even only one world – his or her own.  and now, i find myself struggling with the thought that no one – no single person can form the focus for anyone’s future, or anyone’s salvation, not even his or her own.  time seems to have tested the cliché that no one is an island – and our civilization’s development seems to reinforce this notion in every possible way. 

fast forward 1,500 years to the time of guy fawkes, a time when lords rule mankind – there are the have’s and the have not’s in a way that we who live here in canada can scarcely imagine.  entire populations with no conception of a middle-class, no conception of entrepreneurship or upward-mobility, cast as serfs or peasants kept in place through fear and social strata and hundreds of years of tradition, dependency and oppression.  there is a manga carta; there is a parliament;  there is a social will, but there is poverty, classism, and there are laws but there are those who live very comfortably outside of those laws (legal, moral and otherwise).  this is the type of world that could give rise to a man who could have the idea that the world doesn’t have to be a certain way and who could give voice to such an idea.  such a man could express a “vox populi” and have it resonate throughout the world.  he is an individual who can shatter fascism and elitism with a singular, purely selfless, utterly self-contradictory example of pure democracy – of anarchy.

four-hundred years later and that resonance has echoed and reverberated through tea parties, revolutions, civil rights movements, post-modernism, counter-cultures and protest rallies until it has become a clamoring din of dischordant, non-cooperative chaos.  anarchy through apathy.  obliviousness leading to obedience.  today, our society wages wars that it doesn’t want and can’t possibly win and can’t possibly be of benefit to any but the most infinitesimally small portion of our society.  our society idolizes the most depraved, most hedonistic and most self-indulgent of miscreants because they are pretty or funny or they have a personal trainer and we throw mountains of money at them to continue to be all of those things that we ourselves would never ever even imagine ourselves doing.  every single day, we wake from our beds and throw every shred of moral intuition, of global awareness, of social empathy, of responsibility to our future generations, of respect for our forebears, of decency to our neighbours, of honesty with our partners, of faith in our own selves, right off of our high-rise balconies and we disregard every impulse that tells us that “there is something terribly wrong with this country.”

why don’t we get the message?  leonidas, superman, V… what are all of these stories for if not to move us to question just why we are doing what we do?  if not to make us consider alternatives to the way that things are?  is it something so simple as a conspiratorial scheme by the mass-media/industrial-military powers-that-be to cathartically expunge any motivation to change the world by showing us in a two-hour movie or a twelve-part mini-series that our heroes can change things, so we won’t bother to?  where are the Abraham Lincolns, the Mahatma Ghandis, the JFKs, the Martin Luther King Jr.s of our milennium?  where are the people who can make us believe that the world should and could be a better place and that we should and could all benefit (or dare i say “profit”) from such endeavours?  what are they waiting for?  what if they are you and me?  what are you waiting for?  what am i waiting for?

i think from now on, i’ll start to watch the sunset from inside my apartment – my consciousness will remain far better anaesthetized that way.  but until i do… i think i am starting to recognize that new dream that i was talking about a month or so ago starting to take shape

- g

song of the day for relenting control over your existence: given up, linkin park