Blogging Sean Penn’s “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff” Section IV Peeling the Onion and Watering of the Eyes

Under Communism, typewriters had to be registered with the government, now they are registered under your account.  Ever wonder why?

Sean Penn’s novel is a Canto of sorts.  OK it’s not stage four hopeful, but …  Some call it the worst piece of writing ever, but he didn’t care.  But can we really say any piece of writing is garbage?  Can it be any dumber that spending scads or wads of cash transmitting messages into space at the speed of light to places 25,000 light years away?  Or Instagramming Nipsters (Nazi hipsters) who wear expensive clothes to rallies heightening the fears of the mainstreaming of extremism?  Or placing a lampshade on the Enlightenment?  Or bees repelling scented attacks by vespa mandarina (murder hornets) by smearing the entrances of their hives with ox dung which masks the honing scent of the big jawed, armored wasps sent to kill them all?  Or passing bond after bond to steal the money of the people in the US whose lower 50% have not seen an increase in real wages for over 60 years despite massive advances in productivity?

Station Four mixes in the Scottsdale Senior Services center and the CIA’s Phoenix Program.  For the unknowing, the US fought a war in a place called Vietnam.  The world lost many people in horrible ways.  The Phoenix Program was an attempt to destroy the Vietcong.  Trần Ngọc Châu, a Vietnamese soldier and politico, was appointed by President Diem as chief of Kien Hoa, a large province in the Mekong Delta. Mr. Chau spent much of the next three years in Kien Hoa, experimenting with alternative counterinsurgency methods. 

All South Vietnamese counterinsurgency activities became part of a new program known as Phuong Hoang, a reference to a magical bird associated with royalty and power in Vietnamese and Chinese cultural traditions. In response to the South Vietnamese move, American officials in Vietnam began referring to their own counterinsurgency coordination efforts by the name that they deemed the closest Western analogue to the mythical creature: Phoenix.

Throughout the program, Phoenix “neutralized” 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed and the rest surrendered or were captured.  Mr. Chau and his C.I.A. collaborators hoped to wear down and destroy what they would later call the Vietcong infrastructure — the network of Communist cadres and agents who lived undercover among the rural population.

The Dartmouth historian’s take is that Mr. Chau’s approach was undoubtedly less destructive than the tactics of South Vietnamese and American commanders who preferred to engage the enemy with artillery and airstrikes. But his methods were far from bloodless, and the victory he aimed to achieve did not turn on the winning of hearts and minds. Instead, his approach relied much more on manipulation, coercion, fear and killing. Americans will do well to remember these qualities when contemplating the counterinsurgency wars that their country continues to wage today.

OK, so far so good.  Or not good.  Well Penn moves along to attach responsibility for the Senior program to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, the Rand Corporation, provider of the “Pentagon Papers” which uncovered the scandal in Vietnam in the 70’s and the National Security Agency or NSA.

Penn writes that the seniors were targeted because the “unbranded generation of seniors threatened to bleed human progress and market development dry.”  Seniors in this line of thought are bad for business.

It does seem a cruel statement, but perhaps Penn is juxtaposing other hairbrained schemes ab absurdo to highlight a point.   He doesn’t stop there. 

In Penn’s dystopian zero-sum world, one thing is traded for another.  In this case the flatulence causing seniors, when removed, will allow for more positive environmental gains.  He calls it a sewer swap. 

As for Bob, he’s clueless as to who is responsible.  Maybe Penn is making everyman, who has turned into a machine, into the transactional personage of Bob Honey, “our mallet-wielding American male.”  Honey seems to be disassociated from his physical body, rarely receives callers and seems to live a disharmonious life.  It’s as if life is happening around him and yet he isn’t really a part of anything.  It’s the opposite of Buddhist emptiness.  It’s living an unexamined, unrepentant and ultimately failed existence attached to the world and only the world.

Another character enters, a journalist named Spurley Cultier who pronounces his name in a French manner, Mr. Cult-E-A.  This investigative journalist wants to ask Bob some questions, but he interrogates and Bob asks most of the questions.    The “journalist” is really a huckster who is as disfunctional as Bob who asks, “So, why do you ask questions, Mr. Cultier?”  Cultier answers with “Good, question, Bob” and proceeds to ignore the question completely. 

The concept of truth seems to be on trial when the journalist mentions that he “sometimes” believes responses.   “The practice of honesty has a gray hue.”   

Bob says he doesn’t believe anybody’s answers.  “I don’t know if I ever really tell the truth much.  I wonder sometimes if the truth might be more habit than virtue.”

Wow.  Talk about being on two different pages.  The power of the media to shape opinion and act as judge in the “Court of Public Opinion” is really an issue. 

Perhaps the Internet has made the idea of fair and impartial impossible.  Like the sun overtakes the candle, the magnitude of information and the condition of the recipient is a chasm.  Or is it?  Taking Bob’s mallet, I’ll give it a whack and take this time to end with a crazy idea I call the Multidimensional-human Element Messaging Paradigm (MhEMP):  A new weighted element in the political constellation that embodies social, political, economic and computational properties that are unique and both narrow/general/ and disambiguous/ambiguous in scope.  This new phenomenon has been revealed by the quick access to communications and dramatic changes in the delivery of news via new methods which include audio, visual and written communications.  

The standard pipeline approach to semantic processing, in which sentences are morphologically and syntactically resolved to a single tree before they are interpreted is being challenged.  Newspaper and other forms of communication readership are down; however, the need still exists for a voice of truth or credibility in a system with fissiparous outlets and generators of ideas and expressions.

Simultaneous information resolution is both unpredictable and naturally unsuited to traditional forms of communications by a factor of time.  The pace and cadence of this time element has been readjusted with no immediate counterweight or adjustment.  Some believe that the balance is achieved by raw human instinct taking the place of reasoned prudence.  Instant messages offer a unique set of reactions from the experience and knowledge standpoint.

Here are some key characteristics of this new communication paradigm.

1.   Multidimensional communication meaning spanning national and international boundaries and traditional hierarchy labels like “news source”.  There is no single source from which messaging comes like traditional television networks and less so radio and other forms of written communication like newspapers, magazines and journals.

2.  Facilitated by rapid communicative technology, existing primarily in the public space.  The elimination of private space has been accomplished quickly.

3.  Creates ‘flash knowledge’.  This type of knowledge is used primarily for entertainment and to satisfy interests and can be facilitated by visual placement.  Creates tension between participatory and intention knowledge activities.  This is the most personal aspect of the new revolution.

4.  Require no distillation, can be ingested ‘raw’ or ‘unplugged’.  As a sensory experience, the result is little or no introspection with little or no internalization as would be required by acceptance of a myth for example.

5.  New medium Inclusive and not exclusive, yet not impartial.  Filtering content only exacerbates the tension between truth and desire for truth.

6.  Information subject to obscurity due to ‘noise’.  Cannot ever be taken in totality which reduces its usefulness.

7.  Not easily or completely censored, verified or controlled by human or machine.  What is unknown cannot be controlled, nor can blame or responsibility be immediately or accurately affixed.

8.    Many conscious and subconscious blind spots exist creating a “black box” for individual reality “clouds” , separate modes of reality: each as believable to one person as the next.

9.   Leading to replacement of traditional concepts like ‘balance of power’, ‘Great Powers’ with narrowly defined interests over general interests.  Highly reactive which fits into the mode of entertainment and less valuable as communication.

10.   Facilitating politicization of base desires lessening the value and desire for looking at problems in depth.  Linked to instant gratification.

11.  Satisfies a narrowly defined ‘need to know’ which is heightened by instabilities the medium creates.  Subcritical minds are affected differently than supercritical.

12.  Reduces human thought to instinctual, emotional, interjected reactions.  Often the intended message is directed at a particular audience or purpose which is not specified at the time the message is relayed.

13.  Truth is now challenged daily.  Commonly held structures like family and community are giving way to improvisational organizations seeking to redefine the norm.

14.   Feeds on fears of globalization.   Elevates inalienable universal human concerns like safety, freedom and health which encounter administrative rationalities in the social, political and economic realm.

15.   In the absence of universal structure, has led to falling back to traditional rules of conduct which cannot match against the infinite variations of human behavior or perception at any given time.

16.  Understanding the new technology will be critical for opinion makers and elections can be won and lost with this technology.   The traditional messaging is observed as inconsequential except in the need to sanctify trust and defense of liberties.  There is a reset to basic human instincts, almost exclusively based on emotion at a particular time.  Building a timeworn campaign simply cannot be done in this current technological environment.

17.  No “instruction tables” exist to aid in navigating the new realities and structures forming.

18.  Subject to fakery and message hijacking which can be formidable barriers when locked into desires to satisfy erroneous or (in)correct beliefs.  Each person’s “shape” may be discerned, but the actions cannot be predetermined or known entirely.

19.  Knowledge does not exist in a vacuum in this element.  Predictivity of patterns cannot predict future outcomes as reality is a continuum subject to change.    This means that knowledge itself is a moving target.  The human brain remains the same underutilized mechanism seeking to model advancement on nature.  For example, DNA data storage challenging the processing capacity of humans.  With the loss of objective pattern recognition, a reteaching of meaning is underway.  The filters of history, religion, family and institutions have weakened.

20.  “covfefe effect” This word, introduced by President Donald Trump in a May 31, 2017 tweet, was met with a mixture of thoughts globally.  The complete tweet read “Despite the constant negative press covfefe…”

This phenomenonpoints to a narrowing of concepts to almost poetic simplicity, non-prosaic and lacking depth or real meaning except the meaning prescribed at the time of the introduction.  The experiential and knowledge distinctions are still to be examined with key contributions made by thinkers like Richard Avenarius in his “Kritik der reinen Ehrfarung” written over a century ago.  

Lewis Carroll who wrote “Alice in Wonderland” the nonsensical poem “Jabberwocky” is a good example of words that encase concepts relevant to the time.  This allows words and concepts to be reduced, simplified and bounced to the point of complexity.  James Joyce, author of Ulysses, once wrote, “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

We’ll see in the second half how systems theories mean one small thing leads to another and how Bob deals with love and escapes briefly from a life of “dullness with dignity” when he meets Annie who had alopecia and wore an astonishing wig.  Their sexual escapades are a uniquely dystopic experience that I’m sure the bourgeoise will leave their chairs for.

You learn something new every minute!  And if you are like me, you forget two things every minute! 

You learn something new every minute!

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