by Christopher

Homelessness. The very sound of the word conjures up images which define public attitudes toward us. To me, it almost sounds like poverty, privation, or want blended with the circumstance we all must deal with: clothes, hygiene, a less than welcoming public, etc. I think of George Carlin’s take: a home is an abstract concept made of much more than a house. What these people need is houses and to be called “houseless” in the meantime. But since homeless is the word I turn toward my goal at this publication to counter the source of our dismay in this respect. The source, I aver, is the always encroaching culture of Madison Avenue and Hollywood which defines us as a society. It is a profitable culture which has gone on so continuously people generally don’t know any other way of being.

I try to explain something people are generally not aware of—that their thoughts, ideas, and proclivities are a national uniformity created by “mind scientists” in New York’s advertising/ marketing/ public relations culture. For context, the show “Mad Men” is about the corporations on Madison Avenue. Their goal, for lucre as always, had been to analogically automate the commercial and political behavior of the populace. Like the notion of incredulity in the face of these facts and the Orwellian society we live in, people generally do not believe in the plausibility that we live in a totalistic mind control Orwellian society. In fact, now with technology and the cameras people simply ascribe these things as hegemonies that have always existed.

I look at history to illustrate this. I mentioned Hollywood and Madison Avenue because this culture represents a kind of home fried Maoism which no on recognizes. But to me, celebrity and the idolatry of the telegenic is the Maoism of our culture. This is also useful in terms of “people who generally do not know any other way of being.” It was an historical innovation of Mao after the fall of China in 1949 to systematically make the Chinese populace forget history, forget ancestor worship, Confucianism—in short anything that represented a threat to the revolution. The American feature of this culture presents a means of not knowing history because knowledge is a threat to the people who govern. A corollary to this mode is a culture where people have no legitimate moral aversion to the crimes of the state. Hence war and torture are not moral issues for the majority population. And even for Christians, Matthew 25 is not enough to counter their posture toward the homeless and the poor.

I feel it is my task to contribute to the waking up people regarding the hypocrisy of this culture. I will do this both by illustrating the terrible facts and by raising the consciousness of persons whose only idea of homelessness is informed by silent automated interpretation of our appearance. I feel the Challenger in part upends that silent action. And more and more I hope the deterministic progression of the American hegemony will begin to fissure and crack.

My experience is not the only one, but I feel, in light of the uniformity of the totalism, my experience illustrates the experience and ideas of many others. I note Emerson’s prescience in which he appeals to the reader to think of how many times you have encountered an original idea of your own in the work of a great author and in which you silently dismiss yourself as origin of the idea and defer to book here before you.

There is no doubt and little serious debate that our society has become ever more shrill, venal, and venal when it comes to homeless persons. I feel this uniform culture is of the analogic automation I mentioned before. And like the vacuum of morality it is not questioned or inquisited. Rather than these analogical being understood, now we live in a history moment where the analogic motive is being converted into cold digital automation. Not to make us more free or more informed but merely to re=trench the analogic automation that was never compassed by the populace. It is the scions of culture and history call it progress, but the entrenchment of tyranny by novel technology is not civil progress and it never has been.

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