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
*
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.)
