Foto by tgw, New York City, 2009.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Modern Times Nostradamus
I look in the mirror--a deceitful reflection I'll admit--and see a soothsayer. A prescient. OK, I've admitted I'm trained to observe matters and using the statistical tools of my profession from my noted observations determine probabilities and possibilities. But this goes beyond sociological guesstimating. Sociological thinking is based on playing with hypotheses composed of givens (random samples) and then writing an unbiased account of the determinations you reached with your statistical values and at what point on the continuum of societal existence we human monkeys seem to be. Methods I learned to use and expressed in my own terms in grad school through theses and dissertations and then suffering the scrutiny in abominable seminars with maniac fellow students and tenure-mad professors mincing terms in thinking you clearly observed as backwards thinking--like thinking in one of the cycles of history at that brief (in historical time) moment when as Hegel deduced the cyclical manner of history is repeating itself. Everything we are seemingly hidebound to do is a repetition of what we've already done--the only way we have realized how to do things--right or wrong. Human animals can't seem to walk upright without crutches.
I look in the mirror--a deceitful reflection again I'll admit--and see the future as if it were contained in a crystal ball (actually a see-through planet). I don't SEE DOOM. I see a MOOD.
We are in this MOOD now. This is not to say that we aren't DOOMED. We are. There's no way around that prophecy. Our true God, our Sun, according to George Gamow, the Odessa, Russia-born American cosmologist (involved in the discovery of DNA) in his masterpiece The Birth and Death of The Sun, is "burning out"--which means in human monkey language: it's dying. So as the Sun, our true God, dies, so die we and so die our animal relatives and our plant relatives and our bacterial relatives. THOUGH, not so dies the earth--the earth will twirl on, perhaps blowing a bit off course as it perhaps goes about seeking another SUN. Is the earth a living entity? According to my soothsaying abilities I say Yes. Does the earth have feelings? I'll let you figure that one out.
You say, "C'mon, Wolf Man, we've got 5 million more years before we have to worry about God dying...." I even have a theory of where the "sign [or image] of the cross" came from in religious legend. You ever notice how the sun makes a cross when it is shining through clouds? It's rays stretching out horizontally like the arms of a cross--the vertical beams short at the top and long at the bottom, just like the upright beam of a timber cross. Symbolism. Semiotics. L Hat and the linguists can give a literal meaning to that. Do I not make sense? Good, that's my purpose as a soothsayer. I don't have to make sense to get my point on the continuum across.
I once sat through a 2-hour spiel, you couldn't call it a talk, you couldn't call it a lecture, by one of the great brains of my time--actually the end of his time--I love ironies--Buckminster Fuller, the madman architect who invented the geodesic dome in the late 1940s because he had forecast in 1927 a housing shortage, which we did have in the early 50s, after WWII and soldiers with down payments for homes through the FHA and the GI Bill were gobbling up any little house they could find or any little plot of land they could afford to build a prefab home on. And up grew the prefab home business in this country. Companies that used to make trailer houses started making prefabricated homes. They'd truck these homes to your lot and next thing you know, you had a new house. Bucky meant for his geodesic dome houses to be moveable feasts.
And during this 2-hour lecture (it was at one of radio station WBAI-FM's "Free Music Stores" held in the station's old church studios in the East 60s during the early 1970s--so I'm sure there is a copy of his speaking in their archives), the only thing I understood Bucky to say was that the beginning of the universe had been like us picking up a cottonwood tree seed pod and blowing on it (like the Big Bang blew on the original neophyte cluster of exploding stars). When you do, those little cotton-covered cottonwood seeds go sailing off into space. Then Bucky continued by saying our earth was like one of those cotton-covered cottonwood seeds. In fact, Bucky expanded his thoughts, the earth was actually a spaceship onto which life spores attached, those life spores becoming over billions of years US, all us animals, all us plants, all us bacteria, all us fungi, etc. That stuck to me as certainly a possibility. I knew there were space winds and even still spores blowing in space winds. I used to listen to the songs of the universe; they used to be broadcast over short-wave radio by several radio-telescopes--the biggest bank of these listening-device dishes set on a mountaintop in Puerto Rico. They broadcast the sounds of the universe and those sounds were usually to my ears the sound of winds--and too there are solar winds. We are orbiting in the wind. We are blowin' in the wind.
We are spores who gained form and in this form we now call human beings we are still preaching escape from our spaceship earth--we are running out of room on it--besides it's old and getting a little wobbly as it sucks up its energy from its God, too, the Sun. Plus it's now under attack from outer-space barrages of asteroids (better weapons of mass destruction than our puny nuclear devices).
Another thing Bucky said that night that I understood. He said we were and would always be of the generation we were born into--which to Bucky meant the TIME we were born--you know the day, month, and year. He said we were trapped in the time we were born and the time we started realizing (attributing a personality to ourselves) and trying to understand everything from putting words to what we started seeing, then putting words to the sounds what we were seeing made, or putting words to the feelings we felt erupting from out of our instincts as we starting talking and working things out through words (identification of symbols) to then analyzing in a childlike way what was our reason for being (for me I almost know the exact time I started realizing and reasoning out existence--I was born a Sociologist--curious, wanting immediate explanations--explanations that a 2-year-old could understand).
Acceleration, according to Bucky Fuller was what propelled us; propelling us through what we've invented and named TIME. A time continuum in our invented space, too. Time the way of measuring our lives--and we are the only animals who do this--except elephants seem to know when it's their time to die and they accept it just as an old Native American Aleut grandma used to know when it was time to go out onto the far distant ice to await the coming inevitable. Out on the wind-swept ice.
All of this to ask, wasn't I right in my last post about Obama's State of the Disunion Address? Isn't he trapped in the backward thinking of his generation? Backward thinking also the thinking of our backward-thinking Congress.
Before the speech I watched all these clean-cut, well-groomed, well-suited-and-tied, healthy-looking Congress people and their follow-along asskissing lackeys going around gladhanding each other. Then when Obama trotted out to give his speech all the lackeys lined up wanting recognition from him, wanting to shake his hand, one black woman wearing semi-African garb demanding he kiss her--then other District of Corruption babes wanting kisses--and Obama was grinning like the Cheshire Cat he is--once stopping to whisper something to his old pal Timmy Boy Geithner--I assume now, sociologically that is, the President was assuring Timmy Boy he would be renominated (did anybody think he wasn't going to be?) in spite of the phony grilling he got when he testified before Congress on his shady dealing with his old pals at Goldman-Sachs and AIG. (Have you noticed how Timmy Boy's head is huge?--it sits like a wrecking ball on his otherwise skinny-structured body.) Though Timmy Boy was made a total fool of by his Congressional opponents, it was obvious by his "set in stone" reply no one would dare not renominate him to continue destroying our economy--giving it over to his Corporate constituents, now considered individuals by our Supreme Court. Timmy's defense of his wreckless use of our Treasury is if we hadn't have bailed out these financial pirates we would have had another Great Depression. Timmy "Big Head" Boy responded in the way he was taught to talk at the Dartmouth Spoiled-brat Rich Sons School of Civil Service. By bailing out all these crooked sons of bitches, Timmy Boy chortled on, HE and OBAMA had avoided a failure of the whole fucking system; he and Obama had saved CAPITALISM. And, of course, this was followed by the bullshit that the economy had recovered, the stock market was dancing up and down making the rich richer, and, yes, unemployment has shot up another 10th of a percent, and, yes, housing foreclosures are up, and, yes, more people than ever are losing their jobs, and, yes, we are spending 20-million-dollars-a-day on two illegal wars--and how many more millions-a-day on the Military Industrial Complex's defense of democracy and freedom--yes to all of that, but still, at least we didn't lose Capitalism!
And speaking of repeating history--look how these creeps who are ruling us today totally ignore Eisenhower's warning about military spending (George Washington gave a similar speech). And, did you notice that Obama managed to get Reagan's name into his speech--comparing JFK and Reagan in terms of economics? Holy Christ this guy is a Reaganomics freak--we're doomed, folks--fuck the mood, we're just flat plain doomed.
Also, have you noticed these backwards thinkers avoid talking about the VietNam War? You notice that? Actually Obama was a kid during the VietNam War. But he lived in Hawaii. Hawaii was still a military base in those days--before the Japanese bought up all the beach property and built row after row of look-alike hotels all over the Hawaii Island coastline--like check out photos of Wikiki Beach in the late 40s and early 50s and then check out photos of it today. So now you see why Obama keeps saying he's refusing to look backwards and only think in terms of our future--of course that's a LONG-TERM future--but, hey, he's covering his disappointing ass.
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After one hell of a wonderful time out on the Gotham town last night (with a woman I wolfishly adore--a woman who had me wolfishly howling like a mad lover at that big full moon that hung over Manhattan last night)--I woke up this morning to see on the Firefox headlines we may be alas at war with China! China is really pissed at us. Why? Because the stupid fucking jerks in the Pentagon have insisted Obama send millions of dollars worth of military industrial complex arms to Taiwan--in payment for that phony nation's asskissing loyalty to Capitalism and the American way. After all, it was we who allowed old Chiang Kai-Shek to get his murderous ass out of the New China under a ruthless Mao Tse-tung and escape to the beautiful island of Formosa--thus its name. So what did old Kuomintang Chiang do? Why he massacred the Formosans, took over their island, and renamed it the Republic of China--or Taiwan for those of you who have no idea where Taiwan came from. History repeats itself.
We've for years used Taiwan as a buffer zone of thwart in an effort to get into a face-to-face military contact with the world's largest armed forces. We have been itching for a conflict with China since they as we said interfered in our efforts to massacre and eliminate the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, Uncle Ho's true Vietnamese people's movement. We hate people's movements in this country. Have you noticed? Anything that has "people" in it we go after it to bite its head off. Yep, we are nation of geeks. That's why Dr. Hunter Thompson blew his brains out rather than try and exist in in this rotting society.
Me, I'm not going to blow my brains out. I love the challenge of living. I'm mean, if I'm dead, how am I going to enjoy and have such fun loving such an out-of-this-world woman as I had in my company last eve? Man, the real meaning of love goes a long way in combating backward-thinking-loveless-thinking living in a loveless society we are expected, on the verge of being ordered, to live loveless in.
I'm getting too romantic. Most Sociologists are romantics.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
By the Way: If you want the best analysis of Obam-bam's State of the U address, check out what Joe Bageant (he reads The Daily Growler, what do you bet?):
www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/01/the-annotated-obama.html
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