Missing inaction

The blog forecast calls for light to no opining for the next two weeks or so, with a chance for occasional squalls if I have the time and the inclination.  Enjoy the break.

If you're looking for something worthwhile to read in the interim, here's an essay (assembled from several speeches) by Joe Bageant—one of a number of people whose writing I don't actively seek out but nonetheless always enjoy when I happen across it.  This is one of the most thought-provoking and insightful things I've seen from him; I've excerpted the (happy) ending below, but it works best as a whole.  If you do take the time to read it I'd be interested to hear what you think.

__________________

[E]ach of us is but one strand in the vast organic web of flesh and blood chlorophyll. All things and all beings are inextricably connected at the most profound level. Any physicist will confirm this. We are bound by its every wave and particle, all of us -- the lonely night clerk at Motel 6 and the leviathans of the deep, the sleeping grandmother in New Haven, Connecticut and the maimed Iraqi child in Kirkuk. It can be understood by anyone though, simply by owning one's own consciousness. And in doing so we find that ownership and domination are both temporary and meaningless. And that the animating spirit of the earth is real and within us and claimable.

The purpose of life is to know this. Einstein glimpsed it. Lao-Tzu knew it. So did St. Francis. But you and I are not supposed to. It would shatter the revered, digitized, super-sized, utterly meaningless hologram. The one that mesmerizes us, and mediates our every experience, but isolates us from universal humanness and its coursing energies. Such as love. Or mercy. Compassion. Existential pain. Hunger. Or the unmitigated joy of simply being alive one finds in children everywhere, even among the poorest. Most of the human race still lives in that realm.

Blessed is the one who joins them. Because he or she learns that the truth is not relative, and that because the human mind seeks balance, social justice is not only inescapable in the long run, but inevitable. I won't be around for that, but on a clear day if I squint real hard I can see down that road ahead. And on that road I can see the long chain of decent human beings like yourselves walking toward the light. And for your very presence on this earth and in this room, I am grateful. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

Comments

[Gnome Chomsky]

Several good points, but way too much teleological thinking, bordering on New Ageism (especially in that happy ending). Frankly, I've heard the whole insipid Romanticist juxtaposition of soulless, atomizing technology vs. the true human spirit so many times I can almost recite it robotically.

[ruddyturnstone]

Really, what self righteous, holier than thou, drivel!

Gandhi can bite me. I have no desire whatsoever to pretend to be a poor person as a sort of field trip excercize in learning the "deeper," "spirtual" lessons of poverty. Poverty sucks. Being poor sucks. The farmers in Guatemala know that, as do the fishermen in the Caribean. Most of them, if given any sort of option, would probably like to "improve" their condition. Certainly, modern India has no shortage of folks who don't find poverty to be so great, and who are working their asses off to escape it. And suffering in general sucks. And it is not enlightening in any way. Poor, suffering Third World persons are at least as likely to hold entirely specious, entirley parochial, and entirely selfish views as the average comfortable First World citizen.

And, please, can the "hologram" bullshit. There is no hologram. There is no "red pill" or "blue pill" or "digitized" whatever. We live in the real world, right here in the USA, just as much as folks in Belize. And, yeah, love, mercy, joy and compassion are great things, and are universal (duh! thanks for the "insight," but most of us here in Babylon already knew that, believe it or not), "pain" and "hunger," on the other hand, much like poverty and suffering, suck, and do no one any good.

And try to keep your nonsense consistent, if you can't do anything else. First, you tell me that I have to "own" my consciousness so that I can see all the trite and cliched "Is not all one?" hippy-dippy, psuedo-zen interconnectedness that you, in all your unoriginality, tell me I'm missing out on. Then, in the next sentence, you tell me that "ownership" is "temporary" and "meaningless." Which is it, oh fortune cookie like fount of wisdom?

In any event, if you prefer Belize to the USA, why don't you just stay there? Why come back to what you obviously don't consider to be "the land of the free" at all? Why re-enter the horrible, inhuman matrix, with its illusions of democracy, its police/prison state reality, its "soul-colonizing" popular culture, its evil Coca Cola, and so forth? Why not stay in Belize, squatting in your hut, with no TV or radio, dressed in (locally made!) rags, eating your seaweed and brown rice, and drinking rain water, while contemplating your navel, secure in the knowledge that you, in your ever so specialness, have managed to escape the degraded, false, consumer-driven, bad, bad corporation-run USA and, like, returned to the land, man?

[Jonathan Versen]

I was fortunate enough to meet Joe when he visited Denton in the fall of 2005 and spoke before a small local group, Peace/Action/Denton. All his essays that I've read are worthwhile, and I wonder if Gnome is basing his comment strictly on the excerpt. Also try "Revenge of the Mutt People".

[Mark Nuckols]

oh good god, what ridiculous claptrap, empty and yet pompous.

Life (my version): outrageously beautiful and engaging GF; interesting foreign interlocutors last night in bar near Kremlin, Serbs, Slovaks, nice Tusisian girl; travels soon to far corners of Ottomman empire, accompanied by intensive studies of relevant histories; fantastic dinner tonight, fresh Caspian salmon; review of Russian. Now that's a rich life.

[Gnome Chomsky]

I read the entire thing, Jonathan.

There was a longer comment that originally followed mine that was a bit more blunt, but pretty accurate, I thought. Where did it go? It didn't get hauled off by the civil-tone police for interrogation, did it?

[Nuckols]

Man, what a douchey AND pompous chunk of blathering

[Harold M]

My own conception of a happy ending is one in which everyone, all six or more billion of us, has the leisure and resources to seriously agonize over the soullessness of the universal petit bourgeois comfort they endure. I could really get into a planetary gripe-fest based on a reverse Yorkshiremen skit.

"We had it light. Kids today, they just don't understand..."

[Nuckols]

oh I see your hero Fruitcake Dennis (D-OH) voted against the climate-change bill. Classy.

[KDelphi]

I think that he is speaking against the "lone wolf individualism" that seems to permeate the West today, especially the US.

But I could be wrong. The "new Libertarians" seem especially enthralled with it, as they blog away on the internet, crying out to be left alone.....

I like Joe. He is a bit New Agey, but I think he is sincere. Some of his stuff is just damn beautiful.

[John Caruso]

Gnome: You may have noticed that the blog's been experiencing a bout of Mark Nuckols lately (similar to mange on a dog), since he's apparently followed me over from ATR. As at ATR, his main purpose here seems to be to see how many variations on "douche" he can come up with as he proves to us how wonderful his life is by spending his time posting pathetic diatribes on left-wing blogs. Like Jon at ATR, I've just been unpublishing his trolling, with a tentative plan to republish it later after its troll value has expired (though some won't even make that cut).

The comment you're talking about looked very much like something posted by Nuckols using one of his many sock puppets, seeing as 1) it was coming from an identity that had never been used here before and 2) the main thing in it was ranting, Tourette's-like hostility, so I unpublished it (like several others he posted on this thread). I admit I'm surprised and dismayed to hear that you found something with gems like "Gandhi can bite me" so worthwhile. In any case, I've since republished it (along with some unambiguous Nuckols trolling) if you want to enjoy it all over again.

Generally speaking, as long as Nuckols is around, I'm going to assume that comments that are filled with obnoxious hostility, personal attacks, and not much else are coming from him, and they may disappear for long stretches (or forever). Also generally speaking, yes, I expect people to be civil in their comments here (though Nuckols-like remedies are most definitely a last resort).