Steven Parmenius

  Of course, there is no practical question of banning the meme currently any more than there is much hope of banning the bomb. Still, as an implement for constructing extremism and ultimately murder no more potent tool has yet been invented. It possibly even surpasses its direct ancestor the propaganda poster. This is because the meme is replicated, over and over, as in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice. The poor poster, alas, occupies a single point in space and must be plastered physically across town by someone schlepping posters. The meme is under no such restriction but spreads virally doing its thing. What is this thing? The meme manufactures reality and reinforces it by dint of constant repetition. To do this the meme must function like another of its near relatives the talking point. By dint of repetition that becomes simple habit it defines the boundaries of good and bad, real and unreal. This is an especially immersive kind of repetition for interacting with the me...

  When I was a child I used to gaze at face cards in a standard deck and wonder what mysterious people these could be. Later I found out that they are (or at least were at one time understood to be) figures from classical or biblical history such as David, Caesar or Judith. This, I suppose, I might have happily not known for it seems to add little to the implacable, solemn gazes of the King of Spades or the Queen of Hearts. Readers of The Wasteland , though, know of that other, even more mysterious set of images that is the tarot pack. Eliot used these, he tells us, only for their broadest symbolic import and denied any precise knowledge of their use or significance. The images, however, seem to work anyway for we shiver, poetically speaking, when we fail to find the hanged man in the deck of Madame Sosostris. The hanged man, the crucified god of death and renewal, is hidden in the symbolism of the deck and hidden from us by the fraudulent modern Sybil who reads our cards. This bri...

            Now that my click-bait title has gotten your attention let me say that I’m an admirer of most things English even though in this essay I am going to have to puncture a deep, indeed stupefying complacency about the world that seems to afflict that otherwise admirable nation AND its colonial epigones in the U.S. (especially!), Canada and elsewhere. This is a complacency that, like all such complacencies, presents itself to itself as sublime and simple sense. There are, I am sure, French and German versions of complacent ‘common sense’ but I will let the French and Germans comment on those.   Before saying WHAT this world-view is, however, I should probably say WHERE it is: ASCS (Anglo-Saxon common sense) is so pervasive that it is a bit challenging to say exactly where it is emanating from. I will make a few preliminary observations here. As proponents of it will tirelessly complain it is NOT by and large the arts/social science section ...