Start your Year, Day, Rest of Your Life here:
Stop.
If you are tempted to glide past “Song” to keep reading, then stop. If you do only one, read or watch: see/hear “Song” and then proceed with your Year, Day, Rest of Your Life.
It is too easy to indulge in justified, fawning praise for this video. For now, I simply add that it illustrates an emerging genre of original online art, which I call “kinetic collage” or, more specifically, online audio/video kinetic collage and which differs from ordinary cinematic montage. More on that subject in due course: I have heavier lifting to do here. Moreover, “Song” is among the very few that demand presentation, and deserve the supreme honor, as I see it, of my awed critical silence and the invitation for your comment.
Our World, digital and otherwise, is in chaos caused by the fear, vanity, and, above all, greed of that tiny elite which controls the secret codes to astronomically large, global wealth. Secretly, that Elite has grown unanchored in its arrogance, and consequently the world economy has collapsed. Yes. This is old news … several months’ old.
What is breaking news is the arrival of US President Obama, and his stunning courage quietly shown on his very first day in office. He signed the Executive Order to shut down Gitmo, the strange prison for a group of suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The keenest reports of those in attendance reveal that, as the President arose from signing the Order, his demeanor changed from his familiar yet beautiful warmth to solemnity.
This is so because, the President took an ultimate and irreversible step, as President Lincoln did with his signature on the Emancipation Proclamation. The President unfroze the fate of those incarcerated at our Goofy Gulag Gitmo, and, in so doing, he started the journey of Gitmo prisoners to punitive confinement or, more importantly, freedom. To borrow the old expression which explains our criminal system: “It is better that a hundred guilty men go free than for one innocent man to be convicted.” The intolerable dilemma is when one or more of those hundred is a terrorist who, as a result of the President’s Order, goes free, returns to his intimates, and continues his work.
It takes little thought or vision to foresee that a freed Gitmo terrorist is and will be the ultimate asset for those who yearn to wound, maim, and murder American and other innocents. The ideological criminal, such as each of those who killed and destroyed on Nine Eleven, strives for the most dramatic and most publicized human destruction.
Clearly: an act of human destruction by a freed Gitmo terrorist would be immense in its drama and public effect. And, the responsibility, rightly or wrongly, for that destruction will surge, like the electrodes of Old Sparky, into President Obama and his first day Order. Our President Day One knew and knows this. Therein lies the President’s solemnity as well as a level of courage in leadership of which I know no equal.
The world, as I said and we feel, is in chaos. President Obama’s breath-taking, universal eloquence made him the personified speaker for Hope. His expressed mission was and is to meet chaos with Hope, and, of course, honesty, justice, and endlessly hard work.
In his Order Day One, President Obama moved silently from the speaker personified to the doer of honesty, justice, and the hardest work ever for the father to two of God’s most beautiful children: he put himself personally at moral risk for the consequences of his Order. In the language of those to whom this site is dedicated, he showed, Day One, he “walks the walk”.
Day One.
In the world today where the prevailing style is chronic attentional panic, you may ask, “What does this have to do with the mission of Burning Shorts to advance original creative expression within Web2.0 and Beyond?
Everything and nothing. In terms of Everything: the theme of confronting chaos and, indeed, evil, with Hope is a challenge to each of us aware enough to understand that challenge to walk the walk.
Last Issue, I reported that, in service of Burning Shorts, I was hitting the Road. I surely hit it, I continue to hit it, and often it hits me back. At the same time, know this: Burning Shorts continues and, with the inspiration of President Obama and those to whom this site is dedicated (along with their Brothers and Sisters who served and serve), I, we, rededicate our efforts to seek a higher and more noble level. We have been shown the Way, Day One.
So, changes lie ahead for Burning Shorts, which continues to attract large increases in visitors. What does not change, as our beloved friend Tim Rehling gloriously says, is our commitment indeed rededication to “artistic nobility” in what we here present, advance, honor and strive to be.
