JUAN WILLIAMS FIRED BY NPR

BACK STORY

OCTOBER 21, 2010.  Juan Williams, whom I personally find to be an annoying defender of the Left—but whom conservatives generally like as “a good guy”—gets himself canned by National Public Radio.

Why?  He told FOX’s Bill O’Reilly he’d become nervous and worried if he boarded a plane and saw a Muslim in garb getting on the same plane.  Zang!  Juan is out at NPR.

“…remarks inconsistent with our policy of blah-blah…”

So I started thinking about NPR.  Haven’t listened to it in many years.  Hated All Things Considered and other smarmy precious shows there.

Remind me again?  Why does NPR exist on tax money?  Why is the government permitted to fund a radio network?

The government believes all other radio is deficient and the public deserves to hear “serious programming?”  Is that it?

And therefore, the government (taxpayer) will solve this problem and pick up the tab?

Following that logic, why doesn’t the federal government move into publishing novels, producing feature films, offering men a superior brand of condom?

How about government newspapers?  That industry is dying.  Don’t we need another sober daily paper distributed out of Washington to the masses?  PBS does a nightly television newscast.  How would government publishing a newspaper be any different?

I’ve been, in my day, to a number of sketchy dentists.  Let’s have the government train and turn out Federal Dentists. 

Anyway, NPR, the network who fired Juan Williams, was founded in 1970 by a 1967 law, the Public Broadcasting Act.  When Lyndon Johnson signed the Bill he remarked:

“It [the Bill] announces to the world that our Nation wants more than just material wealth; our Nation wants more than a ‘chicken in every pot’. We in America have an appetite for excellence, too. While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act…It will give a wider and, I think, stronger voice to educational radio and television by providing new funds for broadcast facilities. It will launch a major study of television’s use in the Nation’s classrooms and their potential use throughout the world. Finally — and most important — it builds a new institution: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting”.

My, my.  Most importantly it builds a CORPORATION.  A government corporation.  Now THAT has to be illegal.  And apparently I was right.  The president and Congress decided the USA had had enough of shoddy programming, and it was time to step into the breach and provide enrichment to the spirit—and make the citizens pay for it. 

I mean, lions chasing antelopes around on the plains of Africa, this year’s remembrance of Doo-Wop, some guy with long hair and a smile that would melt a Twinkie as he plays a violin in the Roman Coliseum—I’m dying for that kind of uplifting.

And a few times a year, NPR and PBS can reach into the pockets of viewers for contributions.  What beats that?

To round off this story nicely, the CEO of NPR, Vivian Schiller, released a statement after Juan was fired.  She claimed he wasn’t kicked out because he voiced an opinion about a Muslim on a plane, but because it’s NPR policy not to allow their news analysts to state personal opinions of any kind on any media at any time.  Such utterances would undermine their credibility as analysts.

Really?  Juan has been working double time as a FOX TV panelist since 1997, and has offered literally thousands of opinions on various issues.  NPR could have canned him easily, but they didn’t—until he wandered into politically incorrect territory yesterday.

For example, here’s something Juan said on FOX in 2009 that didn’t get him fired:

“Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going.  If she starts talking…her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim.  If that stuff starts coming out, people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross.”

So let’s see.  What’s the difference between Juan skewering the president’s wife and claiming he’d be nervous if he got on a plane with a Muslim in garb?

I believe we can peer into the fog and see a few priorities on the scale of taboos vis-à-vis the American Left. 

It also tells us something about why American feminist groups aren’t going all out in condemnation of women being stoned, beaten, and raped, girls being subjected to clitoral mutilation, and daughters being killed by their families for marrying non-Muslims. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG

OCTOBER 21, 2010.  Since individual freedom has become an endangered species, we need to look at the propaganda that continues to erode freedom.

In particular, we must understand that so-called science and scientific evidence are being used to propagate the view that those who hold “the truth” in their hands have the right to force everyone else to go along.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the field of medical practice.

Against the secret and concealed background of 106,000 annual deaths in America, as a result of the effects of pharmaceutical drugs, public health agencies continually tell us they know what’s best for our health.  Why?  Because they are relying on good science about disease, diagnosis, and treatment.

We, the great unwashed public, know nothing.  We couldn’t know anything, because we haven’t done the research, we haven’t read the studies, we wouldn’t be able to comprehend the studies even if we could find them.

So, based on what science, precisely, do we get, as an outcome, 106,000 deaths in the US, every year, from the effects of government-approved medical drugs?

Reporters never pose that question to public health agencies.

The presumption is, if you know the truth, you have the right to force people to toe the line of that truth.  In other words, they have no right to be wrong.

“We’re the experts.  We just diagnosed you with RFTYX-45, a dangerous condition that could result in the disintegration of your spleen and liver.  We’ve written the prescription for AbbaDabba, the only drug that could reverse this condition.  You’re refusing the drug, and you’re opting, instead, to drink a tea made from dirt.  You’re obviously insane.”

Does the patient have the right to eat dirt?

Let’s make it more severe.  Does the patient have the right to chew tobacco to cure his illness? 

Does the patient have the right to stand on his head in a snowstorm, naked, to cure his illness?

Does he have the right to lean up against a liquor store window and chant verses of regulations from the alcohol control board manual, in order to heal himself?

Does he have the right to sleep in a garbage bin for a month to cure himself?

Does he have the right to jump off a hundred-foot cliff to rid himself of his illness?

And the answer is yes.  He has that right.  He is free to choose.

It’s not a question of who has the best science, or who can present the best lies about having science.  That question, when it comes right down to it, is irrelevant. 

We have to understand this.

On the other side of the coin, you see, is the proposition that the government exists to protect everybody, everywhere, all the time.  And when you choose to enter that door, you give up your freedom.

The entire “sympathy industry” is built to allow “the experts” to help victims by, in essence, telling them what they must do.  That industry was also built to promote the gooey idea of an eternally meddling community of concerned people who descend on the rest of us, and advise us about our choices…

There are many reasons for freedom, and one of them is: you ultimately follow your own counsel and judgment, and you accept the consequences.  You don’t just do this once, you do it all your life.  It’s a road you walk. 

If the vast social and political agenda aimed at coercing people into “accepting help” wins out, freedom is gone.

We have been taught that every weird action a person takes, every strange choice he makes, every odd idea he voices has an explanation…and if we can dig up that explanation, we will understand how and why the person departed from the group and the norm and the acceptable path.  And then we can place a label on the person.  We can decide “he needs help.” 

This approach has been taken to such an extreme that many of us no longer really believe in that person’s freedom.  Instead, we think he is simply a slave to some distorted inner impulse, and we should do what we can to root out that impulse and return the person to sanity.

On this battlefield, freedom becomes the casualty and the sacrifice.  But of course we don’t recognize this.  We’re so busy trying to fix and patch and rebuild, we lose the thread.

Government does the same thing, except its attitude is cynical and manipulative.  Its day of paradise will come when the entire population is convinced that endless official help is necessary for survival.  Then the beneficent authority can carve up the human psyche into regions that respond to the stimulation of “gifts.”

Freedom and choice will become relics of a long-gone past.

“Oh, yes.  That dinosaur came and went.  Now we have share and care.  We’re really human in this day and age.  And we have the science to prove it.  Have you seen the recent study that was published by…?”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE THIRD CHOICE

October 23, 2010.  I guess we have to jump right into this question—are there ANY politicians in Washington who are honest, honorable, balls-to-the-wall Constitutionalists? 

Are there two?  Three?  Twelve?  Fifty?  A Hundred?

And don’t bother to get back to me with the name of Ron Paul, because that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about the question of whether there are ENOUGH Constitutionalists in the Congress after the election to turn things around.  You know, turn the big oil tanker around.  Turn Washington around.  Because the label “Republican” certainly doesn’t do the job.

Individual freedom from government is the keystone of the Constitution.  That means, among other things, the government has no right to tax citizens to an excessive degree.  It also means government cannot continue to draft enormous budgets just because it decides “lots of people need government help.”

It means government cannot force citizens to buy a product—such as health insurance.

Government cannot rubber stamp a brand of fallacious science called “manmade global warming” and then impose cap and trade and massive lowering of industrial output.

Government cannot demand that companies that manufacture and sell harmless health remedies stop selling them because, in its estimation, such products might sway people away from “real medicines.”  Every person can decide how to take care of his/her own health and body—with absolutely no government interference.

Governments cannot permit corporations that do, in fact, produce and sell demonstrably injurious products to avoid severe punishment.

This is just an introductory short list that revolves around the principle of individual freedom—and so I ask you, how many members of Congress, after the election, will do their best to assure these freedoms are protected?

Because this is what we are dealing with: the freedom of the individual from government authority, the sufficient freedom to make a very wide range of choices in life.

In this regard, both major political parties are deficient and corrupt.  Any attempt to exonerate one party at the expense of the other, is undertaken blindly, or with the intent to deceive.

Politically and economically, we live in a very complex jungle of corruption, and the North Star to find out way back to sanity is the rediscovered principle of individual liberty.

Under the cynical cover of “an evolving Constitution,” the government of the United States has become an elitist, crony-packed, giveaway machine that takes wealth from citizens and delivers it to other citizens (and non-citizens).  In the process, a favored few make titanic profit. 

Whether you are talking about the bosses of the Republican or Democratic parties, you are looking at people who have no intention of giving up their inside positions as “benefactors of the people.”

The current sporadic debate about whether the US government has become a socialist entity is a joke.  A combination of socialism and state corporatism has been operating for a very long time, and although the current Washington administration has upped the ante, we have been un-Constitutional for decades and decades. 

Part of this criminal political program has depended on searching out, inventing, finding group after group that deserves special treatment by the government—sometimes on the basis that the group has been ill-treated in the past.  This operation features a principle that was never delivered in the Constitution: the enforced gift of “equality” substituted for “equal protection under the law.”  Apparently, most people are too ignorant to make the distinction between the uses of “equal” in those two very different scenarios.

In the former case, the word, when it is unburdened, means wealth redistribution.  Some presidents have followed this path with passive acceptance; others have tried to position themselves as prophets of a new Age. 

The essence of “share and care” injected into official policy has had, all along, an ulterior motive: the creation of larger and larger groups that depend on government for their survival, in order to exert top-down control over populations.  In other words, the notion of altruism, a potent idea, has been co-opted to permit elites to run the people of nations.  It worked with organized religions.  It would work with governments—and so it has. 

As a result, we have seen such a twisting of human psychology that the day is approaching when, armed to the teeth, an invading force at our shores—if they whined and complained enough about discrimination and prejudice and disrespect—would be welcomed in with open arms and given the largest free lunch possible by the federal government. 

When George Washington departed the scene at the end of his presidency, his warning about entangling foreign alliances was more than a casual criticism.  It was a prediction, and it has been borne out.  Through military-industrial-corporate-government-missionary allegiances, America was recreated as an empire.  It defaulted on its premise as a republic.  Rather than sticking close to the principle of individual freedom, individual power, and self-sufficiency, rather than becoming a shining example to the whole world in that regard, an example that could be emulated, it entered into the meddling game that has derailed every nation in the history of the planet.

And now we have internationalism and the global village and inter-dependency, concepts that are hawked and sold in every boardroom from Tierra Del Fuego to the North Pole.  It’s worth noting that this “new paradigm” is boosted to replace the principle of individual freedom and self-sufficiency.

Money itself, through powerful banks and their partner governments, has gone global.  Among other features of this designed corruption, American money can no longer operate independently of other currencies.  We all sink or swim in the same stench-ridden pool.

From the dawn of time on this planet, the LEADER has been faced with the same basic choices.  He can take his people into what amounts to a criminal existence, he can descend to the level of the mob, or he can stand clear of all this as a free man.  Rarely has the third choice been made.  It was made, to an extraordinary degree, with the founding of the American Republic.  That republic was never perfect.  The men who wrote and drafted its documents were no angels.  But they showed a path to something great.

That something has been pilloried, whenever possible, as isolationism, a term so heinous that no politician wants to be painted with it.  But, beneath the Constitution, what is now called isolationism was SELF-SUFFICIENCY.  There were enough human and material resources here to allow us to live out individual freedom and, in the process, build a nation that did not need foreign partners—and the full range of machinations and insidious activities that went with such alliances.

Who knows what innovations would have been made in order to bring that dream of national self-sufficency to fruition?  It’s a path that history didn’t take.

If it had, the people and government of the United States could have said to every people and government on Earth: “Here we are.  This is what we have done.  We owe you nothing.  We are free.  If you want to try the experiment for yourselves, we will offer you the necessary record of what we did.  The rest is up to you.”

Instead, our leaders and elites opted for internartional entanglements and the gradual surrender of our own liberty.  Of what use is that?  What kindness does that represent?

Do you stand above the crowd and offer them the lessons of your hard-won freedom and liberty, or do you sink down into the morass in order to be “more human?” 

Do you wrap their chains around your own neck, as a sacrifice to their primacy, or do you shrug off every tainted attempt to drag you down? 

Do you act out a life in which the dead-end dreams of the mob become your ticket to power over them, or you find a lucid place that is your own?

This is the story and fable of our time.  If we pretend that the mere exchange of the name of one political party for another is the grand solution, we are fools of the highest order.

But we are capable of discovering those who truly want freedom, who know what it means.

There is no telling what we can still do, even at this late date.  The middle ground of relative comfort and the vague misery of unfulfilled promise don’t have to be our fate.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE HABIT OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 19, 2010.  We develop a deeply ingrained habit about language, about how it feels to operate it, how it feels to understand it, how it feels to be confused by it, how it feels to go back and forth with it, how it feels to think with it, how it feels to report events and states of mind with it.

Okay, fine.  I’m not advocating destroying language or the experience of it.  I’m just pointing out, to those who can grasp it, that using language puts us in the position of believing we understand what’s it all about, what it feels like—and consequently, when some radically new notion about language shows up, we automatically reject it because, well, we think we’re already experts…

It’s okay and acceptable if someone comes along and says, “Guess what?  The Hopi language has no words that indicate time.  They only have the present.”

Well, we say, that’s weird, but it’s very interesting and illuminating.  We can deal with it.  We know about present and past and future tense, and if some tribe doesn’t have two of those tenses, we can grasp that.

Of course, it turns out this assertion about Hopi language is controversial.  There are people who claim it’s entirely false and the Hopi do have words about the past and so on…but that’s another story.

But suppose someone (in this case, me) says there can be language in which all the “words” can change meaning and do change meaning from moment to moment, as they are received, and yet each experience of a “word” is powerful and clear and distinct and subjective and expansive.

No, that couldn’t be.  That isn’t language.  That goes against every experience and feeling about language we have.  It goes against the deep, deep habit we’ve formed about what language is. 

So we have a person who goes to a museum and looks at a room full of paintings by Kandinsky, and the meanings of these paintings comes through as clear as a bell—and each time the person returns to that room, the meanings are clear and vivid but DIFFERENT.

And, to top it off, the person sits down in a chair and takes out a pad and oil crayons and begins to make drawings that are RESPONSES to the Kandinskys.  “Hey, he spoke to me, so I’m answering him.”

And then Kandinsky actually APPEARS in the room with his own pad and oil crayons, so he can answer back…

Well, without invoking ghosts, we can have this kind of exchange.  For example, on a stage in front of an audience.  THE MAGIC THEATER.  Maybe it won’t be drawings, it’ll be words, but words no one has ever heard before.  Invented words that sound like…music…sort of.  Words, sounds, that carry great emotion and attitude.  Back and forth, back and forth, between two characters on the stage.

And a certain portion of the audience leaves the theater because they think they’re in a crazy place and they want no part of it.  But others remain, and after awhile, the whole thing on the stage begins to come through like a revelation out of the fog.

This is REAL.  This is happening.  These people are communicating on stage, and what is passing back and forth between them is creating layers and levels of sensation and feeling in the audience…layers and levels they’ve never felt before and didn’t even know existed.

Didn’t even know existed.

It’s not religious feeling or sensation, and it’s not mathematical feeling and sensation, and it’s not like the sensation of listening to Bach, and it’s not like the sensation of writing a clear paragraph, and it’s not like the sensation of eating a pineapple….it’s unlike any sensation or feeling the person has ever experienced.

In fact, these new feelings and sensations and thoughts are opening up whole new huge territories that were previously unknown…and the sensations aren’t engraved in stone, they’re changing.

I once did a brief poetry experiment.  I brought together several people from different countries and I taped them reading poems in their native languages.  Portugese, Persian, Italian.  It was all about listening to the SOUNDS of the poems.  What they meant was unimportant.  I didn’t care about that.  We just listened to the sounds and rhythms and the emotion.  We had no idea what the words meant.  It was quite fantastic.  Of course, it went against the habit of language to be listening to the poems in that way, without knowing or caring what the literal meaning was.  But that’s what we did.

The habit of language limits our experience.  It limits our experience of what language CAN BE. It limits our experience of what REALITY can be.

Well, someone says, this whole thing is ridiculous because you don’t really UNDERSTAND what these people on the stage are saying to each other, you as the audience are making it up, it’s entirely subjective, you’re IMAGINING IT.

Yes?  And?

You see, that’s exactly the point.  This is a language of imagination.  On both sides. 

It’s talking in and through and by imagination.

But that doesn’t make it any less real, whatever “real” means.  It makes it compelling and powerful and beautiful in ways we’ve never imagined before.  The impact is THERE.  It’s alive.  It’s changing.

We’re plugging into a faculty and facility that has been lying dormant in us for perhaps eons.  And now that we are plugging into it, reality is expanding by the second.

The old habit is being shredded, and we’re flying freer and higher and wider and deeper.

Who knows what spaces and times will now become available to us?

Now, perhaps you understand better why I’ve spent so much time over the years writing and talking about systems and structures and their limits.

The habit of language and the belief that we truly understand what language is and isn’t?  It’s the lid we place on possible reality.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

TELEPATHY IN THE FUTURE

OCTOBER 18, 2010.  For some reason, the notion that, down the road, people will be able to transmit pure thought to each other without speaking is considered a reasonable possibility.

So let’s explore this a little.  Will this telepathic communication be carried on with silent words? Is that how it’ll work?

“I like you.”

“I like you, too.”

Or will Person A project “the energy of liking” and have it returned by Person B?

Let’s take the latter format.  What is this “energy of liking?”  Is it thought, feeling, energy?

All of the above?

Regardless, it’ll be language in some sense.  A different kind of language.

Many people have no problem accepting this, but to suggest that we could have a written/spoken language in which symbols are open and change meaning swiftly seems impossible, or impossible to fathom.

I think I see why.  It’s assumed that telepathy will be reductionist, whereas the sort of new language I’m suggesting is all about proliferation.

Telepathy will reduce the need for explanation.  Simple and powerful bolts of energy will distill what we are (imprecisely) trying to say to each other.

As if this is a good thing, just the thing we are looking for, to obviate misunderstanding, confusion, conflict, and so on.  It’s yet another Utopian dream.

I actually believe this kind of pure telepathy exists, but I also believe we are dealing with a prejudice against proliferation that is deeply rooted.

People want the simple solution to existence.  They want it in any form they can find it.  They want a god to intercede out of the sky.  They want UFOs to bring us universal abundance on a silver tray.  They want a beneficent and monolithic government that will take care of us from cradle to grave.  They want planets to align so we can live the life we desire.

And because they want this, they’ll willingly sacrifice anything that looks like complexity, including their own minds.

When the subject of telepathic communication is brought up, they like it, because they see it as a kind of reduction down to “simple salvation.”

The whole world—the many worlds and universes—of art speaks of just the opposite.  Proliferation.  Imagination unleashed.  THIS language(s) doesn’t need purified telepathy. 

Religion, salvation, global government, New Age thinking—these and other allied notions all imply the final and complete and overarching solution to our problems.  The only trouble is, when you strip the veneer away, the problem turns out to be freedom.  Freedom is for imagination and creation.  The road to greater life is through the endless proliferation of what freedom is for. 

A truly open language is created through and by imagination, and it is understood by imagination.

This is where we could be heading, if enough people wake up from their amnesia/narcosis, from the reductionist obsession.

See, it IS possible that some very, very good and simple and big thing can happen to you—but the fixation on that and the accompanying sacrifice of endless proliferation of creative power, your creative power, is what gives us a tyranny of limits…

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

A NEW KIND OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 16, 2010.  No matter how interesting or unusual we may find the language of some remote group living at the end of the world—and I’m not discounting the import of such a language—I’m suggesting something different:

A kind of language that constantly changes meaning and yet has distinct and powerful impact in each momentary incarnation.

At first glance, the idea may seem absurd.

But what happens when you look at a painting by Willem de Kooning or Hieronymus Bosch?  Is there merely one stable and lasting impression?  Of course not.  Are these paintings precisely defined scientific statements?  Of course not.

In fact, think of a place you love to visit.  Do you return, over and over again, because you experience EXACTLY the same feeling each time? 

How about weather?  Would you say that, because weather is a constantly shifting thing, it is meaningless and can’t be grasped?

Do your friends evoke carbon copies of themselves every time you see them?

Therefore, why not consider the possibility of language that constantly shifts meaning, as a fundamental aspect of its nature?

Such a subjective language would have a far-reaching effect.  In fact, I’m suggesting that it would shake apart many notions, ideas, convictions, and premises that limit our experience of so-called reality.

And if THAT happened, who knows what might follow?

We all have “pillars” of thought and conviction about reality that remain stable over time.  Our language reflects and enforces the solidity and durability of these foundations.  Now, we take off with a new kind of language that engages a far different aspect of our imagination.  In the process, the pillars begin to crumble.  We’re no longer living in precisely the same structure.  We can see beyond it.  We discover there are infinities beyond it.  And the key to that discovery lies in the use of language that allows us to impart new and changing meanings of an entirely subjective nature. 

Subjective impressions and meanings never went far enough.  We dipped into them here and there, but we restricted their range.  We were locked into the formal structure of our language to such a degree that we never imagined we had such a vast field of invention at our disposal.  It simply never occurred to us.  We were blinded by the shape and syntax of our language.

We assume that the reality that lies in front of our eyes, that challenges us every day, is so problematical that we need all our troops to carve out an area of success for ourselves—and the very last thing we’re going to do is sacrifice those soldiers, the soldiers of our present language.  However, it turns out that if we can temporarily set them off to the side and bring on a whole new set of meanings from the depth of imagination, we speak a new language that changes everything—for the better.

What a strange notion.  But what if it’s true?  And is it any stranger than the thousands of stories that purport to assure us that some vast external intervention is going to save us?  Perhaps those stories are a piece of a larger mosaic, and the missing pieces are the ones that we ourselves would supply, if we could find a medium (a language) that would permit us, finally, to express what we really want to say—with all its shifting and changing emotions and energies and poetics. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 15, 2010.  On October 13, I did an hour of commentary on my radio show about THE MAGIC THEATER and the effects of language-structure on our view of reality.  I recommend listening.

http://garynull.squarespace.com/the-jon-rappoport-show/     

Okay.  Let’s start here:

The best way to trap a person is to make him think he’s free.

Even better—far better—the person traps himself and then tells himself he’s free.

We impose the structure, the syntax, the order, the sequence, the vocabulary, and the grammar of our language on ourselves—and then we pretend this imposition in no way colors or limits our view of reality.

That’s quite a trick.

It reminds me of the trick called the Rorschach Test (RT).  RT was invented by Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), a young Freudian psychoanalyst.  As a boy in Switzerland, Hermann was nicknamed Klecks, which means “inkblot” in German.  He used to fool around, as apparently many kids did at the time, making these blots.  The activity even had a name: Klecksography.

When Hermann grew up, he thought a standardized sequence of blots might make a revealing psychological test.  Therapists could infer a great deal about their patients’ neuroses.

The test is still in wide use today.  The patient is shown the abstract blots and reports what he sees in them: birds, cows, planes, Mommy making bread at the oven, spiders crawling up the sides of buildings…

The Test is a kind of language.  The blots are pictographs, except their meanings are left open.

Of course, in true medical fashion, it is assumed that what a person finds in the blots tells a tale about his shortcomings, problems, disorders, symptoms.

Such an assumption is no accident.  Why?

Suppose we omitted those medical biases and, instead, used blots as open symbols that could be infused with unlimited meanings by those who viewed them?

We would have a different KIND of language.

One that opens doors instead of building walls.

No professional culture (e.g., psychology/psychiatry) would ever admit, in a thousand years, that such an activity was worthwhile or meaningful or possible or tolerable or positive or in the nature of a breakthrough.  

If we found interesting and extended ways of working with such open symbols, our view of reality would change.

This is, in fact—though very few people would admit it or see the far-reaching potential—one of the great implications of modern art.

Let me give you a ratio.  Working and communicating in some fashion with open symbols stands in relation to the Rorschach Test as freedom does to slavery.

For the human race, language has always meant system, structure, and syntax.  To mention language in the same breath as open and changing and subjective infusion of meaning into symbols is considered a perfect contradiction.

But it isn’t.

There is an old actor’s exercise in which students toss gibberish at each other, back and forth, imparting to it certain attitudes and feelings.  The idea is to get actors used to coloring dialogue with non-verbal meaning.  When the exercise is done well, people get the point.  They know what is being exchanged, even though the sounds uttered make no literal sense at all.

Of course, people who are dedicated and committed to precise clinical language would never confess to understanding gibberish.  Every cell and molecule would resist admitting they really do know what is going on.      

The level of reality we all accept, every day of our lives, is like a government agency.  It maintains itself against all attack.  It stonewalls.  It refuses to answer embarrassing questions.  It issues denials.  It defends its own existence as absolutely necessary. 

Its thick volumes of regulations are the evidence of its entangling operations. 

In the same way, our language is an ultimate rationalization of the reality we defend.

If we began to engage in another species of language, our reality would reveal huge open spaces where new experience is possible. 

How and why new experience would surface is answered by the simple word: imagination.  Imagination, wrapped in the cocoon of the kind of language we now employ, is operating on only a fraction of its potential.

But in order to know that, one would have to explore language beyond the limits we presently put on it.  Contrary to expectation, there is no sacrifice involved in launching such expeditions.  Nothing central and secure is left behind.  It’s not an either-or game.  It’s all addition and proliferation.

This would be one of the operations of THE MAGIC THEATER.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 14, 2010.  I can sum up many thousands of pages, many academic careers, and much labor in the area of modern philosophy by saying:

The sun sets in the western sky—and our language mirrors that event by stating: “the sun sets in the western sky.”

In other words, language reports events in the physical world.

You wouldn’t believe the internal wrangling that has gone on for decades in the field of academic philosophy around this fairly simple issue.

(In a somewhat related matter, noted linguist Noam Chomsky reported that, because children learn to speak their native tongue so quickly, they couldn’t merely be responding to inputs from their environment—these kids have some sort of innate capacity [or mental imprint] that involves language ability.  I’m shocked, I tell you.  Shocked.)

However, language as we usually understand it and speak it and write it is not our only option.  We could explore and invent other types of language whose purpose is not to reflect events in the physical world.

These new languages would create new realities.

For example—modern poetry.  Modern painting.  Music.  Hah.  Turns out we have such languages all around us.  Who knew? 

Anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down) 

ee cummings

Those lines aren’t merely constructing a fantasy that doesn’t exist in the world.  Those lines make relationships that confound what happens and how it happens in the world.  They subvert the grammar, syntax, and structure of how things are supposed to happen. 

Literalists hate this kind of thing.  They claim to the death they don’t understand it.  They claim no one, except perhaps insane people, can understand it.  They claim it’s a Communist atheist conspiracy eating away at the pillars of Western civilization.   

Of course, if you just read the lines of poetry, you begin to sense meaning.

Sea is moon,

Ever there you could,

You but I see

Leaning out over

I just made that up.  Why not? 

What would happen if two people began talking in a language that didn’t, in its content or structure, reflect the world?

Would they begin to “catch on” to something?  Would some previously dormant area of mind and imagination float to the surface and grasp what was happening? 

If so, we could speculate that, in fact, there is a huge area of mind/imagination that rarely if ever has the chance to make itself known—because we are trapped in matching our language to the world as it is—not only in content, but in structure and sequence.

I refer you to many movies that posit and depict other worlds of a fantastic nature.  But these movies show other worlds as if they were just like ours, except the people, events, and circumstances in them are “more advanced” in various ways.  The movies never present these alternate worlds as being of a distinctly different kind than ours.  By “different kind,” I mean the order of events, the processes, the relationships partake of a far different “grammar.” 

Suppose one of the intrepid Star Trek crews encountered a world in which everyone lived entirely in what we would call a subjective reality?  And had a language that reflected that?  And looked at life in that fashion?  What would THAT be like?

When I talk about the possibility of a magic theater (see my last article), I’m indicating we could have characters on stage partaking of a different KIND of world—and their language would reflect that. 

Why bother?

Because no one knows how deep the trance is that we live in, how truly devoted we are to the structure of ordinary reality, how tight we hold on to the sequence and grammar of that reality-language.  No one knows how much of our imagination is waiting in the wings to capitalize on a moment when we seek other possibilities.

I fully realize that what I’m saying in this article may take some time to sink in.  But that’s all right.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  And I’ll tell you a secret.  Rome was never destroyed.  It lives on in the vast dedication to its fundamental blueprint.

Our language confirms and feeds back to us our perception of what reality is.  A new kind language; a new kind of reality.  A new KIND of reality.  This is what few people want to contemplate. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE MAGIC THEATER PROJECT

By Jon Rappoport

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

www.nomorefakenews.com 

OCTOBER 13, 2010.  Lately, I’ve been looking over notes I made for a project called THE MAGIC THEATER.  It’s still on the drawing boards…

This article is a selection from those rather esoteric notes, and it’s dedicated to those of you who’ve stuck with me over the years as I’ve written many pieces on the power of imagination.  You know who you are.  I appreciate your interest and your desire to explore this vast area further and further.  To me, you’re champions.   

THE MAGIC THEATER would be for actors, or people who might want to act, or people who are already acting IN LIFE but are bored with the process and the results.

In other words, it’s for anybody.

Most actor-training schools focus on scenes and dialogue and movement rooted in Realism.  I have no problem with that.  I’m just interested in something else.

Here are some preliminary notes—-you may find these ideas opaque or confusing or puzzling…but I submit that just means you need to think about them a good deal more than you think about the news or what’s on television or the next thing you’re about to do. 

Notes—

We need an opportunity to use words, language and expressed emotion that surpasses the expectations of ordinary reality.

For example, if you rehearsed a scene with other actors in which the substance was a DREAM, and the language was an invented poetics in which the usual connections between words were advanced beyond rational and logical discourse, you would be approaching the point where new space and time became palpable.

Most “dream scenes” in theater or film hang on to ordinary language.  The setting and events are challenging, but the words are pedestrian. 

Language as we use it is ballast.  It keeps us rooted in the conventions of reality.  It assures us that the relationships between things and events and people are stable in a simplistic context.

According to at least one interpretation of the Chinese language, it posited, in its original form, a vital flow in which process and relationships and action verbs were the primary forces.  Objects, positions, nouns, measurable distances were background, incidental. 

Poetic drama has the potential to surpass the conditioning that accommodates us to every-day reality. 

Rarely has theater seriously transformed the very basis of language, dialogue, and verbal assumptions.  In that sense, theater has been a bird with rocks on its wings. 

In THE MAGIC THEATER, people learn to speak in different ways.

About 35 years ago, I was a regular in a theater experiment with Scott Kelman, at his Factory Theater in downtown LA.  Every week, about 10 of us gathered for something he called The Liars Club.

One by one, we would take the stage and tell a story about ourselves that was a complete lie.  The idea was to make it as convincing as possible.  We were motivated to tell some major lies.  It wasn’t just, I stole a marble from my childhood friend. 

The effect of each person stepping up and telling a story for 10 minutes or so was rather extraordinary, and it was sub rosa.  We didn’t quiz each other about the “lie aspect.”  There was no probing…just one lie after another.  Then, turn out the lights, and go home.

It took me about three weeks to realize that I was assuming people were telling the TRUTH about what had happened to them, under the pretended cover of lying.  It was that convincing. 

Of course, I didn’t know.  Still don’t.  Lying or telling the truth? 

Conscious lies change space.

Not being able to separate lie from truth, AND KNOWING YOU CAN’T, changes space.

The pressure to tell the truth reduces and distorts space.  Eliminate that pressure and space opens up.

Dada and Surrealism were efforts to subvert conventional space and truth, based on the alternative prospect of finding new space and time. 

THE COSMOS IS A FORGERY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.

People tell or accept a story about the cosmos based on their conception about how the story might suit them.  Help them.

In accepting such a story, they create a reductionist version of what they are.

Imagination knows no bounds.

Theater, for all its props and stories, does relatively little to exercise the far reaches of imagination when it comes to language.  Even poetic drama tends to center on what is fondly called “the human condition.”  The human condition is a convenient set of stories about human nature and motivation which become a shorthand method for cementing people into a limited notion of what is possible. 

There are non-verbal “languages.”  Twenty years ago, I ran a series of experiments that other people started calling Sounding.  I never called it anything.  It involved working with a small group (8-15 people) in a room.  After a set of warm-up exercises, people made sounds—any sounds—for a half hour or so.  The effect was quite interesting, to say the least.  Language unhooked from words provoked all sorts of unique combinations of feeling and thought.

It was theatrical, although content normally associated with theater was absent.

It resembled a five-year experience I had with a space in LA called Dance Home.  Recorded music ranging from Strauss waltzes to techno-industrial-pop was played continuously for 4 hours a night, several times a week, in a dance studio.  People moved in whatever ways they wanted to.  At times, the events took on a distinct theatrical flavor.

In the late 1970s, I rented a small theater in West LA and did 3 one-man shows, which were a series of comedic monologues.  In certain ways, they were similar to my later experiences with The Liars Club.  I was telling surreal stories that became more and more ridiculous as they went along.  It was an early attempt to push the audience into unfamiliar landscapes.

Many years later, when I ran for a seat in Congress, in LA, my team and I began to realize there were significant possibilities for a theater of the absurd in mainstream politics. 

So…these are some of the threads I’m pulling on here.  THE MAGIC THEATER would utilize both improvisation and tight scene-work—using types of language that go far beyond ordinary speech or familiar poetics—to tilt the seesaw of life in the direction of much greater imagination and space for the participants. 

Human beings want to reach for more, but eventually they lose sight of what they could imagine and create.  THE MAGIC THEATER would function as a powerful antidote. 

In my experience, it is at precisely those moments when we, individually or collectively, seem more locked in than ever by external events, that breakthroughs can be made.    

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com