We Are Ready

If it is true that pain is funny --specifically someone else's pain--then I imagine you will wince with laughter at this video of a group's performance at the opening ceremonies.

"We are Ready!"--readiness...now thats a funny word. "Readiness-to-hand" in Heidegger's sense of equipment, tools--the Aristotelian efficient cause. There are no, here there are no purposes here. This is dead land, twilight land. Here the purposes are those spelled out in advance by the chain of command. The human is, to borrow a neologism of the later Heidegger, Bestand, 'standing reserve'. To be nothing other than so much human resources. Ah the pain, the horror, the truncation of life! How do you think these workers like their little troupe's muzak pumped over the airwaves in their toilet bowl scrubber factory? To feed supply chain of endless frivolous demand, just in time?

Feng weeps for the discipline imposed upon these good people. Here they appear to be singing their tune (our tune really--"Ready, boss!") as a kind of millipede being, a true Marxian Gattungswesen each rowing abreast one another at the oarlocks, pushing the legs of the larger millipede moving through the canopy. But the disciplining whip, the whip that goes 'crack-crack-crack' on his 'back-back-back', is really nothing other western market capital availing itself of communist authoritarian control. And that is why these performers are dressed in the customer service outfits that they are in, bearing the unmistakeable impress of corporate America's desire for an ever more servile worker, while at the same time jumping around honoring the values of the party and their own luckiness to be a part of it all.