.. counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike; they’ve all come to look for America ~ Simon & Garfunkel

Have you found America?

Held ragdoll-close, a sea of fractured mirages jostle to lead on memory’s stage.

Snatching money in the wind is less bootless than pursuing mind ephemera in flickering dim persistence.

Lives flow enigmatic in zero-sum fruitless futility, weaving culture in mind’s montage.

Media detritus taunts, echoing relentlessly tinnient our frayed and cherished memories.

Collaged in colloidal silvered cellulose, ink-smeared headers, and crackly acetate audio, American annals precipitate beyond culture to caricature.

Ouroboros marketers wield art-as-corporate blenders in ceaseless rebirths of modern America, puréed to crass cliché.

Trail-blazing frontier heydays, a forgotten 19th parade of decayed decades in these e-times, fossilize sessile beside the 20th in Hollywood’s hubristic faux follies.

Did you find America in fatherland’s flame or motherland’s mystique?

A poorly tended orphan, our nation coalesced to juvenescence then fluoresced at pubescence in two tumultuous centuries. These long, pivotal, busy years occupy barely a blink, mostly a blank, in the public mind.

Débutante as Papal gift to Spain, this homeland’s less scenic circuit saw attrition of native owners, spirited witch hunts, desperate preachings, wrangles with European overlords, uncivil slavery, and can-do capitalism .. from which chaotic nonage wearily emerged The Union, bearing but a buck and a Bill of Rights.

Gilded Age founded imperialism that inexorably begat soul-sapping world wars and two apocalyptic flash-bangs. The world took careful note. Capable of equally revengeful spite, of such Hollywoodesque it was not. Post-war euphoria waned Cold War-soured till extinguished by futility in Asian-Arab crusades.

Premature news of our death was only slightly so, arriving with delicious but heart-stilling irony, in a sense by our own hand. Earth’s greatest empire slain by a home-grown virus. A virulent, highly-praised export variant. Best practice, world class, and best of breed.

Greed.

Which brings us to speed on where we stand in the smoking ruin that was America, and why we might seek what it was, and thus what we are .. or were.

"They’ve all come to look for America" (still searching, by the way) implies not just a tribal ache, but some grasp of the nationhood to which we long to belong.

No-one knows what America, or God, looks like, except those claiming to have seen Her, or Him. Yet all live equally doubtless She is His America.

“God bless America and nowhere else” resonates as classroom oath, if facetious doggerel.

That a combustion-fed tolled artery delivers pilgrims to the City of Ghosts in search of genesis is irony enough.

Irony traveled with those who, from the sea, sought a dream yet to exist, so founded a Mephistophelian metropolis before surging westward (and ho). It led their descendents to pay the piper, and the turnpike, in return inutile quest to this Trimenjous Apple, seeing in it their seeding, as does indeed the entire nation.

Who seeks America?

The addled call West Coast home, in which honey pot limbo they stickily struggle.

True believers came, saw, collected $200, then backscattered eastwards to bigger smokes.

Heartlanders be dull, but with hint of shiny and a glint in the eye know America is beyond daily drear.

Geekocracy, oblivious to the quest, tweets & buzzes;  i-gadgetry addicted eCitizens understanding only The cYbeRst4tes oF aamricc4 (and virtually nowh3r3 else).

Real people adopt tinted orphans, flaunt fashion for flashbulbs, party bare-pussy, frame epoxy teeth in botulinum lips. Smug smiles juxtapose facial twitches that grate of guilt or harbor hysteria.

Is America the land, sullied by our thoughtless greedy hand? Pre-Columbian purity pales to polluted post-apocalyptic pestilence.

Do we seek America by filling it with people and place names, pandering to progress, prostrate before prodigence? 300 million searching for … 400 million? A billion. Do we stop now or is eternal growth the plan? (There’s a plan?)

The world found America without seeking

International opinion of us wanes with global frost and thaw, seasonal or political. Knowing the beast too well it backs slowly towards the door, looking instead to lateral liaisons with Aspirant Asia, Gulf of Lucre, or Crown Prince Europe.

Oppressed and starving craved bounteous freedom in our virgin frontiers but their dreams mired in thread-bare hardship and a genocidal slave culture. And still they arrive, over sea or beneath border, to shatter hopeful longings and languish as Latino latter-day slaves of white wealth.

Marketing, ever our game, drew migrants by symbols rendered as reality. Cowboy and gold rush cloaked ruinous labor. Coca Cola and Chevrolet bestrode dark steeds of economic imperialism, dazzling distant peasants while their birthright siphoned stateside.

Disquiet and delight greeted 9-11. Ensuing crusades blinded-not a media-savvy world that pierced indulgent embedded reportage and found only nakedly hooded prisoners of humiliation.

We, the Americans who seek this elusive illusion, live amongst its trees unwitting of forest’s malignant extent or mischievous intent. We drive its cars, eat its burgers, bail out its banks, laissez its faire, build its weapons of mass misconception, and quell qualms of deep schisms in a reality slippery and thin as spring ice.

And ..

.. while the fortunate of working poor savor septuagenarian jobs  .. while middle class indebted choose which finger of several severed selling the house enables reattachment of  .. while overpaid geeks squander gizmo-lavish lives online  .. while rich and famous pantomime their good and considerable fortune in the preceding’s faces ..

.. the fervent distraction of an entire nation asserts Vidal’s United States of Amnesia in comatose acquiescence to dreamland’s Gordian fabric.

A child puzzles why hordes throng in consumptive frenzy and frenetic confusion.

"Where are they going, Dear Parents?"

"To find America, young one, where else?"

"But that way is perfidious, a circus of illusion, the devil’s torment, bubbles of falsity (of investment, he would say if older).”

The child ponders, and adds (with naïve clarity, of which only our favorite observer is capable):

“America lies within."

  .

With his hand on the gilt-edged burgundy Bible used by Lincoln in 1861, Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States - a new chapter in American history as the first African-American to hold the nation’s highest office.

… our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. … our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”

As xenophobic organizations across the United States of America polished their AK47s, a statesman-like Negro, literally an “African-American,” ascended to the nation’s top job.

As bankers and market touts paused briefly from emptying treasury coffers, then redoubled quick-time their public theft, a statesman-like Negro, literally an “African-American,” ascended to the nation’s top job.

As legions of corporate bagmen paused not in their daily pilgrimage to Capitol Hill to lubricate the wheels of politics the American way, a statesman-like Negro, literally an “African-American,” ascended to the nation’s top job.

As fattened spook agencies tapped phones and renditioned unfortunates of middle eastern appearance, a statesman-like Negro, literally an “African-American,” ascended to the nation’s top job.

As munitions makers and defense contractors burdened the people’s economy with weapons of yet greater complexity and obfuscate utility, a statesman-like Negro, literally “African-American,” ascended to the nation’s top job.

As unfettered laissez faire markets created artificial needs then merrily met consumptive demand, its selfish cankers stifling humankind’s faltering and increasingly ignoble destiny, a statesman-like Negro, literally an “African-American,” ascended to the nation’s top job.

And as oil cartels and automakers rubbed their hands in ecstasy celebrating the passing of peak oil, a statesman-like Negro, literally an “African-American,” ascended to the nation’s top job.

An African-American statesman, the hope of millions.

Or just another American President, at worst a factional stooge, at best simply human?

For more read Jake Mossback’s “Not Just the Crowd” on the inauguration of Barack Obama

Oh what a tangled web ..

G’day, yes it’s Leif on one of my rare posts at this dusty lanolin-stained unfashionable z-list outpost.

I should be rapping on DigitalWildWest.com, but this greasy rag finds a more, shall I say, circumspect readership (and I use the term cautiously, since Dr. Collin says most arrive anonymized searching/seeking “silicon sex doll.”

What stirred me?

Security blogger Dancho Danchev’s irresistible high-priest disdain of the filth that soil this most marvelous of humankind’s creations, our webbly cyber world. In particular his derisive shout to some hapless malware pathetic, who he begrudgingly admires as probably raking it in, cash-wise.

And then his mention of “Cyber Jihadists.”

WTF? As in Weapons of Transient Futility, otherwise, What IS That? Global Islamic Media Front? Did I miss something when I slept through a scene in Life of Brian?

You can stick those two words adjacent and imagine that a cyber jihadist does to the www what his bomb belted brother does to your downtown market at peak hour. But I still needed more of a handle.

I have an image oracle that brings me up to speed on anything in the known (and/or Rumsfeld’s unknown) universe.

Image, right: Click to enlarge, and note the dialogue ” .. yada .. Setup Wizard .. this will install E-Jihad 3.0 on your computer  ..”

Nothing so crude as a Google image search, it generates a cyber montage paralleling real-world stirrings - much the way of noise2news.com with language. The image oracle illustrates not only this article, it seductively also does most of SheepOverboard, a mechanized eking of picturesque essence from obscurity - counterpoised, of course, by Angel Boligán’s acerbic crayon.

As gleaned from the nearest pix above, “cyber jihadist” leads to “E-Jihad” the program. And that is, you ask ..?  The full story awaits here:

 JIHAD is the term used for struggle against evil. Electronic jihad or simply, E-JIHAD, is the jihad in cyberspace against all the propagandas and false allegations against the message of truth. E-JIHAD is the struggle in cyber space against all false and evil disciplines, ideology and forces of evil.

Sigh. I guess there’s just a limit to how many ways the oppressed can describe their oppression. And as much as we cyber-sophisticates might sneer at the naive confused gibberish marking your average religious crusader (on both sides - and one man’s devout is another’s infidel) if you were on the receiving end of Dubya’s ideology for the last 8 years, you’d be feeling a touch Jihadic yourself.

On a purist note, Dancho’s the man. From his wrap of cyber Jihadist hacking teams, this conclusion (is this not command of the milieu?):

The bottom line, script kiddies cyber Jihadists dominate, PSYOPS fill the gaps where there’s zero technical know-how, mentors are slowly emerging and providing interactive tutorials to reach a wider audience, localization of knowledge from English2Arabic is taking place the way propaganda is also localized from Arabic2English, and there’s also an ongoing networking going on between cyber Jihadists and Turkish hacktivists converting into such on a religious level. Case in point - MuslimWarriors.Org defacement campaigns with “anti-infidel” related messages.

I getcha.