[Originally posted 3 July 2011]
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very time I drift away from the mindscum principle I end up
regretting it, and this July seems to be no exception. I had some thoughts—if
that’s not too grandiose a term for a few disjointed and random
reflections—about the birth of my nation, as seen from the perspective of its
decline and fall, and I had them fitted into a scheme with themes for each of
the first four days of July, but nothing is working out. The first day of July
was filled with constant interruptions, and what I thought I would post early
never got posted at all. The second day got aborted in an orgy of food and
irrelevant festivities.
I’ve lost whatever impulse I’ve ever had to write this third
day of July in the twelve thousand eleventh year of the Holocene Era. The
question that keeps going through my head as I try to keep up with the noxious
fumes that pass for news in the vast sea of crap that is the internet is—what
the fuck? The writers I read are all
obsessed with L’Affaire Elevator-Guy, my fellow-Republicans (and I hereby
denounce you all) are intent on destroying the nation that supports them and
allows them to thrive, and that nation is spending its blood and treasure on
foreign wars of no obvious utility. And all of this is nothing but
smoke-and-mirrors, meaningless sideshows to the main event—the suicide of the
only species on earth capable of appreciating the universe, in any abstract
sense, that is.
We’re flunking our first test as an intelligent
matter-manipulating species—a species in control of its own destiny. I get that
microbes will eat up their surroundings until there is nothing more to eat and
then perish. They’re microbes, damn it, brainless, senseless, barely a notch
above the fucking rocks. They don’t know
any better. We do. We’ve always known better than our behavior. When
Euro-Americans were slaughtering the indigenous peoples and piously pretending
that it was God’s doing, not theirs, there were people like John Beeson to
point out that their excuses were a load of shit, empty self-serving mutterings
and shriekings used to keep common sense at bay. When the United States
embarked on its imperial adventure in the Philippines under the guise of a
noble quest to aid an oppressed people there were people like Mark Twain to
call its bluff and show the enterprise for what it was. And we know now that
our primary energy source—the one that allows us to exist in the billions on
the surface of our planet—is running out. We know that one of the consequences
of exploiting it recklessly is increasing heat here where we live. We have this
amazing material, the residue of organisms that have lived and died in their
millions before us, our stored capital as it were—and we can think of nothing
better to do with it than burn it. We know that we cannot feed the people who
are already here without some major new influx of energy—and yet we do nothing
to solve our problems, nothing but hysterically deny the very existence of what
is right in front of us. We are the actual embodiment of the fictional
lemmings—the creatures who periodically destroy themselves by rushing into the
sea and drowning themselves in large numbers. This is a test, damn it—God’s
test for us, if you like—and we’re flunking it big time.
Happy Independence Day.
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