1 April 2007

On 4 March 2007, The New York Times published an article reporting that the British Broadcasting Corporation was “barred from running a report about a political financing scandal that has cast a shadow over Prime Minister Tony Blair’s final months” just “shortly before [it]…was due to broadcast the report on its 10 p.m. news” (“BBC Is Barred From Showing News Report On a Scandal,” London, 3 March 2007, Reuters).  Along with the report, The Times disclosed that Lord Levy, the Prime Minister’s “top fundraiser and Middle East envoy” and Ruther Turner, the Prime Minister’s “director of government relations” were both arrested and released without charge in connection with the scandal.

On 1 April 2007, The New York Times published reporter Norimitsu Onishi’s article on the Japanese Ministry of Education’s move to censor out from high school text books certain acts the Imperial Army committed during World War II, in a continuing effort to ‘re-write’ history for its future generation (“Japan’s Textbooks Reflect Revised History: Ministry Deletes References to Army Role in Okinawa Atrocity,” Tokyo, 31 March 2007).  The negative repercussion of this ‘perceptions’ move is to strain South Korean – Japanese relations in light of the atrocities the Imperial Army is said to have perpetrated against Koreans (especially Korean females) during the Second World War.

In the same section, The Times published reporter Louise Story’s article on the use in Japan (and more recently in the Philippines and in Britain) of new technology to relay information between bar codes and cell phones (“In a New Web World, Bar Codes May Talk With Your Cellphone,” with Martin Fackler as contributing reporter from Tokyo).  Story explains that it is a “new generation of bar codes” that enables cell phones to link with physical objects.  In this communication between the new bar codes and the cell phones, everything from nutritional information of foods to movie trailers are relayed simply by pointing the cell to a McDonald’s burger or a movie billboard.  Apparently, this has been going on for a few years in Japan and is quickly being adopted by media and advertising companies across Asia and Western Europe.

On 1 April 2007, the New York Post published reporter Rachel Beck’s article on the paradox of disclosure: that the “new ‘total’ compensation disclosures” about CEO salaries are far from transparent and far from the intent and purpose of the SEC’s new disclosure rules (“No clarity seen in ‘total’ disclosures in company filings”).  The result: it continues to be “hard to have faith in what’s being recorded”.

Interestingly, alongside Beck’s article, the Post published reporter Catherine Curan’s article on “Starbuck’s 2-faced environmentalism,” fully disclosing Starbucks’ bottled water hypocrisy.  Curan explains that at the same time Starbucks promotes sales of its Ethos water, donating a  nickel for each bottle sold to support global clean-water projects, it also indirectly “helped kill an expansion of the nickel-per-bottle deposit law right here in New York” through its Ethos water distributor, PepsiCo. 

Ok, so what is the link (if any) amongst the above five (5) articles?

In the cases of the BBC being barred from reporting on the Prime Minister scandal, the Japanese Ministry of Education deleting parts of Japan’s historical past from high school textbooks, and the SEC disclosure rulings being anything but transparent, the net effect is to expose the hidden, the attempts to hide and the censored.  In other words, what initially occurs is what I term “hyphenation paradox” in which an act, occurrence, fact, and/or truth actually becomes further hidden under the blaring light of examination – the effect of ‘obfuscated disclosure’ or a chiaroscuro of ‘reality’.  However, at the end, the trace of the hyphen leaves its indelible mark and we are left exposed to the paradox – once we acknowledge and then report on its occurrence.

In contrast, the cases of Starbucks’ bottled water hypocrisy and the use of new bar codes with cell phones in Japan attest to the potentiality of full disclosure and a near-absolute transparency – a rather Progressive haven.  The fact that Curan can write an article about a major company’s hypocrisy and the fact that there is new technology being used today bringing immediacy of information directly to the individual – ‘transparently’ and within seconds - albeit in the same country where education is being censored, proves that hyphenation as the potential of potential, the activating connecting dash between technology and potential that enables the unity between the individual and truth – the uncensored real – can and does exist.

Nietzsche once wrote that “[e]very philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask” (Beyond Good and Evil, #289).  He also stated that the genuine philosophers’ “ ‘knowing’  is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is – will to power” (ibid, #211). 

Rather than being a concealing philosophy, hyphenation is the examining philosophy that impregnates potentiality.  It is not a word that masks but a concept reflecting the virtual real.  Beyond this, it extends as a worldview and beyond a worldview, it is a phenomena of potentiality.  It is the source of absolute potential that inherently contains the power-to-truth in its becoming.

To all those asking, “hyphenation, so what,” let me offer you this:

We have embarked on a new era incorporating newer technologies by the second.  It is time to incorporate a new vernacular to meet our current reality so we can capture each next second with accuracy, immediacy, and assuredness.