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Show You're sitting inside a plastic dome, one that's frosted, so you can't see out. It's dark, silent, warm. You can't feel, see, touch, taste, smell or hear. It's difficult to tell whether you're awake or not, to ascertain what is dream and what's not. There is no time. An image forms on the wall in front of you, the floor vibrates gently, another scene flashes onto the domewall to the left, the air feels electric, wisps of heady smoke trail into the chamber, more images flash onto the dome and begin to move, forming and re-forming in complex pattern that alters as the eye wanders to it. Colors run and flow over the entire surface of the dome, music wells up to accompany the swirling scenes and patterns, which move faster and faster across the dome, blurring into one another to form composite portraits, blueprints and cross-sections. You are not watching a movie, you are an actor in one-1971. The script is a sensory arabesque. 1971 THEME: PROJECTIONS ON A PLASTIC DOME SLIDE SEQUENCE: INDUSTRIAL STACKS POURING SMOKE, STARVING ASIAN CHILDREN, ATOMIC BLAST. We are aware or Overpopulation, Ecocatastrophe and Nuclear Genocide-we treat them as newspaper headlines or television programming and turn to a less unpleasant channel. Most college-attending youth is convinced humanity will suicide. WHEN YOU AINT GOT NOTHING, YOU GOT NOTHING TO LOSE Our culture is technologically able to deal with most, if not all, of the problems facing us at present, but is unable to adapt sociologically. Americans demand automobiles, for instance, in the face of datum which indicate the inefficiency, impracticality and positive injury these vehicles cause. Our know-how and richness will allow us to preserve our culture in an artificial environment as those with less technical ability are forced to evolve or perish. We can, in effect, ignore the other components in the global circuit, biasing it to our life-style and robbing those who are less-developed than we. The U-238 Equalizer is the only defense most of the world has against us. BACKGROUND SHOT - UTAH SUPERIMPOSED ON TURNING GLOBE. Stage setting, the Earth. Utah cannot be considered alone on the shrunken globe. Not that decisions made here will necessarily affect the entire world, but because the input for decision is part of an encompassing circuit. Problems are universally communicable, not solutions. Difficulty may arise in a cultural context that makes it impossible to deal with, but an analysis of any problem must begin by outlining it against a cultural background. 65 SOUND COLLAGE: TABERNACLE ORGAN, COUNTDOWN, UNIVERSITY LECTURER, PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE. In the past few years, a basic hypocrisy of America has been pointed out time and again-the difference between our beliefs and our pursuits. Our culture glorifies the Truth, spends billions searching for it in church, school and politics; yet revels in more violence and physical stimulation than' any civilization in history. We celebrate the mundane in entertainment of all varieties, have countless ways to occupy leisure time and frantically pursue continuous occupation of the mind. One perceives the passage of time on a gut level only because of separation of stimuli, the gap between the end of one sensation and the beginning of another. Society seems to serve the purpose of regularizing stimuli so they can be dealt with. Single persons subjected to irregular stimulus sicken; groups usually do not. A high regular stimulus level is necessary to good health-we have been breeding rugged individualists for many years- if social organization does not fulfill its role, what does? |