Three notable deaths this week deserve at least a moment of contemplation: Those of Farrah Fawcett of cancer in the LA area, 30-year “Tonight” show vet Ed McMahon, and making an even bigger splash (depending on demographics) Michael Jackson at age 50.
Each, in their own way, was a cultural icon, and according to the linguistics, this is just the start of what will be a lot more icons passing away shortly; all part of the world running faster & faster till we all run out of time at some juncture, or till we get past whatever now through 2015 brings us, since one possibility is that there is something big, quite possibility life-altering, depending on your study and interpretation of markers like the Hendaye Cross.
That, however, is a ways off. My musing today is along the line of “Who will fill these voids?”
Beginning with the Wikipedia entry on ‘cultural icons’…
“A cultural icon can be an image, a symbol, a logo, picture, name, face, person, or building or other image that is readily recognized, and generally represents an object or concept with great cultural significance to a wide cultural group. A representation of an object or person, or that object or person may come to be regarded as having a special status as particularly representative of, or important to, or loved by, a particular group of people, a place, or a period in history.
In the media, there is an increasing trend for any well-known manifestation of popular culture to be described as “iconic”.
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Human beings can acquire the status of cultural icons through their actions, achievements, role, beliefs, convictions.
Most people have ‘icons’, people that in the outer world project some of the common mind of humans down at the archetype level. McMahon many times player the Tarot/Jungian role of The Joker, a role also played by legends like George Carlin, but often also as a not-too-foolish “The Fool” when being a foil for Johnny Carson’s jokes & bits.
It’s possible that Farrah Fawcett’s public life could be viewed as either the High Priestess card, or as half of the Tarot “The Lovers” card, where I imagine a fair number of 40-70 something males would fancy themselves.
We could speculate most of the next week over which card (or cards) of the major arcana would best suit Jackson, although I lean toward “The Moon”. Not so much for his ‘moon-walk’ part, but because what little I knew of him seemed to paint him as caught between two worlds – on on some kind of personal quest that seemed disoriented/disorienting at times.
It’s described quite well at a site you may have never visited, but worth the click: www.aeclectic.net which has a fine quick study of the major and minor arcana and this bit about “The Moon” in the major arcana seems particularly Jacksonian, especially when one recalls the publicity surrounding Jacko and Diana Ross:
“When he was in the presence of the High Priestess, he saw hints of this dark land through the sheer veil draped behind her throne. And later, when he hung from the tree, he felt himself between the physical world and this one. Now, he has at last passed behind the veil. Here are the mysteries he sought, at least, here are the dark mysteries, ones that have to do with the most primal and ancient powers; powers of nature, not of civilization. It is a land poets, artists, musicians and madmen know well, a terrifying, alluring place, with very different rules.”
Not many folks turn off the infostream long enough ponder a bit about the important role of the archetypes and icons, how they form and frame us, let alone study how they work down at the preconscious and subconscious levels forming and co creating the physical world we share in ‘waking’ hours perhaps better described as social sleep.
Still, if you’ve forgotten Socrates “Allegory of the Cave” the Wiki entry on archetypes of this sort (here) is about the best short-form description of how those little buggers work.
Might be easy enough to pass off the time monks and me (the local East Texas goatherd & management consultant) as whackos, but it’s hopefully a little harder to pass off the likes of Socrates and Carl Jung in their assessment of how archetypes work…
“Carl Jung was the first psychologist to attach importance to tarot symbolism. He may have regarded the tarot cards as representing archetypes: fundamental types of persons or situations embedded in the subconscious of all human beings. The theory of archetypes gives rise to several psychological uses. Since the cards represent these different archetypes within each individual, ideas of the subject’s self-perception can be gained by asking them to select a card that they ‘identify with’. Equally, the subject can try and clarify the situation by imagining it in terms of the archetypal ideas associated with each card. For instance, someone rushing in heedlessly like the Knight of Swords, or blindly keeping the world at bay like the Rider-Waite-Smith Two of Swords.
More recently Dr. Timothy Leary has suggested that the Tarot Trump cards are a pictorial representation of human development from a baby to a fully grown adult, The Fool symbolizing the new born infant, The Magician symbolizing the stage at which an infant starts to play with artifacts, etc. In addition to this, in Leary’s view the Tarot Trumps can be seen to be a blue print for of the human race in the future as it matures.”
It’s possible to do direct & personal work with your inner archetypes, although it’s not exactly easy, since it’s a kind of meditation that requires some degree of personal purification before being undertaken — not even a glass of wine for several weeks beforehand, and certainly no prescription meds — since they alter how folks work down at the core level in incredibly complex – sometimes subtle, though sometimes not – ways.
If you’re up for it, my old friend Ed Steinbrecher’s book The Inner Guide Meditation: A Spiritual Technology for the 21st Century
All of which gets us back to the point of all this: A lot of people who read this site are members of the Baby Boomer Generation – the folks who were born of parents who participated in some way in World War II. Born between 1945 and the early 1950′s, we ‘ruled the roost’ with a long-running series of icons which you may remember by their names: Monroe, Kennedy, Crosby, Khrushchev, Disney, Bruce. And then we rolled to Farrah, Jacko, and Johnny’s Ed.
We seem to be entering a period between now, and perhaps year’s end, where we’ll see a growing ‘turnover’ of the icons and archetypes, as the Sexy, the Sidekick, and the Moonwalker are just the latest cards to be turned.
It’ll be interesting to see what Fate deals over the coming half-year as it shuffles along. Not too often I’ve seen three Grim Reapers turned over in a single week like this, but perhaps Fate has stacked the deck due to what’s ahead. I have some worries: Will a modern Hierophant be called out? Or may we lose a modern icon for Temperance, who reminds us that:
“Objection!” you may be inclined to protest about now. “In the storyline of Tarot, that’s what Temperance said to the Fool on his Journey.”
Yeah? Do I need to remind you who we all play?
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Send comments to george@ure.net
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The UrbanSurvival Mall:
Peoplenomics: An Update From Directorate 153
Back in the days when my6 friend Cliff’s ‘web bot project’ was known only by the moniker ‘the think tank’ we were able to piece together a really curious concept. Bear in mind that this was in the weeks following 9/11, the American 587 crash and the attack on ‘house or assemblage’ which was all a ‘done deal’ by the time Issue #6 of Peoplenomics put bytes to screens on 6 December 2001. That report ( which is available to everyone free at this link) was significant because of a couple of things. First – based on the linguistic clues available to me at that time, I was able to posit the existence of ‘action arms’ of the PowersThatBe, and secondly that whether its foundations were as a renegade directorate of Britain’s MI-6, makes very little difference. The powers at the very top of the economic food chain are orchestrating a whole new world and you’re on the verge of being deemed a ‘useless eater.” When John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
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MyGroPonics
My commodity broker JB Slear has nailed a great solution for people who living in apartments and condos who want to become at least partially self-reliant when it comes to raising food: An ultra-high efficiency micro-hydroponics system using readily available local parts. 25-pages and plenty of pictures to turn you into a farmer no matter where you live (Great if you have back problems, too…)…or if you just want to fill up the back yard with MyGroPonics trees and feed the neighborhood… $10 bucks here…
Maxa-Cookie Manager
Maxa-Tools has provided us with a free demo – which you’re welcome to try – of their dandy cookie manager tool that I use here on all my computers. It shows both the browser-specific and the newer browser-independent cookies. Quite happy with it.
Here’s the download link for the free demo:
www.urbansurvival.com/setupMCMstdGU.exe
Once you try it out, click the upgrade button (!) on the upper right hand side for the $35 unlock to get it to remove even those pesky ‘non-browser specific’ cookies. Bonus: You computer may run faster. I took over 1,000 cookies off my son’s machine that he swore was clean. It ran much faster.
Attn: Mac Drivers: MCM does support the Safari Browser, but that does not mean it is compatible with Mac OS. Maxa-Tools only support the Windows world.
Help US Go Viral
UrbanSurvival has a dandy growth rate, but sadly, it’s nothing like swine (hybrid) flu’s growth rate. However, if you’d like to sicken the PowersThatBe, just click here for a tool that may help. (It’ll pop up an email window if you use Outlook (or a few other email programs) then simply send a link to everyone on your distro list…
“Live on $10,000″ Updated
What? You haven’t ordered the ebook “How to Live on $10,000 a year — or less”? Suit yourself. We’re all going to live it shortly, anyway. I just thought you might like a heads up by reading about how to do it before you get pink-slipped. But, suit yourself OR visit www.liveontenthousand.com or, click one of the following button:
Yep – still possible. I also took a bit of additional material that was pertinent from recent issues of Peoplenomics and included them. The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the aforementioned dollar amount, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you make a little more than that and do some active savings… Click here for the page with more details on it.
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Last week’s report is here. For back issues of this site, click here. (Goes back to 1997!)