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DEMOCRACY? | |
October 17, 2005The Failure of Jefferson's IdealThere's a lot of writing published in various forms, it is true; lots of molly-coddling tripe passing for journalism; lots of popular fiction serving as pabulum for infantile minds; lots of web logs, web pages, emails (mostly spam), discussion lists, bulletin boards. All of it, well, most all of it, is nothing more than cryptic notes passed among desks in elementary school classrooms. Worse yet, email discussion lists are filled with mindless chatter, lacking even simple punctuation, spelling or, saints preserve us, grammar. The promise of a democratic, anarchic communications medium has been buried under the excrement of popular culture. The English language has descended into a sewage lagoon, there to fester and coagulate into a bloated, putrescent simulacrum of a living language. Perhaps that's part of the reason I haven't written much of late. I'm overwhelmed with the sheer stupidity of the human species, the overweening presence of thick-necked bullies, foul-mouthed young women, apathetic juveniles, and the children now being raised by young people without two brain cells to rub together on a good night. The demeanor of youth unto age thirty is that of stultified, pampered and spoiled brats, filled to the Plimsol line with themselves, unaware and uncaring of the social conventions of community, mutual aid, public responsibility. Their focus centers around their cell phones, talking incessantly with unseen "friends," filling their heads with endless trivial chatter, holding their cells phone permanently in front them, anxiously awaiting the next communications opportunity. When not engaged in personal communications devices, they saturate their brain cells with thumping base "music" (noise), such that they can never have an original thought in their head, never have an internal dialog, never discover what they may or may not think from one moment to the next. The are the future leaders of our country. I think not. Some one else has another idea. The future leaders of the United States are hand-picked, long groomed, prepared by the elite nannies, teachers, tutors and professors at prestigious private institutions of higher, and more rarified, education. Held aloft from the social conditioning of mandatory public schooling, kept separate from the teeming masses with cell phone and boom box in hand, the future leaders receive instruction at odds with the irrelevant masses kept in puerile servitude with a combination of manufactured fear, vapid amusement and pecuniary reward. The new leaders are taught contempt with their current events, elitism with their elocution, neo-conservatism with their nouns and verbs. Meanwhile the mass of humanity is allowed to go about their petty business with the illusion of freedom, fettered by their jobs, chained to their consumption, mollified by TeeVee, kept passive and apathetic by propaganda, disinformation and mindless entertainment. So who is to write, what is to be written, who is to read it, and, more importantly, who is to act? Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate March 8, 2005 A Braver New WorldAs the United States government slides farther and faster into a fascist oligarchy, the rhetoric spread by the stenographers of power (aka "free press") increases the fervor of its fawning sycophancy. This screed parroted by, of all newspapers in the world, The Guardian, is the latest and worst example of the press stumbling over themselves to prove their loyalty to the naked emperor. George W. Bush's speech writer, Michael Gerson, should have his pens and pencils broken and his world processor stripped of all its memory for this one. "Freedom will prevail in Lebanon," ?? What does that mean? Anything at all? "The advance of hope in the Middle East requires new thinking in the region," the Oval One said. "By now it should be clear that authoritarian rule is not the wave of the future. It is the last gasp of a discredited past." So in order to "advance" hope, whatever that means, people in the Middle East must think different... say, like we do, perhaps? After all, authoritarian rule is the last gasp of a discredited past, so they must do as we tell them to do, that is, not be authoritarian, rather than doing what they want to do? "For the sake of our long-term security, ["our" meaning us white folks living in privilege in the United States] all free nations must stand with the forces of democracy and justice that have begun to transform the Middle East." This is not an authoritarian pronouncement, you understand, because authoritarian rule is not the wave of the future. Rather, it must be one of the last gasps of a discredited past. And so it is. The future has less energy in it than the past. The future has warmer worldwide temperatures than in the near past, different climates, different agricultural patterns. The future will be entirely different than the past. Even for naked emperors. The future will not be quite so different for those who live a simple life in the present, those who already eschew retail therapy, cell phone pacifiers, TeeVee pabulum. For those of us who have planted our roots in local community, who live within walking or biking distance from work and local markets, who have chosen a life of simple, quiet pleasures, the future will be much like the present... only quieter. There's quite a bit of discussion these days among those who are aware of the full implications Peak Oil and Global Climate Change about why "they don't get it;"" they" being everyone else continuing on the consumer exercise wheel as if today's world will continue indefinitely into the future, without change. There's a simple reason for this: "they" are not allowed to think. When one's every waking moment is filled with the cacophony of CD players, ground penetrating car stereos, Teevees, iPods, computers and all manner of electronic jiggery-pokery, no thought can force its way to the surface through all the noise. When one's every waking moment is filled with infotainment, there is no time... no room!... for original thought. It takes solitude to "know yourself," hunks and piles of alone time with no distractions. The natural cycles of the non-human world refill your lightened body with the stuff of human evolution. You can almost hear the audible sigh as your body returns to its natural rhythms. Once the noise of "civilization," if that's what it is, is left behind, thinking begins. The people ruled by any government that aspires to naked fascism cannot be allowed to think, at any cost. Thinking leads to unrest, dissatisfaction, rebellion, even revolution, that noblest of human activities. Thus the electronic circus, the "Minute of Hate," the cartoon villains paraded before the multitudes held in a thrall of fear. What is the answer? Well, Nature knows best and Nature is preparing a much quieter future for Homo sapiens, other than the sound of reluctant fingernails dragged through petroleum-based carpets across the globe. Best thing to do at this point is to get rid of everything that requires oil to support, dig the biggest garden you can maintain, orient your house to the sun and invest in insulation while you still can. The future is bright from our lookout on Leona Gulch. Seventh Avenue will be much quieter when all the boomboxers sputter their last exhaust notes, when the foul-mouthed neighbor girl no longer blasts her stereo into the night, when the drunken kids down the block have to walk home from their late night revels instead of endangering every living thing along the way with their drunken driving. Tis a Brave New World with such wonders in it. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate March 14, 2004 Stupidity and Greed"There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed." --Edward Abbey I've been noticing lately, or at least I think I've been noticing a rapid increase in the total amount and severity of stupidity in the world, much to my intense disappointment. And greed too, now that I read these words of the Noble Bard, though stupidity stands out on its own. It's tempting to wax curmudgeonly and decry the fallen state of our youth, as generations of us old farts have grumbled, remembering the days when we walked ten miles to school in three feet of snow... and wind... with no shoes. Yep, those were the days! But stupidity is not restricted to the young, and must not be confused with ignorance, a perfectly respectable state of mind resulting from a lack of information. It has nothing to do with formal education, either, if there is such a thing, which I doubt. Diplomae and other such official recognitions have their place as pass keys to the world of academe, big business and government, places one treads cautiously at the risk of catching moral decay, sloth and corruption, the signs of a civilization in deep decline. But they are not guarantors of an escape from stupidity. Some of the most highly educated people in the world exhibit the greatest stupidity when it comes to making decisions that affect the complex web of life on this our only Earth. One can see everywhere the sources of this increasing increase in our Gross National Stupidity (GNS) index: vapid TeeVee newsertainment; the decline and elimination of critical thinking skills taught in our state-mandated public education system; the militarization of our society, fostering unquestioning loyalty, unthinking jingoism, loss of personal initiative, acceptance of authority and political apathy. With corruption evident and unquestioned in our national and state governments, with war glorified as the base organizing principle of our society, with the militarization of the constabulary and the identification of the people of this country as the enemy, assumed guilty until proven innocent, is it any wonder that our youth have no understanding of the institutions that have traditionally worked to foster community involvement and solidarity? Generations of living in a society fueled by greed have resulted in a populace, in the United States at least, of self-centered, acquisitive, morally bankrupt, uncaring individuals, ill-equipped to take part in a free and democratic society, lacking the simple critical skills necessary to distinguish one message from another, research unsupported claims and blatantly misleading information, and arrive at meaningful decisions about the course of our nation and the representative leadership of our government. In such an atmosphere democracy cannot long survive. It is becoming increasingly evident that democracy has died in the United States and its client countries, not with a bang but a whimper. Fortunately, Mother Nature abhors stupidity in any species, has no tolerance for it, wipes the slate clean at the earliest signs of evolutionary incompetence. Homo Sapiens is no exception: Extinction lurks around the next corner, just down the street from Global Warming and the End of the Age of Oil. There's no escaping it: Nature always bats last, the river always wins, the wheels of the Universe grind exceedingly fine. We needn't sit idly by and wait for the inevitable; we can take a hand in this grand transformation, this return to our rightful place in the world. All we need do is eliminate the safety instructions from all product packaging, and the forces of evolution will select against those too stupid to figure things out for themselves. World population should decline quite rapidly to a sane and sustainable billion or so humans scattered esthetically about a rapidly reviving planet. Once stupidity, fueled by greed, fueled by oil, declines, there may be a chance for the old human species yet, those few representatives remaining. Having to work for a living once again, instead of sitting on our asses in automobiles or in front of infernally demanding computer screens, we may rediscover how to live with the earth rather than on top of it. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate June 30, 2003 Once again we enter that silly season in the lives of Americans when numbers, oratory and brightly colored balloons substitute for thought, probity and rational discourse. The political convention epitomizes this circus approach to choosing those we laughingly and unthinkingly refer to as "leaders." Whether we need leaders or not is never up for discussion. Politics is as American as, well, bakshish in Istanbul. We never think about it, we endure. Our relative lack of public participation in the great panoply is not due to apathy or the decline of our national moral fiber. Rather, we send a clear signal to those who would lead that they are unwanted, unneeded and worse, they're keeping us from achieving true democracy. The children's game of Follow the Leader is unsuitable for such important decisions as keeping our air and water clean, preserving essential non-human habitat and protecting at least a representative sample of wilderness, our true home. Our leaders follow their noses, firmly affixed with corporate nose rings, attached to the long tether of "campaign financing." The fix has been in for a century or so, the entire process carefully crafted to guarantee that those elected to "high" office are well controlled, documented, indoctrinated and disciplined. They have a heavy responsibility, insuring the continuance of corporate domination in the United States and all of its imperialist conquests. The world must be made safe for hypocrisy. Rather than continuing this quadrennial spasm of false and servile patriotism, let's throw the whole mess into a cocked hat and return to the big D Democracy of our greatest statesman, citizen and thinker, Thomas Jefferson. To hell with national politics, what do we need a national government for anyway; to make lives miserable for people thousands of miles away in the desert? Let's practice democracy where it does the most good: in our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities and villages. Let's make decisions about things that matter: the education of our children, the blaring of ground penetrating sound systems set on stun, our local branch libraries, clean water, fresh air and preservation of the wild. If we must, and only when absolutely necessary, we can choose delegates to deal with our neighbors over yonder hill, when they get too uppity and disrespectful. We can form ad-hoc groups of intelligent citizens to deal with those few problems that transcend local juris-diction (talking about rules) and disband them when no longer needed, so as to return to more productive pastimes at home. No need for standing armies, militarized constabularies, domestic spies and national regulators. These are tools of the tyrant and have no place in a democracy where the people rule their own lives. Yes, this will take some time. Once domesticated, a species is long in returning to its basic feral nature. It will take one generation living in freedom to forget the whip and the chains of central rule, once those chains have been broken and the whip forever unraveled. Now would be a good time to start, when the puerile posturing of our national "leader" is laid bare for all to see. There's no mistaking now how the United States government works, who guides the ship of state, and where they are taking us, in tow. It's time to cut our lines, cast ourselves adrift and set our own course. Democracy starts between the ears. Leona Gulch Pacific Plate -- Ed Abbey |