The title slug above is the tagline for Virgin Mobile USA. I don't usually enthuse about companies' marketing campaigns -- there being so few opportunities to get excited about their mostly dullard, braindamaged efforts along such lines -- but this one is absolutely brilliant. As I hugely over-explained yesterday, I'm suddenly cut off from the world of mainstream telecommunications. This has shifted me, interestingly, into the demographic normally reserved for teens, who -- fortunately for them -- are in no position to commit to two-year cell phone service contracts. Gee. What's a boy or girl to do?

Once in a blue moon, companies wake up and pay attention to such dynamics -- once it becomes clear they represent enormous untapped market potential. I went to Target yesterday and asked if there weren't some sort of cell phone I could buy and feed it minutes via a pre-paid card. Obviously, I'd heard tell of such things, mostly via my 15-year-old daughter, but had never had to resort to such an approach as I could so easily sign up for Cingular (nee AT&T) cell service and run up a $1700 bill, which they're now suing me to recover. (Good luck!)

The salesman's answer, although he didn't put it this way, might as well have been: "DUH!" But instead of saying anything, he led me to a 15-foot wide store display where five companies were offering a dozen phones and all sorts of programs that required nothing more than the bucks to buy them on the spot and, in the Virgin Mobile case, a service activation process that takes no more than five minutes. And bam, I'm back online. At least with respect to phone. I'm still dependent on Starbucks and T-Mobile to post here, but even though it's a little pricey, that's filling the bill just fine as well. And the price difference for both these temporary solutions -- phone and Internet -- are trivial in the short haul. Works for me.

Although my situation is the result of gross negligence on my part, it's provided an opportunity to see how the other half lives, so to speak. The "other half" in this case being mostly kids, who depend on cell phones and net connections for indispensable social glue at this juncture of our fast-evolving, ever so confusing history-in-the-making. Are there kids -- and grownups -- who fall through the cracks, who can't afford these alternatives to conventional communications services? Yeah, there are. I have no ultimate solution to the ubiquitous have-nots problem -- aside from smashing the Capitalist State. But, somehow, I'm not holding my breath on that score. Red states, blue states... we're a long way from The Revolution, Virginia. Plus, it puts the fear of God in me like nothing else does to imagine a republic run by the slashdot rabble. You can sue me for that one, though you'll need to get in line behind Cingular.

All that aside, as it needs to be put, "discovering" these perfectly workable workarounds has been big fun. And surprisingly perhaps (given my above smash-the-state remarks), it makes me proud to be an American. No, I'm not being facetious. Is there a huge amount of money to be made in these "new" products-cum-services? You bet. Are companies late to the party in recognizing and seizing on the opportunity the otherwise disenfranchised teen market represented? Yeah again. Though they weren't as late as I was in grasping what was going on. I saw this happening some years ago, but I had no idea it had grown as big as that 15 feet of shelf-share at Target made screamingly clear to me yesterday. But the point of all this to me, and the reason I'm writing about it here, is that these changes were driven bottom up by kids who wanted it "their way" -- and are now rewarding companies who finally saw that with what I can only imagine are windfall profits.

Cell phone service has been a nightmare of needlessly complicated options and draconian "legal" provisions that has made choosing a phone and a matching provider a thicket of conflicting choices requiring the kind of complex multivariate analysis that only die-hard road warriors have been known to take perverse delight in. "Live without a plan" is brilliant not just because it describes Virgin Mobile's waiving of one- and two-year service commitments, but at a deeper (and dare I say more profound) level, it captures the Zeitgeist of our children, who don't give the proverbial fig for the future.

While I guess some culture critics could write weighty jeremiads on how scary that is, I see it as cause for celebration. Let's face it: the future we've offered our kids sucks bigtime. If they bypass it, work around it, leave it on the garbage dump of history that might have been, my hat is off to them. The alternative make-it-up-as-you-go ad hoc anarchy has got to beat trying to fit your life into patterns and programs invented by the unsound of mind for the infirm of spirit. Kick out the jams. Live without a plan. I'm down wit dat, yo. And as you may have guessed already, always have been.

Before you send email about the Dylan quote being not quite accurate, you should know two things: 1) I'm quoting from memory as I can't check the lyrics via Google, and 2) I won't get your mail until the end of next week. This is so embarrassing to report. It wasn't Consolidated Edison (does that even exist anymore?) I forgot to pay, but Qwest, nee US West, a.k.a., The Phone Company. Which forgetfulness resulted not only in the abrupt cessation of my telephone dial tone, but of my DSL service as well.

It wasn't that I didn't have the money this time, though that's been a problem in days (fortunately) past. No, it was mere garden variety irresponsibility. So caught up did I become in the finer points of The Insider/Outsider Problem, esoteric quasi-rational religious studies, and suchlike acrcana, that I couldn't be bothered with minutiae like telephone bills. And for this overweening arrogance I have now paid the predictable price: temporary banishment from the realm of 21st Century Communications Technology. That is to say, I've been ostracized from the ranks of real-time bloggerdom.

It feels so weird to be composing this off-line. Unnatural. I've had to go through my previously downloaded collection of bizarre stock photos and weirdball graphical screen clips and select random pics to illustrate this rambling apologia for why I'm really not here at all -- and won't be until a week from tomorrow Qwest tells me. Which brings to mind another Dylan quote: "Casanova is being punished tonight on... Desolation Row."

I suppose I could turn this into a Public Service Announcement. Kids, don't let this happen to you! "Forgetting" to pay your phone bill on time is a serious crime. Just because some of your "blogger" pals do it, doesn't mean you have to follow suit. Is it really worth jeopardizing your future to post that "one more thing" instead of going to your assigned telecom webpage and dropping a big wad of cash on your long-suffering multinational creditor? No. You don't need this sort of black mark on your Permanent Record. You don't need to ruin your life by spacing out your rightful Obligations As A Citizen. So remember: always fork over "the bread" you owe -- or face the consequences! (This message is brought to you as a public service by the Advertising Council of America.)

To attempt some soupçon of relevance to recent thematic foci here at CBO -- not to mention rationalizing the inclusion of the shot of kids in top-hats and the book-cover graphic, supra -- let me add a few further caveats and bits of helpful advice. Don't forget to be born white and privileged and to keep plenty of money in your VISA-card account so these unfortunate service stoppages don't mess up or slow down your all-important Productivity. Even better, sign up for our convenient -- and Fee! -- Automatic Bill Payment option so you needn't be bothered with the details of when and how much to pay on the thousands of fee-based services required to remain viable in Today's Modern Society. Better still, have your accountant take care of all this crap, as do captains of industry like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. You don't see them getting blown offline for spacing out on a measly four hundred bucks, do you? No. So remember, kids: it's always better to be rich than sorry! Have a nice day.

But this is all just just pointless whining, of course. I had the money. I had every opportunity to relate to the "Important: Open Immediately!" letter from Qwest instead of tossing it on the stack of similarly unopened bills littering my living room floor. I should have picked up the phone while it was still working and "made payment arrangements," as they like to say, so that I wouldn't get to the point I'm at now where I have to write this content-free non-post without benefit of Amazon and Highbeam Research for fact checking and the sort of weirdball "would you look at this!" cultural dynamics that you know we so favor on this blog, and then drive across town in an unregistered vehicle, risking apprehension by the Boulder cops and possibly a month in the slammer for a second offense, just to access the net via Starbucks' horrifically overpriced T-Mobile HotSpot service and thereby upload this pathetic excuse for a blogpost.

In closing, I am moved to append the screen capture I'm most proud of having snagged. It's from one of those draconian warnings the movie industry has produced in its pathological -- if entirely understandable -- paranoia over what I have often called "the technologies of plagiarism" -- one of those annoying PSA spots that DVD makes it so easy to skip over. In my never ceasing efforts to win-place-or-show in the Guinness Book of Records "World's Most Ironic Ripoff" category, I used Graphic Converter Pro X v. 5.6 to boost the following straight off the video disk. I hope you like it. If so, please circulate widely.

In '65 I was 17, like the man said, and reading the Lattimore Iliad that summer for a course I was signed up to take in the Fall at the University of Rochester in upstate, as everybody called it, New York. Upstate meant anything outside the City. You didn't need to ask which one, even though it was 350 miles downstream along the NY State Thruway, turn south at Albany. The middle of nowhere, in other words. From a certain perspective. Long way from Troy if you meant the one in Greece. And if you meant the Greece in the Mediterranean. The surveyors who named the cities in NY state had a classical education, so there were replicants all over: Ithaca, Utica, Attica, Syracuse, Rome. And I was turning the pages somewhere in there, a million years ago, Achilles sulking in his tent, then Hector defeated, dishonored, left for the dogs, and Helen up for grabs, who launched a thousand ships, who wept at her tapestry watching the battle rage below. At her tapestry, which will be central to my little story here some 40 years later. Listen...

The course, Mycenaean Civilization, was taught by this guy named Dean Miller. He wasn't a dean, just an ordinary professor. He was younger then, of course. He was full of energy, full of ideas. He was full of... But no, let's let the story unfold. He was particularly fond of talking about Marshall McLuhan. I remember McLuhan was very hot that year, as was Claude Levi-Strauss. This was before post-structuralism got big, so all you'd hear was the raw this and the cooked that until you were nearly crazy. I had to read The Gutenberg Galaxy too, though I didn't. Something about "media" -- what was that? It would be four years yet before I'd hear the word "software" and wonder about that one too. What did you do in the War, Daddy?

Well, a bunch of things, really. Sort of hard to explain. Which, anyway, took me right up to last night when I found myself, in a manner of speaking, searching up more weird ideas on Amazon and Highbeam (a wonderfully complementary combination, if I haven't mentioned that). It must have been about 4am when I ran across these books I didn't know I'd been looking for. Odd, you say? No: paydirt. Rather than try to explain the abstract concept, perhaps the case in hand would make the case in point, i.e., be more enlightening. But naturally, this needs a bit of background first.

It's sort of surprised me that I've been thinking so much about religion lately. Or "spirituality" if you insist (though they're not the same thing; especially these days). But I guess I have been. It's not that I'm feeling more reverent or more needful of higher powers, hearts and flowers, whatever, but more like wondering why the people of your planet go insane so easily (I hope they're not monitoring this back home -- even if only for Quality Assurance Purposes). Or indeed, if "going" insane comes into it at all, as the distance to get there seems infinitesimally small, given what you're given to begin with. Which is to say: religion. I do hope I'm being clear. When you've worked alone as long as I have, it gets hard to tell.

Anyhow, there I was querying my ass off, and one thing led to another, as one thing often will. The books I found -- unfortunately way too expensive for my limited book budget, which I exhausted back in 1989 -- were these:

1. The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader
and
2. Guide to the Study of Religion

While they're intimately related, the first explains my suddenly bird-dogged attention better than the second. Because here's what I'd been wondering: how can anyone write a half-way (I don't want to say "objective" so let's say instead) disinterested account of religious belief if that selfsame anyone is firmly ensconced within said belief system? Conversely, how can anyone who's not a believer know enough about what said beliefs are to know what he or she is talking about? Granted, many academics have no trouble writing about things regarding which they have not achieved Clue One, but still. This question has been bending my head into funny shapes of late. I know. Call me silly.

But it's been driving me a little batshit because -- and you will understand this immediately if you read the preceding paragraph -- it's hard enough to phrase the question so that anyone knows what you mean. You know what I mean? Not to mention why you're asking yourself that of thing.

So I was pretty excited to find such a succinct rephrasing of my query. It turns out to be the old Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion. Oh. [smacks head as in vintage V-8 ad.] Why didn't I think of that?

Library Journal says (and here note the distinct echo of my own soul'd-out searching, though LJ -- if I may be allowed an observation -- is more prolix):

The insider/outsider problem in religious discourse has its impact at the academic level, rarely venturing into lay realms of belief and faith. The notion that someone can get inside another's belief system and speak with integrity about it exists in tension alongside the notion that only those within a tradition can speak for it. The debate rages on between etic and emic, reductionism and belief, anthropology and theology. These controversies continue, remarks editor [Russell] McCutcheon, but re-creating the claims and counter-claims provides invaluable insight. Reprinting stellar essays from the likes of Kant, Geertz, Otto, and current scholars like Wendy O'Flaherty and Rosalind Shaw, this work covers religious experience, religious anthropology, reductionism, neutrality, and the scholarly voice.

I have to say the scholarly voice is much in evidence in this capsule review. And etic? emic? I suspect that I must've absent that day. Plus, what's Otto's last name? Or is it just plain Otto, like in Repo Man?

But forget this whole introduction, because none of it matters that much for our story. Sorry. I just couldn't think of any other way to explain why I was looking at The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology -- which was the next (or the nth) book I linked to from the above, such are the wonders of Amazon's collaborative filtering tech (a story for another time, perhaps). And what was most curious about The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology was the following blurb on the back cover...

Now, if you've been 'paying' attention (though I can hardly 'blame' you if you haven't been) you may 'prick up' your ears at "Dean A. Miller." I sure did. Because he is, in very fact, the same Dean Miller I took that course from in 1966 or so. And here's what happened back then that I found notable enough to share with you today.

Dean Miller -- that would be Dr. Miller to you -- was up at the blackboard in front of oh I dunno say a couple hundred freshmen in this big old lecture hall waving his arms around and expostulating (not a swear word) with what I can only describe as extreme enthusiasm about some theory I'm trying -- and failing -- to wrap my head around having something to do with Hot Media and Cool Media and Gutenberg and McLuhan and -- after circuitous detours through The Raw and no doubt in my mind whatsoever The Cooked -- arrived at The Iliad. Ta da! It was a tour de force. Wow.

Except I had no idea what he was on about. Huh?

The theory -- nay, the proposition, the proposal -- we were expected to embrace with appropriately enraptured awe -- was something about there being no pictorial representation in The Iliad except for the shield of Hephaestus, which was wrought with many fabulous designs of Greeks and other suchlike types who, after sacrificing a goat or two to Zeus or Poseidon or Priapus or someone, set sail on the wine-dark sea, &cetera, und so weiter, and so on. Yes, yes, it's all coming back to me.

And the reason only Hephaestus had pictures was that he represented a pre-Hellenic metallurgical culture -- much handwaving here, the chalk flying as arrows and diagrams were dashed up on the blackboard, the pace quickening as Professor Miller approached the crescendo of this demonstration of his boundless erudition -- and the reason for the metallurgy thing was evidently explained by the many excellent insights Mircea Eliade provides us in The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy. "So there," he finished.

Herr Professor Doctor Miller waited a beat for our thunderous applause.

Which just wasn't slated to happen that day, because I raised my hand. More timidly than I might do so today, to be sure (should I ask this? was I being a smart aleck? after all, I'd barely understood a word he'd said).

"Yes?" he snapped, visibly annoyed.

"Uh, well, I mean... what about that tapestry Helen is weaving?" I asked.

A portentous silence in which he attempts to stare me down. Then...

"What book is that in?" he snapped again, even more annoyed, if that were possible. Oh no, what had I gotten myself into? But nothing for it now but to press on.

"The Iliad," I said, wondering why he was asking such a stupid question. Hadn't he even read the thing?

"No, no," exasperated now. "What book of The Iliad?" And I could tell he wanted to add: you idiot!

"I dunno," I offered unhelpfully. "Seven? Eleven? In the middle someplace..."

At which point -- I guess finally accepting that I was right; some dim memory from his own undergraduate days, perhaps? -- he swept all his stuff off the lectern, stuffed it into his bag... and left.

I mean, stormed out and the door slammed behind him. Bang! Gone in 30 seconds. And all these kids around me were going like "What just happened? What was that about?"

Of course I knew what it was. The Deadly Sin of Pride. Ho-ho.

Well, win a few lose a few, I thought, and left myself.

Now, I guess I forgot to tell you that my dad was also a professor at the U of R, which is important. Because when I got home that night he said, "I ran into Dean Miller in the Faculty Club this afternoon and he was really getting hammered. He could hardly talk he was so drunk. He said you 'shot him down' in class today. What was that about?"

I laughed and told him the story, thinking the whole thing was pretty funny. Heh-heh.

"You don't get it," my father said. "He wasn't laughing. He was seriously pissed!"

Of course, he didn't give a rats ass, any more than I did, not having much use for Dean Miller and his well known bullshit. My dad's been dead for some years now, so I guess I can reveal what probably wasn't much of a secret back then anyway.

As for me, I left the University some months later never to return, having learned the one lesson I've never forgotten from those halcyon days: everybody's pretty much full of crap, and if their lips are moving, lying. I never thought I'd run into the guy again, so imagine my jawdrop last night. I hope you find this screed someday, Dean baby, ego-surfing the web for elusive accolades, and know this one thing at the end of a long and fruitful life: rock and roll never forgets.

"In September 1898 two respectable Victorians met in a private house in London for the express purpose of traveling to the planets..."

So begins The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. I mentioned this book here about a month ago. And it has since come into my possession. But it wasn't until early this morning -- after a lengthy session googling grafiks of Joel and the bots from MST3K; don't ask -- that I serendipitously stumbled, via Google Print, onto the following material about Freud, Jung and the occult. I've been meaning to search up just the right quote about Freud's "black tide" comment -- which, importantly, was made to Jung -- and these two clips provide more context than even I, in my near-omniscience as regards such matters, had previously known about.

In the first, Freud had been approached by several publications that dealt with occultism and asked for a contribution. He refused these requests, but to one he replied: "If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis."

Holy cathexis, Batman! Now there's a surprise. The passage continues...

Freud apparently later forgot this admission of deep interest, but his personal involvement with occultism during the early years of the new century was real enough. As we shall see, there was a close connection between occultism and innovative approaches to the study of the mind. Indeed, Victorian science itself was sometimes less divorced from occultism than its practitioners might care to admit.

The Place of Enchantment, p. 6

Then, much later in the book, we get (sans grafik) this...

Freud recognized all too well the occult connotations of his interpretive work on dreams and, indeed, of much of the phenomena of consciousness that interested him. His simultaneous fascination with the occult and vigorous attempts to distance himself from it are matters of record. Freud feared that the occult, which he referred to as "the black tide of mud," would compromise the respectability of psychoanalysis. But his early immersion in Naturphilosophie, friendship with men such as Wilhelm Fleiss, investigations of mediumistic phenomena with Sandor Ferenczi, legendary superstitious anxieties, mixed response to the occult interests of some of his followers, and great rift with Carl Jung over just such matters suggest in briefest outline the parameters of the tensions inherent in Freud's position."

The Place of Enchantment, p. 143

But why would Freud and Jung -- the latter to a far lesser degree -- be so concerned to obscure their interest in matters occult? This is difficult for us moderns to grasp, accustomed as we've become to every stripe of spookiness that we take the howlingly irrational for granted. Perhaps fast-forwarding to a more current set of issues will shed some light. Time once again to invoke the Highbeam genie...

from: Contemporary problems in the study of Native North American religions with special reference to the Hopis by Armin W. Geertz
source: The American Indian Quarterly, 22 June 1996
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 1996 University of Nebraska Press

Primitivist misrepresentations of their culture have prompted Hopi tribal officials to place restrictions on cultural research... Primitivism based on the ideas of Eliade is exemplified by the book Religion and Hopi Life in the Twentieth Century by John D. Loftin. New Age interest in the Hopi has also been a concern.

Mircea Eliade, you will remember (from and I coulda been the Queen of France! and The Stone-Age Goddess and the Storm Trooper), was once an outspoken antisemitic fascist in Romania during the Third Reich, and later the author of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. This led to Zeppelins, stairways to heaven, and many excellent trance-and-dental raves -- one reason Eliade is today considered in certain circles to have been groovy.

In my study of Hopi prophecies about the end of the world, I documented the widespread interest in Hopi prophecy and culture by Europeans and Americans. Their prophetic message about the return of a long-awaited White Brother has moved many groups and individuals to travel to the reservation, engage in cultural collision and sometimes cultural collusion, and return home to carry on personal crusades. These crusades generally thrive on the production and proliferation of stereotypes about Native peoples, and they have more often than not indirectly and sometimes directly caused harm on the reservation and off.

Collusion? Harm? Whatever can the author be on about?

Such behavior reflects an age-old European phenomenon called primitivism," which has its roots in antiquity. Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas (1935) have shown that primitivism is the philosophical position that associates the best existence either in the beginnings of time or in "nature." Thus primitivism is part of the more encompassing idea that "nature" somehow constitutes the norm for human existence. There are two types of primitivism: 1) chronological primitivism, which locates the best human condition in terms of time, namely, primordial times, and 2) cultural primitivism, which locates the best human condition in contemporary "primitive" cultures, especially because of their perceived relationship to "nature" or their "natural" way of living. The first type can neither be proven nor disproven, but the second type can be shown to be the product of centuries of misrepresentation.

And this leads to various problems -- the following problems being perhaps the most various of all...

In The Invention of Prophecy I described European and American individuals and groups who more or less adopt Hopi ideology as their own and play out fantasies in the framework of Hopi mythology. I presented a typology consisting of the following: Under explicit identification, I noted the man who thought he had the missing corner of the ancient stone tablet of Hopi legend, the Chinese. Buddhist priest who thought he was the long-awaited apocryphal White Brother; the Flying Saucer prophet who believed that the White Brother consisted of beings from Venus and that he was their prophet; the Jungian doctoral student who thought C.G. Jung was the awaited White Brother; and so on.

And so on, indeed. There is no lack of this fascinating material. But for the nonce, this explication de texte will have to be continued...