Hard On for HughesNet : The Big Massage

By all accounts HughesNet isn't that great but I don't care. I won't be subscribing to it because I know the truth, but it wasn't an easy choice, given the fact that Kimberley Joseph is its spokesperson. She is my latest obsession and I hope to be engaged to her in the very near future. What a goddess, and when in her commercial she exclaims, "No Way!", I just get tingly all over. She will be mine, by the gods she WILL be mine...but I digress. Let's talk about Marshall McLuhan for a moment...that media analyst from way back who coined the clever phrase," the medium is the message." He spoke of various media as being hot or cool. Hot media ...like motion pictures... require little cerebral participation, while television, a cool medium requires more. At least that was his assumption back in the day. but things have changed since then or maybe the delineation between the hot and cool mediums has gotten fuzzy and confusing. I mean really...radio,television, video, DVDs, computers, cellphones, PDAs. Christ, we're bombarded by mountains of information that demand our attention and we are often tempted to just disconnect from the persistent and sustained assault on our senses. But McLuhan would later refer to that constant assault by a different name. He altered his previous statement ( the medium is the message) to proclaim that "the medium is the massage" ...a mild state of prolonged hypnosis where we are more susceptible to suggestion and lulled into a state of compliance and conformity to those suggestions. Television is the culprit. I could include the internet but the point would still be made so let's just settle on television for the moment. Today television has become a tool...a tool for political propaganda and more importantly an instrument of the "free market." I know...I know, It's always been a means in which to sell products and services to the public under the guise of entertainment ( and now a word from our sponsor) but it's ability to influence the masses has increased a thousand fold due to the development of the continuous 24 hour broadcast cycle. It is literally on ALL THE TIME.
I am by no means a man of leisure but I watch my share of news and entertainment on satellite television, and I have to say... Repetition is the enemy of a rational man. It is a wolf wrapped in a lamb suit. More to the point, how else can one explain the current phenomenon of buying insurance from gecko lizards, CGI Generals and penguins, and finally a ditzy female waitress in a showroom that resembles a kind of "insurance purgatory." And banks...don't get me started. Banks aren't banks anymore...they're bicycle shops, peddling ( I couldn't resist) home loans, credit cards and financial planning...to get you where you want to be. Honestly, how absurd can it get... and it's all part of the massage.
I learned something a long time ago that has always disturbed me...insurance companies own the world, or at least the good ol' USA. Insurance companies own banks, and banks in turn own businesses...all of them. And banks control budding entrepreneurs and even established corporations by dolling out money under specific terms for prudent use in daily operation and most importantly ...for meeting the demands of employee payroll. Small companies and large corporations alike have a submitted business plan to the bank that hopefully justifies the bank's risk on behalf of the lendee. The bank ( or should I say the insurance company) basically dictates what employees will be paid for their time and work. And here's a little secret that really isn't a secret at all...the cost of labor is always underestimated...underestimated on purpose by the bank, so that real prosperity can never be achieved by the employee. So how do we as the underpaid employees attempt to realize that prosperity? Two words...credit cards. Lines of credit issued by...say it with me...the bank ( the insurance company) Do you see a master plan evolving? Media distracts while political and economic opportunists hoard the money. The perpetual distraction...entertainment, news,politics designed to dazzle and distract the consumer from the dirty truth embedded in our system of free enterprise. The illusion of prosperity is achieved by first holding back fair wages to the majority of workers only to later give that same money back to them...for a price. That price is the systematic and long term enslavement of the average worker to the moneychangers who fix the game. Honestly, elections have become more like draft picks in the NFL from one season to the next and they serve the same purpose...provide the distraction...have winners and losers...but never ever change the basics of the game. We are told by the media that changing the game would be "un-American." I have to ask,"what is so scary about the prospect of a more equitable system that spreads more money around to everyone and not just the friends and families of insurance companies?"
So that's it... enslavement made palatable by the Big Massage. My television is always on, even when I'm not at home. It keeps me company in my now empty nest and it calls to me and tells me what I need...what to buy, what to watch, who to vote for and of course how to feel. Back in the stone age, and by that I mean the 50's, The Flintstones urged us to smoke cigarettes and we never questioned whether they were perhaps just blowing smoke up our ass. We eventually learned the truth. We became more sophisticated and learned to question what we were told.
Today the massage provided by television is slicker and all the more relentless in it's effort to mellow us out, to patronize us and to ultimately manage us. Repetition of a lie. Discover Card tells us that to save money we have to spend money...huh? Apparently using credit cards is a fast track to wealth...but for who? Years ago I read in a magazine about advertising that we, as consumers, accept the lies contained in advertising because the alternative is to be told the truth and that would be to horrible to face. But I'm stubborn...I always look for the lie. No amount of cutesy cartoon animals and whacky characters will convince me to un-see it.
Meanwhile I'll keep listening to Kimberley and her pitch about HughesNet. I understand that it is an excellent internet provider. At least that's what she says. And she wouldn't lie to me would she? No Way.

On The Passing of Walkin' Jim Stoltz

I never met Walkin' Jim Stoltz. I only knew Jim. We got faintly reconnected in recent years through emails but the person I really knew best was but 14 or 15 years old. We were junior high buddies and I will always remember a large poster he gave me at the time that hung on my bedroom wall for years afterwards. It was a black and white poster of the bottom of two bare feet. It was obscure and random and cool, and we appreciated it for those reasons. I looked at it as a simple token of our friendship. Jim left the flatness of Slidell, Louisiana early on to return to his true roots in Royal Oak, Michigan before he could graduate with those of us in the St. Tammany Parish School System. Even then he lamented the lack of freedom to be who he wanted to be, in a system that said long hair was a path to failure . Jim wrote the forgettable "St. Tammany School System Blues" in protest over attempts to make students conform and comply to silly rules designed to stifle self expression. In the Sixties that was being debated constantly by existing power structures and budding hippies. Jim was the latter and when he finally did graduate in Royal Oak he sent me his official senior picture with shoulder length hair as proof that he had prevailed over society's mandated conformity.
I'm not really sure when the compulsion to unite with nature took a hold of Jim. He is quoted as saying it was the Boy Scouts that gave him his first taste of life around a campfire, but Jim visited me in February of 1973 , long hair and all, and it was clear that the mountains of Vermont had seduced him completely. By September of that same year he had quit his job, quit college, bought a new guitar, and, eventually, set off with a girlfriend to go camping in those same mountains. After three months of hiking and camping his girlfriend left him, but he stayed in those mountains without her. He transplanted himself permanently to live and work there, bought his very first car ( a '66 Buick Special) for two hundred dollars and while living with friends in Newport, Vermont he found work in an Ethan Allen lumber yard. Jim tried to find venues ( bars, coffee houses, lodges) to play his music, something he had begun in Royal Oak, but those were hard to find at first. By March of 1974 he had quit his job in the lumber yard ("it's not where I'm at") and planned his first long distance hike (March thru October) of the 2,000 mile Appalachian Trail. Before he left, he cut his hair ( a little) and grew a beard. Surprisingly he left his guitar behind and took only a flute recorder to amuse himself with music. By then he was signing his letters as "Mountain Jim."
His second endeavor began in May of 1975 and ended in November of 1976 walking the length of the U.S.-Canadian border through wilderness from Maine to Washington- a 5,000 mile walk. Jim corresponded with me that year sending me clippings of media coverage he had received along the way and with those letters accounts of the wonderful people he had met and who had befriended him. His stories about the wilderness and the things he saw were both funny and awe-inspiring. Swallowed up by frozen mountain streams, chased by bears...all great stories to be told around a campfire on a cold winter night. It was on this trip that he or someone on some newspaper dubbed him "Walkin' Jim."
It would be easy to make comparisons between Jim and Thoreau and make reference to Frost's "the road less traveled." According to Jim ,"the road less traveled isn't a road at all."
His life was a testament to his passion and that is what impressed me the most about Jim. Nature called him as a steward long before he even realized it, but it became his overwhelming passion once he took that first step into the wild...into the wilderness. And when he came down from the mountains, he was, in his words, "educated." Nature filled him up and eventually overflowed in him. It was this overflowing that created the music, poetry and stories of the wisdom that could be learned from nature itself. It taught him and gave him purpose and everything he did after that was filled with the desire to share it with the rest of the world.
I've never known another person quite like that...passionate and committed to the very end.
His passion was the high country... wind and snow, mountains, streams and limitless sky.
There are many YouTube videos featuring Jim and his music performing at schools and such and I listened to several of them this past week having learning that he was gone. For me it sums up a philosophy that Jim so obviously subscribed to. He sings about the importance of "taking that first step"...and then the next. It is a lesson about faith and confidence and also persistence and commitment.
I mentioned earlier the large poster on my bedroom wall that I got from Jim in Junior High, you know, the bottom of two bare feet, the picture that struck both Jim and me as being so random and cool. I must admit that knowing what I know now...forty years later, it does not seem so random, but it is so very very cool.