Whoring and Warring and Avoiding the Boring End of It All
Evolution, Revolution, & an Invocation of a Consciousness Convolution Necessary for Survival
MAY DAY REFLECTIONS FOR APOCALYPSE AVOIDANCE
“We all start out as scientists,” Carl Sagan once stated, “every child born to discover the world anew in repeated shocks of awe and wonder,” akin to the scientist’s routine countenance of nature and her cosmic glory. I experience the privilege each day of repeating this amazement at even the most common occurrences. “I’m Atlanta’s cheapest date,” I quip, precisely because the life’s little marvels entertain me so thoroughly.
At the same time that I revere the hypotheses and trial and error of the natural philosopher, of course---as any but pollyannas who read me would attest, no doubt---I’m also a revolutionary. What this means to me, on the eve of May Day, seems like an appropriate idea to explore. I lack the rigor and discipline to hope to achieve the highest levels of technical or philosophical dialog, but I have a way with words, the Blarney Stone my earliest experience of a kiss according to my mother. And the six and a half billion cousins frolicking and fighting and fucking around the globe are clearly at greater risk of annihilation, as a FAMILY, than ever before in the human prospect.
In such a situation, as the estimable madman Werner Erhard once remarked, “either people will find a way to shift the course of the locomotive hurtling humanity along its track, or the train will eventually arrive where it’s going,” to a destination that will enliven the enthusiasm of only the fiercest and most devoted afficianados of Apocalypse. The platitudinous attitude of far too many folks is still that the latitude exists to allow professional politicians and eager nerdy boys to handle the ship of state, which is also the ark of the human clan. A fundamental precept of any revolutionary consciousness is that EVOLUTION has created conjunctions out of which fundamental transformations of relationships can emerge. The popular saying is no less excellent for its popularity, that “EVOLUTION IS NINETY PER CENT OF ALL REVOLUTION.”
As is the case with all of my Jim Journal posts---thrown together, with no budget, from the hinterlands of a life impossibly full---these topics and contextual ramblings, about what is the appropriate Big Picture political content of our conversation about the human condition, are just a few of hundreds or thousands that will emerge, given that time and tide allow. This posting begins a series---that will appear over the course of the next month, more or less---which expresses, first, an abbrevriated overview of selected aspects of human life in crisis, and how community democratic inputs may yet salvage salutary sustenance for all of us who long to live under God’s big tent. Second, it examines, also hyper-quickly, how we might imagine the interrelational connections of revolutionary consciousness and action, as components, in turn, of ongoing, practical, and manageable day-to-day routines that any one of us might manifest.
AN ADVANCE ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEME FOR PERUSERS TO PONDER
Of the scores of critically important developments and areas of work that folks now need to consider and address, this series examines the following five.
1)WMD’s and WAR;
2) AGRICULTURE AND FOOD---CULTURALLY MEDIATED NATURE;
3)PRISONS, POLICE, AND RELATED SOCIAL PATHOLOGY;
4)BIOTECH, NEURO-TECH, AND THE RE-CREATIONAL PARADIGM;
5),DISEASE, WEATHER, TREES: GAIA’S POTENTIAL FOR FURIOUS FELICITY. In the assessment of each of these areas, very much iconoclastic overview throughout, an also initially brief examination will appear of the democratic, grassroots responses to these life-threatening patterns that many elite apologists cling to as once they fought for mother’s breast.
Following this outpouring of overall category analysis and social-response-survey, leaving to others and other times political economic and historical dissection of these issues, the series that begins here will then examine the sorts of relationships that are crucial to affecting these areas of concern. In particular, we will focus on at least four sorts of relationships.
1)HUMAN AFFAIRS---FAMILY & SELF, FRIENDS, AND OTHERS;
2)ECOLOGICAL CONNECTIONS---CULTURAL, AGRICULTURAL, NATURAL;
3)INSTITUTIONAL CONNECTIONS---POLTICAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL;
4)TECHNOLOGICAL CONNECTIONS---MACHINES, SCIENCE, LEARNING. As with the presentation of problems, many additional important and interesting sorts of ideas and interactions exist than this beginning statement will even be able to mention.
And, in both of these organizational categories, clearly, all of the descriptions and depictions are mutually intersecting, reenforcing, and supporting. Inevitably, the parsing out of labels, to differentiate these presentations, will be artificial and far from fully satisfying. So saying, however, at the very least for “yours truly” this will be a fantastic exercise in synthesis and explication of the BIG PICTURE THAT LURKS BEHIND EVERY SINGLE LITTLE TALE I TELL, DOWN TO THE LAST ONE, THE COMPLETE CHRONICLING OF WHICH WOULD MAKE JIMMY DURANTE’S “I’VE GOT A MILLION OF ‘EM” SEEM MERELY A MODEST START TO THE AVALANCHE OF YARNS BUBBLING IN JIMBO’S RESERVOIR.
Finally, in a concluding ‘chapter’ or so to this initial JIMBO-BIG-PROJECT, I offer my ideas for the methods with which media and communications, and ‘culture’ with a little ‘c’, can make crucial contributions to human progress. This is where I imagine my real life’s work to be, the rest of this---for me---just superstructure, just an invitation to conversation, just a plea for trust that, whatever else may be mad or sad or overly glad in me, I aim, and am eager to talk about improving the accuracy of my ‘bead’, to provide useful material to support progressive and socially equitable work everywhere I can reach. An aspect of this outreach will be an ongoing annotated bibliography, the first installment of which will conclude this series.
So saying, TO BEGIN:
ANNIHILATION ANNOUNCEMENTS AND A FEW ANSWERS-BACK AVAILABLE
Number One----WAR AND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION----Although the United States overwhelmingly dominates the production and development of WMD’s, we are, arguably, slightly less likely to initiate their second use---after their first deployment in 1945. In fact none of the primary purveyors of the technologies of mega-death---clearly led by fusion explosive technologies in which our government intends a hundred billion dollars expenditure over the next ten years or so---gain either leverage or equity in contemplating offensive use of Hydrogen bombs.
Various scenarios seem fairly likely, however, for second tier offensive use---the example of India and Pakistan is obvious. As well, having spent the better part of a century sewing seeds of hate through perfidious greed in the guise of disinterested discretion, a minimimum of a handful of hungry, hateful, fundamentalist furies now feel inclined to develop and deploy the primitive forebears to the megatonnage capacity of the U.S., Europe, and China. Such usage would not vaporize the billions who would disappear of a thermonuclear afternoon, but they might well unleash, after incinerating a mere hundred thousand or so hapless homonids, a series of events that made the larger ‘event’ practically unpreventable.
Whereas the U.S. “overwhelmingly dominates” in the WMD category, we ONLY predominate on the conventional war and weapons front. In addition to the HUGE regional war that our leaders have made likely---all in the name of Haliburton and Bechtel, praise good god mammon!---stretching from the ‘Holy Land’ to Central Asia, at least five additional conflagratory possibilities are ongoing with the potential to bring about our collective demise. This does not even mention the dozens of conflicts---just about the entire continent of Africa, for example---that, collectively, could bring about the end of humanity in a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ scenario.
Three of these vectors of vomitous violence spiral off the war that Cheney and Rumsfeld and the other “students of Machievell”---as Edmund Burke termed them---have capacitated by invading Iraq. The Muslim-Hindu verge we have mentioned already, an ever-lively likelihood of upheaval that could spiral toward collective doom. As well, the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, containing oil and humanity and strategic gems aplenty, are all in the midst of civil wars that could at any moment expand explosively, to engulf Southeast and then Central Asia and so on. The other side of the pinwheel of mass murder unfolding in Iraq occurs in Southern and Cental Europe---I always joke with my Lithuanian and Yugoslav friends that “the peoples of Central Europe would easily outmatch the rest of humanity, but for their fortunate proclivity to prefer to fight each other.”
Two additional vortexes of planetary immolation exist. The most obvious, strategically, is Northern Asia and Taiwan, an area few Americans would consider volatile but in which the tiny strategic threat represented by North Korean nuclear capability is but a puny shadow of the volcanic malevolence that could flow from any one of several more conventional engagements in the region. The Korean divide and the stand-off between Taiwan and the Republic of China are only the most visible of these ongoing imbroglios.
The final instance of carnage incarnate, waiting, like a fast-acting cancer awaits a metabolic trigger, to grow into a world-consuming unstoppable tumor, centers on Colombia. The entire Carribean and Northern South America AND Mexico could rise in a year, in a season, in a month, in a week, in the course of a sunny morning, to suck the world down a toilet of terror and war. As a matter of karma, perhaps this region’s role in this regard would be most appropos, since the slaughters here over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries yielded the world that lumbers toward destruction today, most recently and particularly in the form of the doctrine of old James Monroe, whom Congress rescued from bankruptcy after he launched this basic template of the current era.
Thus unfold the “ANNIHILATION ANNOUNCEMENTS,” nakedly lacking any historical or politically astute raiment to present them fully to the reading public. Certainly, such garb will appear here on future occasions, and others more capable than I have spent their lives developing such contextual clothing for the contemporary strand of human life. What of the citizen response to this first lethal issue, from the “Peace Movement” to other possibilities?
The most impressive aspect of all of us common cousins’ responses, to our leaders’ moves to manifest war, are the aggregate numbers of folks who have registered their opposition, as well as their willingness, at least now and again, to stand for a different future. At the very least, according to my best guesses, a couple per cent of everybody on earth has marched, met, mobbed, or otherwise actively protested the divergent devolution toward mass destruction abroad on the planet just now. The actual numbers might be substantially higher, even ten per cent, 650,000,000 protesters, not entirely out of the question, albeit obviously not all at once as of yet. And, just as obviously, there are at the very least additional hundreds of millions of men and women who despise having to pay the bill and bear the moral burden of dancing along the divide that separates a human future from a global wasteland.
Another INCREDIBLE AND BEAUTIFUL AND EXHILERATING attribute to the common stand for human life, manifest on every continent’s responses to all of the wars that thugs begin for the merchants of death to profit and for their own dictatorial tough tactics to appear the only rational course, are the pageants and plays and poignant perorations and texts that have resulted from all this activism. I have had the honor to report on some of this, from the mad courage of prisoners-of-conscience to the wild perambulations of Puppetistas to the crazy “riot-porn” antics of anarchistic youth, to mention just a few of hundreds of such manifestations of human energy and creativity in the name of peace.
Also, the analytical energy---to examine the opponents of human development, in any case---has also been extensive and powerful. Thinktanks full of brilliant men and women, scientists, statisticians, strategic thinkers, and propaganda experts, have churned out thousands of important tomes that lay bare the vicious stupidity which is the friendliest possible estimation of the ruling class’s motives in driving humanity to the brink of extinction. Citations of some of the best of these will conclude this entire exercise.
However, all kudos and self-congratulation aside, there remains a gigantic failing among the cousins who have devoted themselves to creating a context for life. This failing has several obvious parts to it; many of the more subtle drawbacks to present practices by ‘the good guys’ must lie fallow until further development of this work can come to pass. The first obvious failing is that no plan or capability exists for the combination of networking and strategically focusing the massing of the masses, or for mediating the massing of the masses to the even larger masses of potentially sympathetic onlookers in such a fashion as to further activate those onlookers in turn.
The second way in which ‘peaceniks’ flunk the effectiveness exam is in establishing an independent basis for their efforts. Whatever the utility of NGO’s and foundation funding, only morons would argue that an effective PEACE MOVEMENT worthy of the memory of King or Ghandi can ever emerge from doles and pittances handed out by bureaucratic infighters to those who have the best accounting systems. Yet, especially in the U.S., where an effective peace movement must enter the political arena in order to forestall attacks here that will effectuate annihilation, the reliance on established patterns of empowerment is nearly universal.
The third basic bungling of the wider peace movement, again particularly in the United States, is in the failure to interconnect all of the human crises---political, economic, social, biological, technical, etc---with each other, and thus with the drive for peace. Instead, among the policy analysts and grant-writers and talking heads who are at the top of the food chain in this work, ANY attempt to “connect the dots” and make sythetic assessments is anathema.’
Plenty more needs doing, especially in the development of community organizing and media models, both of which I will discuss a bit in the last few parts of this series. And, I know, the characterizations here are both compressed and abstract. If they serve as the basis for discussion, that alone will make them worthwhile outside of their inevitable assistance in helping this lonely writer to produce what he so long has been needing to begin, to wit, this conjunction of ideas about the contemporary world and the social and political prospects for improving our prospects. CIAO FOR NOW
Perhaps, to end this beginning, the words of that old roue, whom I’d love to be able to emulate, will resonate with the patient readers who have plowed their way through prose and syntax to reach this point. “Those of us who would collaborate,” Ben Franklin said somberly and with a sardonic flourish in a Philadelphia public house, “had best hang together. If not, then, assuredly, still we WILL hang, but separately.”
There we can rest for now. THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT.