|
Rediscovered in northeastern Arkansas, apparently, after 60+ years of being considered extinct. A gorgeous and amazing bird.
What we're seeing is the Right reviving all the ghouls and goblins of the past one more time (if only to get the rest of us to kill them off definitively), and getting the society so selfabsorbed with our myths/Past and past traumas that Reality kicks us in the nuts to get our attention that it needs some honest dealing-with too.
I don't remember the Cold War fondly. It wasn't much better, indeed, the present is dealing with stuff we deferred during it because we couldn't bear its full brunt and pain without in essence losing the Cold War. Since 1990 or 1992 we've fought a civil war about all the issues so long deferred- the Kuwait war was a revision of Korea, the Gingrich ugliness of 1995 a reliving and rearguing of McCarthyism, Lewinsky a reprise of the Sexual Revolution beginning, and the 2000 campaign an argument about Civil Rights and ending with that at heart of a disputed election a la 1960. The Iraq invasion/occupation is all Vietnam recapitulation- the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" is the WMD "evidence", the "insurgency" is the VC after Tet, our Hue is Fallujah, and our President Thieu is the Ja'afari/Chalabi thang. We've been refighting Stonewall in the form of gay marriage, Fidel and the Cuba crisis/trauma and incidents with bin Laden/Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. (I refrain from saying much about the Democratic Party in this conceptualization, but you can draw some parallels of your own about who did the FDR, Truman, Dewey, Stephenson, Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, LBJ, Humphrey, Muskie, McGovern, Goldwater, Carter, Ford etc roles in all of it.)
We've run up to 1974ish in this horrid, vile, rerun of a bad movie. We're now re-doing the problems of the Six Day and Yom Kippur war outcomes (in Sharon's Gaza dealings and ko'ing Syria from Lebanon), the Oil Crisis (in the price run-up), the fight with OPEC (now with the Dallas energy industry mafia), stagflation and deficits, Republican Congress crapping out in scandals and partisan malfeasance, a Nixonish Presidency in the dying, Cointelpro reappearing as Patriot Act issues, and the issues of Roe v Wade and the "activist" courts/court stackings of the time reappearing as the Schiavo and filibuster-busting affairs. There's the renewed attack on women in academia. And we're going to be sparring with Iran for a while, arguing with Russia's neoimperialism, as well as putting the CIA back on Castro allies and revivals of Communism in Latin America in the foreseeable future. We're looking at GM needing a bailout in the foreseeable future, rather than Chrysler.
The good news is that we're in an accelerating re-run, going through the problems and arguments of the years of the past at a rate of roughly 4:1, a pickup from a 1:1 clip through the Fifties during the Nineties. The good news is, that all the issues being tackled are being done so definitively- after this goaround, through '08, the slower and reactionary half of the country will have caught up to where the liberal and "elite" half was in ~1990. Predictable is an inversion of the popular conservative backlash that coalesced ~1978 and went through 1985 as a comparable popular liberal backlash in late '05 and throughout '06 and then some.
In truly positive news, Americans are changing as a result. The country is slowly sliding our side's way, the moderate and nonpartisan center is starting to let go of the colonial/Settlement ways and conventions, of the Divine Order and Manifest Destiny.
We were going to go to nuclear energy in some form all along. The question was only the form of it and the care involved in so doing. We will generate- synthesize, on industrial scale- hydrocarbons from that source of energy, hydrocarbons being so convenient as intermediate energy carriers that the alternatives aren't really going to take their place. We will have to use nuclear energy to desalinate seawater, silly and unsound as the present distribution system is. Again, the question remains only the form of it and the care, and an unwillingness to accept the scale.
Overpopulation...well, no one really knows what it is, except that when resources are destroyed in too extensive a way and hostility in civil matters gets too high, we think that it exists. Arguing that other people are doing it isn't a solution, it's a step on the logic that leads to sanction of mass murder. The way to deal with it is to find better allocations of land, water, food, and wild/sacred places and negotiations that achieve living together more efficiently and peaceably and purposefully. The U.S. population is well studied and expected to reach a peak of 600 million in 2060 or so, so the argument is to cope. And it is incumbent on us to help others, explain to (though not impose on) other societies our best ideas about how they, too, can cope. Not all will do well or do so in bearable ways. Parts of the world have chosen to voluntarily cut down population. Others will do so by wars, famine, and semi-deliberate epidemics (i.e. AIDS in eastern Africa).
We live in a world where in many ways we must all, simply, perforce become less extreme and more efficient in material ways and more humane in our thinking. The pressures are all becoming evident, on the powerful (downward) and on the poor (upward) Barbarism is failing, civilization is the only way to succeed. Not an easy thing to learn, for many, but it is the conclusion that is necessary and inescapable.
It's a long and negative road we take as a species, only to discover that what we knew all along- civilization, rationality, clarity, and humanity- are what we need to obey.
Until then, it's a couple of rocky years while the overt barbarisms- feudalism, plutocracy, authoritarianism, warlordism, nationalism, neocolonialism, fundamentalism, traditionalism (paganism)- continue to fight each other in big runs at domination.
The present is an aberration, a time in which the overt barbarisms have seemingly won and yet have so conspicuously failed at the same time to deliver much of what they promised to their adherents. Only the thieving/plunderings kinds have really done well, and (as I see it) it's only a matter of time before the civilized and the victims go and even out the situation.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
