Identity 101 - Exploring Linny's blog

Linny I dont know if you will have time to read all of this, but I thought I would share it. Here are three short passages from my book. I include them here because my main character "Jack" is defined by the ideas that you are studying right now. And thus I would love your opinions on this character. Thanks in advance for your thoughts

The passages are scattered and much is left out between them, but these three I think show a great deal of similarity to what you are studying, so much so that it threw me off guard when you brought up the topic.

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The downtown streets of Petrolia were narrow and accented at their core by tall monuments to the businesses that kept them moving. Some appeared vibrant, dancing as the sunlight bounced off their living facades, while others resembled the gravestones of arrogant and proud men—stiff, cold, and void of the life that erected them. They were structures in decay, and they must have settled in their dying days to fuel the imaginations, not of citizens, but of mere poets and painters.

From the perspective of his office window at the Oneirica Corporation, twenty-five stories over the narrow streets below and facing eastward into the rising sun, Jack Adams felt like a member of some lost line of royalty, seated upon a throne and perched high over his kingdom, looking out over the vast expanses of time.

Below, a river ran along the base of his tower, which he imagined as a great moat. Each morning when he crossed that moat, he became a well-known and well-respected “marketing executive.” And each night when he receded over its banks, usually late and always alone, he returned to being just a man, a man pretending to be free, when in fact he felt himself merely a slave to his own inner, ruthless king. It was as if, over the millennia, the royal archetype had remained intact, repressed deep inside his psyche, only to surface at strategic periods in the form of his ego. At least that was the only reason he could think of that might explain why he did it, why he advanced on the castle each morning to jockey for position in a race that he was beginning to believe he might never finish.

As a child he remembered looking at the downtown core jutting into the prairie skyline, like a castle reaching to the heavens. He imagined the city as a place where every dream came true, every fantasy realized; where Zeus sat on his mighty throne, sending out his orders of the day to characters like Hercules and Newton. Jack had always imagined he could have been Newton the centaur, whistling into the sunset, “I’m glad, I’m glad, to have, to have, a friend, a friend, like Hercules, like Hercules.” It was funny how cartoons could stick with you for so long, yet the real characters you once played with in the sand box, or built forts with, were long gone.

If the city were compared to an island of dreams, and the country a vast ocean of wheat and oil, Jack had grown up in the no-man’s land, which neither land nor sea would claim, on the outskirts of an empire populated by peasants fornicating in alcohol-induced delusions, dreaming of the day when their ships might come in. They surrounded themselves with others who collected lottery tickets and bingo cards, and continually schemed of ways they might one day take the castle by storm. They were people who had traveled great lengths to reach the city, but had nonetheless arrived too early or too late.

Those who reached the island too early found themselves unable to get ashore, climbing over and killing each other as they fought for the seemingly infinite jobs that kept the streets bustling. Those who reached the island too late found themselves drowning in debt, stranded by the retreating waters of the economy and left to rot on the tidal plain in the intense heat of the midday sun. Some, however, did manage to survive just barely, by building the shantytowns and trailer parks that surrounded the great island of Petrolia. Hoping and praying that maybe, just maybe, their children would find a way to breach the castle walls and save them from the incessant tidal wash of the economy.

As one of those children, Jack now found himself safely within the castle walls, looking out across the chaos from whence he had come. He sat alone, although he did not know what had happened to all those friends and family members he had left behind. The data that flowed across his desk each day told him they were still out there, still buying, still working, and most importantly still lost in an ocean of debt, charging away any chance they might have of ever living in a free world.

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The Oneirica Corporation had holdings in almost every sector of the economy, but its primary field of investment was entertainment, for when one controlled entertainment, one controlled dreams, and when one controlled dreams, one controlled expectations, and when one controlled expectations, one controlled everything.

Make a man dream of standing on the moon, and soon he will expect to stand on it. Make him dream of far-off lands he can liberate, and soon he will be sending armies off to liberate. But make a man dream of happiness, and he does not even know where to start, and this was where Jack’s job came in.

His official title was VP–Marketing, but he liked to call himself a behavioral engineer. It sounded more impressive and somehow gave what he did an air of legitimacy that simple advertising did not convey. It was a relatively new profession, having found its real place in the world only since the invention of the television.

His main task was to dream for those too lazy or too ignorant to dream for themselves. One could almost say that Jack created the navigational lights by which people, or perhaps consumers, found their way through the modern landscape. Without his direction, consumers would be lost in the infinite choices of their times. Advertising presented to the masses an economical philosophy of life—which in earlier times had been left up to the individual to write over his lifetime—but one that had proven far more profitable when developed on a mass scale and sold by corporations such as Oneirica.

Today Oneirica created, developed, packaged, and sold entire lifestyles ready to fit. Jack would be the first to admit that Oneirica had had its good times and its bad times. It had been a long and winding road to success, but at the dawn of this new millennium Oneirica had finally synthesized the educators, policymakers, and mentors into its corporate mix, ensuring that the expectations of the individual were in line with the products and lifestyles Oneirica was peddling.

Expectation was the glue that bound the whole thing together. By teaching or programming people what to expect of themselves and others, he had bred into them the appropriate desires, fears, and needs that could facilitate the company’s growth, versus its competitors.’ The younger we can get to the consumers, Jack told himself, the more chance we have of wrapping them in our corporate mix and ensuring they will grow up to be productive members of our economic family.

But there was a glitch. Over the years, entrepreneurs on the streets had begun to adapt his marketing techniques and technologies to sell their own brands of dreams, in the form of illegal drugs. Dreams that were cheaper and came with far fewer strings attached. Dreams that had been synthesized in a chemical vacuum and designed to break down the economic and psychological walls that kept Oneirica’s system from diffusing into obscurity.

Their pre-packaged dreams stood against Oneirica's in the marketplace, Jack continued. Pre-packaged dreams versus pre-packaged lives, and slowly but surely they are gaining ground. He guessed that was why, at thirty, he wondered whether he would ever be able to create anything capable of competing with such simple and addictive products. Products that in one moment could construct a dream in its entirety, even if it was a hallucination.

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The doors to the church stood sixteen feet high, peaked in the center and elaborately decorated with carvings and brass. On the center of each door hung a cross, a symbol that not even God himself could escape the judgment of men. He didn’t know why he had made his way to this location. Maybe he was seeking forgiveness for all the tuna nets he had set over the years, ad campaigns designed to trap the masses, but that also trapped a few free-spirited dolphins. His mind fractured with images of the working poor struggling to meet the demands of their children, demands that he had programmed into their innocent minds.

The corporate battles of the brave new world had always been fought over the children. Education was the steppingstone needed to understand how important the early years were in developing personalities, dependencies, and addictions. If you could get to the children early enough, they could be programmed to believe, and buy, just about anything.

For so many years, the early experiments in marketing had failed. There were too many mothers attempting to program their children with the wrong sets of values. Especially in the sixties when the hippies were trying to teach their children unconditional love. Unconditional. How could a society perform without conditions and expectations?

The television became society’s greatest weapon, for only with the television could Oneirica get the exposure it needed to reformat the maternal instinct. Re-programming mothers to care less about raising their children and more about providing them with the props they would need to take center stage in the new world order.

He hated it when his mind skewed down the paths of history; the world around him was not all his making. Everyone had the freedom not to buy into the whole charade. It was his job to give them what they wanted, what they demanded. That was what supply and demand were all about. It was not his job to give them what they needed; no economist ever developed a theory of supply and need. You could not plot love, truth, and acceptance on a graph.

He knew this was not entirely true. He knew that just as his dreams had been replaced by the humming of the machine, and his imagination exploited to sell rather than to create, so too had the dreams and imaginations of billions of others.

Reaching out for the large brass handles on the church doors, he was glad that places like this still existed, places where one could come to seek forgiveness and hopefully be directed back onto the path of freedom.

His hands grasped the brass handles. They were cold against his skin, cold and devoid of life, permanent and in juxtaposition to the frail hand that held them. Up against this grand doorway he felt weak, small, insignificant.

Leaning back to open the door, his body was met with a swift jolt of resistance. The doors were locked. At first he felt a wave of anger pulse through him, and then it left him. For some strange reason, he sensed that he had already been through those doors.

Turning back toward the street, he now went in search of whatever doorway might offer him sanctuary.