It's only the end of the world, so quit bitching
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to
produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or
other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able
ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of
destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should
they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics,
pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their
thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete,
gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow
levels the population with the food of the world. -- Thomas Malthus, 1798
By Joe Bageant
As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its
natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it
with a little sugar (in the cartoons, ants are always freaks for sugar,
right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when
all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of
their parched little carcasses. I'd guess that it was the lack of water
that finally got 'em.
But the most interesting thing in retrospect -- if a jar of dead bugs can
be called interesting -- is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be
happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of
its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do
that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously
Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper's
grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death.
Now you'd think that the lesson of the ants would be obvious as hell to
any non- intoxicated individual with a grade school education. Never mind
that many people since Malthus, as my sainted daddy would have put it,
"Done drove the point in the ground and broke it clean off." Never mind
that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was a best seller and remains a
classic. Never mind that James Lovelock, the nerdish forward thinking
Englishman who 99% of Americans never heard of, delivered unto us yet one
more time the worst truth in human history, the Gaia Hypothesis. Which is
a fancy way of saying we cannot continue to devour our planet forever
because it amounts to self-cannibalism.
Lovelock also convincingly argued that, due to the side effects of this
species expiration, now acknowledged as global warming, the equator will
look like Mars at some point relatively soon, with the surviving 20% of
humans now alive, or perhaps in the next generation, living near the North
and South Poles.
As to be expected, the few very comfortable elite folks on this earth said
of Lovelock: "This guy is full of shit, a nutcase being adored by a bunch
of naked tattooed pagans and gloomy intellectual types," both of which
number among my favorite kinds of people.
Those pagans who allowed themselves to feel and not just intellectualize
about the earth's condition, and those scientists who did not require
computer modeling to do simple subtraction, recognized that these are the
most challenging of times in human history, "challenging" being a polite
term for the fact that that humanity is gonna die off big time, if not
sooner, then later. Call it the secular version of The End Times.
But not much later, in light of the brief span Homo sapiens hath shat,
frolicked, killed and exceeded their MasterCard limits upon the earth,
which is less than a second in geological time. Already we are on the way
out because we did not have the common sense of lizards, which lasted tens
of millions of years longer without so much as a calculator, much less
computerized eco models.
A bunch of DNA molecules gave us this aberrant evolution of brain and
consciousness that enabled us to dominate everything else and get into the
totally fucked situation in which we now find ourselves. The monkey got so
smart he took over everything, ate most of it, drove over the rest, then
stuck the roadkill on his own dick as a nuclear warhead, and after having
threatened what was left around him, set out to destroy even that small
remaining scrap of his ruined earthly turf. Is this God's cruelest joke?
Global warming as mange medicine
If mankind were discovered on a dog's hide the owner would give the dog a
mange dip. Or if the earth were a Petri dish, we would be called
pathology. Problem is though, mama earth tends to shed pathogens off her
skin, which for us pathogens, is the ultimate catastrophe.
When forced to look at catastrophe on this order of magnitude, we either
go numb in shock or look in delusion to something bigger, or at least
something with more grandeur than Mother Nature flushing humanity down the
toilet. Otherwise, one must accept the both ugly and the weirdly beautiful
prospect of oblivion. Meanwhile, we begin too late to "make better
choices." Grim choices that do nothing but postpone the inevitable, which
are called better ones and sold to us to make ourselves feel better about
our toxicity. Burn corn in your gas tank. Go green, with the help of
Monsanto. But not many can be concerned even with the matter of better
choices. Few can truly grasp the fullness of the danger because there is
no way they can get their minds around it, no way to see the world in its
entirety. The tadpole cannot conceive of the banks of the pond, much less
the wooded watershed that feeds it. But old frogs glimpse of it.
Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice -- the moral one.
Accept the truth and act upon it. Take direct action to eliminate human
suffering, and likewise to eliminate our own comfort. We can say no to
scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to drive at all and refuse to
participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can quit being so addicted
to the rationality and embrace the spirit. Rationality simply turns back
on itself like a mobius strip. Too much thinking, too much cleverness on
the monkey's part leads it to believe it can come up with rational
solutions for what ration itself hath wrought.
All the green energy sources and eating right and voting right cannot fix
what has been irretrievably ruined, but only make life amid the ruination
slightly more bearable. Species gluttony is nearly over and we've eaten
the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature
(though a case might be made for stupidity) but because the existence of
consciousness necessarily implies each of us as its individual center, the
individual point of all experience and thus all knowing. The accumulated
personal and collective wounds fester and become fatal because there is no
way to inform the world that we must surrender our assumptions, even if we
wanted to. Which we do not because assumptions are the unseen cultural
glue, the DNA of civilization. If we did so, the crash would be immediate.
So we postpone transformation through truth, and stick with what has
always worked -- empire and consumption. And we twiddle our lives away
thorough insignificant fretting about mortgages and health care and
political parties and pretend the whole of American life is not a
disconnect. Hell, all of Western culture has become a disconnect. Somebody
needs to tell the Europeans too; progressive Americans give them entirely
too much credit for the small positive variation in their cultures and
ours. We both get away with it only so long as the oil and the
entertainment last.
The front page of today's newspaper tells me that 41 million motorists
will gas up and hit the road today, July 3rd. Another five million will
sip drinks and read magazines while zipping through the stratosphere, in
747s that burn the day's oxygen production of a 44,000 acre rainforest in
the first five minutes of flight just getting off the ground and gaining
altitude, adding to the more than 110 million annual tons of
atmosphere-altering chemtrail gasses, some of which will remain to hold
heat in the upper atmosphere for almost 100 years.
Below it all are the spreading pox-like blotches of economic and
ecological ruins of dead North American towns and city cores, such as
downtown Gary Indiana, Camden, Newark, Detroit -- all those places we
secretly accept as being hellish because, well, that's just what happens
when blacks take over, isn't it? Has anyone seen downtown Detroit lately?
Of course not. No one goes there any more. Miles of cracked pavement,
weeds and abandoned buildings that look like de Chirico's Melancholy and
Mystery of a Street. Hell, for all practical purposes it is uninhabited,
though a scattering of drug addicts, alcoholics and homeless insane people
wander in the shadows of vacant rotting skyscrapers where water drips and
vines crawl through the lobbies, including the Ford Motor Company's
stainless steel former headquarters. (See the works of Chilean-born
photographer Camilo José Vergara.) It is the first glimpse of a very near
future, right here and now for all to see.
The hearts of even our most avowedly thriving cities are just a dead,
reduced to nothing more than designated spending zones, collections of
bars and banks and overpriced eateries lodged at the center of a massive
tangle of overpasses and freeways designed for a nation of soft people
hurtling themselves through the suburbs in petroleum powered exoskeletons
in search of fried chicken, or into the city for the lonely monetized
experience called urban nightlife. Which is no life at all, but rather
posturing in lifelike poses amid simple drunkenness and engorgement.
We allow ourselves to imagine the worst is somewhere in yet another future
so we can continue without owning decision. Love of comfort being the
death of courage, we continue the familiar commoditized life, the only one
we have known. Is it not true that our entire understanding of courage as
we know it is about braving some unknown? About making the socially
unaccepted and dangerous choice? Stepping forward in the face of the wars
and evil mechanics of our own particular time?
Empire and its inevitable permanent state of warfare flourishes not
because evil men are at the helm, but because the men at the helm are even
weaker and more in denial than we are. (Look at Dick Cheney. The guy is a
nervous wreck wrapped in arrogance and denial.) And so their uninformed
and crude confidence is assuring to both them and us. We elect the worst
among ourselves in increasing avoidance of ourselves and they are
validated by our endorsement. Evil men seeking empire did not make us or
the world this way. We made their existence possible through our denial,
love of ease and non accountability.
The most dangerous question in the world
Yet, I dare say that comfort is not the most important thing in most
American lives. It is just the only thing we are offered in exchange for
our toil and the pain of ordinary existence in such an age. Consequently,
it is all we know. Meaningless work, then meaningless comfort and
distraction in the too-few hours between sleep and labor. But we settled
for that and continue to do so. The day will never come when we stand
around the office water cooler and ask one another: "Why in the hell are
we even here today?" It's the most dangerous question in America and the
Western world.
Some few of us are in a hellish limbo, simply waiting for total collapse
because it is easier to rebuild from nothing than to change billions of
minds not even remotely concerned with the looming catastrophe. A minority
of the world, the six percent called America, suffers the mass
self-delusion of endless plentitude. A much larger portion is less
concerned with the moral aspects of consumption because they are brutally
engaged in trying to find enough to eat and a drink of clean water. So
plentitude on any terms looks damned good. Escape to America because those
fuckers over there don't seem to be suffering at all.
Manifesto of the Damned
I thank the stars for younger men, writers such as Derrick Jensen and
Charles Eisenstein. They say what we cannot yet say to ourselves and what
the media will never say because media survives by the corporate numbers
game. Consequently, the iron rules of being allowed to communicate with
significant numbers of people within our empire tend to call for glibness,
fake optimism, and the wide net of inclusion of even the silliest sorts of
people. Fuck only knows I've participated in the sham over the years. But
the truth is never politically or socially correct.
What's left of my own aging hippie optimism dies hard. And as an older guy
who has seen both interior and external horror in this life, I often
assure those who will deal with this world after I am worm chow that "to
have seen a specter is not everything." I've often repeated this theme
because it is important to know that many more specters lie ahead of the
next generation, the survivors of which will be the new "brave happy few,"
links in the chain of reason tempered with art. No one yet knows with
absolute certainty the outcome of our terrible common plunge toward truth.
But even in the worst of times, there is glory in the sheer electricity of
life, the expression of its juiciness, those moments when the eternal
fecundity of the flesh struts by in a tight skirt, or perhaps sporting the
perfect unshaven jaw, offering everything and nothing. Life is never
completely joyless.
Younger men and women will live to rule or rule the day. So seize it for
god sake! And listen to the cellular wisdom of the flesh. I did and do and
am damned glad of it. Despite what a police court Jehova, Yahweh or Allah
may have told us, the only holy thing existent is this the flesh in which
we now walk. It leads us toward both good and evil, but it leads, and most
probably will bleed if we are on the right path. Yet, what could be better
than a meaningful life during meaningless times? Which is everything,
whether we be artistic, queer, altruistic, an unheralded ox in the fields
of labor -- or one of the invisible ones out there with a stone cold
determination to kill the supposedly deathless machinery in which we are
expected to supplicate daily and call that a life.
I am not a wise man, but I dare say that's about all you can hope for. A
splash of small glory, or perhaps even a canteen filled with
meaningfulness in the desert. It is no small thing.
So here we are. You and me. Let us hang all our laundry out to dry in this
tiny corner of cyberspace. I think it is entirely possible that we can be
honest cybernetic bards in an unpromising age, possibly even noble amid
the ruins.
joebageant.com |
