Gonzo Marketing:Winning Through Worst Practices The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy
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Friday, November 12, 2004
auto-colonialism
choose (or invent) your identity
I ran across a book called The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America by Christopher Newfield. This is from the chapter titled "Authoritarian Language."
Sacvan Bercovitch offers a similar combination . Emerson insists that language "is an exercise not in the powers of the individual imagination but in the philology of nature." But Emerson also believes that the use of natural language requires the poet's previous will to "choose (or invent) his identity, and then to impose his own patterns upon experience." To Bercovitch's romantic poet, reception is identically self-reception. Even "the imitation of Christ became for him the process of duplicating himself... a deific creation ex imaginatione in which caritas depended upon autonomy, and plenitude was narcissism extended to infinity." [emphasis mine]


Here's a small piece loosely (so far) joined to the above...

I'm looking at Manifest Destiny as a prototypically American idea, tracing its roots backward to edenic Puritan notions of an Anglo-Aryan "Elect" predestined by God for salvation (all others not only can, but must, go to Hell), and its extension forward through the mid-19th century Transcendentalists to the late-20th "Human Potential Movement" -- a shifting of manifest destiny from geographic imperialism to a psychological form of internal auto-colonialism: "self-actualization."

This last and potent meme, ironically, having incubated and pandemically dispersed from the Pacific coast, specifically Esalen Institute, where geographic "destiny" could no longer manifest, has morphed into a notion of elite (largely white Christian) entitlement and exploitativeness that is virtually indistinguishable from pathological narcissism as defined by the DSM-IV -- and is "manifesting" today from outraged public headlines to the broken intimacy of private bedrooms.

Included will be pit stops in 17th & 19th century evangelical "awakenings," faux-Oriental imports of seance-driven spiritualism and Emersonian "Oversoul," spiced with rabid racism, an all-too-real pre-WWII American eugenics program, and culminating in an American public -- not just the Christian Right -- that's living in a nostalgic dreamworld of alpha-dominant triumphalism rationalized by a spooky hoo-doo "spirituality": the purportedly new New Age.


RageBoy® fending off a calligrapher


2:37 AM | link |



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"RageBoy: Giving being fucking nuts a good name since 1985."
~D. Weinberger
28 October 2004

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Until a minute ago, I had no photos. I still have no photos to speak of. I don't even have a camera. But all these people were linking to "my photos." It was embarassing. It's still embarassing. But I'm used to that.


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