Monday Morning Live

CNN reported on a telekinesis stunt engineered by he producers of the new version of Carrie. A young girl goes berserk in a coffee shop. "Up against the wall motherfucker" is a good expression for the powers she unleashes. It’s Candid Camera and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, a put on which caused mass panic, rolled into one--since the customers have not been forewarned that the girl and her victim are both actors. A similar stunt, this time taking place in a beauty shop, was engineered by the producers of the television remake of the The Exorcist. CNN then went on to document a spate of other videos used to create buzz, including one in which a murder is taking place in an elevator, with bystanders looking on in disbelief. What does the average person do when confronted by a murderer or someone with telekinetic powers? The answer is that they usually freeze up. The videos are hysterical, but they replay the sad story of our contemporary world in which outrageous atrocities occur and the crowd simply gawks, grows paralyzed or simply walks away. The mock elevator murder was particularly unsettling since it brought back Kitty Genovese, the young Queens woman who was stabbed to death back in l964 and whose screams for help were met with inaction. After the humor of these staged events has past, we are reminded that  paranormal happenings are a good description of what is going on in Syria, in Egypt, in Somalia, in North Korea—to name just a few examples of very public bludgeonings from which the rest of the world often turns its head.

Excerpted from the 2011 Commencement Address, College of Tyranny

Here is a tip for the class of 2011 at the College of Tyranny: You can’t have WikiLeaks if you don’t have Internet. As the Times reported on Wednesday, “In a span of minutes just after midnight on January 28th, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet” (“Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet,” NYT, 2/16/11). According to the Times, China has also created “an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project,” which enabled it in 2009 to “shut down cell phone and Internet service amidst unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjian.” In effect, the Internet has become a legislative body and news organization rolled into one, and you need a certain degree of freedom—say the equivalent of the conventional bomb that detonates a nuclear device—in order to pave the way for a full blown explosion of liberty. Now, letting a country roll back into darkness is not a terribly bad idea from a strategic point of view. Pol Pot did precisely that when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, and North Korea is almost Internet-free (although Kim Jong-il himself, according to his Wikipedia citation, loves “surfing the net”). A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge is virtually useless if there is no one there to receive it. There would be something innocent and almost Rousseauesque about a world without leaks or pornography, a world where Eve was too afraid to reach for the forbidden fruit, if it weren’t for the fact that such a world could only be attained through the repression of thought.