SCOTTSDALE, AZ--Cloning has somehow, without anyone noticing, been going on at an industrial scale in this affluent Arizona suburb.
I am here as a consulting producer, developing a Television series and tonight we are shooting in an upscale night spot in downtown Scottsdale--valets, velvet ropes, doormen with earpieces, VIP List.
Not that any of that is actually necessary, it is part of the marketing of this particular night spot.
It is inside that I make the discovery--the Scottsdale Players. The guys are all wearing the same shirt. And while with mass email, text messaging it would be easy to send the memo that tonight is embroidered, white button down shirt night--it is more difficult to explain how they all have the exact same haircut.
The ladies must also have system, but it is not as refined as the guys'. The guys, the Scottsdale Players, are like the Stepford Wives--same shirt, same hair, same tattoo, same neck & wrist decorations.
Down the block, I poke my head in another night club. Clones, but from a different manufacturer. All them are wearing t-shirts with what appears to be a rorschach design covering most of the front and back.
The haircut is still the same though. Obviously a by-product of the process that created the clones.
Back at the original night spot, I let shooting drag on a bit so I could engage the Scottsdale Players and their female counterparts in their natural habitat.
It didn't take long for a few of them to approach me. After giving vague answers to my legitimate purpose for being there, I would compliment them on their embroidered shirt and ask why they wore it.
The answer was always a variable on standing out, expressing individuality or, "its cool."
They were seemingly oblivious to the other 250 guys wearing the same shirt.
The downtown Scottsdale, AZ night scene is an archetype for post-modern America. And it has broad implications for public policy and the direction of history.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung studied archetypes, or templates of self identity, basic themes in which to view the world.
Carol S. Pearson, Ph.D., took the archetype model into business world, specifically marketing.
Pearson identifies broad archetypes, or maybe cliches, that humans can readily categorize and identify with and try to emulate--Hero, Outlaw, Explorer--among others.
The nexus for marketing being that part of out personal identity (archetype) can be tied to a line of products.
I later discovered that the t-shirts resembling rorschach blotters are well known within the Mixed Martial Arts/Ultimate Fighting community. And worn by fans of the sport. You may not have the guts to get into the chain-link octagon and go mano-on-mano, but the shirt allows you to identify with that warrior archetype.
One of the oldest archetypes is the warrior. For an archetype as old as mankind, and in which certain variations are celebrated today, the ancient variety is shunned.
I have met many warriors in my travels in Iraq. My documentaries about Iraq are filled with them. I to to Iraq to tell the stories of these warriors because few others appear willing to--and few seem to want to know the stories of these true life warriors.
"It's unsettling," David Bellavia says.
Bellevia, perhaps the walking epitome of the warrior archetype, was an Army Staff Sergeant during the Battle of Fallujah in 2004. Bellavia went into a house filled with terrorists. He came out alive, they didn't.
He killed with his bare hands in the ultimate fight to the death. No rules, no referee, no tapping out.
That is not only unsettling the average Scottsdale resident, it is impossible to identify with on several levels.
The Scottsdale Player may be willing to internally convince himself that he could get into the octagon, and if worse came to worse, tap out or the referee will stop the fight.
He can also ape the mixed martial arts attitude--individualistic, brash.
But having the fortitude to go into the house and once there finish the bloody work of killing face to face is not something that can be faked--especially since it is so easy to walk down to a recruiters office and join the Army or Marine infantry (They will pay you to do it!).
It is not easy to be poseur of the ancient archetype of the warrior.
It is easy to go from the day job as personal banker (glorified teller) and pose as just about anything after work. In fact, the dichotomy is part of the appeal of it.
But there is no posing in Baghdad's West Rashid district district. The bomb is out there, the sniper is out there. And you must get them before they get you.
Post-modern society has made it so easy to pose as an archetype, that society does not know how to react when confronted with the real thing. People who actually are the warrior archetype and take it all the way.
Further unsettling the Scottsdale resident is the gravity of the tasks of the warrior.
In MMA, the only people affected by the outcome of a match are the opponents, those with business dealings with the MMA industry and those who bet on the sport.
The warriors in Iraq, beyond the gravity of life and death on the streets of Baghdad, carry the direction of history on their shoulders. The outcome matters.
Who wins, matters.
Victory or defeat will affect the lives of everyone for generations.
Taking on life and death, then taking on the responsibility of the fate of the world is so contrary to human nature that the nation so comfortable with posing cannot square it.
Surely then, there must be another explanation. And that explanation is summed up in this MoveOn.org political ad.
The young mother in this ad, is actually scared to death that her baby boy, Alex, would grow up to be a man who would be the ancient archetype of the warrior and, his late teens or early twenties, walk into a Marine recruiters office and volunteer for the infantry.
There is no mandatory conscription and I sincerely doubt there will be mandatory conscription in Alex's lifetime. If Alex at some point winds up in Iraq, it will be of his choosing.
But the young mother cannot accept that Alex may make that decision, or that any young man would make that decision. There must be a malevolent force at work--and in her mind it is probably BushHitlerBurton, McCain, Neocons, ad nauseum.
This is also a archetypal defense mechanism, a rationale to disguise one's vanity. We all want to be the warrior, but very few will actually display the fortitude of the warrior.
Those who like to think they are warriors and have fortitude, yet do not choose to display it in action when given the opportunity will, as the Bard wrote, 'hold their manhoods cheap.'
It is of Vanity, an over-abundance self-esteem in the post-modern parlance, that prevents the recognition of fortitude.
"He who thinks himself worthy of great things, being unworthy of them, is vain," according to Aristotle. "The vain man goes to excess in comparison with his own merits, but does not exceed the proud man's claims."
The vain man, unwilling and unable to attain the honors associated with the virtue of fortitude in the "greatest and noblest of danger" will attempt to redefine fortitude warrior or the nobility of the danger the warrior faced or the motivation of warrior.
Courage, for the vain man, becomes questioning and challenging a civil authority which poses no corporeal threat. The truly mortal enemies of the good (Al Qaida, terrorists, Iranian Special Groups) are denied and supplanted with those who pose no mortal danger (Halliburton.)
Those warriors who show the virtue of fortitude are potrayed as victims, they have been fooled, tricked, they had no other options in life.
All of this is to allow those who pose as warriors, whose identity encompasses the warrior archetype, to redefine what it means to be a warrior down to something the poseur can square their identity with.
This is just one policy implication of archetypes and identity.
The broad application of identity to politics and policy positions, is just as disturbing. As Thomas Sowell pointed out in his book the Vision of the Annointed, people will pick political parties and policies not based on merit or their relationship to reality, but on how it squares with their self-identity. There are Democrat, Republican and Libertarian archetype/stereotypes.
Just as wearing a t-shirt that looks like a rorschach test allows one to identify with cage fighters, an Obama, McCain, Reagan, Che t-shirt, sticker, allows for an identity.
In the nation of poseurs that we are, it is much easier to glom on to an identity associated with Obama--the blank slate of Hope, Change. McCain though, has a biography that, like David Bellavia's, is unsettling. Enduring years of torture in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, is not something that can be posed.
Which brings us back to the night spot in Scottsdale and the Scottsdale Players all wearing the same shirt and the same haircut who, though desiring to stand out and express their individualism, were actually all the same. But they all bought into the identity, the archetype. Wearing that shirt made them unique, or allowed them to see themselves as a certain type of person.
Obama himself, as an archetype is easier to identify with for the poseur, because he is one.
The Scottsdale Players will describe thier occupation as, "I handle millions of dollars of financial transactions." Which when translated means he's an assisstant branch manager at a bank. A worthy and neccessary occupation, but nothing exciting. Or my favorite, "I invent custom communications products." Which, when translated into non-player, means he his a cellphone troubleshooter.
The same mechanism of defining down of the warrior archetype is in place as people define up their own archetype.
Obama's rather thin list of accomplishments and experience is similar to that of the poseur nation which pads their own resumes.
His shifting positions on certain issues mirror how the poseur nation moves from trend to trend.
His evasions on Rev. Wright match the ever occurring evasions and rationalizations of the poseur nation.
Obama's personal archetype, embodies the the dominant archetype of our time--the poseur.
When confronted with a real archetype for which there is no way to mold a pose--the poseur will reject it because it shatters the identity.
We all want to be the warrior, the hero, the outlaw. And for much of the history of mankind, to be, meant you actually had to do. It is only now, that one can take on the identity, without having to do anything.
John McCain's personal biography, is actually an impediment in his presidential campaign. David Bellavia, being a living, breathing, walking, talking embodiment of a warrior, hurts his congressional campaign.
What they have done is unsettling and, in the era of the poseur archetype, threaten people's identities. And if there is one, and only one thing people are willing to fight for and defend in the poseur nation--it is the right to define their own identity...as long as the fight doesn't involve anything to difficult or dangerous.
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