Rock On Portland

Typos fixed, links added.

--- In Synergeo "coyote_starship" wrote:


> Another meme that makes the rounds is that "conspiracies are bad" i.e.
> you'd never want to throw a surprise party, or be in league with some
> friends and work to steer the company in a positive direction. No,
> those'd be collegial networks among peers, whereas a "conspiracy" is
> by definition nefarious. This FBI guy doesn't seem to have much
> immunity to the "conspiracies are bad" meme.
>

This is where I'd go back to the memeplex I was hammering on with an influential McLuhanite (newmedia) with Church of Bob connections. Synergetics Dictionary -> M -> Marshall McLuhan gives us a scene wherein Marshall shows up on Bucky's radar going "I've read your books, and I want to join your conspiracy". Said in a cheerful, affable style no doubt, with a tinge of mischief.

The word "conspiracy", meaning "to breathe with", also has that "piracy" meme embedded (there it is, right in the spelling -- aren't memes fun? not unlike numerology, a sub-branch of memetics). Pirates conspire. Or Pyrates.

Now here in Portland, we like Pirates, think they're cool, might dress and talk like pirates on some days. So we might like conspiracies too then? Let's say we do.

A radical bookstore like Laughing Horse is where people are likely to know a lot about the various conspiracy theories ("911 inside job" is a bevy of theories, not just one). They're like librarians, or at least the more experienced ones are. More like Giles or the female equivalent in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Portland as a city is quite well read, with some enormous famous bookstores (Powell's especially, but others too) and a really excellent library system (the on-line stuff works). So it stands to reason that Portland, even without a Library of Congress, is able to serve as a decent intelligence gathering headquarters.

Our analysts are nothing to sneeze at.

Kirby