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[ by Charles Cameron — or should that be Uber über alles?]
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Forget billboards — motorists now have ads buzzing a few feet above their windshields — MIT Technology Review

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There is an endless variety of possible starting points for a critique of oneself and the world. One might start from:

the message in a fortune cookie

whatever one’s parents imparted

whatever one rejected of what they imparted

Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates

a return to the Green Line

Palestine from the river to the sea

the sweet humility of the Magnificat

the fierce doctrine of Original Sin

the Cloud of Unknowing

the uncontaminated Unity of Godhead

the Buddha’s Noble Truth of suffering

the shining suchness of the Tathagata

something Karl Marx said, or Darwin

a tall tale from Chuang-Tzu

Lao Tzu’s unspeakable truth, unmappable path..

or the way someone reacted when one trod on their foot in the subway

Myself, I tend to go from either:

the Bene Gesserit adage, Fear is the mind-killer

or its obverse in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Yoga is the cessation of waves in the mind.

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Which brings me to advertising.

Yoga is the cessation of waves in the mind.

Advertising is the paid attempt to capture my attention regardless of my wishes in the matter.

In terms of the Yoga Sutras‘s goal of an unruffled mind, advertising attempts to stir up trouble — not in Syria or Afghanistan, or even in my kitchen, but within my consciousness.

And I’m not alone in detesting this invasive behavior. “Nearly 90% of people watching timeshifted shows fast-forward the ads,” the Guardian reported in a piece titled TV advertising skipped by 86% of viewers, and while Victoria may have a secret ingredient which makes her ads memorable — I’m referring here, of course, to a recent Nobel Prizewinner — most ads are simply irritants.

The benefit of advertising, to those whom it speaks, is that it acts as a road-sign to what we may want. It’s adverse effect is to clutter up our lives with road-signs to irrelevant and possibly offensive destinations. Apples don’t need little stickers on them proclaiming “apples by the Creator” but a discreet mention of “All purpose disinfecting cleaner by Bright Green” was quite helpful to me the other day, as I was wandering the aisles of Safeway in search of a brand they no longer carry..

And yes. Advertising drives sales drives manufacturing drives employment drives a roof over the head for many who might otherwise find themselves in the rain. Granted.

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But here come the mosquitoes.

The image at the head of this post comes from an article titled Uber’s Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic.

The unfortunate drivers in traffic jams in Mexico City are close to ground zero of an epidemic; Beelzebub, remember, is Lord of the Flies.

[ by Charles Cameron — plus ça change? ]
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Same difference?

Those of you who follow my keen interest in sameness and difference will appreciate the irony here.

There’s no disputin..

[by J. Scott Shipman]

American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur 188-1964, by William Manchester

Often on weekends my wife allows me to tag along as she takes in area estate sales. She’s interested in vintage furniture, and I hope for a decent collection of books. A sale we visited a couple months ago had very few books, but of those few was a hardback copy of American Caesar. I purchased the copy for $1 and mentioned to my wife, “I’ll get to this again someday…” as I’d first read Manchester’s classic biography of General Douglas MacArthur in the early 1980’s while stationed on my first submarine. “Someday” started on the car ride home (she was driving), and I must admit: American Caesar was even better thirty years later. Manchester is a masterful biographer, and equal to the task of such a larger-than-life subject.

MacArthur still evokes passion among admirers and detractors. One take-away from the second reading was just how well-read MacArthur and his father were. When MacArthur the elder died, he left over 4,000 books in his library—both seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of history and warfare. Highly recommended.

PS: I visited the MacArthur Memorial, in Norfolk, Virginia, recently while in town for business and would recommend as well.

[ by Charles Cameron — iconoclasm, Iranian style ]
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From AP today:

Iran confiscates Buddha statues from shops.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – An Iranian newspaper is reporting that government authorities are confiscating Buddha statues from shops in Tehran to stop the promotion of Buddhism in the country.

Sunday’s report by the independent Arman daily quotes Saeed Jaberi Ansari, an official for the protection of Iran’s cultural heritage, as saying that authorities will not permit a specific belief to be promoted through such statues.

Ansari called the Buddha statues symbols of “cultural invasion.”

He did not elaborate on how many have been confiscated so far, but said more would be seized from shops.

Iran has long fought against items, such as Barbie dolls and Simpsons cartoon characters, to defuse Western influence, but this appears to be the first time that Iranian authorities are showing an opposition to symbols from the East.

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Walter Benjamin, very much apropos, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it.

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Sources:

Barbie Sitting Acrylic Cut Out
Buddha, seated