Home > Uncategorized > Earth Day At 50: Mid-Life Crisis. Collapse Accelerating, Democracy Broken

Earth Day At 50: Mid-Life Crisis. Collapse Accelerating, Democracy Broken

Everything Is Broken, The Game Is Rigged, And Everybody Knows

Rebellion Is The Only Solution

[Update: 4/26/20: even liberals at The Atlantic know:

Yes, everybody knows, even Princeton professors:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. ~~~ Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014)

And here’s another Princeton man: (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism):

Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive — and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a “managed democracy” where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls.

If there is perhaps one positive thing to come of the coronavirus catastrophe, it’s that we don’t have to suffer all the Earth Day hype and bullshit this year.

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour’s getting late. ~~~ Jimi Hendrix

And there’s nothing worse, at this point in time, than a naive faux innocence (e.g. see Chris Hedges’ most recent book  (YouTube – watch “America: The Farewell Tour”):

I don’t share this country’s mania for hope. I think it’s very dangerous. (Listen to Hedges on WGBH interview)

Writer James Baldwin was perhaps the most compelling truth teller about the sham of American innocence.

[Update – 5/29/20 – Just found a perfect Baldwin quote in this Counterpunch piece:

…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. ~~~ end update]

In his classic book “The Irony of American History”, philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr explores the folly and tragedy of a demented US innocence.

More recently, the climate catastrophe – and what scientists say could mean the collapse of civilization and extinction of the human species – has spawned an explosion of literature about the dangers of illusion, false hope, naiveté, and faux innocence.

But remarkably, there are some in journalistic and political circles who still don’t get it – who desperately cling to and embrace the illusions, myths, lies, and magical thinking.

Has Donald Trump finally shattered our illusions, so that we can see clearly the forces—economic, political and technological—that are plunging the planet toward a man-made heat death? Is he, in fact, a kind of clarifying agent for the real state of things?

One can hope so.

Except one mustn’t hope.

As Kafka, the High Priest of Realism, admonished his readers, “There is hope. But not for us.”

Hope is an illusion, an opiate, an Oxycontin for the masses. Instead of hope, we need a heavy dose of realism. A realism as chilling as reality itself.

Case in point: today’s NJ Spotlight pretend muted celebration of Earth Day and lecture on democracy and government. For cluelessness, check this out – a criticism of which I hardly know where to begin:

The answer in a democracy is with clear, fact-based, courageous leadership that is willing to take on this difficult task of informing citizens of their available options in forming public policy that is in the public interest. Not always an easy job since it may entail taking on the status quo. And not for the faint-hearted.

An essential component is getting citizens engaged and informed. Engaged, because this is the way our system is supposed to work, with participatory democracy. The system does not work unless we all work at making it work. Informed, because you can’t fix a problem if you don’t understand the problem. Worse yet is if you don’t even know there is a problem.

Howard Zinn pretty much destroyed the myth of “courageous leadership” and top down approaches, by showing that social change is the product of movements and change comes from the bottom up – that “leaders” are educated by and follow the people.

The aforementioned Princeton professors destroyed the myths of participatory democracy and public policy in the public interest.

Covid-19 has exposed the rot of the rest of it.

But, we’ll let the artists take the rest of the critique from here:

Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken. ~~~ Bob Dylan

Leonard Cohen got it right – and everybody knows:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows. […]

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past. ~~~ Leonard Cohen

Yes, the truth is bleak indeed:

There’s a Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
The flag on his wheelchair flapping in the breeze
One leg missing and both hands free
No one’s paying much mind to him
The V.A. budget’s just stretched so thin
And now there’s more coming back from the Mideast war
We can’t make it here anymore
And that big ol’ building was the textile mill
That fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
‘Cause we can’t make it here anymore.
You see those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They’re just gonna sit there ’til they rot
‘Cause there’s nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks
Empty storefronts around the square
There’s a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don’t come down here unless you’re looking to score
We can’t make it here anymore. 
High school girl with a bourgeois dream
Just like the pictures in the magazine
She found on the floor of the laundromat
A woman with kids can forget all that
If she comes up pregnant what’ll she do
Forget the career, forget about school
Can she live on faith? live on hope?
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it’s way too late to just say no
You can’t make it here anymore
Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
‘Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can’t make it here anymore
Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in
Should I hate ’em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed
Their kids won’t bleed in the damn little war
And we can’t make it here anymore
Will work for food
Will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks
Let ’em eat jellybeans let ’em eat cake
Let ’em eat shit, whatever it takes
They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps
If they can’t make it here anymore
And that’s how it is
That’s what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper
Read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind
If you’re listening at all
Get out of that limo
Look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone
Tell us all why
In Dayton, Ohio
Or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That’s done closed down along with the school
And the hospital and the swimming pool
Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There’s rats in the alley
And trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can’t make it here anymore. ~~~ James McMurtry
Categories: Uncategorized Tags:
  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.
You must be logged in to post a comment.