DESIRE-A-DAY

Welcome to the poem-a-day club. I’d like to think it’s ‘automatic writing’, but no, it’s work. Automatic writing was all the rage for a while with the Dadaists and surrealists and psychics and psychoanalysts looking for shortcuts to the ‘inner self’, as if what’s there might simply be downloaded on to paper. That was a golden age for art and literature and even science, too, the years 1900-30, the age of relativity, quantum, cubism, surrealism, pragmatism, positivism, and more, literally an age of knowledge that we have yet to supersede, despite all our technology. Those were the good old days of silly-eyed optimism and belief in endless progress. Now that we’re swimming in the fruits of that progress, we don’t know what to do with it. We’ll probably end up blowing it, arguing about who gets the biggest piece of the pie, without appreciating the fact that the pie didn’t even exist a century ago. I lived in a house during my childhood that wouldn’t even be considered ‘livable’ by middle class standards in the US now, regardless of the fact that my father died in a house very similar, by choice. Desires are somehow very adept at keeping up with the Joneses.

THE OTHER HALF

Half the world is using technology that they didn’t create and might never have created without it dropping into their laps. This makes one wonder if they can feel the same responsibility for it as those who did. It’s not the US, UK, France, Russia, or even China that’s likely to launch a nuclear missile, it’s countries like Iran or Libya with money to spare and axes to grind. It’s not the developed countries whose washes are filled with plastic and cheap aluminum; it’s the third world. It’s not the industrial countries whose drivers take their motorbikes to the sidewalks or come down the wrong side of the street because they couldn’t figure out why the chicken crossed the road; it’s Thailand and Indonesia and Vietnam, countries with more motorbikes than brains. Think about that before you let the genie of genetic modification out of the bottle.

CARGO CULTS

The cargo cults demand obedience.  The cargo cults demand sacrifice.  The gods of the cargo cult are jealous gods.  More more bigger bigger, you have to build a longer runway to attract the jet planes of the really important gods with the really important goods.  Entire populations build symbolic ports and harbors to place upon altars in their own private homes to placate the restless gods looking for devotees to reward and the ignorant to punish.  Consumerism is a jealous god, a god without face nor gender, just legal tender, no idols nor idleness.  Hard unceasing work is the ultimate sacrifice, the only thing that will placate the spirit of a God with no name, only number.  These gods drink sweat, not blood, and count their conquests in sales, not souls.  The only conversions allowed are for currency, the arbitrage of circumstance, prostitution to a higher god, complete immersion in the blood of money, the word of the book of the united states of sacrifice.  Leave if you can and don’t look back.  The whore of Babylon disobeys and receives her Lot; Saddam and Gomer and Bin and Tony share a bed of their own making, the fearsome foursome caught in the act of the sins of their fathers, sharing shallow graves in empty deserts, forbidden fruits long gone to seed and drifted elsewhere, leaving the trees of life to their own devices.

LCD’s

With the Industrial Revolution gradually came Consumer Culture, the age in which we live.  In reality there is no explanation for the Industrial Revolution, though Protestantism, capitalism, and mercantilism all played roles.  It was a cultural mutation that couldn’t have been predicted, a ‘brilliant mistake’ like much of evolution, biological or cultural.  It’s even getting prettier now with multi-colored Internet screens limited only by speed and memory, prettier but dumber.  We’re dumbing ourselves down to lowest common denominators, LCD’s with flat screens and multiple display options.  The more technology we get, the dumber we become, victims of our own progress, even the technicians ignorant of the Big Picture.  Will they even believe it millions of years from now when they go digging around and start pulling up televisions and cars that must have been created somewhere between the fourth and fifth glacial stages?