Thursday, March 1st - Snow day today. The fluffy white flakes are falling outside. There's that "gray feeling" in the air. Nothing to do but write.

When you look around, isn't it amazing how many paid actors are running around these days: people paid to pretend, whose job is to strike a pose, to keep up appearances, to make us believe that the dubious substance of their celebrity fantasy is in fact a binding reality (a money-making reality)  by virtue of being a "real fantasy" just as movie showing at a real theater is real as far as that goes, if that makes any sense....I wonder if this is what the future holds for all of us, that in the future everyone will be - not so much "locked into" a career or a relationship or a family or a community or a particular location (you see this already happening for about the past 30 years, right?)  - but simply a dilettantish dabbler knowingly stepping into a temporary role or a series of roles. But surely something (vague word) remains binding! Surely, the setting itself - wherever we happen to be - the bare environment - the specific locale - the people we're surrounded by must be keeping our wishes in check. But on top of that terrestrial setting, there has been superimposed a more ethereal, virtual setting - that confirms our sense that we are beyond what earlier generations called Fate. The old customs, habits, traditions, social interactions, modes of etiquette, norms, limits, orthodoxies, expected behaviors continue to fade, continue on the wane, dated, inoperable, washing away, ever so gradually, year by year, decade by decade, century by century, never actually capitulating or disappearing (how strange that is!) only to be replaced by the "absolute infinite negativity" of irony that resists all etched-in-stone social conventions as approximations of the Absolute. We remember quite a bit of the old and wish to keep it alive; our nostalgia leads us to reenact various scenes populated by long-suffering mothers and pater-familias, large families, villagers,  towns-folk, artisans, peasants, land-owners, aristocrats, soldiers, salesmen, welders, steel-workers, bankers, country doctors, churchgoers - but never with a sense that these antiquated "roles" could  entirely rule over us or determine the basis of who we are nowadays. Thus we reserve for ourselves a strange veto power to step outside of any given circumstance as out of a play gone wrong. It remains uncanny, nevertheless, to consider that, however much certain natural, historical,  religious or economic forces have shaped these various character "types" - these possible forms -  the world has already changed to such a degree as to make it impossible to ever climb back into the sinking vessel or to reside within some fading hologram on the horizon; stranger still that this same vessel, that same fading hologram on the water refuses to sink entirely - but only enough as to make us question our status "on land."

But suppose that someone objects - takes issues - with all of this - if only to remind us of the obvious,  glaring, intractable "class divisions" that still exist within the so-called "classless society" that we appear to be building brick by brick like some ideal edifice drawing closer by slow gradations. And despite the valiant efforts of "pop culture" to bind us all together into some "common soup" of shared discourse, these group divisions - rich/middle/poor, urban/rural, right color/wrong color, skilled/unskilled, literate/illiterate,  laborers/technocrats/managers -  strangely call into question the unity of it all - unless of course there remains a "chosen class" whose basic assumptions, aims, goals, tastes - are absorbed and disseminated without question, unconsciously as somehow taking precedence. Ruling class ideology - cultural hegemony - paging Antonio Gramsci.

All very true as far as it goes, but that leaves open the confusing trend of upper classes emulating lower classes and vice versa not to mention any emerging hybrid social classes or eclectic combinations of class loyalties - rich people claiming to be born in log cabins, accountants pretending to be gang members, computer geeks eschewing traditional business fashions, etc. etc.