Not technically a random thought, but if you subscribe to Jung's concept of Synchronicity we're all attaching our own meanings to simultaneous events anyway.
I'm going to see Devo live with my kid later this year. I came across this video where Gerry is being interviewed by the press after the
Kent State shootings.
It got me thinking about the cyclical nature of our societies in modern times. Populist cults of personality emerge, and the technology of the day promotes and disseminates their ideologies. We all live in our own generational zeitgeists, with social and cultural indoctrination via the technology available at that time.
Devo went on to express themselves in a way that the mainstream capitalist entertainment industry would have never gone for. Punk bands are often held up as the first to use DIY production and promotion, but those techniques were actually born out of a frustration with the hegemony (printed and live 'news' on TV at that time). Essentially, they found a way to promote a different narrative
in their time.
All this to say, I'm randomly wondering how my kid's generation and the next generation will see this time in their own contexts. I know that artistic expression will continue to be used to protest, but part of me fears that the emerging 'always connected' data stream combined with AI will, on the whole, make us collectively easier to manipulate by steering us in the direction of the desired narrative.
This newly discovered film footage aired only once — in the year 1970, in Europe — and has never seen in the USA. But now it can be told! Jerry Casale explains: I remember participating in this BBC interview in July of 1970. I tried in vain to find out what happened with it in the ensuing years, resigned to thinking it had disappeared off the face of the earth without a trace.
Yellow taped-off Kent State University be damned, we were permitted on campus so the BBC could conduct the interview at the location known as ‘The Commons,’ which was the opening scene of the crime on May 4th, 1970.
I was selected for this interview because I was a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and I in the midst of the action that fateful day, 2 months prior to BBC’s film shoot. Two of the 4 students killed that day, Jeffery Miller and Alison Krause, were my friends.
It’s almost amusing now to see myself at age 22; a boy trying to be brave and figure things out.
What’s not at all amusing is this interview gives evidence that the cultural warfare issues of Tyrannical Authoritarianism vs. Liberty and Democratic Rule of Law — which are front and center today — were in play over 50 yeas ago.
Some things never change. In fact, the stakes are much higher now given a world facing existential threats such as the collapse of the environment and the rise of AI. The good fight is eternal.
—Gerald V. Casale
www.thecanadianpressnews.ca
defector.com
