Culture
of Life and Death
Renewing my pledge (subscription)
to http://www.adbusters.org/home/
acquainted me with their antipreneurial offshoot of the http://adbusters.org/metas/corpo/blackspotsneaker/home.html sneaker campaign. Blackspot culture: a new culture of directives, from the bottom up, of cool, environmentalism and community empowerment. As owner of a v1 pair of blackspot sneakers, I am a shareholder in the anticorporation. Not sure "anti" really describes what should be happening but an anticorporation is progress, not just change. It's a corporation on it's head, still broadcasting the values of it's legal charter just as the others, but not psychopathic. Like Asimov's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Robotics 3 Laws of robotics, as opposed to the current corporations tenets of maximizing profit and externalizing harm/costs.
Imagine the corporation as an organism, a tyrannomacrophage: costs are harms,
profits are growth and offspring. It's terrifying. We could do
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell stem cell research and we could produce http://www.biotech-info.net/RAFI_abandon.html terminator seed. Who governs? An employee at a terrible
institution may be the nicest person. A top down collective mindset
relieves the employee of their natural responsibility and replaces it with the
artificial gains of economic stripmining, of transgenerational taxation through
extrenalizing environmental and social costs. When this dynamic nears the
surface is when the dissonance sets in ringing loudly. The responsibility
to maintain the vitality of the commons and the strength of the civic fabric
supporting civilization is repressed. The connectivity which makes us
happy is brutally severed to serve this modern life and commodify every
lifestyle experience.
China More Popular than America
Having just returned from http://www.apogaea.com/about.html,
I unpacked, started laundry and did those reentry tasks:
answering machine messages, voicemails, news, snailmail... they were all waiting
for me with an air of impatience or pitiful neglect. I spent the weekend
in the woods, luxuriating in the only pressures of hydration and shelter.
You can go a weekend without food or sleep, just ask rock stars or
truckers. I, however, slept wonderfully, albeit dreamlessly. The
strong drumming from our neighbors and the dance sounds of Aspen Groove just up
the hill kept me steadily lulled. Aspen Groove, by the way of my etymology
fun, was built by the group Metameme ("meta" meaning transcendant and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme "meme" meaning evolving memory (the link explanation is
excellent)). Which brings me to my dream of exerting evolutionary pressure
on human nature, civilization, what have you. You know how in some limp
scifi fiction the intellectual pacifist civilizations of the future reflect upon
us as barbaric, grotesque, but spirited? On the way to Apogaea we passed a small
SUV with a large window banner that read, "Love your children, don't bomb
theirs."
This administration feels like a planet of the
apes nightmare with none or few of their redeeming qualities. Karl Rove
accuses the liberals of responding to the 9/11 terrorists with therapy,
understanding, and indictments. The implication seems that the war on
terror and the subsequent but unrelated Iraq invasion was and still is the
strong and righteous answer. If he speaks for the conservatives, and a
sizable portion of conservatives are Christians, then what would Jesus have
done? If Jesus were President maybe he would have been in Saudi Arabia that day,
"reformulating" oil revenue sharing for the region so that prosperity would
provide an alternative to Islamic extremism. Next stop, Africa. It
sure seems to me that if I had no job, no family, no purpose and barely owned
the clothes I wore, I'd throw rocks instead of eating dust in an oil
privatization scheme. Even as a pawn between a fundamentalist corrupt
warlord and the imperial armies of the great Satan, I would draw purpose in the
battle.
Finally arriving at the catalyst of today's
rantings, a BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4124164.stm article reported a survey of 17,000 people in 16 countries that
found China more popular than us. On the downside, we're "violent" and
"greedy". I'm not so concerned with the perception of Americans but am
dismayed ahyhoo. If I believed we were on the right track, I'd believe as
some conservatives do that I were being persecuted for unpopular beliefs.
I'm comfortable with unpopular beliefs, but when you outlaw a freedom or bomb a
civilian surviving a brutal dictatorship who says, "Hey, wait a minute!" as
they're vaporized to make room for opium trading, oil pipelines, and regimes
friendly to U.S. investment/foreign policy, that's worse than unpopular.
I'll set something else straight before I get sleepier. Clinton bombed
Iraq too. I am not just picking on the Bushes even though they've got
blacker hearts.