Today is Super Bowl Sunday -- or so I gather -- and I probably haven't watched the Super Bowl in over 40 years. I used to watch as a kid, when it was just a football game. But the Super Bowl became merely a spectacle, a focal point for everything that is wrong with this culture. In a world driven by $$$, everything becomes just another commodity to sell, so....money, greed and avarice win the day yet again. No matter who wins the football game, the advertisers have made their bid to buy and sell your soul. Again.
If you wonder what happened in the Sixties, well, the Merchants of Menace simply took the Revolution, commodified it, and sold it back to the people. In their world, which unfortunately is also our world, there is nothing so noble that it can't be co-opted and turned into just another marketing opportunity. Did you turn a profit? That's their bottom line, and the only bottom line that matters in a world that can be bought and sold.
There must be a way to co-opt the co-opters and beat them at their own game? My hope is to tell the truth as I see it and let the chips fall where they may. In today's world, someone will come along to twist, spin, lie and spew forth their inverted version of whatever you may have said. So be it. Let the buyer beware. Use your own common sense, if you have any left.
What would a world that wasn't built on the mercenary merits of greed and avarice look like?
I haven't written anything in a while and one of the issues that someone raised recently was the protection of intellectual property. I have to look into that. Not that anything that I've written qualifies, nor is what I've written anything someone might try to steal, beyond a fairy tale I published hereon, but if one aspires to write, for whatever reason, one has to consider the consequences of possibly being co-opted. By whom and for what reasons, who knows? Everyone seems to have an axe to grind nowadays. Anyway, I'm posing the question to myself.
If you don't write for self-aggrandizement, then why do you write? If not for riches, fame, glory, or even to publish? Certainly not for literary merit. In other words, not for the sake of vanity. What if you write simply to discover what you really think? To translate the unconscious into consciousness, in the crucible of cognition? And if you happen to say something that helps even one individual, then it is well worth the while.
As for all the rest -- the buyers and sellers, the arbiters of value, worth, and the holy grail of a buck, the axe-grinders and ne'er-do-wells of the world - well, que sera, sera. I'll speak my piece and then be on my merry way.
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