The Mayan calendar ends in 2012. Bible thumpers and snake handlers all across Jesusland agree that the last days are upon us. We are in the end times. Sadly, it’s not even because Jesus is pissed. No, it’s more high tech than that.
I hope that the University of Wisconsin physicists have siphoned off most of their grant money by now, because in a few months when they really start hurling protons at each other at the speed of light, it won’t matter much. The Large Hadron Collider was powered on today and they fired off a few test shots. They don’t expect to create any dark matter right away. It may take months before they fire up a mini black hole, and then it will take months and months, maybe a couple of years before the earth turns to swiss cheese as the black hole enlarges and chews its way back and forth through the planet. Eventually we all appear on the singularity’s event horizon, and then like pet goldfish consigned to the toilet bowl, we swirl around and around and down into the abyss.
Not a bad way to go really, and we get to avoid election 2012 entirely.
My goal? Push back the green. Re-take Jesusland from the extremists, the bigots, the mindless deluded snake-handlers and the hockey moms that represent them.
Four years ago, about the time I posted the Jesusland map, I wrote,
I have a passion for truth. For three hundred years, euro-culture advanced an understanding of the universe in a quest for foundational truth. Then about thirty years ago, there was a retreat from the commitment to shaping a universal understanding in favor of a darker solipsistic postmodernism. While this cultural cul de sac provides fuel for its own immolation, it has also encouraged the growth of bizarre belief structures and fundamentalisms. Ideally, the next thirty years will be spent recovering lost ground and committing to reinvestment in science, knowledge and the growth of respect for universal education. I look for an emerging global culture with broad advances in international law, health and wellness, food and shelter for the billions, and equal opportunities for creativity and interpersonal cultural enrichment.
The problem of combustion-based energy haunts us. Discarding substitutes like coal gasification, ethanol, and bio-diesel in favor of bio-electric, wind and solar will be necessary if we want to halt global warming in time. Unfortunately, combustion alternatives are the low-hanging fruit economically as we shift from the petroleum culture. Democracy is necessary to enforce a world-wide mandate against the destruction combustion based energy causes. Chemical based agriculture seems to harm as much as it provides sustenance. Closed system organic approaches that recycle bio-wastes will be needed on a broad scale to restore soil that has been sterilized by herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. The internet promises communication and cultural integration for all. Protecting it as a commons and developing it according to standards that will prevent it from collapsing under its own weight is a challenge constantly before us.
I might refine some of those thoughts today, but they still seem pretty much on target. The “stories” that are emerging in the 2008 election are examples of the poison of postmodernism and its erosion of the values attendant on the critical distinction between veracity and mendacity. Truth too often is buried by the narrative, while lies are carried by it and transmuted into conventional wisdom.
Presidential candidates in their roles as communicators often elide facts and nuance in the interest of advancing their narrative. The same goes for promoters throughout the culture, tin plated philosophers, game theory economists, and marketeers advancing their causes or beliefs regardless of factual constraints. Oil men. Fundamentalist Christians. Blackwater mercenaries and mob killers. Libertarians and delusional Ayn Randians. Dick Cheney.
Here is the story: There are among us wealthy and powerful people, the vast majority of whom gained their wealth and power by force of will and intend to keep it no matter what the cost to the other people who share with them the land, the water, and the air. The wealthy and powerful do their best to mislead the masses of people who are not wealthy. John “Crash” McCain and Sarah Palin are in their service. Barack Obama and Joe Biden understand the power structure, and operate with constraints imposed by wealth and power, but they are at odds with the wealthy and powerful to the extent that they are pledged to help the masses. They represent a huge threat to the amoral oligarchy, the aristocracy, call it what you will — the power elite. Dick Cheney, John “Crash” McCain, and the power elite are so outrageous in their concealment of ill will that they paint the party of the people as “elitists.” Indeed, our candidates represent an elite of achievement, the peak of the “meritocracy,” brilliant people with personal power and human values that are an affront to the wealthy and powerful, the power elite (see The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills 1956.)
Many of Barack Obama’s supporters pragmatically seek his victory in order to protect the environment, or to maintain a reasonable Supreme Court, or to address any one of the many issues that the power elite have managed poorly and to our detriment. But we have a great opportunity today to begin the development of a new consensus, to re-write the rules for membership in that power elite that has failed us so miserably since the Kennedy assassinations in the sixties. We’re at a fork in the road. Obama’s election doesn’t guarantee that a technical revolution in energy distribution and environmental improvement will follow. Pulling the world out of the depression that the cynical masters of war have pushed us toward won’t be easily achieved. But unless we elect Obama we will never know if it could have been done; and, if we elect John “Crash” McCain we may see new energy pipelines, but we will certainly see further deterioration and collapse in our infrastructure, our economy, and in the logistical systems that deliver food and health care throughout the US and to billions of people world-wide.
[tags]post-horns on the Danube, Thurn und Taxis, truth, justice, and linzertorte[/tags]
A wise theologian of my acquaintance once proposed, “Sometimes difficult writing reflects the genuine torsion that accompanies unfamiliar theories’ transition into discourse.” I’ve borne this in mind as I’ve read his work over the years, and I’m proud to say that I’ve grasped some of the mind bending material he has put in front [...]
