When American Empire completes its fall, we will not have the ability to sacrifice one big bank just to rescue an even larger corporate entity along with an ill-devised government program. Instead, we’ll be focused on the only economic system too big to fail: Earth.
As I’ve pointed out before, I’m proud to be a doomer. I’ve never minded the negative connotation and rapid dismissal by mainstream folks. But it turns out there’s more to doomerism than I knew nearly a year ago. Kathy McMahon has developed a clever classification system for doomers. I’m easily classified as the ecosophic action-oriented variety.
I spent much of my afternoon participating in an exercise in mental masturbation at the local offices of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. We discussed the latest projections for build-out of the suburban area around Tucson within 100 years, with significant construction activity to begin in 20 years. Fortunately, we’ll be well into the post-industrial stone age by that time. But it’s a little disappointing when even a majority of the “environmentalists” in the room think we’re stealing a huge victory from developers by limiting paved surfaces to merely half the Tucson basin. We just keep trying to sustain the unsustainable suburbanization of the desert southwest, long after it’s clearly failed as a viable living arrangement for the entire industrialized world.
I managed to tolerate the demoralizing intellectual clusterfuck only because I’d received a bit of good news immediately before the meeting began. The local morning daily declined to run my latest op-ed, but the local counter-culture weekly rag will be running it within the next few weeks. When they do, I’ll post a link to the piece at my “News” page. You get to see the latest draft before the masses. For regular visitors to this blog, there’s nothing new here. I’m just writing for one of the primary reasons Orwell wrote: sheer egoism. Hey, if it was good enough for him ….
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Joe Bageant’s recent piece, Escape from the Zombie Food Court, is a classic. He clearly and concisely dismisses the notion that our lives are lived in anything resembling freedom. The corporate media and their primary brainwashing device, television, have taken care of that:
As the sucker rally on Wall Street passed the four-week mark, your president, Congressional delegations, and media worked themselves into a lather explaining how a recovery was under way. To which James Howard Kunstler appropriately asks, “recovery to what?”
If you believe your life depends upon water coming out the taps and food showing up at the grocery store, you’ll defend to the death the system that keeps water coming out the taps and food showing up at the grocery story. News flash: If your life depends on that system, you’re a very unusual human, especially historically, and you support a culture of death. And you’re sorely mistaken, besides.
Let’s review.