AGAIN MY APOLOGY for extended silence.
I am struggling, quite painfully, with questions of content, which of
course are actually questions of conscience and consciousness. How,
for example, does one who came of age when the United States was
still a quasi-democratic, socioeconomically mobile society, cope with
the new USian realities of irremediable powerlessness and inescapable
socioeconomic hopelessness?
Obviously I have not found an answer.
But unless one is willing to embrace madness and retreat into a
clinical state of delusion, the facts are undeniable, even to former
optimists like Chris Hedges.
Powerlessness and hopelessness are now the summum bonum of our
lot – the best we in the 99 Percent dare imagine – and given the
invincible technological superiority of the surveillance-and-murder
state that protects and sustains the One Percent who rule us all, so
will it be forever – that is, until our species is extinct.
Quoth Hedges in a more recent
essay:
“No one, not least our corporate overlords, believes that our
material conditions will improve with the impending collapse of
globalization, the steady deterioration of the global economy, the
decline of natural resources and the looming catastrophes of climate
change.” The first major-media journalist to acknowledge the
terrifying totality of the doom capitalism has brought down on all of
us, Hedges now writes from a perspective similar to the one that
has been mine at least since 2007.
Unfortunately Hedges remains bound by
the intellectual paralysis imposed by Abrahamic religion and his
ministerial training therein. Though unlike most Leftists he
understands the symbiotic and synergistic roles of religion in human
society and consciousness, he fails to acknowledge how capitalism –
infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – is derived from the
three principle doctrines of the Divine Führer
Yahweh/Jesu/Allah. These articles of belief, at the core of each of
the Abrahamic faiths, are (1)-the murderous hatred of woman and the
ultimately suicidal contempt for nature; (2)-the ubermenschen/untermenschen
hierarchy of the chosen and/or the saved versus the damned; and
(3)-the prosperity gospel so derived – the point at which Ayn
Rand, despite her defiant atheism, becomes the world's most
influential prophet.
Nor – with the tragic blindness
characteristic of most of my gender – will Hedges allow himself to
recognize capitalism as the direct descendant of patriarchy, the
seemingly alien paradigm that arose mysteriously about 4,000 years
ago to overthrow at least 100,000 years of human societies that were
centered on motherhood and structured around its requirements. Thus
he will not – perhaps cannot – admit how the rejection of biology
and biological imperatives that began with patriarchy eventually
morphed into the death-worship at the core of Judiasm, Christianity
and Islam and now, via capitalism, imposes the unthinkable horror of
apocalypse as its self-fulfilling prophecy. Literally – because it
is ever more obvious the capitalists are too terminally greedy to
allow us any exit – we are doomed.
No doubt because such absolute
hopelessness has never before been the central fact of human
consciousness, there seems to be nothing in our legacy – no
psychology or psychiatry, no religion or spirituality, in fact
nothing apart from the slow but relentless suicide of intoxication by
debilitating drugs – that can genuinely ease our adjustment to the
new and ultimately deadly master-and-slave paradigm by which
capitalism now rules all the peoples of this planet.
Hedges, for whom despite my criticism I
have enormous admiration and respect, suggests in the the first of
his two essays linked above we embrace the opiates of religion or at
least spirituality and the intoxicants of art. But I am too skeptical
for the former alternative, and too experienced in the real-world
economics of art to accept the latter.
Though a part of me believes, fervently
and on the basis of seemingly otherwise-inexplicable evidence, in the
existence of (some) deity and an afterlife including reincarnation,
another part of me can with equal conviction refute all such evidence
as hallucinatory symptoms of terminal insanity – the final response
of the human mind to the terrifying reality of death: the fact that
for the one who is dying, death is literally the end of everything,
including the cosmos itself.
And Mr. Hedges' other option, art, is
increasingly beyond our economic reach: computers, musical
instruments, cameras, paint and canvas, ceramic materials, most of
all the essential education in content, form and method – all these
prerequisites to making art have become so prohibitively expensive,
they are even now legally accessible only to the aristocracy – that
is, the One Percent, the Ruling Class. Hence there is now a huge gap,
indeed a truly unbridgeable chasm probably greater than at any time
in human history, between the arts of the aristocracy and the arts
of the people.
Hence too, in the great ghetto that
is now 99 percent of USia, there is an intimate connection between
people's art and people's crime: note for example the relationship
between hip-hop, graffiti and gang-banging. In other words, to be a
successful as a people's artist in today's world is to be successful
as a criminal, or at least to successfully consort with criminals –
and I for one could never be comfortable in such outlaw realms.
*****
It was with earlier,
less-well-articulated variants of the above considerations I
responded to the footage of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a
Dream speech posted by the Seattle on-line daily Crosscut
nearly a month ago:
While I applaud Mr. Copeland's
decision to post the video of Rev. King's speech, to call it
“uplifting” in the context of today's socioeconomic and political
reality is like calling a film about gourmet dining “uplifting”
when it is shown at the height of a famine. As anyone fit to be an
editor should understand instinctively, context is everything. The
United States in which Rev. King could dream of “the riches of
freedom and the security of justice” is no more, nor will it ever
be again. “The whirlwinds of revolt” cited by Rev. King have come
and gone, and their merciless suppression by the Ruling Class has
left us with far less than we had in 1963. The so-called American
Dream is as dead as the American experiment in constitutional
governance, both slain by the most obscenely powerful oligarchy in
human history. Nor will we in the Working Class ever have such
liberty and wealth again. Now we are all slaves, enslaved by a
capitalism so diabolically cunning, so infinitely greedy, so
sadistically merciless, resistance truly is futile. Thus the
significance of Rev. King's speech today: a eulogy, a lamentation for
all we have lost, for what might have been but is now beyond our
reach forever.
Later on the same thread I replied to a
poster who rejected my “cynical perspective”:
My apology, Louploup,
for responding so tardily. But the fact remains the unwilling
subjects of empire have ever spoken as you do, with hopes nearly
always false and all too often fatal.
Here in the United States today it
is only our abysmal ignorance of history that keeps us from realizing
real empires last effectively forever and are overthrown only when
superior force is applied from without. The Roman Empire empire in
its diverse forms lasted 1,700 years (c. 300 BCE to 1453 CE), and
even now its legacies shape global political and economic realities.
The U.S. Empire is just beginning, not approaching its end, and based
on its policy of merciless application of its technological
superiority and its utter lack of effective enemies anywhere on this
planet, it can be rationally expected to last at least as long as the
Roman forebear after which it is increasingly patterned.
The only factor that could possibly
shorten its longevity is Gaian intervention, the extermination of our
entire species in retaliation for its contempt for the natural
environment and its hatred of nature's microcosm the human female.
Meanwhile the realities of imperial
subjugation offer us not the “audacity of hope” as described by
Obama the Orator before he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer and
sold us to the oligarchs, but the utter imbecility of hope proven by
how so many of us were deceived by the Big Lie of “change we can
believe in” and by how promptly the Occupy Movement was crushed
thereafter. The same lesson – need I say again the imbecility of
hope – is taught abroad by the imperial legions, much as it was
taught to Queen Boudica's anti-imperial revolutionaries by the Roman
massacre of 80,000 of their number in Britain c. 61 CE.
In bitter truth -- unquestionably
since the advent of patriarchy and the sack of Knossos, possibly
throughout the entire 100,000 years of our species' existence -- the
light of freedom is never more than a very occasional spark in an
otherwise unbroken eon of darkness. Hence in old age I celebrate the
accidental good karma of my childlessness: because I fathered no
children who lived beyond birth, I have damned no descendants to
inescapable slavery, which is now the only future possible for anyone
not of the Ruling Class.
*****
A few days later, when Robert Reich
predicted a new progressive revolution, I responded via a Reader Supported News thread. My comments,
which I realize now were an elaboration on the above, were rejected
by 26 thumbs-down votes – an all-time record for me:
Sadly, Mr. Reich's claim -- “it
will happen again” -- panders to the imbecility of hope, the
moronic Polly Anna optimism of those who, by ignorance or delusion,
deny the apocalyptic reality underlying the permanent death of the
American Dream. A progressive resistance to capitalism will not arise
again because the world's resources are decreasing too rapidly to
allow such reality-based optimism. That's why the Dream is dead
beyond resurrection; without the material wealth of the Dream, the
progressive vision is meaningless.
Even if this were not so, the Ruling
Class will never allow another progressive era. The Ruling Class is
hoarding the world's wealth to protect its self against the looming
triple apocalypse -- terminal climate change inflicted by fossil
fuels, the exhaustion of those same fuels and, as a result, the
extinction-class disaster of total technological collapse. And this
time, unlike any other epoch in human history, the Ruling Class has
the technological superiority to impose zero-tolerance enforcement of
its will.
The combination of all these factors
means our powerlessness and ever-worsening poverty is forever –
that is, until our species is extinct. Thus the damning validity of
Chris Hedges' claim our only sane alternative is to embrace the
opiates of spirituality and religion, never mind they too are mostly
delusional.
***
To clarify, I was an activist all my
adult life, going to jail, sacrificing a promising journalism career
on the altar of change.
That's why, two months away from my
73rd birthday, I am economically no more than a common bum – damned
to the slave-pen powerlessness of dependence on welfare for the
remainder of my life, condemned to die if not literally in the street
then surely and inescapably in the proverbial gutter of shame and
degradation that is the welfare-recipient's lot.
In today's United States activism is
not just pointless; it is often also socioeconomic suicide.
It is rendered so by the obscene
reality of Moron Nation. The U.S. population has been dumbed down to
a nadir of prideful ignorance and moral imbecility that has no peer
in human history – a collective idiocy so grave, Ayn Rand with
her variants on the Mein Kampf theme now elevates it to
perverse heroism – infinite greed as ultimate virtue.
As Occupy proved, the resultant
combination of anti-intellectuality and selfishness forever prohibits
solidarity. It reduces activism to egotistical shouting. Hence –
beyond the likelihood of wrecking one's economic prospects –
activism changes nothing.
Nevertheless I persist in small acts
of defiance. Why? So I feel less useless as I sink into the
pre-extinction darkness.
Here in Moron Nation, it is idiotic
to expect anything better – a bitter truth no deluge of negative
numbers can refute.
*****
But such realization does not give us
any respite from the looming horrors we are ever-more-obviously
powerless to avert. Though it pains me to say it, perhaps the
junkies are right; perhaps there is no longer any human prospect for
joy or pleasure beyond the suicidal ecstasies induced by drugs.
With or without drugs, we long-ago
bohemians saw the darkness hidden beneath the American Dream decades
before the economic defeat of the Soviet Union eliminated forever
capitalism's need to disguise its bottomless savagery. Allen
Ginsberg's Howl denounced it: “I have seen the best minds
of my generation destroyed by madness.” The Freewheelin' Bob
Dylan foretold its consequences: “It's a hard rain's a-gonna
fall.” Tim Buckley's “Phantasmagoria in Two,” speaking as for
all true-hearted men to all the world's oppressed women, lamented its
devastation: “If you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never
smile again.” And Diane di Prima's Loba speaks
so powerfully it could have served – if indeed there were any
remaining long-range hopes of human survival – as the foundational
epic of a new consciousness, its definitive lay of magic, the
wellspring of its revolutionary spirituality: “All things are
possible within the mother...”
Given
such undeniably compelling poetic inputs, had we bohemians been
allowed to pursue our own visions, we might well have evolved an
ideology genuinely capable of averting the coming darkness – or at
least of coping with it. Much of bohemia was thinking in that
direction; many of us saw the old Counterculture as an ultimate and
ultimately encouraging expression of our species' survival instinct.
Gary Snyder in Earth House Hold
hailed the children of Countercultural parents as “different in
personality structure and outlook from anybody...since the
destruction of Knossos.” My own forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale
Dancer” – obliterated by mysterious fire just as it seemed bound
for publication – identified via semiotics the hitherto-unnamed
common vision that might have united the diverse threads of what
Walter Bowart had already correctly labeled “revolution in
consciousness.” It was my hope “Dancer” would encourage
collective exploration of the often-sensed but
never-before-identified legacy shared by traditional folk music, its
folk-rock derivatives and the Feminist, Environmentalist,
Back-to-the-Land and Alternative Press movements. Such exploration, I
believed, was the essential precursor to solidarity – perhaps even
the formation of a nationwlde Countercultural united front akin to
the spontaneous cooperative efforts I had
witnessed in Lower Manhattan and in the larger cities of the Puget
Sound area.
But the domestic bohemia that was
birthmother and midwife to these revolutionary impulses was soon to
be crushed. Its unforgivable sin was providing the U.S. Working Class
with opportunities in music, art, literature and the quest for
humanitarian social change that had previously been available only to
the Ruling Class. Bohemia had thus become the grassroots
population's aesthetic, ideological and spiritual incubator. The
suppression of its radical potential (and the restructuring of the
economy to eliminate all possibility anything like it would ever
rise again) was therefore an important part of the war on the 99
Percent declared by Nixon in his 1973 post-inaugural declarations to
William Randolph Hearst Jr. Speaking on behalf the One Percent,
Nixon said the U.S. Working Class had become like spoiled children;
from now on, he said, we would be disciplined with whatever degree of
hardship was deemed necessary to guarantee our submissiveness. In
this context, di Prima's 25-year, 1973-to-1998 perseverance in
writing Loba approaches both the miraculous and
the heroic – all the more so since bohemia's destruction was
effectively complete by the mid-1980s. And without bohemia, which was
not just an attitude and a subculture but the protected space in
which rebels and visionaries could gather and interact, any potential
our species might rescue itself from the impending apocalypse was
dead in the womb.
Not that it matters now, three decades
after the fact. Successful reformations, like successful revolutions,
are born only of optimism, of rising expectations. But capitalism's
rape of the environment guarantees there will never again be rising
expectations anywhere on this planet. Every day we in the 99 Percent
are thrust closer to the brutal, hand-to-mouth existence
characteristic of antebellum slaves and medieval serfs. Our only
certainty is tomorrow will be worse than today; our only question is
how much worse will it be. Loba
thus becomes, in the old First Nations sense, a kind of death song,
not just for di Prima herself but for all humanity and our Mother Earth as
well:
“there
is no knife can sever me from her
where I go down to bleed, to
birth, to die.”
Moreover, history proves declining
expectations provoke no protests beyond flash-in-pan flare-ups of
agony and rage, tantrums of rebellion as doomed as any of the Middle
Ages' innumerable peasant uprisings. The peasants failed – just as
their Working Class counterparts fail today – because they lack the
four prerequisites essential to revolutionary success:
ideological solidarity, or at least a commonality of analysis;
organization, including leadership; mastery of all extant
technologies; support by powerful forces beyond the oppressors'
deadly reach. Most of all they are doomed because each of these
prerequisites requires some degree of optimism as a condition of its
birth. But the savagery of capitalism has combined with the certainty
of self-imposed terminal climate change to banish optimism forever
from the Earth.
How
could we have let our only home be trashed beyond repair? How could
we have been such fools?
LB/11 February 2013
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