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I‘ve been having a hard time these last few weeks.
“The last DECADE, you mean!” interjected the love of my life, when I said the same thing to her.
She had me there, of course. That’s the first thing that jumped out at me when I started reviewing some of my ancient blog posts. The insight was depressing, but then I reasoned that if I couldn’t do anything about the way I am, I might as well stop trying: screw it, just have fun and make some money while that’s still possible. Let it all roll off like raindrops on my forehead.
Radical enough, on the face of it, considering that I’ve always been a doomster. To my mind, being born on the day Nagasaki was nuked has something to do with this. The “shoutin’ Methodists” in my grandmother’s family do, too, as does the Depression-era mindset of those who raised me. But it’s more than that. It’s in my natal chart. It’s where I swim. Geez, I remember reading about Velikovsky’s crustal displacement theory in the Saturday Evening Post in back in the ’50s when I was 10 years old. Of course, that’s natural cataclysm stuff and doesn’t worry me. What the hand of man is up to is another matter.
Now, I’m an educated man. I learned to read before television existed. I’ve seen a lot of history. Hell, I can even do algebra. And I look at the mechanisms of what’s going on until it hits me that the big boys in the Treasury Dept. don’t know what they’re doing. Locked into old patterns, denying any guilt. There is no “Plan B,” in other words, at least not where we’d like to count on one, and denying what every instinct says is right around the corner takes too much energy. Maybe I should just let go and celebrate by getting that farm, dang it. What I’ve always wanted is what’s called for, anyway, so I don’t know why this has to be so hard.
After all, maybe everything will work out fine, and we’ll just keep a-loggin’ and a-drillin’ and pollutin’ and a-buyin’ and a-sellin’ and a-blowin’ up brown people on the other side of the world until we’re all just filthy rich and the spaceships from Venus land with gold from outer space to pay off all the debt. I mean, MAY-BE, you know?
In that case, come on down, I’ll throw a party. Hah!
(We’ll boil that loud ol’ rooster, too, if the coyotes haven’t et him yet.)
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
John, you have indeed appeared to have a tough few weeks. It’s been tempting to yell and fume at you, because frankly, reading about this over and over is starting to lose its charm. But… the feelings and issues you address are not open to debate, in my opinion… they simply ARE, and your preoccupation is undoubtedly “legitimate.” So. Okay. As I see it, here’s the shit:
If the seemingly insurmountable problems we’re facing are of our own making, then we have to a) behave in a way that reverses the problems AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE and we have to start doing this RIGHT NOW or b) we have to (as individuals or families or, at most, very small communities) TOTALLY opt out of “the system” not only as soon as possible but also with as much built-in “infrastructure” as we can (almost literally) carry on our backs.
If the seemingly insurmountable problems we’re facing are simply the workings of the cosmos that do not favor our survival, there ain’t shit we can do. Perhaps we should, on a theoretical level at least, throw a party.
Now, the immediate problems WITH MY OWN OPINION that I can see from here: a) we can’t be utterly sure which of the above problems we’re facing… it’s probably both, anyway! and b) if our problems are of our own making, history seems to show that while we’ve so far had the luck to pull off heroic saves at the last second of the ticker, we’ve NEVER faced problems of this magnitude before and to cap it all off, we will probably never succeed at changing our own ugly, selfish, human nature. Humanity as a whole has repeatedly survived the nasty collapse of one or two nation-states, but there’s so many intertwined tentacles now…. Hell, I don’t know.
I WANT to behave differently – I really do, and I could mention at length all the cool, hip, stuff I FEEL like I’m doing to “help the situation” but truly…? Tomorrow morning is gonna look an awful lot like this morning looked, and I’m still gonna drive a gas-powered car, still gonna occasionally eat at McDonald’s, still gonna use my credit card when I “feel” like I “don’t have a choice.”
Buy bullets and canned goods? Well, that might sound like a comfy quick fix, even to me, but it can’t last, not really. John, your mythical “farm” (I speak of the one in your head, not the one for sale in Iowa, or wherever…) sounds better to me, but when roaming radioactive one-eyed zombies start beating at the gates, there’s only gonna be so long you can hold out.
On a long-enough time line, survival for everyone and everything drops to zero. Civilization is crumbling. All things must pass. Wave goodbye, and party ’til its over.
Ah, Chipper! EXCELLENT comment…
“…reading about this over and over is starting to lose its charm.” Well, that’s a good point. It’s long lost its charm for me, too, but some things have to be said. Did you follow that link? And have you checked out the tagline for Zero Hedge?
But I think we’re going to see profound changes. For example, I’ve read that the UK is about to unveil a austerity budget that cuts public expenditures by 25%. Could be what happens here soon, short of an as-yet unmanifested miracle. On a more mundane level, how will K. and I survive if Medicare and Social Security are slashed? I do think about this. And what do we do if the money’s no good at all? All of these things have happened in other countries in the past…
So this is out there. The extractive, exploitive system we’ve been operating under is kaput–although ’twill no doubt limp along for a while yet–and its bankers are insolvent. Anything can happen.
I need to garden and make things. Jesus, I used to make giant kinetic SCULPTURES that you would have loved! We had beautiful gardens. So the “farm” isn’t mythical, but something I now recognize was a vital part of me, and losing it hurts. A LOT. It’s also a symbol of something that I haven’t always accepted: a need to live closer to Nature. Has nothing to do with survivalism, holing up, or fighting off the ravening hordes. Honest!
Has everything to do, however, with who I really am.
John, my friend!
Glad you seem to understand where I’m coming from, despite that we may have a tendency to “agree to disagree.” Heck, I could be wrong about even that, muchless all this other stuff.
I wrote a nice, long, impassioned reply to your reply, then deleted it. I can’t really accuse you of talking in circles without admitting that I’m doing the same damn thing. I think you are most right (or we are most in agreement) when you say “All of these things have happened in other countries in the past…” Indeed, and I think that times are going to get hard, and we as Americans are woefully unprepared – emotionally and physically – for what’s ahead.
But what it really comes down to for me is this: barring the moon crashing into the earth, we DID make this trouble for ourselves and it seems like we could UN-make it if we just would. I feel this in my bones, but I don’t seem to know how to go about it on a practical level any more than anybody else does. I justify my own greed and selfishness and laziness just as much as those I abhor do theirs. Here’s a quote from Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War, A Narrative” by then Attorney-General Edward Bates: “…in times like these, the minds of men are made dizzy and their imaginations are wrought to a frenzy by the whirl of events. When the public cauldron is heated into violent ebulition, it is sure to throw up from the bottom some of its dirtiest dregs, which, but for the heat and agitation, would have laid embedded in congenial filth in the lowest stratum of society.”
Between the greed-heads running the banks and the insurance companies and the Federal Reserve (not to mention our own ELECTED scoundrels) at one end of the spectrum, and the desperate, ignorant, tea-partying, redneck hate-mongers at the other end, I don’t know how we’ll ever find enough strong backs to dig ourselves out of this hole. I don’t care if they worship Jesus and speak in tongues and handle snakes! I don’t care if they want to blind themselves to Darwin! Hell, I don’t even care if some of ‘em have private planes and yachts and three houses… there’s always been rich and poor and there probably always will be. I just want them to allow me the same freedoms and peace to do what I want as long as it doesn’t hurt them or their property, and basically to let me go to hell in my own way.
John, last night I dreamed that the catastrophe had come, society had collapsed, but that you and I were playing music together – on ELECTRIC guitars – and that there was a small gang of friends around us, having fun and dancing and drinking and being merry. We were all delightfully healthy and happy, and doing just fine. I woke this morning remarkably calm and content.
I don’t know how naive I am, but I am hopeful, at least in the long view. Again, from Foote’s “Civil War:” “All things end, and by ending not only find continuance in the whole, but also assure continuance by contributing their droplets, clear or murky, to the stream of history. Anaximander said it best, some 2,500 years ago: ‘It is necessary that things should pass away into that from which they are born. For things must pay one another the penalty and compensation for their injustice according to the ordinance of time.’ So it was with the Confederacy, and so one day will it be for the other nations of earth, if not for earth itself.”
John, I know that when the great collapse comes, you will welcome me and mine into the gates of your farm, and I will do the same for you and yours, and we will play music together.
Your friend, Chipper
I had greatly edited that last comment of mine last night, but the database reversion I had to do this morning brought back the OLD version. My revisions were much more accommodating and less dire.
I will attempt to fix that now…
[tick, tock...] Okay, more or less the way I had it.
I like your dream. We won’t wait that long to play together, though!
“All of these things have happened in other countries in the past…”
we have an old wallet full of wads of czarist-era russian rubles, that came from relatives on my mom’s side of the family. they wanted to sell their house, but didn’t trust banks since things were getting sketchy in russia, so they insisted on being paid in cash. THE NEXT DAY was the revolution, and that huge stack of bills became worthless paper overnight. i keep it (and occasionally give a couple bills to friends) as a reminder of the true impermanence of all things, that at the end of the day (Universe) NOTHING escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics – entropy ALWAYS wins in the end. y’know, that whole “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die” thing.
as for the tagline at zerohedge.com: John, have you seen Fight Club? there’s a reason the zerohedge guy uses the alias Tyler Durden. John, if you haven’t yet, YOU NEED TO SEE FIGHT CLUB!!! netflix it right now and watch it straight through in one sitting. trust me on this…
“You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fuckin’ khakis. You are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world….”
–Tyler Durden
You boys are all right about our civilization running down and everything coming to an ignominious end, etc etc. But the cheerfulness of your posts belies the comments therein. As Samuel Beckett, a notorious pessimist, said, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”. Such things have been said, thought and felt by almost every sentient human being in every single age of the human experiment. Seneca was saying it in the silver age of the Roman Empire. Thucydides was saying it to the Greeks. We moderns ought not to be so self-pitying about our own particular plights. Just think about the state of dentistry in the Roman Empire, and it might give you a different perspective. Yeah, the world is going to hell. It always will be. But, damn, let’s enjoy the spectacle, and let’s stop wailing about our own poor plight, which is better by magnitudes unmeasurable than anything experienced by our forebears.