Friday, October 15, 2010

Apologies

I do apologize, Gentle Reader. I know you depend on me to offer inscrutable yet possibly (hey, anything's possible!) incisive takes on the things going on these days, both near-in and in the wide wide world, but I've been tongue-tied. There's just too much. You'll be wanting me to make sense of China, which I swear I've been pounding away at the keyboard trying to do. It's hard though, what with the Nobel committee sending me softballs almost every day. Then there are those miners, which just remind me again about how we like dramatic disasters so that we can ignore the more important ones. It's all about mining life's riches, you know?

Then the Church can't help itself from weighing in on the other Nobel prize from another direction. Plus there's all that stuff I simply can't remember from almost every other point of the compass.  The election coming up - here in NYS we have this nutjob from my home town who's gotten rich by skimming or is it scamming the Peoples' tax pool, and who thinks he can stir up anti-tax anti-government anger to get elected. Well, he can and he does and he is. All the angry people now who just can't or don't want to believe that you really can't suck all the stored up energy under the earth and burn it up at a rate which equals an atomic bomb in geological terms and not have an impact.

Frankly, I'm scared. I breath in, breath out, and I'm scared that we're killing off the plankton that we still don't even know about which is the main source for my breathing in and breathing out. I'm scared that we won't stop turning our industrial-strength cleverness against what used to be the wild. We tear off mountain tops now to get our black-gold, and we clearcut the ocean bottoms for our fishes and we manufacture want and need among the populous to sell Facebooking Viagra Cholesterol fears and desires.

Our economy renders up only lust and where's the love? We are human because we once did learn to cultivate. And now we equate eating cows, which never even existed in the wild, with eating tuna which can't exist anywhere else. And some people feel virtuous eating tuna, but would never ever eat a cow.

There is still such exuberance to rape the earth. So much money to be made, and so much technology to deploy and to be proud of. As if its occasional deployment to save some symbolic miners can make up for all the thousands sacrificed before them and in the same Name. Progress was it? We'll make these ones rich - they've won the lottery, and the rest of us will indulge them and adore them, and wonder when they get divorces or drink themselves to death. Or maybe they'll discover that they really are more intelligent and deserving than their rescuers? Hey, there's always hope.

We are all rapists by proxy, and none of us has a choice. You can drive a Prius, but you're in the self-same pool with those pumped on steroids Hummer girly men. You can buy local, but you're still lusting after calamari appetizers, because you've had them, and you see them on some technicolor screen, and there are limits to what you want to know or hear about. There sure are limits on what I want to think about, but I have no choice either.

We will shortly grow really really testy with one another. We are dividing ourselves off into the ones who can stand Bushism and the ones who primly can't. We will grow murderously angry with one another. Everyone thinks they're too civilized for that, but look at Rwanda, look at Lebanon, look at Israel for Chissakes, and look at the recent history of China. You don't have to look very far.

Things change and people get confused, and they need to be angry about something and at someone or some group of people. Yes, the Nobel committee absolutely had to award the prize to a notable Chinese dissident who happens to be in jail. Yes, the Chinese had no choice but to respond the way that they have. The Church has no choice but to express its distress that the Nobel had to be awarded to the man who developed the technology which will make lots of adoring couples way more happy than Institutionalized Jesus ever could.

They had to! And so we have to become more enlightened. We could start by letting Jesus out  from the prison house of Words. We could start by trying to see things in Chinese terms for the sake of the planet. We could find some way to talk across the things which divide us, instead of always to fire salvos from some dug-in position of false certainty. We could.

And I could learn to write. It's far more work than I ever imagined, but I'm trying, I'm very trying as I joke with my kids. Speaking of whom, it's the birthday of one and old home day for the other as I celebrate leaving town.  Buffalo is far too much the microcosm for me to stand it any more. We will always elect Jimmy Griffin or Carl Paladino even though these people who seem to be like us aren't the ones to lead us. It's not like the legacy children of great men are the ones to lead us either. Bush, Cuomo, Brown, why are these the best we've got??? Even when and if they are better than their celebrity Dads. What's wrong with this picture, people?

We need to learn trust, and to stop trusting winners as though we have no choice. Winners in this economy of lust are almost always kingpin rapists who've talked themselves into seeing themselves as lovers. Nobel winners are a step in a better direction. But Jeezus, we have to give the real leaders a chance to lead. (It would be nice if they could keep their pants zipped). I'm rooting for a woman, but not in the style of Margaret Thatcher, or some other Palin Whitman Fiorina clone drone masturbation-phobe man-up femme fatale who wants the ball. Not them, please oh please oh please.

I still do pray for a groundswell come election day for those on the side of my main man Obama. I don't mean those Dumbocrats who are caught in their oily machine. I mean the thinkers and the doers and all the rest who aren't afraid to engage although it will make them look dirty. It will make them dirty and still they engage. That's who I'm rooting for, and there's not a single Tea Bagger among them, if you want to know the truth. Know-nothingism targeted below the belt is not a stand-in for intelligence. It's not. It's not that hard to make yourself cry and then release the anger. That's the beastly part, and we all have it. But for heaven's sake, let's not celebrate it!

Anyhow, sorry sorry and sorry again. I can't seem to rise above the noise and the filth msyelf. I can't seem to make the words crystallize into anything worth reading. But I'm trying. I'm really trying.

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