The Grimmest Fairy Tale
We’re accustomed to talking glibly about “the future” as if it were a given. “There always has been a future, hasn’t there,” you may say. Yes, it always has been something we could take for granted, but now it’s not. Now life as we know it on this planet is not assured a future.
How did that happen? One thing is certain: it didn’t happen by “fate” or accident. It didn’t happen due to puerile biblical prophesies, and it didn’t happen by natural disasters, not in the first place, anyway. Those natural disasters were provoked by mankind. (I’m going to permit myself this gender transgression, as most of the floods and firestorms, droughts and extinctions, were caused, directly or indirectly, by men, not women.)
But it’s not complicated. What threw the future of the world into grave uncertainty was greed, but not any old greed. It was–and is–greed hyped up by technology the way the garden shovel was superceded by the bulldozer and the power shovel. It’s a terrifying, mortal, previously unthinkable greed that ruthless men have loosed upon the world.
From Thom Hartmann on the LA Progressive Newsletter yesterday:
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1933 inaugural address about an earlier generation of Republican obstructionists: “They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
How Stupid Are These Consummate Businessmen, Anyway?
Don’t they realize that they will ultimately be swept up in their own maelstrom? No, they don’t. They think their astronomical treasure will protect them but it won’t. They are convinced of that because they’re drunk on wealth, power and self deception. Just as they have left us bereft of a future they have done the same for themselves. Cold consolation for us.
Where do these mega-cannibals come from? These shrewd exploiters come principally from an upstart nation that was founded two-and-a-half brief centuries ago in a broad, green, far-off land populated by tribes of primitive peoples living wholesome–which is not to say warless–subsistence lives. The founders of this new nation promptly dispatched the natives to the happy hunting grounds. By the mid-19th century they had conquered that broad, green land from coast to coast. They called it the United States of America.
Sadly for history, that procedure of genocide and spiralling profit off the rich land became the playbook for the Americans. (They called themselves “Americans” as if the sum of two entire continents belonged exclusively to them.) The world had seen many conquerors before, but these self-styled Americans added a new ingredient to the recipe. They told the world they were not conquerors, but liberators. They took something they called “freedom” and a primitive, warmed-over miracle religion they called “christianity” with them. These seemingly inoccuous innovations not only promised their victims a pleasant life on earth but also a dandy afterlife.
This sort of balderdash can be labeled “voodoo hypocrisy,” as none of it was true nor ever would be. Instead it became one of the most fearful arms in the American arsenal, thanks more to their outstanding-if-mendacious salesmanship, than to the merit of their product.
Greed Makes the World Go Round
Greed, as we know, is ongoing, like a perpetual-motion machine, only better. Not only does it continue to run; it continues to grow, like compound interest. That’s how unscrupulous American speculators and usurpers coopted everyone’s future and started playing fast and loose with it. They discovered that the most lucrative business of all was the arms trade. It’s the only enterprise where the products are promptly blown to smithereens, creating a perpetual market for the violent death of mainly people with funny names in far-off countries. The flaw in this impeccable plan was the same one all over again. These free-market freebooters discovered the atomic bomb and, by extension, the one winter–the nuclear winter–that not even the Eskimos can escape from. So the exploiters are now in the same boat with those they exploit. Nevertheless, they pretend not to notice. The bizness must go on.
Throughout this entire historical process–though historically it wasn’t actually very long–these unspeakable American men covered themselves with a magical blanket of legitimacy. They were, after all, constructing the Free World. How did they manage to achieve that respectability? The same way they managed everything else. They bought it. They didn’t mess around. They went straight to the Congress of the United States. And they bought it.
Which Brings Us to the Brink
Today humankind’s future on this earth rests on a knife’s edge that can cut either way, but not with equal probability. With those slick American entrepreneurs ferreting around the known world provoking powerful potential enemies by ringing them with warships and nuclear-missile bases, the odds look decidedly in favor of some sort of imperialist Armageddon. Why would they do such foolish things? You don’t even need to ask. Just refer to their agenda, which is their deadly script. Your possibilities of surviving? They’re nearing zero.
The plain laws of probability tell us that, after so many near misses on so many fronts, including so many slip ups, from near nuclear launches to the three-trillion-dollar, fruitless-for-all-but-the-parasites Afghan War, the definitive wipeout is now approaching inevitability.
Above us, on Olympus, from where we thought the gods looked after the wellbeing of humanity, it turns out there are only malevolent, self-serving dwarves. What do you think your chances are with them? How do we know who they are? It’s easy, just read the paper. You will have to discard the words but you’ll get the drift just humming along with the music and watching the shit that’s going down.
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Trump and All the Rest 