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[More photos of the fireworks here]
Whatever may be going on in America, it is still the greatest country in the world. The Fourth of July fireworks by Macy's, over the Hudson River, were the most spectacular I've ever seen. Of course I wasn't there, but NBC programmed the full hour live last night.
But one thought that came to mind as I watched the event was that in order to appease the masses, totalitarian regimes produce spectacle: through huge processions, displays of might with military marches, and various mind-numbing techniques like action packed films and streams of empty television shows. It is a strategy to wipe out people's thinking processes by a constant barrage of noise.
Perhaps Macy's planned this spectacle to quieten (however temporarily) the agitated mood in American politics, to distract the people, and to let Obama proceed with his dismantling of the fundamentals of the society.
Guy Debord, a philosopher whose book The Society of the Spectacle we studied during my film/photography studies, although a Marxist, understood this society of the spectacle, although he attributes it to capitalist societies. But socialists are even better at programming spectacles, often ignoring their bankrupt coffers to temporarily appease the masses.
George Orwell, another socialist writer, described the omnipresent telescreens in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which were used both for surveillance and as propaganda monitors on the citizens of Oceania.
These days, spectacle is presented through brilliantly orchestrated images right into our living rooms, via our television screens, now wider, bigger and better through High Definition technology, with cheap, made in China screens made available even for the poor proletariat.
Here is what Wikipedia writes about Orwell's telescreens:
Telescreens, in addition to being surveillance devices, are also the equivalent of televisions (hence the name), regularly broadcasting false news reports about Oceania's military victories, economic production figures, spirited renditions of the national anthem to heighten patriotism, and Two Minutes Hate, which is a two-minute film of Emmanuel Goldstein's wishes for freedom of speech and press, which the citizens have been trained to disagree with.Home monitors as surveillance isn't so farfetched anymore. Already, it is easy to monitor the internet "history" of a computer, and to collect data on the internet user.
From World Net Daily:
The Barack Obama administration has announced plans to lift a government ban on tracking visitors to government websites, and potentially, collect their personal data through the use of "cookies" – an effort some suspect may already be in place on White House sites.From Politico:
[A]ccording to a campaign official and former Obama staffer, the campaign’s Chicago-based headquarters has built a centralized digital database of information about millions of potential Obama voters.More at Politico on the Obama Newspeak/Doublespeak:
"The Obama campaign has to confront the contradiction that the president talks about ‘timeless privacy values,’ and then, his campaign using contemporary digital tools to operate a stunning commercial surveillance system,” says Jeff Chester, executive director for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Digital Democracy. “The idea that the Obama campaign can create a political dossier on you that they can act upon without asking permission first is outrageous."