By Rowan Wolf
Maybe my brain is overloaded, or my life is over the edge, but my ability to focus this morning seems like a lost cause. I look at the news from around the world, as I do almost everyday. Usually themes and connections arise, but today, what keeps running through my brain is stupid. It is the dumb, wrong-headed things that keep emerging.
It makes no difference whether the topic is the environment where we get such selections as:
Heat Waves to Worsen Across America, Europe - Study - the heat is on, we have a chance to change it, but we keep generating more global warming gases;
to Pollutants cause huge rise in brain diseases - yes Charlie Brown we really are destroying ourselves with the better life through chemicals approach;
to Al Gore's review of Glebspan's new book "Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis--And What We Can Do to Avert Disaster" - in which Gore forgets to even mention the title of the book. Gore tells us that Glebspan argues there is a conspiracy among the fossil fuel giants (and their pawns) to keep the public dumb and the world on a climate collision course. Boy that's new news.
Or how about those investigations into the torture of prisoners? On one hand we have a U.S. court ordering the government Give Rights Groups Torture Papers - and of course the papers are not appearing;
meanwhile the British court admits evidence gained by torture - let's legitimate the use of torture shall we?
And guess what, only 30 years behind, but three Vietnamese citizens are suing US firms over damage caused by Agent Orange - maybe the U.S. government should join the suit. It might smooth relations with Vietnam.
Forgive my downbeat reporting. I can't seem to get beyond "Duh" this morning.
Similar sensibility over here ... particularly following a Friday night viewing of "The Corporation," and a particularly interesting slug of readings from my Utopia to Dystopia class.
Even twentieth-century modernist literature seems to echo the languishing idea that we are killing ourselves. This quote from the end of D.H. Lawrences "Women in Love," struck me as apropos to this feeling of an environmental, social and political avalanching:
"If humanity ran into a cul de sac, and expended itself, the timeless crative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation [that is if anything is left of this planet] ... To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery ... Human or inhuman mattered nothing."
I just find that a haunting notion. I look ahead to a paradigm shift ...