Nowhereville

Nowhereville

by Marco M. Pardi

“There’s a scheme of evasion that has gotten into everybody. It’s as though people were to say: “I get home dog tired after a terrible day out in that jungle, and then I don’t want to think about it. Enough! I want to be brainwashed. I’m going to have my dinner and drink some beer, and I’m going to sit watching tv until I pass out – because that’s how I feel.” That means people are not putting up a struggle for the human part of themselves.” Saul Bellow. “Matters Have Gotten out of Hand”. In A Violent Society.

All comments are welcome and will receive a response.

In 1965 the Beatles released their song, Nowhere Man. I suggest we all Google that title and read the lyrics. It will take you only a moment.

Even in those years, the 1960’s, I wondered if the United States was reaching – or had reached, the upper limits of what holds a society together. As we ran from pillar to post, one social crisis after another, we felt we were seeing every institutional pillar of society being exposed as weak, fractured, delusional, built on sand. For many, the “Good Old Days” took on a reality they never for a moment had. Alvin Tofler captured our fear in his book Future Shock, the examination of how the increasingly rapid pace of social change was outpacing our ability to cope with, or even understand it. People withdrew into enclaves of fantasy, long running television series, “New Age” groups – which touted themselves at outwardly focused but were instead simple grottoes for the alienated, “Eastern” religions, “witchcraft” – falsely portrayed as “The Old Religion” but simply a fantasy of personal and/or group power, “swingers” groups, and etc.

As could be predicted, most of these ran their course and were either replaced or marginalized, especially as social fantasy gaming emerged; Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy Sports teams, and eventually the baffling plethora of internet based games. Far less often we heard the once common question, “Who’s minding the store?”

It could also be predicted, and was, that the accelerating growth of distractions – amusement and calamities alike, would blind the American people to the formation and emergence of the American Fascist Party, in the guise of what used to be the Republican Party. (Just yesterday Trump’s SA, the Sturmabteilung popularly known as “Conservative Republicans”, stormed into a a private Congressional chamber to disrupt the testimony of a witness in the current impeachment inquiries. Ironically, several of the Sturmtruppen had already been invited into the hearing but chose to enter with their fellow Braunhemden. )

With the attention of so many Americans vacuumed into their now ubiquitous devices: tablets, smart phones, i-pads, i-pods, blueteeth, noise canceling and reality filtering headphones, etc., information about the nature and the ramifications of social change is increasingly an annoyance, meriting a grunt of uh huh, or “fake news”.

But returning to games, as of this writing one of the most amusing metaphors of American life is currently dominating television: the “World Series” of baseball. Since teams from no other countries have ever played in this series I always wondered why it was called the World Series. As I got older I came to understand American hubris.

I should first say that what I know about sports could be inscribed on the head of a pin, and not displace a single angel. And, I do not watch baseball since I very much dislike watching players and coaches chaw and chomp with open mouths as they spit and vomit various materials all over themselves and the playing field. This year the teams are the Washington Nationals versus the Houston Astros. If chawing and spitting is the predictor of victory, the Astros have it won as they did so all through the National Anthem.

In the context of Naomi Klein’s new book – discussed below – I was struck by the juxtaposition of a team from Houston, the epi-center of the planet-destroying fossil fuel industry versus a team from Washington D.C., the governmental center of the one nation on Earth with the most power to stop the destruction from that industry.

When we look at the history of the fossil fuel industry, particularly oil and gas, we see an ongoing march in which, as the industry grew, it progressively bought the U.S. government. It has shaped everything from domestic environmental policy to foreign policy and the decisions of where and how Americans will die in armed combat. It sets our moral standards as we look the other way from the death and butchering of a critic of an oil producing foreign partner and we fatally pollute the air, water, and food which sustains our own children. The currently ongoing attempt by the Houston Astros to subdue and conquer the Washington Nationals is American policy writ large. And the band plays on.

I’ve reproduced below the publisher’s review of the new book by Naomi Klein. I’ve read her other books and they have a prominent place in my library. Ms. Klein should have a prominent place in our collective mind. I would vote for her as President, but she is Canadian. It should be instructive that the Trump regime has just filed suit against the State of California for partnering with Canada in an effort to mitigate the horrendous damage to the planet’s air quality, especially in the wake of the regime’s roll-back of the Clean Air Act.

On Fire: The Case for a Green New Deal. By Naomi Klein.

“#1 international and New York Times bestselling author Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything , makes the case for a Green New Deal–explaining how bold climate action can be a blueprint for a just and thriving society. For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet–and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, she pens surging, indispensable essays for a wide public: prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices. These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now,” to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of “climate barbarism,” this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented “ecological conversion,” Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis. An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.” 

So, this isn’t a video game. We can’t just control-alt-delete our way out of this death spiral. It seems many have misunderstood the meaning of Wu Wei, the concept developed by Kong Fu-Xi (“Confucius”), taking it simply as the benign “doing of nothing”.

We can no longer afford the Nowhere Man; Nowhereville is where we go to die, taking everything with us. A slogan which emerged in the 1960’s, and still rings true today was, “If you are not saying No, you are saying Yes.”

Of course, speaking up has its risks. Just today I received an email from Sharon Wilson, an environmental advocate, detailing how a fossil fuel company took her to court on false charges after she exposed their utterly poor environmental record. Even as I write this I wonder how many readers will accept that as a warning to keep their mouths shut and their communication devices tuned to other things.

I’ve been a wanderer all my life, but everywhere I’ve been is Somewhereville even though I’ve not always liked the human inhabitants.