Liberatory Nihilism, Or how I faced the future my children have inherited...

The endless wars and police actions, the entertainment-industrialization of murder, the rapid increase in the expropriation of the Commons, the bank and insurance company bribes, the war on drugs, the expansion of the prison-slavery complex, the whole damned lot of it - fairly depressing shit.

But, in truth, human shit. It has the stink of a medieval sewage runnel because that comparison really works. Our massive degradations, in plain, shitty sight. We did this shit, and we could - in theory at least - not do it.

Unlikely that we mere peons can stop it, but the betting chance remains.

We could, with a lot of violence, or on an even off-er off chance, a whole lot of nonviolent resistance, put some breaks on the industrial march into our own obsolescence.

But that "oil spill," and Hubbard's Peak?

No fix available. The oil "leak" will likely keep on erupting a jovian magnitude storm of petrochemicals into the Gulf, and therefore the world oceans, for years to come. And nothing can prevent the unfolding of the logic of EROEI. Ineluctable. Inevitable. Second Law of Thermodynamics, it shall not budge.

And that leaps right beyond depressing into nihilism inducing.

Which, for me at least, has the feel of liberation.

I - merest of mere peons - cannot stop it.

My rage lacks the quality of wrath. It has no force, no effect, no power. So, it only poisons me, and the environments in which I move.

It doesn't work, this outrage. It has no play.

I care, but that too amounts to nil. As does, in all likelihood, your concern. I plus you plus you plus us, plus they and them - we don't add up. If we did, we would.

But, we don't. We won't, or we can't or we just came into our own too late, heirs to a rich tradition of revolt and resistance, but with none of the tools, and few of the emotional loyalties. Ancient pistols aimed away from the target. Or a newly discovered Grimm's tale, with half the references lost to obscurity, lost in the translation from a Latin no one speaks, to a German no one cares about, into an English few have the heart to hear.

We provide a distraction, a cautionary tale, a warning to the newest class of Veblenites and technocrats. We inhabit the last outpost down a lost highway which recedes only into the distance of yesterday, and yesterday's forgotten tomorrow.

It doesn't end well for us, this leftishness.

We don't frighten, anymore. We lack the quality of kobolds, and goblins. Or even of Puck, gone off the reservation.

Red threat?

Hah!

"Faggots and feminists," a lawyer* once told me. "Or book heads. That's the left in America." Crudely put, and missing the point by focusing on it. But, a fiction which shows the truth.

We obsess the margins, because we live there. It doesn't compute.

We don't translate.

Pointillists tiddly winking words sidereal, off putting and off pole, positioned with self as spectator, watching the Spectacle as it glues us to each other in anonymity and entertainment.

United by anonymous disgust.

And it doesn't work.

Outrage reveals the love, the compassion, the care. The desire for justice, or whatever word you prefer. It doesn't self obsess. It demands an Other, a meeting and a meeting place. You cannot strip it to 140 characters and announce it to equally voided strangers, all out on a doe-see-doe dance, bouncing along with mirrors in hand, filterless gyrovagi in a flattened space of bits and bytes and the Self as an arrangement of symbols meant only for consumption. It doesn't network, this angry love.

It really doesn't compute.

Well, fuck all that.

And fuck me, too.

Sick of the seeping wound, and sick of the pain.

Sick of the degradation.

These words - they don't travel. They don't go anywhere. They have no place.

These words won't stop the oil eruption. They won't stop wars. They won't make Imperial Barack or Georgie the Lesser wake up and grow a conscience, even shared between them - never mind the noble and ennobling desire to take a samurai view of their manifold failures.

Impotence, impotence.

I don't yield. Far from it. But, in these wee hours at least, the nihilism liberates.

Clarity, like Camus once mused. Because the Absurd inhabits real time and real space.

It really does. I've pared it down for myself: monster, or machine part?

I chose the monstrous.

And for that reason, barely reasonable and hardly rational, this world has value.

We cannot stop what we've unleashed.

But, fuck all and fuck the fucking fuck, we will all greatly suffer it.

And that has value.

Yes, yes it does.

So - I'm off to join the goblin horde, to turn my love another angle.

I give the Morrigu mother her due, and await the beautiful, horrible, lovely reckoning.

UPDATE 11:55AM:

Emily H is a goddess.

Talk about the transubstantiation of real tragedy into actual self-mastery.

Awe. Just awe.








* - not really, but he fancied himself a legal expert. He owns a bar, now, or some such. A "libertarian" of the Kim Stanley Robinson characterization.