24 February 2019

Truly Our Last Chance to Prove Ourselves Worthy of Survival

Climate Change Reveals the Patriarchal Gods as the Deadliest of Demons; the 1% Perpetuates the Crisis to Impose Shock-Doctrine Tyranny; Our Mother Earth Issues Her Ultimate Challenge
IMG_2731 - CopyApocalyptic Wonderland: late February in Tacoma. Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss © 2019.
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TO (MOMENTARILY) DUCK the shrapnel already ensuing from the issues implicit in the above typography, I feel obligated as a writer and editor to explain (or perhaps confess) that this is the first time I have ever written the headline before I knew exactly what the story might say. Magic? No, nothing so exotic; merely an exceptionally telling encounter with journalistic intuition -- precisely the kind of power-to-envision-outcomes that in darker times was damned as witchcraft and all-too-often got you burned at the stake. 

Apropos which, the story I seined up after I wrote the head is now no doubt predictable: the ecocidal misogyny at the doctrinal core of Abrahamic religion and thus manifest in all societies so influenced or founded; how its adherents' belief in "End-Times" salvation obstructs even minimal environmental protections; how reading Chris Hedges' American Fascists (Free Press: 2006) and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (Viking: 2006) and most of all Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008), which by its subtitle tells the sordid understory of our national paralysis today: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.  

But presumably we -- the collective we of readership -- already know all that; and in any case,  does  repetitive disclosure of the same painful truth not eventually become a form of bludgeoning?  

As for the unapologetic paganism my headline acknowledges, those metaphors for our cosmos and our solar system and our planet and our place upon it and within its weft and weave are derived from visions at least as old as our species itself, so I most certainly cannot be blamed for citing their 200-thousand-year integrity. 

Though I would most assuredly be derelict in duty were I not to point out how the breathtaking magnitude of  such a vast expanse of time becomes mother macrocosm to microcosms of human consciousness and thence to visual representation. Picture a tranquil sea invaded by a contagion of predators;  picture a Mother Earth that even during her periodic storms and quakes and eruptions was embraced as the proper head of the household suddenly and now terminally invaded by a relentlessly militant hate-the-planet cult. 

An alien species?

(Now that I am old and no longer have a career to protect I can ask such forbidden questions aloud.) 

A mutation?

Might then the introduction of patriarchy -- which is prerequisite to Earth-hating -- be an earlier, much more ambitious application of the same tactic employed in gifting First Nations peoples with smallpox-infested blankets? Or invading their lands with missionaries bearing bibles and touting paths to salvation by self-destruction? 

Preparing to transfer all I had written in response to letters of the Roman alphabet behaving as if they were runes, I began one last quick entirely routine pre-posting perusal of favored websites. That's  how I came  upon "Diane Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal" -- an infinitely damning report that epitomizes our circumstances as well as any of the 61 bookmarks from which I chose the eight definitive reports linked below. 

Thus in response I posted the following:

(To read the rest, go here.)

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