Retroblog: The Eye of Bob, August 19, 1991, 10:29am

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
-"Me and Bobbie McGee"

"Bob is. Bob becomes. Bob is Not."
-Sub-Genius Handbook

Monday, 10:29 am 39.6N 72.6W... This is not a preamble, this is the Thing Itself. We've got heavy, driven rain coming down. Folks have appropriately been getting the hell out, and I'm coming to believe that that's what I may have to do. Soon. Most of the other cars are gone now. The neighborhood is quiet. Up and down the street, rows of windows wait taped up with crosshatch test patterns. Down in the bay, whitecaps are running in front of what feels like 20-30 mph wind. A sudden jump in intensity just at 10:31 and the gusts begin moving the trees around, rain coming down at nearly 45 degree angle, in from the east, the Bay only vaguely visible now. This definitely looks like the leading edge of some Activity. When the wind starts making noise, its time to punch out, and the wind has started doing just that. So I think it's time to do a scan on the security of all rooms, and then get the eff out of here. Let's see.. a final check upstairs, all seems to be well. Plastic over everything on the beds...near the windows...and let's shut it down.

"Jamestown Bridge, the Newport Bridge and the Mount Hope Bridge will all be closed in less than a half an hour. At eleven o' clock, they're going to be closed because of the anticipated high winds. And then at 11:30 the Braga Bridge is going to be clolsed."
-WLNE 6News

Oh, man. The Braga Bridge is not a suspension bridge, like those others, it's a a big beastly truss construction, but if the weather is going to close THAT...it's convincing me. The cat's looking at me, got him in the car already, cuz when things get bad they might get bad quickly, and I'll want to be able to move with some degree of rapidity. This must have been what it felt like those last few hours on Atlantis, wondering when the Hammer was going to come down. Well, here it is. Sky low enough now that I can hardly see across to the houses around the curve of the bay, whitecaps running in front of this wind, gain way up, making questionable noises as it whips through the utility poles...whistling windthrash plus a nearly subaural low frequency moaning. Unexpected, not what you associate with trees. A crow just took off from a power line and almost experienced a Colorado Springs Event.

"Tense, but prepared." Those are the words we hear over and over on the news, the rain has cleared up briefly, you can see lower clouds running crazily against the high slow deck. As I look out the back porch door, they're coming almost directly toward me, parallel to the side of the house's east-west axis, which leads me to believe that the back of the house, bathroom and garden, may get the worst of this. There's an almost eerie quiet in the street now, no cars going by, no cars with their Houses. When they turn the water off, as they've promised to do here in the not-too-distant, it's really time to get out.

Another quantum jump in wind intensity at 10:41. Now we have the consistent wire howl and a serious, serious tree movement accompanying it. Bending crowns & top branches some 5 to 10 feet from the vertical. But coming over my head, so I can look down the block and see no signs of human occupancy, quite a barren sight here on Gormley Ave. Again, you can see the lower clouds, darker, outlined against the lighter backdrop. Quite an eerie noise. I'm going to try to wait another few minutes, try and stay on top of the news. They're showing footage form Charleston: smashed McDonald's signs, (cuz everyone knows how they're supposed to look, I guess...) houses with siding sheared off, debris choking the streets. A warning, a semiotic precursor. Gaze into the Crystal Screen. Here is your Future, viewers...

They're just marveling, the weatherfolk, over the technology, these GOES satellite images every half-hour, enabling even the one-lungest of local stations to put together a little flip-book animation of Approaching Doom. Baudrillard was right. The hurricane has ceased to exist; what we experience now is its simulation. We are disappointed at the views outside our windows, the vews from the mobile Broncos. We want to see a hurricane-shaped phenomenon, not all this boring rain at the windows. Why doesn't it look like that cool view from space, the swirling, almost galactic whirpool of white?

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"Long ago when the Great Rains came
and the Sea rose up on the Land
We stood on the shores like dinosaurs
with crystals in our hands..."
-The Reptiles, Mother Atlantis

"We are all Tasaday."
-Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

Jean Baudrillard, one of those marginally comprehensible French semioticians, wrote this book called Simulations, in which he argues that the logic of late-stage consumer capitalism (to intertextually tag Fred Jameson) is, unsurprisingly, simulation. Now by simulation, I believe that he means the possibility, indeed, the propensity, for cultures such as ours to reproduce objects until they become an infinity of mirrors wherein the authenticity (and even the existence) of the "original" becomes not so much doubtful as irrelevant. Put simply: Everyone knows that watching a football game is better on television: is more of a spectacle, is more up-close and personal, is made more interesting by its verbal annotation from a couple of friendly sports-geeks in the booth and slo-mo replay with paintbox circles and arrows. Football, the game, has been remade in the image of television, the archetechnology of simulation. When we used to have to read about the game, the day after, in the newspaper, we never had the illusion that we "were there." And yet, ask anyone on Tuesday morning if they "saw the game" last night, and, by gosh, they did. But they didn't, you see. They saw a pattern of several million colored dots per second interlacing around on their screen. That's the reality now. The "real" game has no running color commentary.

Bau(drillard) knows football. And when he sez "We are all Tasaday," he means that we, like that unfortunate pre-literate tribe, live now in the haunting age of "having been discovered," having been "allowed to return to our natural habitats," by kindly social scientists, and that we all now Pretend that Things Are As They Were Before, that we just live, exist, and Be, when in fact we all really know that everything is carefully forecast, plotted and maximized, and that every step we take in our concrete forest, we've been sold the shoes (Gotta be the Shoes!) we wear as well as the road we walk on. (All the miles of Alamo country.) Everything is, has already been, simulated. As Baudrillard points out, nothing is clearer proof of this than Disneyland, an enormous "artificial" habitat whose true function is to convince us of the Reality of the everyday life we spend watching television, trading Merc index futures, and electing cowboy actors.

Cut loose from any moorings in reality, such a culture drifts becalmed in a sea of doubly dereferenced signs.

We do experience this as a social tension: the desire to establish requirements for "social literacy," the reactionary insistence on the canon in literature, the not-so-subtle critiques from the right of "political correctness" as a tool of leftist repression. We long for the "Family Values" that Norman Rockwell simulated and Ronald Reagan homilized: women in labor and minorities off-screen.

There's a joke I heard a Russian commentator tell some years ago, probably on Nightline, that went something like this: When the Soviets want to change history, they imprison the intellectuals and change the textbooks; when Americans want to change history, they make a mini-series. Simulation has taken command when people flock to pseudohistory like The Civil War, when actual crimes are referred to by their filmic antecedents, and when each new scene of tragedy or horror is crowded, not only with attorneys, but with producers trying to buy the rights to the Event. In his own homespun American way, Chayefsky tried to warn us about all this in 1975, with words that hold the grim prescience of the unheeded:

"We spin illusions. We'll tell you any goddamned thing you want to hear. We'll tell you that Kojak always gets his man, and that nobody gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house...you eat like the Tube, you dress like the Tube, you even think like the Tube. This is madness. You maniacs. My god, we're the illusion...you're the Reality..."
-Howard Beal, Network

The only time television is real and necessary is in times of crisis; it is at its best when unscripted, at its worst when pretending to be at its "best" — the "highbrow" crap like the Ring cycle on PBS that many may tape, but nobody watches. But pure, raw television, on those few occasions when the mask slips... oh, that is a heady thing indeed. Special reports almost always have that character: a poorly prepared newsperson jerked in front of a camera, mispronouncing things. Live, unedited footage. Remember the first feed from the Sadat assasination, where you saw that guy whose arm had been blown off? Dan Rather winced audibly, a breath-catching grunt, and the mike was live. You and Dan were seeing this for the first time; no pre-packaging, no preconceptions. I do not make the claim that when cameras point at something that they are transmitting "it," but only that mediated virtual presence posesses degrees of simulation. The first time we saw the Challenger explode, it was immediate. The seventy-fifth time, with the slomo closeup on the SRB rotating into the tank, was, to put it charitably, mediated. And by the time they did the "made for TV movie" we didn't even need to see it. Cut to Peggy Noonan's poetic, noetic masterpiece of spin.

"Shall I project a world?"
-Oedipa Maas,
The Crying of Lot 49

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