The Art Neuro Weblog

Recent Readings
Having a bit of time, but short of cashflow, I am going over books I have stocked up over some time without being able to get to open even the first page. These include things like Herodotus' Histories which I haven't read since I was 14, and that was in a Japanese translation. I also have the Koran sitting next to my bed, not because I am an aspiring Terrorist - I'm not in anyway shape or form - but because one must know the enemy, and again I don' think I've read English translation of that book. I read a Japanese translation when I was 16-17. I went through a phase of reading *spiritual* texts where I read books on sutras such as the 'Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra', and also the 'Bhagvad Gita' which I was given by a high school teacher intent on warping my fragile little mind (Yes that's you, you freakozoid Mrs. Gosbell!). I guess I was going through a kind of 'spiritual research phase' before I settled on a long period of Central State Materialism and arguments at parties about being brains in a vat.

Anyway, I'm sticking my head through 2 books at once, for reasons only known to my eternally bad reading habits. One is Aristophanes' Penguin Classics edition "'The Clouds' and Other Plays" which is a hoot, but being drama, I need to go very slow in order to figure out how it gets played. I'm also reading Susan Faludi's 'Stiffed', which is an unfortunate coincidence as she goes through describing unemployed white males of South California, and frankly, I am part of the jobless throng, so it kind of stings. :)

The Susan Faludi book is an eerie read as she travels way 'out there' in order to get her facts straight. In the process she abandons easy categories and characterisations she has inherited through feminism and tries to come at the issue of masculine identity and an increasingly consumerist society. In the process, what she identifies about the US Aerospace industry is something we should make note.

People in Susan Faludi's book testify that the US aerospace industry that grew out of the WWII experience was essentially there to absorb the people coming back from the great war, to give them a position in society, so as not to let them sink into the depths that the Great Depression left their fathers. And so the Aerospace industry became one gigantic, work for the dole scheme where vast majority of workers actually didn't have anything to do, but were given jobs nonetheless, and got paid a lot of money to do it.

The structural change that swept through American Industry in the 1980s in large part under the Reaganomic mantra was to sweep aside the vestiges of this system. While the anger felt by men that Faludi chronicles is kind of interesting, it also shows that for the entire 50s, 60s and 70s, there was a generation of people who had jobs, and pretty well-paying jobs at that, doing essentially not much. This conforms to the 80/20 rule that 80% of any system's function lies in 20% of the system. That is to say, the other 80% of the system is contributing to only 20% of the result.

The US Aerospace industry Faludi describes is an industrial monolith used by the government to pay off the generation that fought WWII, but beyond that generation, all bets have been off. The reason structural unemployment is rising in many countries is not because of the economic rationalisation alone; it's because those jobs weren't really real to start off with. They were mechanisms by which a Keynsian Govenrment could dispense money to the people. The Promise of Space, was actually a big red herring. What does this mean for us? It means programmes such as the Space Shuttle programme was a crock, because it was always intended to be a crock.

Now this is something I have long-suspected, and wise readers have postulated; and partly why issues to do with the Military industry Complex (including the Kennedy Assassinations) keep coming up for discussion on this site. Faludi's findings strikes at the raison d'etre of our blog here. For, if the Aerospace Industry is indeed an elaborate kind of work-for-the-dole scheme and nothing else, we don't really have a chance of getting off this rock. We're just waiting for the next shuttle to blow up killing seven astronauts. It's just an elaborate, morbid version of the New Years' Fireworks on Sydney Harbour.

- Art Neuro