Many religions have rules against the display or worship of graven images. These faiths are so uncertain and insecure that the sight of a gold-plated cow or three-headed monster — or a thunderbolt-hurling, childish dude who lives on a mountain — is enough to confuse the believers as to who is really the Boss.

The kids are all right: the most effective advertising is that which is not immediately recognizable as such. Rock stars like Springsteen have made billions of dollars becoming shills for the auto industry … without even trying.

Too early to the party: Jackie Brentson wrote what is arguably the World’s first rock and roll song about an Oldsmobile in 1951, shortly after the Great Depression ended. Like many other ‘colored’ artists who were active before Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, Brentson toiled in obscurity. He struggled with alcoholism before dying in 1979 at the age of 49.

Milton Berle (born Milton Berlinger; July 12, 1908 – March 27, 2002) was an American comedian and actor. As the host of NBC’s Texaco Star Theater (1948–55), he was the first major American television star[1] and was known to millions of viewers as “Uncle Miltie” and “Mr. Television” during TV’s golden age. (Wikipedia)

The Great Depression ended in 1948 when Uncle Miltie lodged himself in America’s living rooms with the message that viewers should spend money they didn’t have on junk they didn’t need. Tossed out the window in a heartbeat was the country’s hard-won habits of thrift and critical thinking. Into the vacuum rushed the ascendent corporations and banks … After having won history’s most destructive war, America’s ‘Greatest Generation’ believed without question … in the secular religion of endless prosperity on the installment plan, in technology and benign science, in the inferiority of Negroes and Communists and the guru-like wisdom and foresight of corporate tycoons.

“Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves by Cal Martin, sung by Doye O’Dell. Modernity is actually the anti-religion, made up of nothing but graven (false) images and distractions … Despite intimations to the contrary, the images serve to amplify the ideology and support the main-stream rather than subvert it. The outcome in post-Depression America was- and is institutionalized banality; where everything meaningful is hollowed out leaving the externals to be reformed into kitsch. Americans have ‘Freedom in a can’ as a substitute for the real thing which is strip-mined for advertizing content in the name of ‘progress’.

Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Luke Askew, Dennis Hopper, capturing the zeitgeist of tens of millions of children confronted with the inescapable reality of growing old. What can be around the next bend? Certainly not boredom! Within modernity, irresponsibility is a profit center: the bad boys go to heaven, the good girls get what’s coming to them …

Harrison Ford, John Milner, Mackensie Phillips, Debralee Scott and the Wolfman. Babbitry lurks behind Detroit-issue voluptuousness. Any choice outside the commercial is buried under the avalanche of clichés. Freedom = Coke or Pepsi, leather vs. Naugahyde.

He died with a greasy comb between his teeth, his seat belt unfastened … Corey Allen, James Dean and the chaste Natalie Wood; sex, death and well-stamped sheet metal, Dean became an icon portraying troubled youths just like himself: persons lacking tools needed to deal with unearned prosperity … Dean never had the chance to be a human, instead he became a face on a piece of cardboard. Dean was killed in a car crash at the age of 24, a Hollywood Jesus for the 20th century.

Hypnosis as a form of propaganda: America was a nice country before it was turned into a gigantic parking lot speckled with useless junk. Not to worry, with less fuel there will be less junk, America just might be a nice country again some day!

Steve McQueen, Paul Genge, Bill Hickman, Ford Mustang GT and Dodge Charger … “I left my heart in San Francisco … ” along with spare parts. Here is trickle down ideology at work; the success of any belief system renders it unstable and ultimately worthless. Modernity relentlessly excludes any ideas that do not conform to the internal laws of fashion regardless of consequences. The bad guys could have left their ridiculous car in Chicago or Cleveland and taken the bus … they never would have been found out … nobody would have bothered to make a movie about them, either.

The wheels have fallen off: who is buying? (The New York Times):

Egyptian Soldiers Said to Kill Dozens

David O. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim

CAIRO — Egyptian soldiers fired on hundreds of supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi before dawn Monday as they were praying outside the facility where he was believed to be detained, dozens of witnesses said. Egypt’s military said armed assailants fired on the soldiers first.

Monday’s clash was the second episode of deadly violence outside the military officers’ club since Mr. Morsi was deposed on Wednesday.

At least 51 civilians were killed, all or most of them shot, and more than 300 wounded, doctors and health officials said. Security officials said at least one police officer died as well.

The mass shooting was the deadliest single episode of violence since the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s longtime autocratic leader. It immediately escalated the nearly week-old confrontation between the generals who forced out Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, and Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters in the streets.

The Egyptians’ chance to gain the American Dream of home ownership and high-speed police chases slips away. Their country is flat broke, it must borrow to import food. At the same time the government subsidizes fuel waste … because it is impolitic for the confused ‘leadership’ to do otherwise.

The primary source of foreign exchange in Egypt is tourism:

“Please come to Egypt so we can burn you alive!” Clearly, a marketing work-in-progress: the country is desperate for wealthy visitors fundamentalists do everything they can to scare them away.

Egyptians Reject Fatwa Calling For Destruction of Pyramids and Sphinx

Waleed Abu al-Khair in Cairo

Egyptian scholars, officials and tourism workers denounced a fatwa — recently issued by Egyptian cleric Morgan Salem al-Gohari — that calls on Egyptians to destroy the country’s pyramids and the Sphinx.

Al-Gohari, a member of a Salafi jihadist group, said he wants these antiquities demolished, just as Prophet Mohammed destroyed the idols he found upon his conquest of Mecca.

During an interview that aired on Egyptian satellite channel Dream TV, al-Gohari likened the Egyptian landmarks to the Buddha statues that were demolished in Afghanistan.

He also equated those who work in the tourism sector to those who work “in prostitution and debauchery” and demanded that the tourism ministry be abolished.

The Fatwa Committee at Al-Azhar rejected the fatwa, saying antiquities are part of the country’s culture.

Dr. Mahmoud al-Jabali, sharia law professor at Al-Azhar University, said the fatwa and others like it have no basis in religion.

Al-Jabali said such edicts violate sharia and Qur’anic teachings and profoundly contradict with the true interpretation of the Qur’an (tafseer) and the Prophet’s Sunnah …

… they also represent a failure of imagination alongside that of modernity’s. The bankrupt West offers the false promise of endless resource waste and chic nihilism. The Wahhabis offer the whip and the sword, the police state and tyrant rule, pain and irrational violence for its own sake; they are relentlessly anti-modern … but, so what?

Besides confused ‘holy men’, the Egyptians have little- or nothing to trade for imported fuel, (Wall Street Journal):

The cul-de-sac at the end of Thunder Road is a gas station with cars and no gas; photo by Mohamed Abd El Ghany for Reuters. Fuel shortages feed on themselves: the country is broke because of them, there are shortages because the country is broke. Here is the grim new religion of fossil fuel depletion: shortages that occur because fuel is unaffordable are permanent. As the country becomes poorer, fuel becomes less available even as the high cost of the remaining fuel bankrupts what is left of business in the country.

Lack of Bank Guarantees Stalls Egypt Oil Deals

Summer Said and Benoit Faucon

DUBAI—Cash-strapped Egypt is struggling to complete oil supply deals agreed on with Iraq and Libya, seen as vital for easing its fuel shortages, because it has been unable to provide acceptable bank guarantees, officials familiar with the matter said.

Egypt’s inability so far to secure the oil supplies underscores the weakness of its public finances and could deepen discontent with the government as energy shortages continue to disrupt daily life.

Pay attention, this is what currency revulsion looks like. the Egypt pound is unacceptable, a 3d party guarantee is necessary for a fuel exporter to accept it. This may be the first instance of currency revulsion but it certainly won’t be the last.

Japanese yen, anyone?

Power does not come from the barrel of gun like Mao suggested but from a hole in the ground in the middle of a desert; Unknown Photographer, (AFP/Getty, UK Mail Online) corpses lined up in Cairo hospital presumably shot by Egyptian military as they protested the removal of Mohamed Morsi as President of Egypt.

The Egyptians and Syrians and the rest with cars are determined to keep them and those without brave machine gun bullets for a vanishing chance at theirs. Americans don’t care: 33,000 citizens were butchered like pieces of meat last year on American highways, a few dead Arabs is meaningless.

The oft-promoted idea is that the political revolutions in these countries are about higher-order abstractions such as ‘personal freedom’ or religious preference. The embedded desire is more concrete: born of countless programs on billions of television sets across the length and breadth of the world. The fantasy is compelling, for a brief moment the energies of the entire world managed to make it real enough to touch. In our onrushing world-to-come, who gets the girl and who gets left out is being determined by those with the most firepower.

Figure 1: Brent Crude continuous futures contract from TFC Charts (click on for big). oil prices hover within the upper and lower bounds. Today’s price — $108/barrel — is about twelve dollars per gallon below the $120 price that would trigger a credit eruption … beyond those eruptions which are already underway.

Public figures offer reassurances at the same time they cross their fingers behind their backs. It is hard to ‘sell’ uncertainty, or foreclosed futures: they are tough subjects and language is inadequate. The graven images and hopeful fantasies of our secular religion have run themselves hard aground against reality. Modernity fails as the consequence of its stupendous success; what remains of it is the spectacle of its disintegration. At the same time, the ordinary operation of modernity over the past four-hundred years has cannibalized meaning itself leaving behind a lethal conceptual vacuum. What does ‘meaning’ actually mean? A man or woman on the street in the Wiemar Republic in 1932 or Rwanda in 1993 would have offered opinions of Jews or Tutsis little different from those offered by the Islamist and his highly-fashionable bag-wearing girlfriend above. Here are literally Dead-End Kids, corn-ball pop-culture outlaws, from this comes mass-murder, the unremarkable outcome of frustrated true believers.