A very insightful analysis of Mr. Robot by J. F. Sebastian of the Arke Soul blog. Well worth a read.
Repression and Revolution: The Ironic Hero in Mr. Robot
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Arcadian Gates by T.A. Wardrope: Dystopia on the Fringe
By Brian Whitney
Source: Disinfo
T.A. Wardrope‘s new novel, Arcadian Gates, tells the story of how ten years ago, the entire nation was struck by a chemical weapon which destroyed most people’s memories. Akiry, a young woman who makes her way smuggling amongst the lower caste of the rebuilt country, is haunted by dreams of a daughter she otherwise does not remember. As civil war erupts in the city around her, she takes the last chance she has to find the truth about her daughter and her past.
We talked to author and Disinfo contributor T.A. Wardrope about his new book.
T.A., Thanks for talking to me. Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired Arcadian Gates and what your process was writing it?
The book began as a short story in a writing workshop. I had fun with it and so I just kept building it forwards and backwards for quite a few years. There was a substantial amount of world building that was a byproduct of writing Akiry’s story. Next thing I knew I had a book with a glossary and a map on the inside cover.
The story itself evolved as I tried to understand Akiry’s relationship to the world around her. I wanted a dystopia that was drawn from the lore and theories that Disinfo readers would recognize. Fringe stuff that you might hear about on Darkness Radio or Art Bell’s classic Coast to Coast AM. There’s kind of a unified conspiracy theory under the whole thing. A substantial amount of Terence McKenna and William Burroughs influence too. I joke that it is my “Streets of Fire”; one book that has everything I enjoy about science-fiction in the mix.
In your book almost an entire nation loses its memory due to a chemical weapon. Memory is always a fight, even in the best of times, it can be tricky and elusive, can you touch on how the loss of a nation’s memory changes everything?
Oh, I think we can just look around. I think that part of the book comes from a place of satire or critique. Americans, in particular, are very good at forgetting the lessons of the not-so-distant past. This bizarre hyper news cycle is a particularly troublesome symptom of this. By making something so very important for a few days, nothing becomes important at all. It’s very Orwellian.
But within the Administrated Republic, the weapon’s effect allows for a constantly shifting narrative of history. It’s the least subtle method of the winner defining history. Practically speaking, families are separated, identities destroyed, and personal empowerment disintegrated. It’s very hard for people to trust who they are if they don’t really know their past. Plus the shared experience allows for national community and a national wound that is easy to use as needed. Again, we can look at our recent history for evidence of that. That Administrated Republic just takes all of this to the next level of control. They had their reasons, though. I wanted them to be much more authentic than your standard dystopic power state. I had as much writing their side of things as I did the roughnecks in Akiry’s world.
You seem to have the chops of someone who has long been a student of the Sci-fi masters. What writer influenced you along your path?
Oh, thank you. There’s a solid foundation of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury and David Drake. But the actual authors who had a direct influence on how I thought about the world of Arcadian Gates would be people like Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, Samuel Delaney, J.G. Ballard, China Mieville, Moebius, Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson and Margaret Atwood. My program advisor at Hamline, Lawrence Sutin, is a PKD scholar so his input was especially helpful. I am a student of cinema too, so there’s plenty of influence from that realm. Some folks have asked me to write a screenplay version, but the book seems basically unfilmmable to me. Movies about underdog drug dealers don’t get the kind of budgets it would need to get made correctly.
Are there lessons to be learned from the Dystopian world that we see in Arcadian Gates?
I see it as satire in the tradition of 1984, Brave New World or We, so the lessons available in the story are just as evident in the world around us now. I think that one reason dystopia was so popular with young readers is that the world around them is a dystopia in many ways and fiction just distills that into a less confusing form. Arcadian Gates isn’t a YA book, by any means, but every part of it is drawn from history or historical theory. I didn’t write it for a particular moral, though, I wanted to keep it focused on how one woman navigates this world and how her actions reverberate throughout that world. I suppose the lesson is that history is a collision of millions of stories driven by many more decisions and desires. Akiry’s journey is one of those stories.
What are you up to next?
I am working on a pair of books drawn from the Sirius Business blog that runs here on Disinfo. One of those will actually be in the same continuity of Arcadian Gates. There will be a sequel to Arcadian Gates, as Akiry is just getting started. In between the books there are some short stories written that are both in continuity and some not at all related. Those could wind up in a collection at some point. Finally, I’m doing some more world building for a project that is firmly grounded in the horror side of things. Sometimes I wonder if I love the development stuff too much, even the shorts have considerable background to them.
More info on all of this stuff will pop up on social media. I’ve got more things planned in support of Arcadian Gates, too. Readings and maybe some convention visits. Being an indie author requires a having a finely honed sense of the balance between creative work and promotional work. I’ve still got a lot to learn in both of those aspects, I think. I’ll be learning advanced time engineering. Whiskey, too. Plenty of whiskey.
The Eurasian Big Bang
How China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington
By Pepe Escobar
Source: TomDispatch.com
The several hundred Republicans who have thrown their hats into the ring for the 2016 presidential race and the war hawks in Congress (mainly but hardly only Republicans) have already been in full howl about the Vienna nuclear deal with Iran. Jeb Bush took about two seconds to label it “appeasement,” instantly summoning up the image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain giving in to Hitler before World War II; former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee spared no metaphor in labeling the agreement “a deal that empowers an evil Iranian regime to carry out its threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ and bring ‘death to America’”; Senator Lindsey Graham called it a “possible death sentence for Israel”; this year’s leading billionaire candidate, Donald Trump, summed up his opinion of the deal in one you’re-fired-style word, “ridiculous”; Senator John McCain described Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the deal, as “delusional”; and Senator… I mean, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mockingly turned Chamberlain’s infamous “peace in our time” into “peace at any price,” dismissed the deal as a catastrophe filled with “absurdities,” and then appeared on every American media venue imaginable to denounce it. And that’s just to start down the usual list of suspects. Even Senator Rand Paul swore he would vote against the agreement (though his father called it “to the benefit of world peace”), while Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was typical of Republican presidential candidates in swearing that he would personally scuttle the deal on his first day in the Oval Office.
This, in short, is the mad version of international policy that makes Washington a claustrophobic echo chamber. After all, the choice isn’t actually between Iran having no nuclear “breakout” capacity or regaining that capacity 15 years from now (as the present deal seems to offer); the choice is between an agreement for 15 verifiably non-weaponized years and a guarantee of nothing whatsoever. And if you’ve just checked off that nothing-whatsoever column, the alternative is to somehow crush the Iranians, to force them into submission. It is, in other words, some version of war. Two questions on that: How successful has war in the Greater Middle East been as an American policy weapon these last 13 years? And what makes anyone think that, when even Dick Cheney and crew couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger on Iran, Jeb B. or any of the other candidates will be likely to do so in an ISIS-enriched world in 2017?
When you’ve satisfied yourself on those two questions, consider the seldom-discussed larger context within which twenty-first-century nuclear politics has taken place. In these last years, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Russians, and the Americans, to name just four nuclear powers, have either been expanding or “modernizing” their nuclear stockpiles in significant ways. And god knows what the Israelis were doing with their super-secret, never officially acknowledged, but potentially civilization-busting atomic arsenal of 80 or more weapons, while the North Koreans were turning themselves into a nuclear mini-power. Nonetheless, the focus of nuclear attention and the question of “disarmament” has remained almost exclusively on a country that had no such weapons, has officially disavowed them, and at this point, at least, doesn’t even have a weapons program. And note that no one who is anyone in Washington considers any of this the least bit strange.
In this context, that irrepressible TomDispatch regular Pepe Escobar offers another kind of lens-widening exercise when it comes to the Iranian deal. He focuses on a subject that Washington has yet to fully absorb: changing relations in Eurasia. Few here have noticed, but while the Vienna deal was being negotiated, Russia and China, countries the Pentagon has just officially labeled as “threats,” have been moving mountains (quite literally in some cases) to integrate ever larger parts of that crucial land mass, that “world island,” into a vast economic zone that, if all goes as they wish, will be beyond Washington’s power and control. This is a remarkable development that, despite the coming two months of sound and fury about Iran, won’t be at the top of any news report, which is why you need a website like TomDispatch to keep up with the times. Tom
The Eurasian Big Bang
How China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington
By Pepe Escobar
Let’s start with the geopolitical Big Bang you know nothing about, the one that occurred just two weeks ago. Here are its results: from now on, any possible future attack on Iran threatened by the Pentagon (in conjunction with NATO) would essentially be an assault on the planning of an interlocking set of organizations — the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), the AIIB (the new Chinese-founded Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), and the NDB (the BRICS’ New Development Bank) — whose acronyms you’re unlikely to recognize either. Still, they represent an emerging new order in Eurasia.
Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad, and New Delhi have been actively establishing interlocking security guarantees. They have been simultaneously calling the Atlanticist bluff when it comes to the endless drumbeat of attention given to the flimsy meme of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” And a few days before the Vienna nuclear negotiations finally culminated in an agreement, all of this came together at a twin BRICS/SCO summit in Ufa, Russia — a place you’ve undoubtedly never heard of and a meeting that got next to no attention in the U.S. And yet sooner or later, these developments will ensure that the War Party in Washington and assorted neocons (as well as neoliberalcons) already breathing hard over the Iran deal will sweat bullets as their narratives about how the world works crumble.
The Eurasian Silk Road
With the Vienna deal, whose interminable build-up I had the dubious pleasure of following closely, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and his diplomatic team have pulled the near-impossible out of an extremely crumpled magician’s hat: an agreement that might actually end sanctions against their country from an asymmetric, largely manufactured conflict.
Think of that meeting in Ufa, the capital of Russia’s Bashkortostan, as a preamble to the long-delayed agreement in Vienna. It caught the new dynamics of the Eurasian continent and signaled the future geopolitical Big Bangness of it all. At Ufa, from July 8th to 10th, the 7th BRICS summit and the 15th Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit overlapped just as a possible Vienna deal was devouring one deadline after another.
Consider it a diplomatic masterstroke of Vladmir Putin’s Russia to have merged those two summits with an informal meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Call it a soft power declaration of war against Washington’s imperial logic, one that would highlight the breadth and depth of an evolving Sino-Russian strategic partnership. Putting all those heads of state attending each of the meetings under one roof, Moscow offered a vision of an emerging, coordinated geopolitical structure anchored in Eurasian integration. Thus, the importance of Iran: no matter what happens post-Vienna, Iran will be a vital hub/node/crossroads in Eurasia for this new structure.
If you read the declaration that came out of the BRICS summit, one detail should strike you: the austerity-ridden European Union (EU) is barely mentioned. And that’s not an oversight. From the point of view of the leaders of key BRICS nations, they are offering a new approach to Eurasia, the very opposite of the language of sanctions.
Here are just a few examples of the dizzying activity that took place at Ufa, all of it ignored by the American mainstream media. In their meetings, President Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi worked in a practical way to advance what is essentially a Chinese vision of a future Eurasia knit together by a series of interlocking “new Silk Roads.” Modi approved more Chinese investment in his country, while Xi and Modi together pledged to work to solve the joint border issues that have dogged their countries and, in at least one case, led to war.
The NDB, the BRICS’ response to the World Bank, was officially launched with $50 billion in start-up capital. Focused on funding major infrastructure projects in the BRICS nations, it is capable of accumulating as much as $400 billion in capital, according to its president, Kundapur Vaman Kamath. Later, it plans to focus on funding such ventures in other developing nations across the Global South — all in their own currencies, which means bypassing the U.S. dollar. Given its membership, the NDB’s money will clearly be closely linked to the new Silk Roads. As Brazilian Development Bank President Luciano Coutinhostressed, in the near future it may also assist European non-EU member states like Serbia and Macedonia. Think of this as the NDB’s attempt to break a Brussels monopoly on Greater Europe. Kamath even advanced the possibility of someday aidingin the reconstruction of Syria.
You won’t be surprised to learn that both the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the NDB are headquartered in China and will work to complement each other’s efforts. At the same time, Russia’s foreign investment arm, the Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), signed a memorandum of understanding with funds from other BRICS countries and so launched an informal investment consortium in which China’s Silk Road Fund and India’s Infrastructure Development Finance Company will be key partners.
Full Spectrum Transportation Dominance
On the ground level, this should be thought of as part of the New Great Game in Eurasia. Its flip side is the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Pacific and the Atlantic version of the same, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, both of which Washington is trying to advance to maintain U.S. global economic dominance. The question these conflicting plans raise is how to integrate trade and commerce across that vast region. From the Chinese and Russian perspectives, Eurasia is to be integrated via a complex network of superhighways, high-speed rail lines, ports, airports, pipelines, and fiber optic cables. By land, sea, and air, the resulting New Silk Roads are meant to create an economic version of the Pentagon’s doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” — a vision that already has Chinese corporate executives crisscrossing Eurasia sealing infrastructure deals.
For Beijing — back to a 7% growth rate in the second quarter of 2015 despite a recent near-panic on the country’s stock markets — it makes perfect economic sense: as labor costs rise, production will be relocated from the country’s Eastern seaboard to its cheaper Western reaches, while the natural outlets for the production of just about everything will be those parallel and interlocking “belts” of the new Silk Roads.
Meanwhile, Russia is pushing to modernize and diversify its energy-exploitation-dependent economy. Among other things, its leaders hope that the mix of those developing Silk Roads and the tying together of the Eurasian Economic Union — Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan — will translate into myriad transportation and construction projects for which the country’s industrial and engineering know-how will prove crucial.
As the EEU has begun establishing free trade zones with India, Iran, Vietnam, Egypt, and Latin America’s Mercosur bloc (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela), the initial stages of this integration process already reach beyond Eurasia. Meanwhile, the SCO, which began as little more than a security forum, is expanding and moving into the field of economic cooperation. Its countries, especially four Central Asian “stans” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) will rely ever more on the Chinese-driven Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the NDB. At Ufa, India and Pakistan finalized an upgrading process in which they have moved from observers to members of the SCO. This makes it an alternative G8.
In the meantime, when it comes to embattled Afghanistan, the BRICS nations and the SCO have now called upon “the armed opposition to disarm, accept the Constitution of Afghanistan, and cut ties with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations.” Translation: within the framework of Afghan national unity, the organization would accept the Taliban as part of a future government. Their hopes, with the integration of the region in mind, would be for a future stable Afghanistan able to absorb more Chinese, Russian, Indian, and Iranian investment, and the construction — finally! — of a long-planned, $10 billion, 1,420-kilometer-long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline that would benefit those energy-hungry new SCO members, Pakistan and India. (They would each receive 42% of the gas, the remaining 16% going to Afghanistan.)
Central Asia is, at the moment, geographic ground zero for the convergence of the economic urges of China, Russia, and India. It was no happenstance that, on his way to Ufa, Prime Minister Modi stopped off in Central Asia. Like the Chinese leadership in Beijing, Moscow looks forward (as a recent document puts it) to the “interpenetration and integration of the EEU and the Silk Road Economic Belt” into a “Greater Eurasia” and a “steady, developing, safe common neighborhood” for both Russia and China.
And don’t forget Iran. In early 2016, once economic sanctions are fully lifted, it is expected to join the SCO, turning it into a G9. As its foreign minister, Javad Zarif, made clear recently to Russia’s Channel 1 television, Tehran considers the two countries strategic partners. “Russia,” he said, “has been the most important participant in Iran’s nuclear program and it will continue under the current agreement to be Iran’s major nuclear partner.” The same will, he added, be true when it comes to “oil and gas cooperation,” given the shared interest of those two energy-rich nations in “maintaining stability in global market prices.”
Got Corridor, Will Travel
Across Eurasia, BRICS nations are moving on integration projects. A developing Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor is a typical example. It is now being reconfigured as a multilane highway between India and China. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia are developing a transportation corridor from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the Caspian Sea and the Volga River. Azerbaijan will be connected to the Caspian part of this corridor, while India is planning to use Iran’s southern ports to improve its access to Russia and Central Asia. Now, add in a maritime corridor that will stretch from the Indian city of Mumbai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and then on to the southern Russian city of Astrakhan. And this just scratches the surface of the planning underway.
Years ago, Vladimir Putin suggested that there could be a “Greater Europe” stretching from Lisbon, Portugal, on the Atlantic to the Russian city of Vladivostok on the Pacific. The EU, under Washington’s thumb, ignored him. Then the Chinese started dreaming about and planning new Silk Roads that would, in reverse Marco Polo fashion, extend from Shanghai to Venice (and then on to Berlin).
Thanks to a set of cross-pollinating political institutions, investment funds, development banks, financial systems, and infrastructure projects that, to date, remain largely under Washington’s radar, a free-trade Eurasian heartland is being born. It will someday link China and Russia to Europe, Southwest Asia, and even Africa. It promises to be an astounding development. Keep your eyes, if you can, on the accumulating facts on the ground, even if they are rarely covered in the American media. They represent the New Great — emphasis on that word — Game in Eurasia.
Location, Location, Location
Tehran is now deeply invested in strengthening its connections to this new Eurasia and the man to watch on this score is Ali Akbar Velayati. He is the head of Iran’s Center for Strategic Research and senior foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Velayati stresses that security in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the Caucasus hinges on the further enhancement of a Beijing-Moscow-Tehran triple entente.
As he knows, geo-strategically Iran is all about location, location, location. That country offers the best access to open seas in the region apart from Russia and is the only obvious east-west/north-south crossroads for trade from the Central Asian “stans.” Little wonder then that Iran will soon be an SCO member, even as its “partnership” with Russia is certain to evolve. Its energy resources are already crucial to and considered a matter of national security for China and, in the thinking of that country’s leadership, Iran also fulfills a key role as a hub in those Silk Roads they are planning.
That growing web of literal roads, rail lines, and energy pipelines, asTomDispatch has previously reported, represents Beijing’s response to the Obama administration’s announced “pivot to Asia” and the U.S. Navy’s urge to meddle in the South China Sea. Beijing is choosing to project power via a vast set of infrastructure projects, especially high-speed rail lines that will reach from its eastern seaboard deep into Eurasia. In this fashion, the Chinese-built railway from Urumqi in Xinjiang Province to Almaty in Kazakhstan will undoubtedly someday be extended to Iran and traverse that country on its way to the Persian Gulf.
A New World for Pentagon Planners
At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month, Vladimir Putin told PBS’s Charlie Rose that Moscow and Beijing had always wanted a genuine partnership with the United States, but were spurned by Washington. Hats off, then, to the “leadership” of the Obama administration. Somehow, it has managed to bring together two former geopolitical rivals, while solidifying their pan-Eurasian grand strategy.
Even the recent deal with Iran in Vienna is unlikely — especially given the war hawks in Congress — to truly end Washington’s 36-year-long Great Wall of Mistrust with Iran. Instead, the odds are that Iran, freed from sanctions, will indeed be absorbed into the Sino-Russian project to integrate Eurasia, which leads us to the spectacle of Washington’s warriors, unable to act effectively, yet screaming like banshees.
NATO’s supreme commander Dr. Strangelove, sorry, American General Philip Breedlove, insists that the West must create a rapid-reaction force — online — to counteract Russia’s “false narratives.” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter claims to be seriously considering unilaterally redeploying nuclear-capable missiles in Europe. The nominee to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Commandant Joseph Dunford, recently directly labeled Russia America’s true “existential threat”; Air Force General Paul Selva, nominated to be the new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, seconded that assessment, using the same phrase and putting Russia, China and Iran, in that order, as more threatening than the Islamic State (ISIS). In the meantime, Republican presidential candidates and a bevy of congressional war hawks simply shout and fume when it comes to both the Iranian deal and the Russians.
In response to the Ukrainian situation and the “threat” of a resurgent Russia (behind which stands a resurgent China), a Washington-centric militarization of Europe is proceeding apace. NATO is now reportedly obsessed with what’s being called “strategy rethink” — as in drawing up detailed futuristic war scenarios on European soil. As economist Michael Hudson has pointed out, even financial politics are becoming militarized and linked to NATO’s new Cold War 2.0.
In its latest National Military Strategy, the Pentagon suggests that the risk of an American war with another nation (as opposed to terror outfits), while low, is “growing” and identifies four nations as “threats”: North Korea, a case apart, and predictably the three nations that form the new Eurasian core: Russia, China, and Iran. They are depicted in the document as “revisionist states,” openly defying what the Pentagon identifies as “international security and stability”; that is, the distinctly un-level playing field created by globalized, exclusionary, turbo-charged casino capitalism and Washington’s brand of militarism.
The Pentagon, of course, does not do diplomacy. Seemingly unaware of the Vienna negotiations, it continued to accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons. And that “military option” against Iran is never off the table.
So consider it the Mother of All Blockbusters to watch how the Pentagon and the war hawks in Congress will react to the post-Vienna and — though it was barely noticed in Washington — the post-Ufa environment, especially under a new White House tenant in 2017.
It will be a spectacle. Count on it. Will the next version of Washington try to make it up to “lost” Russia or send in the troops? Will it contain China or the “caliphate” of ISIS? Will it work with Iran to fight ISIS or spurn it? Will it truly pivot to Asia for good and ditch the Middle East or vice-versa? Or might it try to contain Russia, China, and Iran simultaneously or find some way to play them against each other?
In the end, whatever Washington may do, it will certainly reflect a fear of the increasing strategic depth Russia and China are developing economically, a reality now becoming visible across Eurasia. At Ufa, Putin told Xi on the record: “Combining efforts, no doubt we [Russia and China] will overcome all the problems before us.”
Read “efforts” as new Silk Roads, that Eurasian Economic Union, the growing BRICS block, the expanding Shanghai Cooperation Organization, those China-based banks, and all the rest of what adds up to the beginning of a new integration of significant parts of the Eurasian land mass. As for Washington, fly like an eagle? Try instead: scream like a banshee.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for RTand Sputnik, and a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Empire of Chaos. Follow him on Facebook by clicking here.
Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World
By Eric Wargo
Source: The Nightshirt
You don’t have to be a hardheaded materialist skeptic or an atheist to be troubled by the idea of synchronicity. The fundamental mystery—or really, outrage—of synchronicities is they seem arranged, stage managed, in a way that is impossible without imagining an active higher intelligence taking interest in guiding us and arranging the events of the wider world to produce unmistakeably uncanny outcomes. Even if we believe in God, many people aren’t comfortable living in a world of miracles and signs.
This was the problem faced by Philip K. Dick, whose Christianity couldn’t countenance fully divine meddling in his psyche and life. The story had to be more complex and also more rational. Hence, he tended to think that the synchronicities he experienced in 1974 reflected his own enlarged self haunting him from an orthogonal dimension of time, perpendicular to the four spacetime dimensions we ordinarily experience.
My last post sparked an interesting discussion in the comments about the apparent role of coincidence in synchronicities if they are really, as I argued, cases of misrecognized precognition or premonition. For instance, even if Jung’s famous scarab arriving at the window of his office was a purely random event that his patient had dreamed about the night before, there is still a coincidental element to it: Why a scarab, which has an archetypal meaning connected to the patient’s therapeutic situation, as opposed to some other insect?
Here’s where I think we really need to take seriously the revised picture of time that Dick grappled with through his 8-year frenetic journaling in his Exegesis: What is the connection between the archetypal world and the multidimensional nature of time? In a Eureka moment (not unlike the hundreds recorded by the manic Dick), I think I figured it out: Archetypes are an illusory effect produced by our failure to recognize self-confirmatory actions (feedback loops) made possible by the looping nature of time. Temporal feedback loops amplify the personal significance of symbolic formations, which (because we fail to recognize psi) appear as somehow objective or external to us.
For reasons I discussed in my Psi of Regret post, most information from the future should be negated by one’s own and others’ willed actions; but in a minority of cases, a self-confirming feedback effect could arise which would actually intensify or amplify the significance of the stimulating event in the future. This would happen specifically when that event involves a minor random coincidence (which are myriad) and/or fulfills some kind of unconscious thought or desire we had harbored.
Through this time-loop mechanism, minor coincidences, when they resonate with our own personal meanings and priorities, can be the nuclei of major significant moments (synchronicities) as well as meta-symbols (archetypes). Small coincidences, in other words, may be like grains of sand around which time’s oyster builds Platonic-Jungian pearls.
Bootstrapping Ourselves Toward Meaning
The idea of information from the future reaching us in the present should be unproblematic to parapsychologists and Forteans, yet we still tend to think of it somehow as a very special case. But if we grant the experimental results of Daryl Bem and Dean Radin and the observations of J.W. Dunne and others, then information must indeed be constantly rippling backwards in the time stream; this would have to produce all the paradoxical effects familiar from time travel stories in science fiction: doubling or multiplication or intensification of information (not unlike what happens in the interesting 2004 sci-fi film Primer), as well as self-cancelling effects such as I discussed in the context of Dune Messiah, and perhaps even wholesale self-negation (the famous grandfather paradox). If I am right about the future not being etched in stone (or glass, as in the Minkowski glass football)—that is, as subject to free will—then precognitive material cannot be about what is definitely going to happen but about what is probabilistic, and much of that information will be rendered inaccurate by our willed actions, and thus we would have no way of knowing it (i.e., because it didn’t come true or wasn’t close enough to how events unfolded to be discernible). It wouldn’t even be information, just noise.
However, in special circumstances, for instance when there is a slight perceived (and random) coincidence, such as between a specific genus of insect and the theme of therapeutic rebirth, it could instead have the effect of entraining our actions to the signal, in turn amplifying the felt significance of the signal into the past, generating a precognitive or premonitory experience which in turn feeds forward to intensify the uncanniness of the stimulating event, in turn boosting the signal into the past, and so on … The result would be an informatic/emotional time-loop feedback effect centered on what emerges as a truly uncanny, meaningful, and even decisive coincidence (the ’synchronicity’) that could even alter the course of a person’s life in a significant fashion going forward.
Within Jung’s larger and less radical paradigm of “individuation,” the unconscious is ever seeking out opportunities to progress and develop and change toward wholeness, and its capitalization on significant coincidences provides a way for the individual to bootstrap him/herself toward integration. The unconscious has no sense of time, so it doesn’t recognize this operation of atemporal time-looping—that is, the artificiality of the apparent coincidence (i.e., the fact that the person him/herself created the apparent coincidence through his/her actions and attributed it to objective external reality). The tendency of ‘synchronistic’ events to have a recursive, fractal, or self-similar quality, in some way being ‘about’ the whole notion of synchronicity or coincidence, reflects the tendency of the coincidence-receptive person to be attuned to coincidences in the first place. It is, quite literally, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Jung and Plato Must Die (that Psi May Live)
Thus the kinds of events that spark an emotional ripple into the past will be ones that support the ‘prophetic enjoyment’ I mentioned in the last post: Synchronicities are self-confirming effects produced by misrecognized precognition within an overall attitude of receptivity to mystery, magic, and meaningful coincidence. Belief in synchronicity produces synchronicity, which further reinforces the belief. In a larger sense, this mechanism may underlie the “law of attraction” in all its forms. It really is just like the “strange attractor” in Chaos Theory (and which is also identical to what Lacan and Žižek call the “symptom”).
What this suggests—and this is my Eureka—is that “archetypes” as such—as well as the Platonic world of “forms” that Dick suggested was the “fifth dimension” (printing out archetypes on the paper of history as on an IBM Selectric typewriter)—are really an illusory or anamorphic effect produced by not seeing or recognizing these self-confirmatory time loops, these informational/emotional eddies in the spacetime continuum, and failing to see our own role in feeding them through our perceptions and actions. We ourselves make meaning, including the intensified meaningful nuclei in the collective unconscious that so fascinated Jung and that formed the centerpiece of Platonic metaphysics.
At times, Dick came close to saying this: He suggested that synchronicities occur because we in the future are time traveling, cultivating our own development; that our own enlarged consciousess has the power to “stage manage” not because it is a white-bearded deity sitting up in a cloud reaching down and playing with us like chess pieces, but because of the nature of time itself. Coincidences may be the product of time tampering, our own time tampering in the future.
Where I’m departing from this notion is in emphasizing misrecognition and the role of the unconscious: Instead of our future (conscious) selves meddling in the past, our unconscious minds are constantly receiving and reacting to future information without knowing it comes from the future; through our actions, we thus sometimes confirm this information, particularly when it resonates with our priorities and unconscious beliefs about meaning or our own significance in the bigger cosmic picture. That sort of information will act as an ‘attractor’ in the Chaos Theory sense and give rise to the illusion of BIG coincidences and the meta-symbols that are necessary (in Jungian thinking) to make sense of them.
We live in a world that curves and bifurcates and loops back on itself, and these loopings and crossings and doublings and cancellations exert a shaping force on our lives and larger events via what we call psi, but we (a) think linearly and do not believe in time travel, (b) generally disbelieve in psi, and (c) fail to include the knower in the known even when we do believe in those possibilities. Consciously being open to coincidence and ‘larger meaning’ but failing to recognize our own role in creating significant moments, we inevitably imagine a Higher Knower who recognizes and certifies these eternal forms or archetypes, stage-managing these amazing occurrences as signals or signposts for us. But this is a mistake.
I’m suggesting we kill both Jung and Plato here in one stroke … maybe even God. Not only synchronicities but also archetypes and Ideal Forms are illusions caused by our failure to recognize the truly science-fictional way that informational-emotional time loops may intensify the potency of confluent events and symbols in our lives, and the role we ourselves play in the process.
We live in a science-fictional universe. To move forward, we need to recognize that fact.
Founder Of Skeptic’s Society Rattled After Witnessing A Paranormal Event (Michael Shermer)
By Joe Martino
Source: Collective Evolution
Michael Shermer is a well respected man amongst his community. He is the founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, a regular contributor to Time.com, and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is very skeptical and scientific by nature and until now had never had a supernatural or paranormal experience.
“I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.” Michael Shermer
A Shift In Perspective
In his 2006 TED talk, we see a very skeptical and almost condescending Shermer. Nonetheless his talk is certainly an interesting one and well worth watching. Although much of the time he pokes fun at “odd” theories, he makes some good points about how we choose to see and hear things and form beliefs as a result.
On an observational level it is still interesting to hear someone, who clearly has a bias towards certain subjects, call out others who have bias’ in an attempt to explain why we believe weird things. For example, he pokes fun at something like UFO’s and aliens stating “it’s very likely they are not real.” He does this in a manner that some skeptics do where they use words to divert from the evidence and call upon the more ridiculous claims in an attempt to debunk the entire phenomenon. Perhaps he hasn’t seen the abundant evidence that exists including declassified government documents on the subject?
Either way the point here is simply that from a standpoint of discovery, sticking true to the scientific method is important in all cases when we’re looking for external validation of an idea. Leaving bias or methodology to prove a point by finding the most obscene examples of a theory out of the equation is the best bet. Being skeptical is OK, but being a skeptic in true form does not mean being closed minded, it simply means being open to questioning and exploring new ideas without simply believing it.
From his talk I can see why so many skeptics are not humble in their beliefs and often feel superior to others who don’t share the same beliefs. It almost seems to be ‘skeptic culture.’ But given his latest experience, perhaps Michael will have an entirely different view towards some of the claims others have made during his career?
His Recent Supernatural Experience
Here’s his story as he wrote in an article entitled Infrequencies. It was also published in Scientific American.
“The event took place on June 25, 2014. On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany. She had been raised by her mom; her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16. In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged and several precious heirlooms lost, including her grandfather’s binoculars. His 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set out to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried “percussive maintenance,” said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.
Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home, and in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings. Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don’t have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.
At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven’t seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can’t be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather’s transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I’m not alone.”
Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.
Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter’s radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.”
How We Can Relate To Others
Given Michael can say he now has first hand experience of something supernatural that he cannot explain or simply set aside with some “logical” explanation, it’s quite possible he can now better relate to people who truly deeply and completely believe something unexplainable that they have experienced. Even in his latest 2010 TED talk, Michael still felt that believing in alien abductions was absurd, but what about those who claim to have experienced it? What would they say to that? Is it fair to say all who have claimed it are simply crazy?
It’s sometimes very easy for us to discredit, set aside or be skeptical of experiences we didn’t have yet others had. It’s almost become “cool” and “intelligent” to simply come up with a logical explanation even when it doesn’t truly explain what happened. Nonetheless, it’s OK to be skeptical, we simply need to keep our ego in check at the same time and keep an open mind to the fact that putting a logical explanation on something doesn’t prove it false or incorrect. When we do this we simply close off a lot of possibility vs truly exploring it.
I think it’s powerful that Michael has had this experience and I also feel it’s a timely one. I believe we are in the midst of something huge here on earth. I feel we are experiencing a shift in global consciousness that will transform the way we view many facets of our lives. Although this view has been somewhat perverted and misunderstood by belief systems and mismanaged movements (new-age), I feel it has a lot of validity and this can be seen both scientifically and through direct experience. I talk about this in my TEDx talk.
Interestingly, Shermer ended his piece off with something very important.
“The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.”
Although it didn’t come with some backlash already form a commenter
“Michael,
I was embarrassed to read your concluding paragraph. What are we to keep an open mind about? That Jennifer’s dead grandfather maybe fixed the radio? Did he even know how to fix radios? Wouldn’t there be an easier way for the dead to communicate with the living? It would be mildly interesting to have an electronics expert determine exactly what is wrong with the radio.
Regards,
–Mark”
Embarrassed? Because suddenly one of the biggest skeptics in the world is open to the possibility that there is more to life than just what we can measure?
Sources:
Onion Dispatches from Ferguson
Source: The Onion
Nation Doesn’t Know If It Can Take Another Bullshit Speech About Healing
In the wake of a grand jury’s divisive decision not to charge Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, a weary American populace told reporters Tuesday that they are not sure if they can take another bullshit speech about healing. “If I have to watch some politician, law enforcement official, or pretty much anyone regurgitate the same meaningless platitudes about setting aside our differences and coming together as a nation, I might just lose it,” said Atlanta resident Samantha Hubbard, echoing the sentiment of hundreds of millions of Americans who are uncertain if they can stomach even a single empty call for respect and civility. “I honestly don’t know if I’m physically capable of listening to another community leader recite the same unbearable garbage about how it’s time for an open and honest dialogue. I swear to God, if I hear even one goddamn person assert there’s more that unites us than divides us, I will immediately blow my brains out.” At press time, the nation was particularly apprehensive at the prospect of a bullshit speech that declared words were not enough.
Ferguson Decision Reaffirms Right Of Police To Use Deadly Force When They Feel Sufficiently Inclined
Following a legal precedent established over the course of decades, the St. Louis County grand jury decision Monday to not indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of an unarmed teen reportedly reaffirmed the right of police to use deadly force whenever they feel sufficiently inclined. “The outcome of this grand jury investigation further supports a police officer’s right to shoot to kill if, and only if, he feels absolutely willing to do so and it suits his purposes,” said Georgetown law professor Adrienne Hoffman, adding that reasonable suspicion to use lethal force is 100 percent optional when an officer fires on a suspect, regardless of circumstances. “This decision makes it completely clear that, when confronted in the line of duty, police are legally justified in using extreme force against a suspect whenever they need to or just feel like it.” Hoffman added that the decision further asserts an officer’s right to claim self-defense against anyone within range of his weapon.
Heavy Police Presence In Ferguson To Ensure Residents Adequately Provoked
FERGUSON, MO—Ahead of a grand jury’s decision over whether to indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, police in the city of Ferguson have reportedly heavily increased their presence this week to ensure residents are adequately provoked. “We’ve deployed additional officers throughout Ferguson in order to make absolutely certain that residents feel sufficiently harassed and intimidated,” said St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar, assuring locals that officers in full riot gear will be on hand to inflame members of the community for as long as is necessary. “It’s absolutely essential that the people of Ferguson have full confidence that law enforcement is committed to antagonizing them every step of the way.” At press time, the Missouri National Guard was on standby with tanks and urban assault vehicles in case Ferguson residents required additional incitement.
Why Independent 9/11 Research and Education Still Matters
Editor’s note: This is a revised article from last year followed by recent podcasts and videos on the topic.
One of the ways corrupt people and institutions retain power is by discouraging criticism and discussions that could lead to organized opposition. A classic tactic is to vilify targets as unpatriotic, disloyal, traitorous, heretical, dangerous, crazy, etc. Think about what happened to critics of capitalism during the peak of the cold-war hysteria. George Orwell’s 1984 depicted how governments could also manipulate language, history, media and other information in order to diminish critical thought (which leads to critical speech and organizing) and to control thought. The creation of a Big Brother-style police/surveillance state is another way to create a climate of fear and foster a culture which discourages the sharing of knowledge about certain topics and prevents people from taking action.
This should be kept in mind when discussing 9/11, because those who still have complete faith in government and corporate media (an increasingly shrinking number), have been conditioned to ignore, deny or dismiss any information that would lead them to question the official story. The most common knee-jerk reaction is to defend the official story by labeling all alternative narratives “conspiracy theory”. Though this argument is not as convincing today, when political scandals and crimes are almost a daily occurrence, the association between “conspiracy theories” and negative terms such as “crazy” and “wacko” are deeply ingrained in the culture, and not by accident.
The term “conspiracy theory” was not used as an ad hominem attack until shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Documented evidence shows the CIA needed to develop new and more effective ways to attack and discredit those who dared to question the Warren Commission Report. So when one counters questions about the official narrative with “That’s just a crazy conspiracy theory” they’re actually using a psy-op attack developed by and for a conspiracy. Because of experience and greater proliferation of information through the internet, fewer people are naive enough to deny extremely wealthy and powerful people would conspire to protect their position and interests. History and hard evidence shows it would be crazier to suppose that they don’t.
Another common argument is “The government is too incompetent to pull off something of that scale and keep it a secret”. It’s true that aspects of the government are incompetent, but the incompetence is generally limited to things they care little about such as medical and educational systems, the food system, domestic infrastructure, safety, financial regulation, disaster relief, fair elections, etc. When it comes to things they prioritize such as wars, bailouts, black budgets, black ops, cronyism, crowd control, surveillance, propaganda, etc., the US government is extremely effective. And the higher up the hierarchy, the easier it is to keep secrets. All it takes is a relatively small number of people in key positions, and through division of labor, compartmentalization, formation of policies conducive to conspiring, and covert actions and communications protected under the cloak of “national security” (with help from a mass culture of conformity, credulity and fear). One should also keep in mind that governments are not monolithic and are comprised of factions with conflicting interests which can be used, manipulated and/or compromised by players involved in the conspiracy (not just within U.S. government but in foreign governments and the private sector as well).
Some simply can’t accept that individuals and factions within U.S. government could intentionally cause an attack such as 9/11 or let it happen. This speaks to the power of corporate media and establishment propaganda on different levels. It shows how a significant majority of Americans can be kept completely ignorant of decades of violent imperialist policy around the world and how false flags have been used to start wars through history. There’s also a long history of state violence against its own people and on American soil going back to the genocide of Native Americans, murders of countless slaves and people of color, multiple massacres of labor activists, assassination of leaders such as JFK, RFK, MLK, Black Panthers, and MOVE, the 93 WTC bombing, WACO, OK City bombing, etc. There’s also ample documentation proving the US government has at least considered actions not dissimilar to 9/11 such as Operation Northwoods and Project for a New American Century. What this argument presupposes is that powerful and wealthy (mostly) white men are inherently more trustworthy, empathetic, and righteous than “Muslim fanatics” or any other “enemy” most Americans have been conditioned to fear and hate.
Other attacks against independent 9/11 researchers include dismissals like “9/11 is no longer relevant” and/or “there’s more important problems to deal with so we need to move on”. I would argue that when such crimes occur that have harmed and killed vast numbers of people and is responsible for countless casualties and elimination of civil liberties more than a decade after due to policies supposedly justified by the event, we have a moral obligation to uncover who did it and why. There’s no peace without justice and no justice as long as the truth behind such nation-changing crimes remains suppressed. Of course there’s always plenty of immediate and equally important issues to address, but those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. More specifically, those who benefit most from historical events such as 9/11 are motivated to repeat it while those who only know a distorted version of history while remaining ignorant of the truth are more likely to let it happen again.
Because of the work of “conspiracy theorists” we are now more aware of the scope of government/corporate criminality and connections between government, wall street, war-profiteers, and the criminal underworld. For example, without the work of independent JFK researchers we wouldn’t be aware of Operation Northwoods which many now view as a false flag template used for 9/11. Gaining a better understanding of how and why 9/11 happened helps us put current geopolitical events in context while providing insight into how such operations work and how they can be counteracted.
There’s also the “straw man” argument which creates the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing an argument with a superficially similar yet non-equivalent proposition and refuting it without ever having refuted the original position. This is particularly easy to do with complex high profile incidents such as 9/11 and the JFK assassination, where there can be a wide array of theories and speculation due to the complexity of the narrative, widespread interest, deep secrecy and disinformation or misinformation from “useful idiots” and/or those who would benefit from keeping crucial information hidden.
Discussing controversial subjects is never easy but it’s always rewarding when people turn out to be more receptive and thoughtful than one might suspect. Though corporate media does its best to defend the official stories, more people than ever are waking up. On this 9/11 anniversary with the potential for another war on the horizon, it’s as good a day as any to talk about it, share this information and help others wake up.
9/11/14 Update:
On the 9/3/14 episode of “Guns and Butter” Tod Fletcher uses a contextual approach to analyzing events at the Pentagon, explores origins and elements of the hijacker story (ie. telephone calls from the planes, analysis of eyewitness reports, physical debris, photo/video evidence, black boxes and FBI involvement) and investigates means, motive and opportunity.
audio http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140903-Wed1300.mp3
This episode was followed by the 9/10/14 Guns and Butter: “9/11 and the Politics of Deception” with Christopher Bollyn.
http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140910-Wed1300.mp3
Project Censored 9/8/14: With the anniversary of the September 11 attacks at hand, Peter and Mickey speak with Ken Jenkins, organizers of the annual 911 Film Festival in Oakland, California, about questions that still linger 13 years after the attacks. Then Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee talks about the scope and implications of the ongoing federal surveillance activities against Americans, and how to resist them. The program concludes with Robbie Martin of Media Roots, speaking about his new documentary “American Anthrax.”
https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/Project+Censored+090514.mp3
9/11: The Mother of All Big Lies by Stephen Lendman
9/11 Truth, Inner Consciousness, and the Public Mind by James Tracy
Thirteen Years After the September 11 Attacks, Blindness Persists by Thierry Meyssan
Weed + Sci Fi = Chromicon: The world’s first cannabis friendly sci-fi, fantasy and comic book convention
By Chris Lites
Source: Omni Reboot
Anyone who’s seen Zardoz knows how well weed and sci-fi go together. Now, like something out of a Kevin Smith movie, Jaymen Johnson brings Denver Chromic Con. One half expects Bluntman and Chronic to make an appearance. Inspired by his long history of attending conventions while high, Johnson, decided to bring this once illicit activity out into the marijuana friendly Denver and Colorado Springs weed club scene. Three such clubs will serve as venues for the con which includes sci-fi, fantasy and comic books along with the presumably non-requisite weed. Johnson himself owns one of the clubs, Speak Easy Vape Lounge, and promises “light saber [sic]whiffle ball” among the con’s attractions.
I’ve attended more than a couple of cons in an altered state and always had a great time. Any con-goer knows about party floors dedicated to themed libations patrolled by the drunken ranks of Barfleet Personnel. The first con I attended in such a state featured a gay Klingon wedding. In the aftermath, as the sun crept through the hotel windows in the ballroom, one could see a host of Klingons passed out under tables, atop the DJ machine, behind curtains. It looked rather like the aftermath of a battle until one of them threw up. But cons and partying have a long history as do altered states and creativity. SF/F, in particular, has always lent itself to those on the fringes of normalized demographics. Just as the “nerd” has popularly typified fandom, so too do the legions of those who enjoy altered states with their creativity. Artists too, have long espoused the virtues of blended artistic creation. Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles is practically a catalogue of psychoactive trips the writer himself took. Thomas Pynchon claims writing large sections of Gravity’s Rainbow higher than an esoterically referential kite. Drugs and the creative process behind SF/F has a long history.
Chromic Con [the logo divides the M so that you can read the word “chronic”] offers the first Alchemical Wedding of the outsider art of comics and the outsider recreation of pot smoking. But this begs the question: are either really outsider anymore? Chromic Con’s inception suggests they are not. In much the same way “geek” culture has become mainstream, so too has pot culture. Recent polls suggest those who like to toke-up are as legion as those who flocked to theaters to see The Avengers, some likely high at the time. Pot has become mainstream. The days of Reefer Madness are largely behind us. It’s only a matter of time before Wil Wheaton takes up the pot banner and becomes fandom’s Tommy Chong. The licensing alone might bring Disney into the fold. Imagine smoking some great skunk out of R2D2 or Darth Vader’s head? A Millennium Falcon bowl can’t be far behind.
William Gibson has suggested that there are no more Bohemias. As soon as a sub-culture pops up these days, it’s co-opted by the mainstream and commodified. While Chromic Con is still an indie event [as evidenced by its site, a kind of throwback to 90s web design], I can’t help but think that it’s the first step in a corporatization of the weed-SF Rainbow Bridge that’s always existed behind the scenes. Soon, I can imagine Comicon rife with glazed-eyed James Franco types promoting their latest movie and their favorite strain of California’s best. What kind of pot does Wolverine smoke in those blunts he calls “cigars?” Marvel could partner with a major pot corporation and let you know!
To be fair, Chromic Con is still very much a small event. The website suggests almost no celebrity guests have yet signed up [presumably unwilling to commit to the weed association just yet], and the event list is scant. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a full con in sense most of us think of when we hear the term. Yet, where Jaymen Johnson may not produce much more than a fun curiosity this time out, he may presage the marriage of pot and mainstream conventions.
I’m all for the open enjoyment of comics, science fiction and weed, but I can’t help but feel that something is being lost. The stamp of the establishment on anything, however putative, takes away some of the exclusivity of the activity. Chromic Con’s site features its weed friendly sponsors prominently. Fandom is still alive and well, but the mainstreaming of genre favorites like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings does carry with it a certain deference to the larger culture. It’s been recently announced that John Constantine won’t smoke in the upcoming NBC TV adaptation. A small thing, perhaps, but a significant one. Once we open the fringes to the doors of corporate America, there is always a period of sanitization. When the sub-culture and the root culture merge, it’s almost always the former that has to change some of its DNA. Chromic Con isn’t that. It isn’t close to that, but it is, I think, in the same neighborhood. You can see Snoop Lion endorsing San Diego Comic Con’s toking booth from here.
After the Crash 