Bienenstich: Modernity is Honeycombed with Poisonous Pricks. .

Chasing the dream  has become a nightmare.

If you look at the globe at night, especially around the Korean peninsula, the darkness suggests that the answer to climate change is staring you in the face: Communist Dictatorship. That's one of the main reasons the GOP starkly refuses to admit there's a problem. Because they know the solution, as the rise of the Compassion-less Conservatism foisted as Bible belt in the mouth Christianity makes plain, will kill the cornucopia of capitalistic overproduction, overcapacity and overpopulation on which it thrives. A cornucopia that has, for the last couple of generations, been run on the fumes of over-militarization, arms sales, drug addiction, and the devastating wars and climate catastrophes that goose the goose that lays the golden dregs for we the people who refuse to come to terms with the tragedy we're living through.

While half the population pretends there is no such thing as climate change, the other half pretends that the very same corporations they work for, so don't dare question, and which have no legal responsibility to anything but their shareholders' "value", will somehow, using the magic of science, the same science that created every one of the dilemmas with which we are faced, devise a technological "fix" to "save our Planet" or "save the Earth", two of their favorite phrases, neither of which makes the least bit of sense. The first one, because it is most decidedly not "our" planet to save, and secondly because it is not the earth that needs saving, as it isn't in the least bit jeopardized by mankind's machinations.

All life on it may be in peril, but like any other planet, the earth itself has no need of life existing on its surface for it to continue its billions-years-journey around the sun. A burnt-out husk flies through the vacuum of space quite as easily as one teeming with life: the orb in orbit cares not a whit. Whether men are from Mars and Women from Venus, neither left a sphere capable of supporting complex lifeforms. Where you're from matters not at all, where you are, however, and how you live, considering the constraints of reality thus imposed, matters quite a lot, and everything that matters is energy.

Earth has a perfect balance, a stasis that has maintained itself for millennia, one that made the evolution of life possible, that the beast called man was discontent with, and therefore engineered a different reality: one that took as little account of that stasis as was possible while still being able to plan crop plantings and waste disposal.

Let's go back up for that worldview, but maybe not look at North Korea. Let's look across the Pacific a little ways east where we espy the brightly lit islands of Japan, a country that has, to keep it shining through those dark nights, for an entire generation and a half, been spurring its economy to unnatural production, employing millions to do "busy work" that has nothing to do with meeting their own needs, serving at the behest of "the economy", even as that economy sucks its life's blood out of it, and now irradiates it with an ever-growing array of nucleotides being spewed from melted nuclear reactor cores slowly, unstoppably, irredeemably shedding radioactive particles whose eventual home is in the soil of Japan and the seas surrounding it.

That's the price of freedom. It's never paid by those enjoying it, because, at its heart, freedom means exactly what the cynical Republicans claim it means: the freedom to crush those less powerful and take their sustenance and enslave their offspring so that their labor goes toward Your comfort: that's how a Madeleine Albright, a Secretary of War in the guise of a Secretary of State, insisting that more murder of innocent children is needed, can claim that half a million Iraqi children, dead from sanctions, is akin to lawyers at the bottom of the sea: a good start. 

On this 100'th anniversary of the carnage of the first mechanized maelstrom of madmen referred to as the Great War, it might be helpful to ponder the fact that 18 millions were killed, followed by roughly 18 millions more from the epidemic that followed hard on its heels, then the free market madness of exaltation that followed and the crackup that ensued, resulting in the destruction of yet another 70 millions or so, give or take a few million here and there. But don't despair. A mere century afterwards the human population has so catastrophically overshot the planet's capacity to support it and its multifarious animals and destructive machinery, that had those conflagrations and orgies of slaughter not taken  place, they would be in full swing right now, instead of being at the incipient stage we see them.

It was only after her murder that we discovered my sister was keeping a secret diary. At twenty-six, she was a single mother, living in a Lowell tenement, and unemployed. Her last entry sounds like mankind's, it was written on her birthday, June 12:

"I felt a bit better in the afternoon, but the good days are so few and far between. There is no one I can talk to as I'd like to. That's why I decided to put everything down on paper. When my condition hits me, I'm incapable of anything, the least little thing is extremely difficult for me. Everything I see when I'm in that state provokes new thoughts which I am unable to shake off, and then I'm agitated and have difficulty making myself do anything. I get terribly wound up, and still I can't do anything, for instance: when I wake up in the morning I don't feel like getting up at all; but I make myself and I try to encourage myself. Even getting dressed is an ordeal. Because so many things are going though my mind I am continually obsessed with the idea of doing something badly and causing damage. Even something as simple as making breakfast; when I leave a piece of bread in the toaster too long and cause it to smoke, I take fright, and have to check and see that nothing has caught, in case I burn something up and cause a conflagration. And that's how it is all day long: everything I need to do seems terribly difficult, and when I force myself to try and accomplish it, in spite of trying to be quick about it, it seems to take forever. So the day passes, and I don't do anything, because every little action demands so much thought. When in spite of all my efforts, I still can't cope, I fall into despair and cry. I have always suffered from this condition, the first time it appeared in my life I was only sixteen. My parents took it  all for playacting. When I was twenty-four I tried to end my life, but I was rescued. At that time I hadn't had any for a long time.

For the past week I've been doing very badly again. I don't know what will become of me if it lasts like this. I think if I was alone in the world I would turn on the gas without another thought, but I can't do that to my darling girl. I really hope I get a grave illness which will carry me off. I have written everything down the way I really feel."

And now we're all like her. Unable to veer off the path our economic engine is speeding us down, leaves the most sensitive and aware individuals blinded by the headlights of the onrushing dreadnought threatening everything, plastic straws or no. For it is these driblets of hope, promising our own actions can make a difference, that trickle like rusted water from a lead pipe, that amount to  nothing but empty sweets proffered to hungry children when it is protein they need. But if you drive less you thrive less, if you conserve energy, you don't deserve energy, if you care about the earth, you don't bother to give birth. Thus can we learn from the Native Americans who have spilled their blood over the continent they thought was their home, trying to live the lives the planet could support even unto its end. This the Europeans, staggering drunk on their own superiority, eschewed, instead enslaving the world to provide for them, as God saw fit.

And even to this day, each of the world's major religions, the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, are all full-bore participants in the overblown, obscene materialism they preach against from one side of their mouths while sucking tax-free dollars in with the other, labeling themselves "moral" because they object to homo relations while eagerly supplying the cannon fodder and slave units necessary to feather their own opulent nests and those of their Corporate owners. Lambasting sex while sanctioning murder; outlawing prostitution while prostituting the deities they profess to worship as avatars of destruction; hell-bent on banning abortion while wiping out entire populations of innocents, and this they have the effrontery to call "religion".  Each time you hear a secular leader commanding the deity to "God bless America" you are hearing profanity. You are hearing a lay moron use blasphemy as a tool of military enslavement, dragging the name of the lord thy god through the muck in order to justify their own use of brutal, lethal force to stomp their enemy-of-the-week into the earth.

"God bless", whether "you" or "America", is not a polite request, a humbly pleaded endearment used to flatter before entreating for some special attention from a beloved deity. It is an order, delivered perfunctorily and half-hardheartedly to the One. In other words: profanity. Because in actuality, when the name of the deity is so slip-shoddily used in such an off-handed way, with more casualness in exercising your right to command than if god were nothing more than your dog, it reduces its stature to that of a servant, a ghost to be manipulated for your individual, selfish whims, and such verbal exhibitions of desecration of Holy awesomeness is, when indulged in by one of the so-called faithful, nothing less than blasphemy. In fact, the President of the United States saying, "God bless America" is the very definition of blasphemy ... Look:

blasphemy ... synonyms:    profanity, sacrilege, irreligion, irreverence, taking the Lord's name in vain, swearing, curse, cursing, impiety, desecration:

"the nuns would punish me at least three times a week for my blasphemy"

So as you see, simply taking the lord's name in vain is blasphemy, yet that is not even close to actually ordering it around, since so doing not only hints, but outright claims, that you believe you have the ability to call down either the Blessing or the Wrath of the creator of the universe, who's presumably just silver-surfing around the vacuum of space waiting for the next gig you deign to offer it. Yeah, you see, a pagan can say that, or an atheist, but if a professed Religionist says it? Pure blasphemy. Truly religious people used to stone such perpetrators, not sing hosannas to them, nor join in the sacrilege of ordering the divine to intervene in their sacrilege, which murder and war, purposely contrived privation, and destruction of entire species amounts to. But two members of the same sex holding hands? That evil must be redressed. Love, like everything else that actually is sacred and moving upon the surface of the earth, must be killed, squashed like an ant under the jackboot of Progress. For the greater glory of God. (Blasphemy!)

Every native American knows this, but every Native American knows even more than this: that treading softly on the beloved earth yourself, while others use all the weapons and tools of modern science to tear its very face off, will leave you walking softly on a burnt-out husk, a smoking ruin incapable of either supporting life or healing itself. There is no salvation for non-participation. Au contraire! Reservations have already been made for you.

As we mark the hundredth anniversary of the mechanized carnage we now know WW1 was merely the amateur hour for, we're given, yet once more, the opportunity to see how a species, one endowed with reason, one that considers itself to be rational, is as helpless as the Nez Perce to halt the killing machine that's been purposely constructed to impose full-spectrum abomination onto mankind. Europeans, now calling themselves Americans, once again readying themselves, this time from different shores, to go at each other with bared fangs of steel honed to a razor's sharp edge on the strop of Nationalism and ready to rip open the throats of anyone having the temerity to oppose them. We have all been invested with the title Knight of the Long Knives, our appetites for slaughter whetted by austerity, the nightmare of  Austerlitz folded into our vision of the future as softly as whipped egg whites into a souffle. One that's already been set into a pre-heated oven. The future's baked in, even a minute disturbance can make everything we've whipped up collapse and fall.

Maybe that's why marijuana's being made legal all over the place: it seems as though there's nothing we can do anymore but get baked.