lost thoughts at 7:13 after editing and reading news feeds
An evening spent awash in the media fallout of Fahrenheit 9/11... studying headlines... Bush... Texas... death row... Texas kills foreigners (a violation of some international law) because they, as a state, did not sign the treaty -- I am not fucking kidding here... researching North Korea... fascism... despotism... oppression... I briefly began to feel my numbness dissolve, replaced by a sublimely alienated terror. A bleakly fascinated horror at the atrocious nature of human existence here on Planet Earth.
I had begun, long ago, in some strange way to root for North Korea, urged on by two parts ironic distance, one part anti-Bush sentiment (enemy of my enemy), one part misguided desire for the underdog to triumph, one part the bit that prayed as a child for tornados, one part the bit of me that very secretly gets erect for totalitarianism and well-pressed uniforms, and no doubt the whole mess all fused together by a patina of some simmering bacterial fragments of pathological or psychiatric illness clinging to the insides of my psyche like so much gunk in a bathroom sink.
But thats fucked up. Take it from me. Fucked up. North Korea? Not the dudes to root for. Iran, maybe, hope for reformers.
Make no mistake; North Korea is a terrible fucking place to live. At best, you starve and work for the state. At worst, you starve in a prison camp and work for the state in a prison camp. Mass detentions! Executions! Bullet to the back of the neck! North Korea is like some fucking midget clone nightmare vision of Maoist China. Fucking insane line of family despots. Guerilla society. Nuclear weapons. The state exists only to prop up the military, which exists to defend the military from the entire fucking world.
Is any shit scarier than North Korea?
We are, man! I can only fear North Korea because I can put a finger on it, its a whole goddamn country; but it isn't like North Koreans are genetically evil. Man, they are Koreans, like our allies in the south. The bizzare Orwellian state was created not merely because of some regional-specific tendency to go insane; rather, the roots are in all of us. Humankind is its own worst enemy. We are animals but also murderous ones. We love and hurt with the same hands! We spit on a pariah with the same mouth we use to kiss our grandmothers at family reunions.
Bears don't have death camps, cats don't make poison gas, and dogs don't machinegun one another into open graves.
But dogs don't write symphonies, either.
Alright, fair.
If I offer you the choice between a world with no symphonies and some death camps and a world with symphonies and some death camps, that is a difficult choice, is it not?
I'm saying: the world is imperfect, but its also what it is. Horror is endemic to the world, so is beauty; both ingrained, though horror is easier, horror triumphs, horror wins in the end. You must make a friend of horror, indeed.
We overthrow a vicious dictator in Iraq; we become an occupying power, oppressive by our presence, let alone our prison escapades, the way we "split hairs with the Geneva Convention". We fight global terrorism, radical fundamentalism; we fall prey, as a people, to the two-fold danger of allowing the political opportunists to further entrench (though this burrowing of scum seems to have become a fundamental of society, something not only to expect but to rely on, as basic as gravity to physics)... and of becoming, as a people, so radically fundamentalist that we lose sight of humanity, ethics, charity, compassion, reasonable common sense desires for world peace, the mitigation of world hunger, a cure to AIDS, life amongst the stars. Our hope evades us.
Life is becoming worthless on planet earth; there's six billion, throw him away, and get a new one. Striking workers, replaced by scabs. Jobs held by American steel-workers become jobs held by Mexican steel-workers... then, maybe Chinese prisoners or the ultra-impovershed, people who make destitute Mexicans or Chinese prison laborers look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic clothes manufactured in third-world nations for the poor Americans who have lost their jobs to third-world nations... when America becomes a third-world country, who will we sell Nikes to?
Not all is lost, but shit is fucked. Shit has always been fucked, but as things complexify, grow, and build on planet Earth, the potential for global fuckedupness, total worldwide catastrophy seems only to grow; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have always been with us, they represent in a certain way fundamental archetypal fears of our societies, our entire species. but a worldwide culture seems to raise the spectre of these diseases, famines, wars, and just general death running rough-shod, completely out of control...
Principles work both ways. If I can deliver a heart to a dying woman in Baghdad by overnight mail, I could also theoretically deliver this woman an explosive device designed to kill her, or her children; and we create controls, filters, laws, authorities... child-proof caps on things... but it becomes an arms race for security, when you go down that root, rather than addressing the issue of why anyone would want to mail a human being a bomb in the first place.
We can put a man on the moon, which means we could probably put labor camps there, as well.
The concorde could fly across the Atlantic in... what, an hour? I think it'll only take nuclear rockets about twenty minutes to cross the polar ice cap.
Our great works are also our great sufferings; we build with the same hands we destroy. We cannot save ourselves, we cannot kill ourselves. That's maybe the saddest part, that this will perpetuate, and ultimately, it is cosmically meaningless; the only meaning our actions have resides with us, first, as individuals taking action, and secondarily, as the individual being acted upon... finally, third and increasingly important in our interconnected world, there is what the action means to the world, to society, to the species.
Its out of the hands of individuals now; first, into the hands of nations... soon, into the hands of corporations, our multi-national (or perhaps extra-national) soveriegns. Or are things headed another way entirely?
I'm not scared, at 7:30 AM, I'm just numb again, accepting and acknowledging the horror/wonder of our human condition. Briefly and fleetingly aware of a thin slice of some global picture, still utterly blind to cosmic purpose. I've got rehearsal at one and so I better go sleep soundly in my bed. I'm so tired these days, I have long days, starting early and stretching well into the evening. No gainful employment. I'd have ethical qualms about living off of my parents if I was spending very much money. I live sort of lean, though still with a certain undeniable bourgeoise privilege. Tomorrow, I'll drive 45 minutes to rehearsal and burn the guzzoline. I'll order fast-food; I'll probably waste portions, throw unconsumed bits away rather than saving them. Regardless, even if I finish the food, the damage is done; I become fat, lazy, broken up inside, unable to do anything but sit here at this computer and fume and vent my poisonous thoughts and feel a measure of control over the overall out-of-control situation we are all in here on Prison Planet Earth. We all become a victim, no more desirable a role than victimizer, a role we must also relish.
Is that the final truth? Are we all victim/victimizer, forever and ever? Is that the grand design that powers the species interaction worldwide, from the microcosm of individual relationships to the macrocosm of global commerce and diplomacy? Is the global work machine powered on blood drawn from a vampire and fed right back to him?
No, worse. The global work machine is powered on we lower-tier vampires who drain the lowest-tier vampires (who drain one another quite well), and we drain up the pyramid to the Secret Masters, to the thousands of unnamed presences, faces, institutions, organizations that make up our social tapestry... like a Ponzi scheme, like Reaganomics, the trickle-up scam. We eat and are eaten. And maybe the whole sorry mess eats itself; but more likely, just an ever bloating Ouroborous for eternity, gladly suckling at his own shit, and as his body grows, his mind cankers and the whole sorry mess gets worse and worse until one day you come back and find the sad little wretch starving the day he realizes a fat snake can't live of its own feces forever.
I think a good friend of mine was really onto something when she suggested that the world is just one big circle of people screwing and being screwed in return.
Signing off.