thoughts – cranky and droll – from a feisty geezer determined to ride his quick cancer into the ground

I tried, yesterday, to add something to my pile of pixilated profunditude, but I was so far down the drain that I was only able to to deliver the best of my musings, more-or-less-directly (by accident) to the domain, “Trash”.  Just as well.  All I had to say was that it was not a day which I felt inspired toward living any longer, and that I’d spent much of the morning in a torpid state of hallucinating semi-somnolence.  I did wonder if this was the sort of thing people were prone to do just before they croaked.  Five-hundred, seventy-six words down the drain.  Good riddance.

I am (perhaps) ‘better’, today.  I’ve been sporadically pecking at a collection of essays by radical primitivist, John Zerzan.  I don’t know if Mr. Zerzan appreciates being called such names, but there it was on the back cover of his book (but wait – there’s no such epithet on the back cover, or the front… someone, somewhere, called him that, I swear.  I’m just repeating what I heard).  In an essay on the transition out of the bronze age, into the iron age, Zerzan mentions something about the WTC “Twin Towers” representing a sort of pinnacular monument to late 20th/early 21st Century civilization.  His brief mention of the WTC was enough to remind me of my second (spontaneous) verbal ejaculation, upon seeing the televised strike of the first tower (or was it the second?) by a jet airliner.  My first uttered outburst was, “Oh, my god!” (probably not the only person watching TV, on that Tuesday morning, who made such an exclamation).  My second outburst is the one I find more interesting and, perhaps, less likely to have been repeated by more than a few thousand other folks watching TV at that moment.  Right on the heels of “Oh, my god!”, I said, “Ahh… there!”  I immediately imagined that I was watching a first major attack on the Modern Western World Order – something whose time seemed due, or even overdue.  A big chunk of my soul’s supreme court approved of what I was seeing.  I was quietly pleased to see the World Trade Center buildings being taken down by somebody.  From my 3000-mile-distant safe perch, I saw their destruction, however horrific, as a good and ultimately necessary event.  I was, perhaps, not in complete sympathy with the jubilant Palestinians we saw on TV that day, but I sure thought I understood what they were feeling.  ”At last!” (we might have said in unison).

Over the next several years, while I never forgot the moment or the exclamation, my sense of it’s possible significance quickly faded as things appeared to return to a more-or-less “business-as-usual” pace and posture, e.g., the US immediately bombing and invading Afghanistan, then doing the same in Iraq a little more than a year later, followed, another year later, by the brazen, broad-daylight dive-to-the-mat by the Kerry/Edwards (“WE WILL COUNT EVERY VOTE!”) team.  Clearly, it seemed, the forces of onward-marching industrial civilization were still very much in control.  ”Ho-hum, business as usual, I wonder what inane nonsense they’ll be prattling about on the PBS Nightly News, this evening.”

Then, following two or three years of my own obsessive attention to the issue of “peak oil”, we had the oil-price spike in July 2008, preceding the stock market crash of 2008, followed closely by the housing and banking debacles.  After muttering a few additional, somewhat-more-muted “Ah, there!”s, I began to recall the ejaculation of September 11, 2001, once again.  Ah, yes… the WTC attack.  Once again, it looked like the Blockbuster Beginning of the End for Western Industrial Civilization.  Does it really matter whether the events of 9/11 were masterminded by Osama bin Laden or Dick Cheney?  For me – not so much, after all.  Sure, I do still think that there was a whole lot of behind-the-scenes skullduggery going on that day, but I’m now even more fascinated by the larger, more subtle events of the past two years, and by the events-not-yet-unfolded in the coming decade.  Cheney, Bush, Obama, Congress – they’re all just doing what they were bred to do: political thuggery.  They will stay at their careers as long as they can, grabbing every shred of whatever they can get their hands on – for as long as it lasts.  Meanwhile, we build up to the Mother of All poli-sci-fi dystopian Movie Plots.  Mad Max, The Road, The Book of Eli, The Day After, Silent Running, Soylent Green, The Children of Men, etc (all of ‘em), rolled into one heck-of-an “interesting” scenario over the next five, ten, twenty years.

The American national political stage seems so utterly irrelevant right now.  It is quite apparently not responsive to concerns of or or me (unless your name happens to be Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Scaife, Monsanto…).  The fools, crooks, poseurs, thugs, sycophants, parasites and humbugs, who have their tentacles and other appendages inserted into the zombied-corpse of this country’s government, will not alter their activities significantly – until the Peasants rise up in some truly-and-convincingly-wrathful posture, and burn them out – with what might be the last vestiges of gasoline on the planet.  How often have we heard the term “Political Theater”?  As in, “Oh, that’s just so much political theater!”  Guess what??  That’s all there is – on the national stage – POLITICAL THEATER.  No matter how much money or effort any of us manages to pour into the re-directing of the American National Train-wreck, all we’re going to see on the national stage is more political theater. I think it was Everett Dirksen who proclaimed “All politics is local!” ( I should go look it up ).

It’s time for All Good Peasants in America to begin paying attention to what’s going on at home.  It might – after all – be about time to starve the federal government down to something small enough to drown in the bathtub.  Let’s just be sure some little weasely-varmint like Grover Norquist isn’t one of those with his snorkel in the scuppers as the thing bleeds out its last.

A lot of us have lived the high life for most of the past century.  It’s about time for us to step off the boat (into the water), and let those of our children (who might possess some guts and savvy) begin to take over the mess we’ve made for them.  No – it won’t be pretty.  It’s time for the fat, feckless, spineless, clueless babies we’ve become, to go off and suck our thumbs – quietly – in the corner.  No – it won’t be pretty.

For now.