We had a hardware store go broke here in the 80s. They had those little wall signs , with the wall wisdoms. "Don't stand out in the sun if your head melts" "Let all things be done decently and in order" and the one made popular during the Black Plague by those powerless to battle the fates "Eat. Drink. and Be Merry. For tomorrow we may die"
I was hoping for divine or extra-terrestrial intervention but that unopened box of disappointment is not coming before dear ol mother natures intervention will This is all happening in exactly the way the average human mind works the arrogance that we can fix it is just exactly the same arrogance that let us "improve" things to the point of disaster in the first place. Fun times.
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy. Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal. We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head? Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions . Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget." I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in. 74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
We had a hardware store go broke here in the 80s.
ReplyDeleteThey had those little wall signs , with the wall wisdoms.
"Don't stand out in the sun if your head melts"
"Let all things be done decently and in order"
and the one made popular during the Black Plague
by those powerless to battle the fates
"Eat. Drink. and Be Merry. For tomorrow we may die"
I was hoping for divine or extra-terrestrial intervention
but that unopened box of disappointment
is not coming before dear ol mother natures intervention will
This is all happening in exactly the way the average human mind works
the arrogance that we can fix it
is just exactly the same arrogance that let us "improve" things
to the point of disaster in the first place.
Fun times.