The Saga of the Stick

Herein is told the ongoing tale of them that do, doing unto them that get done unto.

Going back in time we find . . .Stuck in a perilous situation, homo sapiens grabbed a big stick and started swinging it.

His strategy worked sufficiently for subjugating wild animals and other scary intruders.

With frequent use, wielding of the stick became an habitual strategy for homo sapiens’ survival. Before long, he was expanding his use of the stick as a staff to herd sheep.

By herding sheep and scattering seed, sapiens man was able to survive on a higher level, and so he ascended to a certain  sovereignty over his surroundings.

By ’n by, by finding fire, he discovered he could roast and toast and scald food and in so doing consume stuff more satisfactorily. This utilization of incendiary power also supplied heat sufficient to smelt metals from ores and to cast tools from stones and then to strike utensils for use in shaping a new way of life and ultimately a society.

"Hunters and gatherers we will be," said the shepherds in their new society.

"Shepherds and smelters we shall be," said the scions in their new ascendency.

Such satisfactory progress afforded sapiens some time to ponder the universe he was espousing. Moving right along, sapiens man began scribbling squigglies on  stones, scratching symbols on papyrus, and certainly scrawling scripts on scrolls.

“Scholars and stargazers we shall be”, said the Scions in their ascending hierarchy.

“With swords and sceptres will we assert our sovereignty; with scythes and scripts we shall extend our authority.

Take ye these instruments," said the sovereign to the scion.

"Distribute these scythes and sickles; supply these utensils to yon peasants to scatter and to sow  seeds in our fields.

Take these here symbols and scripts; scribe them upon the hearts of our people and in so doing implant our sovereignty over them. Establish our legendary sacrifices that such may become a sacrament unto them. Sow the seeds of our royalty, and thus harvest surplus with which we shall surely abolish the scourge of scarcity.

Clothe their servitude with civility. Sever their discontent with circuitous servility. With sword and scepter and script shall ye establish our ziggurats of slavery by which we shall  dissemble them in the latest greatest viral-spinning splendors of sensuous satisfaction.

Urge them to spin in circles of superfluity.

Like them and tweet them and retweet them and thus sheepify them, deleting  from them their former certainty and by ’n by  their very liberty.

Cast ye the rising symbols of our datified sovereignty over them.

From search engines squeeze forth pseudos of science, as the tube yieldeth toothpaste until it is rolled and trolled and empty as a zero hero. Quantify and datify and pacify these scruffy malcontents. Render them thereby castrati and technocrati and couchpotatoati. 

Swing ye the sword of censorship upon their scribblous postings while they yet cannot detect our tampering with their turbulent protestations.

Tell them to Get thee to a neutereing nunnery— lest their spurting emissions prolong the cursed progeny of our climate changing catastrophe!

Eliminate their emissions!

Publicize their scandalous commissions!

Narcotify and opiafy and entertainify them until they’ve been sufficiently socialized to binge upon the fodder of fakenews foolishness until the cows come home while the social medias drone on and on.

Stick it to ‘em,” said the hierophant to the sycophant.

Herein was told the the ongoing tale of them that do, doing unto them that get done unto.

So . . . of which group are you?

Glass Chimera

Shades of things to come

"It might have been seventy million years ago that a large asteroid hit the earth somewhere near Cancun. And it might have been that the big space-tossed boulder would have thrown such a cloud of dust and disturbance into the earth’s atmosphere that it probably altered the pecking order of biological kingdoms for thousands or even millions of years thereafter.

Earth shaking events. They happen.

It might have been that the severe rearrangement of earth’s biomes had put a major crimp on the old dinosaurs. Maybe they became like DOS after Microsoft, just slipping down into the dark hidden recesses of the new program, relegated to subterranean, hydrocarbon pools of potential energy, their giant-generating introns and exons having been unraveled and liquefied like the assets of international corpuses and cartels that would later profit from their demise. It might have been that the superbad, supermad totally-rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle could no longer compete with the smaller, sleeker, smarter, uppity mammals who were in the ascendancy and currently favored by the committee for Natural Selection. It might have happened that way. And maybe the superbad supermad totally rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle found themselves faltering, over the next few eons, losing their command of the playing field, becoming more and more baffled at their waning ability to throw their weight around any more, until finally they just, maybe, gave up the ghost and conceded their diminished reptile role to those miniscule, dust-lickin’ mutated cousins who would later distill all that serpentine angst and alienation into a venomous infusion of death—inflictible on those new-kid-on-the-block mammals who were ruining the neighborhood. Equipped with the ugliest, hissingest triangulated head that God ever allowed on a breathin’ creature, these slitherin’ peabrains could nevertheless still proudly carry on, simply by opening their mouths, the dominance and intimidation of their ancestors. Speak of the devil……

“Watch out for the damn snake!” yelled Simon."

from chapter 19 of Glass Chimera

And this just in, Cen0zoically speaking...from Ezekiel, at the River Chebar, among the diasporas:

" Thus says the Lord God, 'Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords--"

"...Persia, Ethiopia, and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet, Gomer with all its troops..."

Stay tuned for more planetary updates on the continuing crisis of Darwinian survival of the fittest on the third rock from the sun.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

the American Dream bah humbug

The simplicity of this American life became vastly complicated when a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage became comfortably obsessive for us. As our post-WWII affluence folded continuously over upon itself, keeping up with the Joneses replaced tending the back forty as moonlighting hubris. As the years rolled by, the good life's credit account steadily inflated while a great internally-combusting bluster of yankee productivity and domesticated our national enterprise beyond the amber meadowlands and the verdant forests, transforming them into manicured lawns and paved driveways with picket fences to ensconce our burgeoning prosperity.
Daddy climbed higher on the corporate ladder while mama kept the home fires burning, and their productive yearning kept those Chevy wheels turning while all the while spurning the hardscrabble life that grampa and granma had left in the dusty clapboard cobwebs of antetheGreatWar memory.
"Moon River, wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style some day," sang Andy Williams, in the 60's just before everything hit the fan.
"In style," sang he, on TV.
As pursuing that 1950s cornucopic good life morphed through the convulsive 60s into the hyped-up 70s and blownup 80s, the commuterized suburban squirrel cagey treadmill produced a financial stress that daddy couldn't quite maintain; so mama went pounding the pavement too, stalking the elusive balanced budget by contributing a second income, and that worked pretty good for several decades until the rest of the world caught on to our picket-fencing ruse and decided to get in the game.
Gail Collins talked about this boomering lifestyle last week in her perpetual discussion with David Brooks. She called it an "unprecedented standard of living." Grampa and granma called it "high on the hog."
Unsustainable standard of living is what it later turned out to be, as many of us ultimately determined by the time that fall of '08 rolled in and the bubble burst.
But a sizable, you might say more introspective segment of the boomers had opted, back in the day, to drop out of the race. They started checking out Mother Earth News in lieu of of Wall Street Journal. I was one of them. However, in my case the effort to get back to the garden that Joni wrote about and CSNY sang about at Woodstock proved to be just as untenable as the keeping up with the Joneses suburban thing. It was just flat-out too much 1930s-type retrogressive, labor-intensive work, and as it turned out my bred-in postwar comfort quotient would not sustain it.
Viewed as dynamics in the Hegelian dialectic, it was something like adopting a drop-out anthithesis to counter the rat-race thesis.
Meanwhile, back at the office, enter the cognitive revolution that David Brooks talks about in his most recent NYT exchange with Gail, linked above. But that development was one that I, caught up in a 25-year routine of carpentry labor and the traditional responsibilities of raising a family, did not check into until much later, because I was, you see, a late bloomer.
A late boomer.
And so, now, the Hegelian dialectic squeezes out--from the clash of postGreatWar affluenc-seeking thesis against postVietnam enlightenment-seeking antithesis--a new synthesis:
It's a back to the future 1930s-style survivalism, but this time with a web-based cognitive revolution twist, and a dash of cloud computing resourcefulness sprinkled in for fun and profit.
The old physical resources that grampa and granma had--the back forty, the iron and the steel, the needle and the wheel, the tinkering with low-tech stuff--now are replaced, or at least supplemented, by winging it across knowledge-based cyber-resources.
Grampa's flea market morphs to our eBay and craigslist. Granma's cottage industry evolves as milking the internet, mommy-networking it like Charlotte spinning her web, weaving opportunities for strategic advantage in acquiring the necessities of life.
And those necessities--they're not what we had earlier expected. Welcome to 2010. As Yogi said, "the future ain't what it used to be." And we're looking more like granny and gramps with every passing day.
I'm betting David was right about the enabling progress of this cognitive revolution thing, though it may need a tune-up after a few years.