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Paging Dr Demonization

By Owen Paine on Tuesday July 24, 2007 10:23 AM

You know They have got ya when all possible directions ahead out there look bad -- real bad.

Example : the present rampantly destructive pattern of global trade flows. Both sets of American elites tout some version of a better world tomorrow through wider-open borders. But we all know -- or at least, judging by the polls, more know than don't – that this win-win parade is more like a nonstop go-everywhere raiding party that leaves huge lose-lose blocks of mortal souls in its wake. And its producers, the mighty transnational corporations, have been at this earth-wide rodeo-ing so long, and with so little durably effective opposition, that any set of progressive policies aimed at more then amelioration look like bath houses for sadistic blood sports. So re-taking the planet from the present management seems not only wildly daunting, but full of hideous choices.

Once you see that every corporate scam has taken hostages, millions of hostages, and has formed millions more human shields around themselves, one ends up realizing any road ahead -- I mean any road that runs really ahead, not just sideways into more of the same old shit, only worse -- will bulldoze huge masses of entirely un-culpable folks. Oceans of innocent blood will be spilt, and sweat poured out to no end, and all inevitably pitted against each other -- such is the harvest of our interdependent civilized integrated world.

Try to find a metric for carving that up, you would-be Benthams and Rawlses! Try weighing existing US wagelings against third world wannabe wagelings; or letting in more undocs, vs. letting more plants run away; or stripping more forests, vs. starving more peons.

These are not necessities that a proper pro-little-people cosmopolite can readily make, without a demonization kit to be used on one or the other set of mortal souls. My point? Ain't got one today. I had a stomach for it yesterday and I'll likely have one tomorrow again. On the world-historical scale, I don't stay Buridan's Ass for long.

But on occasional moments like now -- at the bottom of my mind's basin, the earth's present free-for-all commercial setup just makes me shake my head in grimbletudination.

These are not choices we face here and now -- they're ways to condemn ourselves to spiritual hell. But even as I write these last few words -- some weird Miltonic echo of Satan's up-against-it rally-hoo on that last day in heaven, facing that grotesquely overawing and charismatic Jesus battlewagon, lifts me up and back into the struggle.

Comments (5)

bobw:

You ARE in a tough spot, OP -- "better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven!"

Truly, I dont think we (progressive Americans) have a hell of a lot to do with shaping events in the next 50 years. Resistance is going to come from other people, and from contradictions within the imperial machine. We dont have the money, the will or the ideology to run the world. One way or another, we (the nation) are headed for a humbler role. Where the transnational corps end up in this scenario, I dont know.

Brian:

That's the problem. Do you say f*&^% it all and just go off to a corner of the world relatively untouched (a la Joe B.), doing what you can to ameliorate the lives in the smaller circle around you?

What are the solutions? Maybe there are no big solutions, no easy ideologies? Maybe that's where the Anarchist Hobbits have it right-"just leave us alone." But how can that happen when the big boys control so much, and their inevitable wars cause so much destruction.

I'm just babbling. Sorry. :(

op:

babbles 'bout all we got right now brian
so babble away ....

bobw:

Maybe we need a good dose of repression that drives us all underground and makes us speak in irony, like the writers in Eastern Europe under Communism. Since I dont really want that, I think we should babble, but wittily, so that later generations admire our subversive courage.

op:

as a dia-mat guy

bobw

my immortal soul is of no signifigance

i hire out
for other purposes
then a seat in God's azure choir

the ultimate future
will not be on my tv

the class judgement day
is a poetic compression...
like one of the 7 days
of creation

not like noah's 40 days and 40 nites

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