...the dealers in death have been building for this terrible new war. modern equipment is ready and waiting, and the sky is the new war testing ground. aerial armies have completely changed the character of warfare. planes one hundred times more powerful than anything heretofore used will zoom out of the sky. big cities will be their principle objectives. if there aren't enough bombers, mail pilots, trained in dropping mail bags, will release powerful bombs from converted mail planes. these deadly missiles will swiftly descend to make a gruesome shambles of civilian communities. the sky will be dark with monster planes, planes so stabilized that landings and takeoffs will be foolproof, planes controlled by wireless, responsive to the touch of mechanical men miles distant, planes built to carry heavy loads, a ton of bombs, poison gasses, death rays, liquid fire! long-range anti-aircraft guns will blaze away in a futile attempt to scare off these devils of the air. thousands of planes equipped with automatic machine guns, each this territory divided into aerial wings, with a 200 plane squadron for each wing. swift monsters ready to battle to the death far above the earth. winged of destruction, they will elude high-powered guns from below. their will drop from the skies to lay waste waste to factories, power stations, railroads, food and supply depots, homes, in a mass murder of civilians. there will be no limit to the territory covered in this next war; an entire continent can be spanned in ten hours by these winged demons. nothing can stop them. nothing is safe from their onslaught. countrysides and city streets will become blazing infernos as thousands of bombs crash in their midst...

a lurid but factual 1934 documentary on the abuses and collusion of the arms industry; the transcription here is part of a consciously fictitious coda, its function a forewarning of what these dilberts are going to get into next... but there is a strange, sinister-quaint dissonance listening to this after having encountered its derivations first. im situating it in a conflux of, not only the actual development and use of military technology from wwii onward, but of popular mechanics grover boners and francis e. dec: reeling off the (exaggerated) capabilities of weapons now immediately pertains to militarists, not the disgusted pacifists here; the roll of grimly clipped alarum, emotive description in conglomerate with numeric specification and reinforced repetitively -- one's real brain is a moon-brain contained in a brain-bank city on the moon. the filmmaker's affect has been denatured, robbed of fantastic terror by the fantasizing of terror enthusiasts, its urgency worn by further propagandists (and marketers) into a cultural rut where lunatics wallow. yet the intensity and poetic devices are still there, in the words and voice, and while the original affect has rotted they have gained a new resonance with validation: big cities really were bombed into oblivion by masses of bombers, this did result in enormous profits for the arms manufacturers and economic boons for their patron nations, and even the wireless planes, artificially stabilized, are now real, although the mechanical men havent been given clearance to supercede fleshlings (yet.)

...twenty-five hundred dollars a bomb. ninety ton tanks are motorized to a speed of a hundred miles an hour. they are manned by high-powered machine guns which function with equal precision whether the tank is in motion or standing still. infantry, completely mechanized, is machine-gun-equipped too. light artillery travels on fast trucks and is even mounted on airplanes...

what has happened is that claims which are ironclad in content (overwhelmingly accurate prescience) have had their form sapped and made ridiculous. in this case there is no deliberate attack, the drift of history has simply cut in, but the dissonance between quaint delivery and still-disturbing message makes the workings of the process here acutely visible through contrast: our immediate reception has been altered, but our ultimate evaluation of the message is still in accord with the narrator (because we know he was right) and his urgency, as what he was right about continues to operate today; and so the altered reception juts out into the light of conscious disconcertion.

ok i had gone into this thing about how statements can be undermined without being argued against, by repetition which necessarily functions as parody, but which doesnt always register as parody or any other attack at all, but it was superfluous and didnt really follow so fuck it. heres my feelings blog