Suspecting Something Bad Will Happen as the Proximate Cause of Something Bad Happening

Here is a very weird debate. Paul Kingsnorth says: industrial civilization cannot infinitely grow nor indefinitely be maintained, and whether we like it or not, external circumstances--political, economic, and environmental--are going to force its gradual collapse. He suggests that if we acknowledge this fact we may at least begin to prepare ourselves for what follows. George Monbiot then accuses him in barely veiled terms of desiring the disease-and-starvation deaths of billions of people as the precursor to a macho-millennarian fantasy of some kind of agraro-utopian society rising from the ashes: in essence, thus, accuses Kingsnorth of the Khemer Rouge heresy. This is quite plainly nuts, a callous, intentional, unethical, and thoroughly dishonest misstatement of an opponent's position in order to paint him as a monster. Well, never let it be said that the forensics dorks weren't capable of their own brand of bullying. Additionally, as if accusing Kingsnorth of hoping for the holocaust of the majority of humanity were an insufficient calumny, Monbiot becomes quite hysterical:

Here are three observations:

1. Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient.
2. When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over.
3. We seldom learn from other people’s mistakes.

From the first observation, this follows: even if you have somehow hardened yourself to the fate of human beings, you can surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all others. However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo sapienscan no longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource - in the absence of political restraint.

It is at this juncture of course impossible to say if our species is "tough and resilient" or merely one of nature's more ungainly, passing fancies. Compared to the geological life of the planet we are not yet an eyblink; compared to our fellow chordates we are a quick-drawn breath; compared even to many of our late-arriving, brother and sister mammals, we're barely newborn. The coelacanth and crocodile are laughing at you, George Monbiot. Bacteria are not impressed. The idea that our own apparent death-wish, even were it to melt all the ice in the Antarctic, will assert and reassert itself until at last naught but us remains, and after that, zipp-o, nil, rien, niente, forevermore, hallelujah, amen is a measure beyond mere vanity.

Monbiot is in any case hard to take seriously, as he simultaneoulsy proposes that while we are, as a species, fundamentally incapable of learning lessons even from such a catastrophe as the total collapse of all our civilizations, it may nonetheless be possible, albeit unlikely, to "[engineer] a soft landing - an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy." It doesn't require much in the way of rhetorical training to spot the glaring contradiction there. No, we cannot learn through disaster of unimaginable magnitude, but yes we can learn from . . . what? Seminars? Subtle political pressures? Blogs!? Like I said, nuts. He warns that if we do not . . . call our congressman? . . . then we face a future world without, ye gods, "political accontability," in which power monopolies maintained through force and coercion control the distribution of resources. How, how, how will we survive in that brave and novel world?

Well. As Kingsnorth tries to point out to his crabby dance partner, it is possible to believe that civilizational decline is inevitable without cheering the misery it will likely bring, just as it is possible to believe that during and after such a period of decline the fortunes of many of the world's poor and downtrodden might actually rise, even if only in a relative sense. Of course, Kingsnorth does not claim this outcome as an inevitability; I suspect he believes that of humanity, as of all things, the only surety is that this too shall pass. In the meantime, he wins the debate simply by grace of not saying anything idiotic.

Sur-prizes.

I think we should give him a fucking Booker prize. As a native-born Kenyan, he should be eligible.

A Call to Action

What heights we gained, in glancing back, we found
were neither quite so high nor quite so much
a rise to unclimbed peaks as a descent
that fooled, by means of world-perspective bent,
our untrained eyes--for sight, unlike the sense
of smell, of touch, is easily fooled; as such
it can mistake the blasted, war-pocked ground
for the bare and yet pristine, austere expanse
of world above the tree-line, though the scent
will be of marsh and mud and too much rain,
the touch, of bog and slug and slime and mulch,
the sound will be like locusts ruining grain,
the taste will be of molding earth and rot,
the texture, altogether, most like snot.

The Bang in the Dynamite

Giving a "peace prize" to a sitting head of state is in any case faintly absurd, like giving a Gruber Prize to Roman Polanski, but giving it to a sitting American head of state while his country is engaged in two major conflicts resulting from its occupation of supposedly sovereign foreign countries because of "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people" is like giving me the Nobel Prize in Medicine because I promise all my bareback partners that I am going to cure AIDS. Well, it's fine then! The White House reports that The Obama is humbled by the news.

What Do You Know?

Well, I would certainly not vouchsafe the truth of any of the beliefs of this IOZ character, but it is interesting how many people look at the world and conclude: the people who do not believe as I believe do not really believe what they believe; the people who do not think as I think do not really think what they think. From this mindset arises a sort of Ptolemaic model of the universe of the human mind, piled high with epicycles, seeking to explain what various interests and counterinterests drive people to so universally misrepresent their true beliefs, which are necessarily my own, of course, because how could anyone believe otherwise? Add to this miasma the fact that we are all, each precious flower among us, deeply inconsistent, that there is no such thing as ideology, that what we flatter as "systems" of thought and belief are constructs of almost pure contingency and exigency, and you end up with white noise, a buzz in the background.

They Were Threatening Castration

In the prior Polanski post, I only noted the bitter irony that monsters who make things may well be remembered for something quite other than their monstrosity, but since The Children were involved, and The Sex, I assumed it might spark a bit of kerfuffling in the thread. Quel kerfuffle! Threadwinner La_rana really deserves the credit for the following, as he first noted, and best noted, the preposterousness of crying, Justice! I mean, here you have a gang of mostly progressive types seizing a moral issue with thoughtless tenacity. Throw the book at him! But anyone searching for justice in our judicial system is going to find themselves forever searching, and what these people are really looking for is a sort of vindication, some programmatic process through which each precious, individual conviction that he is the scum of the earth can be validated by some external authority. Throw the man in jail if you must, but do not pretend that it is righting some wrong. Our prisons abound with people who probably deserve to be there: they are not all leukemia victims who got busted for pot or innocents on death row, except perhaps in Texas—this doesn’t make them bastions of justice, nor even poor imitations thereof. You cannot selectively call it just when you agree with it--or, you can, but it makes you an idiot. Hauling Polanski back to the States and throwing him in jail for a thirty-year-old crime is in the end a poor attempt at vengeance on the part of those who wish to make a hazy point about rape, which, they rush to remind us, is bad. The victim, by the way, believes he should be forgiven, and wishes that all you fucks would shut the fuck up, though in politer terms. But whatever, fuck her! Justice delayed is justice denied! Exterminate the brutes. Throw away the key! If we can save just one more teenager from quaalude-spiked sexual abuse in Jack Nicholson's swimming pool, then by god, we must!

Consider: one does not disarm, dismantle, disassemble, or even inconvenience the goddamned patriarchy by availing oneself of its systems of coercion.

The Parable of the Table

Once there was a table.

It was neither a very big table nor a very small table, but a middle table, with a table top and four strong legs and an extension that was in the basement honey, I swear, because remember we used it the last time your parents were in town at Thanksgiving? Oh, it was a fine table, and upon that table were all the options.

"Oh my!" exclaimed the Princess. "There are so many options on the table!"

"Yes," said the Tea Kettle. "All of the options are on the table."

"Let's count the options!" cried the Hippogatorypus. Oh, the Hippogatorypus!

"Yes," said the Princess, "It will be splendid!"

"But first we should have a masquerade ball," said the Parakeet.

"Oh, yes!" said the China Cabinet.

And so they had a ball, and all of the people in the land were invited, and each of them wore their finest costume. The Bird dressed up as a sailboat and the Rat dressed up as a cobbler and the Cobbler dressed up as George Noory, the host of Coast to Coast AM.

"Oh my goodness," said the Princess, "I love the Wild Card Line!"

But the Chauffeur's daughter was too poor and so Audrey Hepburn played her with a classic mix of ingenue's naivete and knows-what-she-wants pizazz.

They danced the night away.

When she awoke in the morning, the Princess cried, "We forgot to count the options on the table!"

And the frog said, "I'm sure they're all there."

And it was still hot.

120 Blog Posts of Sodom

On Polanski, I commend to you Father Smiff, that ratiocinating reverend.

I don't have much to add to the matter except to say that those who claim that great art does not redeem cruel, evil, perverse, and otherwise undeniable men of their more heinous acts may comfort themselves which such bosh and piffle, as The Mencken might term it, here in the lonely present, but they have not paid attention to their history.

Stuff We Like - Figaro

I hope to be back this afternoon with some kinda political whathaveyou, but in the meantime, Things We Really Like: FIGARO. Look. Mozart was not the greatest composer, although he was a great genius. The popular Mozartian mythos (and made more popular by Peter Schaffer, lets not forget, who besmirched poor Salieri as thoroughly as that bitter queen Terrence McNally later besmirched Callas) casts him as a protean creative mind the likes of which the world had never before seen nor has seen ever since, but frankly, Mozart wrote many more ordinary orchestral works than great symphonies and many more lousy divertimenti than great chamber pieces. That said, he was the finest composer for the human voice, and his Figaro is the greatest staged work ever written, the most perfect opera, against which all others should be measured and none measures up--so much the better and more incredible that Le Nozze di Figaro is a comedy. Here, in the opera's second act, in which various confusions are taken for a ride and put back in the garage, is one of its loveliest quartets, "Signori, di fuori," ("My Lords and Ladies" - Figaro is trying to get a wedding started, etc.), which also contains what may be the most beautiful note in all music. Listen as the character of the piece changes around the 2:15 mark. Then, at around 2:38, as Figaro, La Contessa, and Susanna sing to the Count, you hear a soft bass figure in crescendo, and then at 2:46 a great swelling note deep in the bass. It then repeats itself at 3:02. Everyone else wishes they wrote that passage, but damn, bitches, you didn't.

FAQ: AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan! What is it and why should you care? For the education and edification of the Who Is IOZ? reading community, we present a few Frequently Asked Questions about our friendly neighbor.

FAQ: What is Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is an expression of pure being, the it-in-and-of-itself-ness of the to-be-of-being. It is that which is by dint of its is-ness, an iteration without antecedent, the indwelling of exteriorality and externalization of indwelt inherency.

FAQ: Where is Afghanistan?

You go up where the old Isaly's usedta be, ya know? Then you take a left, but not really a left, more like . . . a soft left. But not just like bearing off to the left, cause if you do that you'll end up in Sheraden. Go under the Parkway, make a right at the third light, then drive down to where the window is busted, go left past where they usedta sell them sandwhiches, and follow the Purple Belt until you end up at Camp Horne Road. There's a Target there, but you don't want to go there. Take Camp Horne to the Perry Highway, go South until you see Riverview Park, look for the Edgar Schneider sign, hang a quick left, get onto 279 South, follow it through the Tubes, and once you hit West Liberty you'll go through Dormont and Mount Lebanon until just before you get to the Galleria. It's around there somewhere. You can't miss it.

FAQ: Why is Afghanistan?

To begin by asking the question, Why is Afghanistan, is to begin by asking the wrong question. Why must there be Afghanistan? If each moment forces Afghanistan to change, move, alter, grow, feel joy, suffer, then there is no Afghanistan, but many Afghanistans. And is that not the same as saying that there are no Afghanistans, that there is no Afghanistan, that the true nature of Afghanistan is nothingness, not emptiness, but no-thing-ness, formlessness without suffering.

FAQ: How is Afghanistan?

Afghanistan's okay, thanks for asking. How're yinz?