This, That And The Other Thing In Revolutionary Times
Years slip by like rain drops on your back yard cannabis leaves in the early spring mornings. The water gathers in puddles and gets absorbed into the earth or evaporates back into the sky to congeal around dust motes and then to come pouring down again as rain. Some of it runs off into streams, rivers, lakes and oceans where it mingles with the tears of heaven in the salty seas. Why don’t the oceans loose their salinity and become like lakes? Because the world it too saline. And like an old dog with the mange, nobody wants to bother to clean all that salt out of the oceans. So we continue to live on a planet full of water, water that will drive you mad and kill you if you drink.
I had an urge for pecans yesterday and today I bought a bag of Pecan halves. I like them better the way my grandfather used to sent them, He would put the whole pecans in the shell in a big box and ship them to us in Connecticut for Christmas. I used to love cracking open those shells and scooping out tasty morsels of pecan meat. Pecans and walnuts in the shell were both worth the effort to smash them open on a rock, not too hard, or you would end up with fragments too small to eat mixed in with the bits of shell, no the trick was to take that rock or hammer and gently crack it with a good swift blow that would crack the shell open and reveal an intact half or even a whole nut inside.
Just grabbing them out of the bag is not a satisfying and you end up eating too much. Humans emerged from the jungles or Savannah’s eating nuts and berries, insects and fruits. Hunting came later and farming much later still. Some few hold outs still refuse agriculture, preferring the older scavenger ways of primitive man. The Bible had one thing right, man as we know him, homo agriculturalis is only about 6000 years or so old. He started protecting the crop for his home brewed beer or was it his cultivated cannabis, and then graduated to eating bread, and all the rest, cities, writing, armies and wars. But it all started with the desire to get a steady source of party favors. Why else would people used to coming and going as they pleased, working only a few hours a day gathering berries or hunting the occasional deer, settle down to the drudgery of agriculture?
It took a lot of persuading with drugs, booze and then as they got more sophisticated the hocus pocus of religion to reinforce the emerging division of labor and to justify existence the primitive haves from the rest of the common herd of humans.
I can just imagine some smart ass future lawyer in about 4000 BC Sumeria, maybe in UR, convincing a group of local yokels at some drinking party where they were celebrating the mashing up of the mead into beer, he stands up, a little tipsy himself maybe, but not too tipsy and he presents the yokels with a proposal. He says my brother here, lets call him Zeke, has a magic ram horn and on that horn he can call the corn ferry to bring rain and good harvests to get us a whole lot more of this mead. Maybe he even put on this shindig with his brother. But he says my brother has to spend all day working up the wind to blow that horn hard enough for the corn ferry to hear. So you folks will have to pitch in a couple of bushels of corn, or a barrel of mead each to sustain him while he does the important work of summoning the corn ferry from the other side of that mountain over there where he/she/it lives.
Some of these yokels don’t buy it. They think the corn ferry is a bunch of nonsense but then old Lawyer guy here pulls out his trusty calendar stick and notes that on this notch last time there was an eclipse of the sun. So he says, well if you don’t believe in the corn ferry I am going to ask my brother to ask the Corn Ferry to do something mighty big, like blot out the sun. And they laugh the way yokels do and say go ahead and try. Lawyer man nods to Zeke, Zeke puts on his special corn ferry hat made of corn tassels and clay held together with some cow dung glue, he makes a mighty huffing and puffing and looks up in the sky and sees just a sliver of the sun disappear and goes for the horn. He blows mightily and low and behold the sun is blotted out. Lawyer dude gets up on the big rock where the kids liked to play king of the hill and said to the now awe struck yokels and grabs a handy flare, lights it up and says to them, now do you believe?
He has to act fast because that sun is going to be back soon but while the darkness holds he has a pretty rapt audience. No one else even though of a flare in the middle of an afternoon beer feast. So he has a captive audience. He says bow down to Zeke there and give him what you got and maybe if he is not too offended he will call off the corn ferry. And do you know what, that is exactly what Zeke did. He blew and blew and the sun came back and everyone was happy again and he was inundated in barrels of mead and bushels of corn.
That dear friends is about how I think it all got started more or less repeated in river valleys and protected spots all across the planet wherever smart ass lawyers with amenable relatives could be found. Later they probably had to add the innovation of the big dumb cousin as enforcer for the laggards who reneged on their bushel of corn or barrel of mead and so it goes from family to village to city state to nation to world wide corporate religious elites with idols and interpol’s and what have you.
It all comes down to observation of nature and playing upon human nature. One smart ass with a couple of helpers, can rule an entire village or an entire planet. Humans will happily pick and pluck their individual ways oblivious to all from dawn til dusk and sleep in a hole in the ground unless there is some one out there pushing them to do something different. Is that better? That is debatable. Some say the ends justify the means. Look we have cell phones and flat screen TV because of that smart ass and his brother with the horn. But on the other hand, do we really need to force people to bust their asses supporting a small percentage of the population just so they can dispense a few favors upon the rest of us of dubious value? Are we really better off than those hunter gatherers? Could we have developed another model? Can we still?
Some modern primitive types want to return to the hunter gatherer stage. It certainly was less of a strain on the environment, but can the planet support 7 billion hunter gatherers? personally I don’t think so and I believe that to attempt it would be equivalent to the Pol Pot experiment in Cambodia only with a much bigger die off. You would have to drag some of these humans kicking and screaming from their play station 2’s and their flat screen TVs. It would be uh inhumane.
Socialists simply want to end consumerism cold turkey. Make us all live like oh say Cubans do today, driving well made 1950’s cars, free medical care, lots of well educated people roaming around with little to do besides pick the garbage and grow vegetables in their own home gardens. Well maybe not like Cuba, after all we can blame that on the American Embargo and Cuba is green. They had to be. Russia stopped sending subsidised oil and Chavez wasn’t around back in the early 1990’s. Now Cuba trades Doctors for Oil with Venezuela and things are not so bad. But they are green and every third Cuban from what the media reports cannot wait for those American/Chinese made Play Stations to start rolling on in. Cubans if you can believe the media can hardly wait for their chance to play in the consumerist sun.
What else is there in the world? Well capitalism. I mean lots of capitalism. Consumerist capitalism with a dose of moderating state regulation in places like Europe, but in most of the rest of the world it is Capitalism with a Capital C. Let her rip and the consequences be damned. This is free beer today for your soul for the rest of your life capitalism. This is indentured servitude, debt compounded by the miracle of compound interest capitalism. Where does all that compounded interest come from you might ask? I would ask the more succinct question where does it go? It goes as far as I can tell into the hands of a few wealthy investors. They offer compounded interest because they know that they are the ones who benefit. Not the retired school teacher who invested $5.00 fifty years ago and is now a millionaire that the capitalist propagandists love to taut as an example of capitalism working for the little man or woman, like some old style Soviet Model Worker who dug 5 times the coal quota because the system was rigged to let him win. No it is not the retired school teachers who win. If they did do you think capitalism would still be around? No the wealth would be dissipated like so much gas let out of the entropic bag. It is only because wealth is constantly concentrated and excess or surplus wealth is destroyed, that value is kept in the hands of the few and capitalism works. It is merely the modern extension of feudalism or the rule of kings, or priests or what have you. It is the few dictating to the many, and if there is a surplus it gets demolished in a convenient war or disaster of one kind or another. We can’t have wealth dispersed. Better burn it than feed those damn starving Bengalis or Bangladeshi or Bavarians or what have you.
Capitalism, like all con games is created to support the well being of its master players. If you learn the rules and are really good, perhaps you will be allowed into the inner sanctum of wealth. But more likely you will be just another indebted slob out there in slobonia drinking your ersatz beer and eating your government surplus macaroni and cheese. But only a little. If you get too much surplus the market might drop and heaven forbid we let that happen.
It is not that these are particularly evil men and women. It is just that, well, given the alternative of equitable distribution, with everyone working a few hours a day to support the social well being, well civilization as we know it will end. Look at what happened in Russia. They ended up giving money to artists and to the Ballet for gods sake. What kind of nonsense is that? Only the elite get the Bolshoi, the rest get Karaoke and that is what they deserve because as we all know that is all they really want. George Orwell put it pretty well in his Orwellian novel 1984. Gee I wonder why his parents named him after something as evil as Orwellianism?
Americans know that pop culture if allowed to flow to the least common denominator will give us pap that is virtually unpalatable. But we also know that people will become so accustomed to it that they will eat shit and say it is good shit if it is presented in the right packaging, say McDonalds anyone? Who determines this stuff? Scientists do the research, marketers do the research and corporate directors well compensated decide what pile of inedible shit the vast majority of us is ready to consume now. It is even environmentally correct as most beef products are 50% soy now.
So what am I advocating? I am saying that we need rational decision making, but not made by the elite who profit off of giving us less for more. We need to educate ourselves as to what is healthy and what is not and make intelligent choices about what we consume and how much. We need to put managers in place who work for the benefit of the majority, well meaning geeks, incorruptibles like Ralph Nader and semi Incorruptibles like Congress persons Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee. The problem is that politics as practiced in America emulates the values of the United States. It is a mix of high minded preaching with sleazy practicality. Americans want politicians who look good on the surface but can cut a deal that benefits numero uno first and last. It is part of the capitalist ethic of greed, the protestant ethic of hard work and moral uprightness and the various patterns of ethics, religion, morality, economics, culture and what have you that has been thrown together in the great American grab bag of a nation state.
This experiment in radical individualistic pleasure seeking under an all seeing calvinistic god, one who does or doesn’t exist depending on your frame of reference but certainly maintains a tight grip on this nation at the apex of the dollar pyramid, this deity that sees all and doesn’t see a damn thing is pervasive and incoherent as is appropriate for a nation created in a hot feverish summer, in Philadelphia between bouts at the local tavern.
I don’t know if this is what the founding fathers saw when they were smoking their home grown back then, but I am sure that what we have now is not even close to what we had then. More importantly we need to get a grip and plot a new course and that means some serious partying and a new constitutional convention. I suggest shrooms this time and maybe Miami or Palm Springs.
Tags: New Revolutionary Constitution Needed, World History On A Nut Shell.