From: bilh@pd.jaring.my   
      
   So how should we understand 'join the march and eat my starch'?   
      
   1. Since 1938 or so, the US has had various popular campaigns (in China we   
   called them mass campaigns, e.g. the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution,   
   the Great Leap Forward etc) with names such as "March of Dimes" (1938). All   
   meant to evoke the image of    
   an unstoppable progress towards something, like the march of a battalion of   
   invulnerable soldiers.   
      
   So read 'join the march' as an invitation to join up, be part of, a trend.   
      
   2. And the trend is to ...?   
      
   Let's understand the 1935/1946 socio-economic context of the two times that US   
   kiddies were fed with ideological education (in China, we were more honest and   
   called it propaganda) about the existential contradiction of an elderly couple   
   living in the    
   midst of a forest, the male of the couple getting some release from the drab   
   humdrum of daily life chopping wood through his interactions with a chirpy   
   sparrow, the female being responsible for balancing the budget (proceeds of   
   selling wood vs expenses    
   of buying light industrial goods on the retail market), and the chirpy   
   sparrow.    
      
   To understand the context, we need to contrast the two economic ideologies   
   that have been put to the US electorate for many decades. Those economic   
   ideologies have exact counterparts in biology - not biological theory, but   
   biological science.   
      
   Entertain, if you would, two societies.   
      
   Let's call the first society by the name 'R' and suggest that it is a society   
   of a social mammal such as chimpanzees. Like most societies, it lives in a   
   cycle of abundance followed by scarcity. The chimpanzees are ordered   
   internally by hierarchy - sexual    
   dimorphy (big males, smaller females) and inequality in each sexual cohort   
   (big strong alpha males, small weak omega males).   
      
   Let's call the second society by the name 'd' and suggest that it is a society   
   of a social spider that lives in groups clustered around a dominant female.   
   Although the spiders live by an ethic of equality. When possible, they divide   
   all food equally    
   among the members of the group. That is not always possible, such as when a   
   big prey species blunders into the web at one of the extremities of the web -   
   in that relatively rare event, only the few spiders who happen to be near the   
   prey and generally    
   those who put themselves at risk grappling with and killing the prey get to   
   digest the prey (big prey is too robust to tear into smaller chunks; spiders   
   consume partly by external digestion, i.e. injecting digestive enzymes into   
   the prey and then sucking    
   up the products of those digestive enzymes on the body of the beast).   
      
   Now, lets see what happens in a time of scarcity. The spiders don't have   
   enough food for all to survive. So they start to die. The bigger ones have a   
   greater metabolic need. They need more calories to fuel their bigger bodies.   
   So they die at the same    
   speed as or faster than the smaller spiders. End result is that not many   
   spiders are left when the cycle of scarcity moves into abundance. The d road   
   can lead to extinction. Ethical, but still extinction.   
      
   Over in the R strategy, the big strong alpha males make sure that they and   
   their favored mates get food. The small weak males and females die first. At   
   the end of the scarcity cycle, a few big males and females are left to benefit   
   as abundance grows.   
      
   The morality tale of the Old Lady, the Old Man, and the Sparrow is just such a   
   quandary for humans. Should they follow the d strategy of equality? Or the R   
   strategy of hierarchy? In the d strategy, some starch is sacrificed for the   
   pearls of an enriched    
   cultural life. In the R strategy, the Sparrow is sacrificed for assured   
   survival.    
      
   I'll leave you to embellish the R and d strategies and related them to the two   
   major political ideologies in the US. And to question whether the Sparrow   
   character, although just clean entertainment to the kiddies in the audience,   
   is a hint at    
   recreational sex, flirtation etc., for the adults in the back of the room.   
      
   For FZ, I think starch is his Project/Object - his cultural product. The   
   cultural economy of the US was one of inequality. Run of the mill, forgettable   
   pap filling the radio waves. And a small number of interesting, progressive   
   composers who found they    
   had to produce some works that passed for run of the mill commercial work to   
   earn any money for the Synclavier works they labored over in the back room.   
      
   So ... 'Join the march, eat my starch' might be an invitation to join a trend   
   and consume the pearls produced by FZ rehearsing the band to a level not seen   
   in the stumbling drunken performances offered by others.    
      
   I see FZ as self-critical, cynical about himself and the 'music industry', and   
   thinking on a much wider plane than that.    
      
   He might have been offering 'Starch' as what other performers were doing - the   
   package of clothing fashion, hype, recreational drugs as an easy way to a   
   religious experience, etc. all wrapped around yet another forgettable music   
   commodity release. More    
   consumers were marching to retail record stores and lining up to pay to attend   
   concerts of that sort than to FZ concerts.     
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)