"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jun 22, 2011

Apropos

...of the rant below, I invite you to read this:

" 'We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,' said Gundersen. 'The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.'

Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.

TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable..."

The immediate managerial response to crisis, demonstrated again and again and again, is to lie about it. These are the people with the lawyers, guns and money. And their first instinct is to tell you that a catastrophe is no big thing. They've spent their formal educations and their careers accumulating power, influence, wealth and position. And they use it to lie to you. Not some of the time. Not over minor shit.

When it matters most. When it's about your health, your survival and the quality of you ridiculously brief mortal existence.

Because you don't matter to them.

Nuclear meltdowns? Inundated cities? Man-made flooding from reservoir releases? Toxic beef? Dying oceans? Rising seas?

You can go fuck yourselves. It's what they really think.

And remember when "well, at least it's not worse than Chernobyl" was like part of the by line?

Yeah, me too.

So, the next time someone tells you that you have to vote or die, or sign a petition to persuade Congress to do the right thing, or organize a free speech zone posing party for the local police, or get some mo'betta Democrats, or trust the Teap Arty to conjure an honest Republican, remember Fukushima. Or Katrina. Those motherfuckers have a first instinct. And it's to lie to you.

Let him make his appeal to your good citizenship. Let him finish massaging the soft pelt of the better and angelic natures the schools spent twelve years indoctrinating you to believe you possess. Let him wrap up and settle on his hind legs, confident that the colonization is going to do the trick.

And when the first turn of the self-satisfied smirk starts to pucker up those lying lips, punch that motherfucker right in the face.

12 comments:

Justin said...

"And when the first turn of the self-satisfied smirk starts to pucker up those lying lips, punch that motherfucker right in the face."

Which is only possible if you accept the consequence of going to jail. So whatever is standing in the way of accepting that is where you have to start your punching.

In my view, the real battle here is our ideas of progress, because what that motherfucker is really saying is that the cost of human progress is worldwide suicide. Punch him in the face, but until that mindset shifts, until people en masse not only see the absurdity of defining human progress as keeping the industrial lights on at, literally, all costs, but act upon that absurdity to put an end to it, you'll have to keep on punching.

One way to get people to stop acting on an idea is to physically threaten them. We are physically threatened to stop acting toward our own destruction by the status quo. That sometimes means literal physical threats, such as the ones the U.S. makes on foreigners and poor and mostly minorities at home. It also means threats of comfort and security, if you try to stop it you will likely get arrested and sentenced to a decade of prison for disrupting the auction of public land to oil and gas companies to ruin and degrade. There are subtler threats, of losing your home if you act up at work, of losing social standing if you begin speaking and acting your mind instead of thinking it. If you wish to supplant those threats with your own, then punch. I agree that punching might be necessary to deal with those illegitimate threats against you, but I don't think the long-term solution is supplanting them with better threats towards ends I am happier with. Threats like, you better stop defining progress as accepting the threat of nuclear catastrophe or I will punch you, even if it becomes necessary as a matter of survival to make that threat in the short term.

Another way is to show by your own actions that it is possible to stand up to the existing threats, accepting whatever it is they claim to have against you, and keeping on. Because there are a lot of people get the existing threats, and they want the alternatives, but the fear of what happens if they brave those threats against long term comfort, security, and well being keeps them from acting. We have to start finding ways or alternatives by our personal actions that are not destructive, but constructive. Even if we as individuals try an alternative and fail, its the actualization of a few more ideas, from which we can continue building upon.

Living a green lifestyle in the context of an industrialized life is one alternative that's been tried, but I believe doomed to failure. So are a myriad number of other constructive and destructive responses. But not all, and surely there are more to be found; yes, an alternative based on a new set of violent threats always exists, but its the worst of a set of good choices because it is doomed to repeat, as we know from the rhyming of history. We know it exists, so why keep trying it? If you are not ready to try it now, at this moment, there could well come a day when you are as things keep sliding. But until that day, why not seek out other alternatives to see if something constructive can work.

JM said...

That's kinda easy for you to say, you're walking away from it all to live off the grid, so to speak.

Justin said...

You are missing the point. If you think living on the grid and working toward an alternative in the grid that you believe could work as a lifestyle, meaning what you can personally envision, prepare yourself for that. What I mean is that living off the grid means several things that most of us are not comfortable with.

Understanding how basic mechanical stuff works.
Understanding how to make do with less than what we think we need.
Understanding how to provide for our basic needs, meaning breeding, caring for and slaughtering animals, learning how to preserve the food you get, understanding agricultural systems. You have to be comfortable that stuff before you can begin exploring what it means to find an alternative to industrial resolution.

Its not about walking away, that doesn't make anything easier. Quite harder, in fact. If it made things easier, everyone would do it. But the things that make it harder can be made easier, so work on those without worrying about whether they ever get easy enough to actually go. The last point is that its too ambitious for one person, so surround yourself with people who are on the same page and willing to take up expertise in different things than you are. Nothing that really has to be planned, we all have different areas of interest and will naturally follow them, but if the premise is shared, that you are seeking constructive alternatives to a status quo, then it won't matter who does what.

Unknown said...

And when the first turn of the self-satisfied smirk starts to pucker up those lying lips, punch that motherfucker right in the face. I have a few blown discs, three to be exact, can I just use the Louisville Slugger on those fuckwads instead, cause your preachin' to the choir dude.

BDR said...

Hey Man, all well?

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

They lie, they dissemble, they mislead, they obfuscate, they "explain," they frame, they re-construe, they meliorate, they pontificate with authority, they dictate the terms of existence and define them as What Is And What Always Will Be.

"They" are the people who profit from the misery of others. "They" include many of the "noble professions" like Medical Doctors and College Professors. And of course "they" are economists, sociologists, psychologists, human resources managers, accountants, lawyers, salesmen, regional marketing directors, spokesmen and affiliated "consultants."

Who "they" are not?

Day laborers. Ditch diggers. Roofers. Mechanics. The unemployed. The underemployed. The human fodder for the great maw of Economic Progress.

***********

As to Justin and JM above, I'm just reminded of JM's constant service as Professional Progressive Concern Troll. Nice work, JM. You kick ass whether you post as "JM" or "Jenny." It's always awesome, how you remind us that buying a Prius and voting for Obama is the solution to every problem.

Abonilox said...

Anxiously waiting for your next post, Mr. Crow... Didn't realize I had gotten hooked. I need I need.

Jack Crow said...

Been unwell. Thanks for replies and concern.

Anonymous said...

Hope you feel better, Jack. We'll keep tossing peat bricks on the fire.

Paul Alexander said...

Good luck, hope you feel better! Someone has to keep Dawson in line.

Unknown said...

Feel better soon, I am a newbie here but really enjoy your commentary. I hope it's not serious, I know serious medical conditions all to well my-own-damn-self.