[OT] [Long] [Inflammatory] Re: [Coco] Jingo - Jango - Mars

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 09:30 AM 1/15/04 -0500, James C. Hrubik, Sr. wrote:
>There's nothing wrong with looking at the world through clear lenses.  
>I live in a country where I still have far more freedom and "goodies" 
>than I could have anywhere else in the world.

As one who is slowly working on emigrating to the Netherlands, I'll say
that where the US has advantages for you, it also has some disadvantages
serious enough for me to leave it.

One disadvantage is its 150-year-long, ongoing movement toward unbalanced,
aggressive, and zealous capitalist theocracy. This was set in motion by the
constitution's property guarantees -- neutral in themselves -- but advanced
beginning with the granting of corporate personhood in the 19th century.
>From there, the country has careened ever further away from creating a
meaningful and rich culture toward feeding a rapacious, consumptive beast
that wants a worldwide Pax Americana in the guise of Coca-Colonization.

Do we have more freedom in the US? It only depends on how you define your
freedoms, and how those definitions are implemented. Saying the US meets
the standards of its own US constitutional freedom (even if that's true,
which it isn't) just becomes tautological.

Do people want to come to the US to better themselves? Certainly -- but the
whole world is not knocking at our door, however US propagandists might
like to present that. Developed countries worldwide are flooded with
immigrants. America is iconic, yet there is much disappointment facing
those who arrive ... especially as the country fills up and the doors are
closed.

In any case, as an artist who has watched generations of great American
artists have to leave this country to survive, I don't believe the US has
come close to meeting its potential in what is the ultimate realm of
humanity, i.e., society and culture, and has dug an ultimately fatal
constitutional hole in this regard. While putting forth claims to
excellence, we work to encourage mediocrity or failure -- the former by
decrying differences and meeting imagination with anti-American labels, the
latter by refusing to acknowledge the worth of that which does not operate
in the commercial realm. Meaning is increasingly measured in terms of coin.

Staggering as it may seem to say out loud, I am as free to be a successful
composer here as I might be in a dictatorship. The difference? There my
work would be censored by state machinery and have to conform to its point
of view. Here it is censored by the corporate machinery and has to conform
to its point of view (and I'm happy to present evidence if you really want
it, but it would clog this list!).

It is not possible to meet one's potential as an artist in the US because
of the nature of art (in which I include the visual arts, music, dance,
etc. -- all of what makes life worth living) and its natural challenge to
mass-market measurement. So I will 'escape' to a place where corporate
censorship is held in check by the state and human culture is encouraged
alongside what is still one of the strongest capitalist traditions in the
world. That, to me, is more freedom, not less -- and those are the 'clear
lenses' through which I look at the world.

Dennis