That's great, lovely. I was in a mall in Chicago in 2002 and they had a static hologram (didn't move, like the real one, and just as intelligent) of St. Ronnie's well-coiffed-and-empty head. That wasn't the first time I'd seen one: the Museum of Science and Industry had the one Salvador Dali did of Alice Cooper's head, with an exposed brain, so I knew he had one, his own conservatism aside. Holograms aren't very convincing up close--the Cooper one was greenish, and it photographed badly. I believe it was made in 1973, when the Watergate hearings were reaching a crescendo.
That Ronnie-the-vegetable one, however, was impressive. They'd shot a close-up of him that had close to a 3/4s wraparound of his head. Every hair (the fucker had dandruff and trout eyes), every pore, every liver spot, every wrinkle, and every glint from his Irish eyes (yes, they were-a'-smil'in, yes) was there in incredible photographic detail. Now, from some angles, sure, the color spectrum started to shift, and it looked transparent--a hologram. Of course, for laughs, I was miming the same moves that put John Wilkes Booth into the annals of history, really milking it for a friend, a lot of yuck-yucks. And yes, there were laughs, 9/11 (the American public) hadn't ruined things as badly, there hadn't been enough time for that yet.
Fox News (entertainment for the emotionally challenged) is throwing around a rumor of a yet-to-be-revealed speaker at the tail end of the GOP mosh pit in Tampa, after all the lawful demonstrators have been brutally, criminally beaten and pepper-sprayed by dirty cops and private security, and after most of the drinking and whoring has sated the...uh, bought press, the delegates, candidates, incumbents, and key SuperPAC donors, maybe a few Rotarians, heh. Because I think their corruption is, in the words of one of the Founding Rapists, self- evident. Why bother writing about it? Because someone in the back row couldn't hear last time, so shut up you loud-mouthed assholes in Section A seating, you animals, you rabble, Jesus.
So, they had this two-dimensional Tupac on stage not more than a few months ago, and creepy it was dear readers. From what I could see, an actor's body was composited with footage of Shakur's face from a variety of visual sources, but it could have been modeled from imagery too and made lifelike. Either way, the head was generated, the body was not, making this a sentence that was destined to be written one day. Top that, Cybermen. You know, the GOP isn't doing anything new here, as always, but putting out their usual historical revisionism onto vulnerable people who don't know shit about where the country's been in the first place.
They've been flogging everyone with this moronic, delusional (delusions of adequacy, Republicans aren't even that) "no new taxes" bullshit for over 30 years. What does it say about someone when they keep falling for it again and again, expecting different results? Those are gamblers stabbing in the dark, looking for what? A Leader, a dictator, to tell them what to do, and that's a lot of Americans who harbor these authoritarian tendencies, many of whom have convinced themselves otherwise. The old models of male-headed authoritarianism are at a crossroads. These clowns down in Tampa are at a funeral wake, America died long ago, back when they sold out after the sixties and became the most irresponsible citizenry in modern history. Watergate gave millions of Americans what they always wanted: an excuse to no longer be engaged in the political process. Voter apathy gave us Ronald Reagan and while it probably won't give us Mitt Romney, it's given us weak and compromised candidates for well over a generation. That's the fault of the public, and so is the decline of the unions, out of selfishness, laziness, and stunning stupidity.
Everyone knows that a computer generated hologram of a dead corrupt president isn't going to change the fact that everyone owns a piece of this economic and political crisis, no one is immune, not me, not anyone. The wealthy, the criminal management class, and the politicians own the lion's share of this. Every branch of government is to blame. From this, one should get that we have a fundamental flaw in how our society is ordered, what it's centered around. Now go have fun watching the dead guy who gave us a lot of this crisis, the one with the CGI stick rammed up his ass.
