Monthly Archives: April 2012

1945 to 1955 to 1965; two half-generations of change, Part II

Posted on April 28, 2012 by | 2 Comments

From the last episode of this piece, I began my diatribe rather softly, merely suggesting that the “job creators” who hire the rest of us for a mere pittance, make their money by taking all our resources, leaving us, first, sick and, finally, dead, while creating a dependency on the stuff they sell us, and make us have to have.  <Breath>

Yep.  First, they take all our resources, leaving you water you can’t drink, mountains with soil that has no health (so you can’t even grow and can your own beans anymore, without worrying that there might be toxic levels of metals in them beans), and you with a host of health problems.  In toto, they have left you with a once beautiful home, a home to not just you but also millions of other creatures, that is forever (in all human lifetimes) changed. Forever, disturbed.  The Appalachia of your grandparents’ youth?  Of their grandparents?  Well, at the risk of being accused of being nostalgic, and not merely reporting facts about a very old planet and what a few latecomers have wrought, their Appalachia was better.  Objectively better.  Sorry.  There wasn’t a Superfund site because of the reclaiming of mining equipment.  Then there were watersheds that were created naturally.  Now, we have watersheds that we are working to safeguard and restore.  Fishable.  Swimmable.  Those were the days, and can be again.

But now that I’ve pissed off half of my friends and bored the other, with these bright and sunny facts, I’ll get to the point.  That is, to my opinions about a system that would allow some people to do this to our home and the rest of us, under the guise of “giving us jobs.” Sell it down the road.  This sister ain’t buyin’.

Here’s what I’m thinking.  We must be either:

  • not playing with a full deck of cards, to let some people take us to the proverbial cleaners, as they say, and on an ongoing basis, and saying thanks for it,

OR

  • playing a game of cards with our every breath, that we think is a different card game.  That is to say, they have us thinking we’re playing something we’re not.

Because I think we’re a pretty smart lot, being apex scroungers and all, I believe it’s the latter.  I think we have a full deck, but the cards we are holding in our hot little hands aren’t capable of winning, ’cause we don’t know the game we’re playing.  And we don’t know that we don’t know.

Knowing better than to do so, you bite your tongue as you ask, “What is the card game we are playing?”

Well, since you asked, it’s the game of SORUBNED: the Stuff-oriented, Resource-using But Not Equitably Distributed game!  Yay!  And how’s our hand in the game of SORUBNED?

Well, that’s the thing.  Whether you have a good hand or a bad hand in any card game depends on the game.  It also depends on your understanding its rules.  We play SORUBNED, thinking it was like Go Fish, and didn’t realize that it was more like Blackjack.

Picture the game being played.  The card table that everyone in the 1950s had.  A cheap, beige, vinyl-covered one.  A few folks had the nicer ones with the green felt cover, with oaken hinges and sawtooth joinings.

The  ones who think they are playing Go Fish have the vinyl ones.  The group with the felt knows the rules of SOURBNED and knows that we don’t.  That groups’ members know that if they play Blackjack against an opponent who thinks the game is Go Fish, their opponents will giggle gleefully until the winner is announced.  At the end of the game.

During play, he will giggle along with you as you squeal with delight as he hands you over his Sevens and Fours and Sixes and Threes so you can amass a pile of matching cards.  He giggles in the same tone as you pass your Aces and Jacks to him.  So there we are, our scrambling for as many matching cards as we can; their looking for two cards that will seal the deal.

You know it’s true.  We are waking up to this realization.

The problem is, we should have woken up to the rules somewhere around 1965 (back to the theme of this piece – 1945, when we really began stoking the furnace of unsustainability).  But here we are.  Some woke up a bit earlier, some weren’t ever really asleep, and some have managed to sleepwalk through the whole game, having taken the Blue Pill.

Solution?  That’s for another day.  Meanwhile, I’ll exercise my uniquely 1955 expression of the human ability to ignore the oncoming doom, with a song, as I begin to venture beyond the path between this chair and my coffee pot.

Oh, what a beautiful Jackman!

Oh, what a beautiful day!

I got a beautiful feeling

Everythin’s goin’ my way.

Oh, the sounds of the Earth are like music,

Oh, the sounds of the Earth are like music,

The breeze is so busy, it don’t miss a tree,

And an old weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me.

Oh, what a beautiful mornin’!

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Hitchens quote “Heaven intervenes,” from Gibney film

Posted on April 23, 2012 by | Leave a comment
Chirstopher Hitchens and Blue by Annie Liebowitz

Hitch 'n Blue by Annie Liebowitz

I so wanted to go to Hitch’s memorial, and back in December knew that I would try to attend; but in my slackard way, didn’t notice as the date approached.

So thank you, Ms. Blue, for allowing this to be shared out to us, and to Vanity Fair for posting the marvelous readings and speeches from the service.  All who were there know better than I that anything we now say about him, anything of his that we read aloud, pales against hearing it directly from him.  But the mind is a wondrous place, where you can actually hear the person’s own voice as you silently read the printed word.  Marvelous, isn’t it?

I’ve transcribed a short piece from the memorial video of Hitch by Alex Gibney that I posted here this past weekend, and that Vanity Fair has posted.  There are so many Hitch gems in this video.  Here is a favorite (they all are, I confess), where Hitch, with his delicious wit, points out one of the improbable bases upon which the whole of the Judeo-Christian belief system is grounded.

At about 6 minutes in:

A hundred thousand years people have been, our species has been, around.  For the first ninety-seven, ninety-eight thousand of this, heaven watches with indifference. “Ooh, there they go again.”  They’ve all, that whole civilisation has just died out.  “Wha!  What are you gonna do?”  Three thousand years ago, at the most, it is decided that, “No, we’ve got to intervene now.”

You have to believe it.  You have to believe it.

“And the revelation must be personal.  Must appear . . .  So we’ll pick the most backward, the most barbaric, the most illiterate, the most superstitious, and the most savage people we can find, in the most stony area of the world.  We won’t appear to the Chinese, who can already read.”

And of course, there’s the part of the video at about 8 minutes in where he considers the practice of churches – clerics and lay-people alike – of going to visit the sick and dying in hospitals.  He asks whether it isn’t a bit unfair, these attempts at deathbed conversions, and points out that good taste prevents its happening in the reverse sense.   You know, where atheists show up at religious hospitals to call on persons who have but a few days of life and suggest to the ill one that he/she has been duped into serfdom.

Fuck.  Surviving Christopher Hitchens is a bitch.

 

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Michael Jackson’s Earth Song on Earth Day

Posted on April 22, 2012 by | 3 Comments
Earth Song Elephant Michael Jackson

From Earth Song, Michael Jackson video

This morning I was reflecting that I couldn’t really remember the song when Earth Song was first released.  I thought that maybe it was because, in 1995-1996, the time of its release, I wasn’t paying much attention to videos or even music.  True, I didn’t have a TV for most of that time.

This morning I learned that it was not because I was becoming a fogey or even a budding Luddite, but rather, I hadn’t heard it because it was not released as a single in the United States.

Let me repeat that: Michael Jackson’s Earth Song was not released as a single in the U.S. in 1995-1996.  What is his largest-selling single in Britain was not released in the U.S.  Eh?  Not released in the United States.

Say what?

According to an 2009 article in Treehugger via Creative Loafing (I savor my papers), Epic Records apparently didn’t feel that it was a topic/song of interest in the U.S. market, or would have much appeal here.

Hm.  Americans not interested in global environmental or military devastation (also related to environmental exploitation and resource abuse).  Hm.  In 1995, 1996.  Hm.

So, what was going on in the U.S./world during 1995 and 1996 that might have informed Epic’s decision or determination that not releasing this hugely popular song would be more profitable than releasing it?  Someone with better research skills than I could come up with a comprehensive list, but here’s an appetizer of events in 1995 and 1996:

  • According to Encyclopedia Britannica’s The Environment: Year in Review 1995 (you must have a subscription to read the entire article, which I don’t, but here’s an excerpt): ” The threat of global warming continued to dominate environmental concerns in 1995, and for the first time, climatologists were confident they had detected conclusive evidence of it.”
  • The second UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), aka the Earth Summit, had occurred three years previously.  This important conference lead to the development of the Kyoto protocol and focused on reducing greenhouse gases.
  • On January 3, 1995, Republicans gained control over both houses of U.S. legislative government the first time since the 1950s.
  • The 104th Congress supported and ratified the Contract with America – which omitted any reference to addressing American’s innate right to clean air, clean soil and clean water.
  • 1996 – the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act – not suggesting that this has anything topical in common with this subject, but just the nature of control by the Congress over say over our personal and societal destinies.

I must say that I can’t imagine how it became lucrative to Epic not to release this as a single in the U.S.  Hm.  How can that be?

Well, I don’t know the answer to the Epic Records question, nor care I to find out.  That was then; this is now.  Fuck that.  Actually, I’m quite curious.

Come the Divine Wind; the Earth will take care of the rest.  But it would be really nice if humans woke up before that Wind blows, and before more innocent living creatures had to die for human greed and ignorance.

Well done, Michael.  Happy Earth Day to you.

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Alex Gibney gives us Christopher Hitchens

Posted on April 21, 2012 by | Leave a comment
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, by I can't remember; I know that's horrid,but I downloaded it right after he died, and I couldn't find it again.

So I can be sure to find this video in remembrance of Christopher Hitchens, here is the short memorial film by Alex Gibney.

Bury My Dick at Wounded Knee.

You’ll have to watch the video to get that one.

And if you watch the video from beginning to end, you will fall in love, as I have, with Christopher Hitchens.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

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Don’t Go to the Dolphin Show – Ric O’Barry Interview

Posted on April 21, 2012 by | 2 Comments
Ric O'Barry after release of The Cove

Ric O'Barry after release of The Cove, photo from The Examiner

Ric O’Barry, from Save Japan Dolphins, articulates

  • why going to the dolphin show is what keeps the dolphin hunting and capturing money machine going
  • why dolphins bred in captivity is not an acceptable alternative

So, whether your local or not-so-local dolphin show or display is at the Georgia Aquarium, Sea World, Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, the National Aquarium, the Shedd Aquarium – don’t go.

Georgia Aquarium General Admission ticket price includes dolphin show:  Now that the Georgia Aquarium has included the price of the dolphin show in the General Admission price (but only a third or less of the participants will actually be able to make it into that horrid theater), everyone who goes to the Georgia Aquarium pays directly for dolphin captivity.  No longer can one rather craftily make the argument that they are going to see the jellies, but that they do not support dolphin captivity.  Nope.  Not any more.  The Georgia Aquarium is making you pay for that.  More on that later.

But now to Mr. O’Barry, who has worked for dolphin freedom for over 40 years, interviewed on February 16, 2012, by Veenarat Laohapakakul, for the show Viewpoint on ASEAN TV:

He also provides a pathway to dolphin freedom:

  • Stop the captures;
  • Rehabilitate and release the dolphins (who can be) already in captivity;
  • Use birth control for those dolphins already in captivity.

Freedom is not just another word for nothing left to lose.  Maybe it is for humans, who with those amazing thumbs can give up on their own lives.  But we have no right to project our own failings on the rest of the animal kingdom.

Just say NO! to the dolphin show.

For more information and how you can help:

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1945 to 1955 to 1965; two half-generations of change, Part I

Posted on April 20, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Ten, eleven years.  A half-generation.  We in our middling age recognize that our lives ten or eleven years ago are a lot like our lives today.  In many ways, it’s very much the same.  How ten years occurred to us in our youth, more than forty years ago, is very different.

Hence my morning musing on something about the ten or so years on either side of my birth.

The beginning is marked by 1945, a year characterized by a sense of shared elation and promise, but also of our first exposure to true, you-can’t-hide-from-it horror.

Cute movie. But then, I was born in 1955.

From 1945 to 1955, we acted out 1945′s promise and tried to forget anything truly horrid, allowing ourselves a let’s-play-pretend version of it regularly at The Bijou.  The campier the better.  It also made for a cool use of the Theremin.  On the big screen, there were always the lucky few who could, until On the Beach, hide under the bed or spray the giant insects with acid and get away.

The Patio.  By 1955 there were more brick backyard grill patios constructed than “ever before.”  And now they were modern and hip, a cool place to have a cocktail and a Viceroy. I’m reminded of that scene, at the very end of Blast from the Past, where Christoper Walken begins to pace off the dimensions of the perfect backyard patio.  For the third time.  That we know of.

The Promise.  By 1955, a half-generation (not my half-generation, mind you, but our grownups’ one.  You know, The Greatest one; the one with the martinis and cigarettes and parties out on the patio while we watched through the big sliding glass doors in our jammies and thought that our parents were the coolest!) had plowed that field of elation and promise, with just a dash of ducking and covering and shameful enemy-inventing and scapegoating.

We churned that promise machine, harder, faster, better to make paper to make ads last longer for products that lasted less.  We pumped more and more hydrocarbons into that system to make it work harder, faster, cheaper, glossier.  Making consumable items with a short life span, then shipping them and selling them in containers that had longer life spans than the thing it contained.

Somewhere between 1955 and 1965, it became apparent that the promise wasn’t exactly coming at everyone in the same way.  We, perhaps vaguely, remember – I can still see the images on the news – the barbed wire marking a line that must not be crossed, a line where you could be shot or injured in attempting to cross it.  A line that notwithstanding the grave threat, I remember seeing a woman in a cotton dress, the kind with the self-belt at the waist, a smallish roundish woman, gathering the folds in her dress, so that they didn’t become entangled in that wire, running for it, risking injury and her life to cross it.  A line where, because of the call to freedom that made humans willing to die to cross it, the Berlin Wall would be erected for what seemed to us to be forever, but not to the half-generation before or after us.

The Price.  By 1965, uneven balance between the promise and the price was becoming stronger and more apparent.  The promise had just about hit its peak relative to the price that the planet could pay.

That was the point when we should have realized that we were on a moving sidewalk to unsustainability.  Before then, we and, I think, even many CEOs, didn’t realize that along with what we were manufacturing, we were busy building inequity with and into that promise-manufacturing system.

Investing in inequity.  Building inequity and demanding oil.  Not only oil, it also demanded way more human labor, way more blood, sweat and tears, for an increasingly less equitable portion of the proceeds.

And stuff.  But in that trade, we got more stuff.  Lots more cheap stuff.  Stuff that we could hold, plug in, watch, clean, have repaired.  And replaced.  Stuff that we had to have.  And still have to have.  Stuff that must be bought by the cheapest labor that any human can endure and survive.

For some, who can get the stuff, it seems pretty great.  But there are people on this planet who, not only don’t get the stuff, they have their local economies become addicted to a system that will extract all their local resources and leave them, first hungry, then ill and finally dead.  Whether the resource is timber, food, coal, oil, soil/rock, natural gas, or the animals we can grow using those resources, the system is using it up, and belching out, well, to put it politely, poison and death.

(The second half of this oh-so-fascinating and uplifting article will be published as Part II.)

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