Continued on the Death page

Hail To The Chief

                It's a good sign the world's still barbaric that almost every feather bonneted chief of state still thinks he must confront his neighbors with a strong military. It shows he's tough!
        Chiefs without coasts command navies. Chiefs of tiny countries without enemies command airforces. Chiefs elected by pacifists, once empowered, cry "national security" and take command of their own 30,000 troops. Tough!
        And all the tribal editors, whose pay checks are traceable to the arms industry, love most to hail their black or white or woman war chiefs by the talismanic adjective, tough.
        Waa wa wa wa wa! Waa wa wa wa wa! Waa wa wa wa wa! Waa wa wa wa wa! Waa wa wa wa wa! Waa wa wa wa wa! WAH!

Glen Roberts

Hitting The Walls

         While the universe has to be infinite because it can't have edges, an Earth with no edges to sail over is nevertheless finite and locked in by hard factual walls against which a Colombian humanity sailing ever and arrogantly onward had to at last crack up.
       Whoopee! We did it (decades ago)! The proof is overwhelming to anyone but the deliberately and stubbornly deaf and dumb. Good grief! The ice caps are melting. Ozone holes, acid rain (HEY! ACID rain), and pollution of everything pollutable are rapidly increasing. Deserts are spreading. Large lakes are dying - or dead. Whole rivers are poisoned and even flammable. Water tables are sinking and turning salty. Forests, coral reefs, birds, animals, and fish are disappearing. Vital resources are becoming precious. And ALSO, while timidly talking about it excuses us from talking about anything else, the ecosphere is dangerously warming, TOO.
       Meanwhile, excess human numbers, the cause of the catastrophe, are growing faster than ever. The asphalt and concrete deserts of the human encampment are spreading faster than humanity. Once-wild, now rapidly developing and growing countries are demanding resources already overgrown countries thought were theirs. Refugees of wars for space and resources are flooding across all the borders.
       And politicians, who aren't philosophers and became politicians only to be bigshots and get the influence to smooth the way for their businesses to "freely" GROW and make them and their friends richer suddenly have to deal with a reality they've never even acknowledged in which "free" growth and blind human business activity have deadly limits and consequences. And they don't know what to do.
       They thought they wanted more people to sell things to - "the more the merrier." They thought "freedom" and "growth" "made the world go 'round." But they were blind to the real world's finite size and limits and unprepared for the mathematical results when the separate whirling edges of all the separate ever-growing merry-go-rounds, none of whose politician operators gave a shit about each other, filled and then jammed and then exceeded their no-longer separate spaces and gridlocked.
       Now the mythical national boundaries they foolishly took seriously are overlapping and disintegrating, and the real natural physical limits of "free" enterprise they've always foolishly dismissed are in the way and their"free" business juggernauts are piling up and they aren't prepared for it because they never thought about such things before and they don't know what to do.
       So Senator Cheerful and Governor Forceful and Secretary Slick, when asked by reporters, turn out not to HAVE an immigration policy or an energy policy that has anything to do with the real world. They always thought the world would stay the way they used to think it was. They thought a packet of signed and stamped pieces of paper they paid good money for would, with a few cops to enforce them, make fancied lines around mythical countries work.
       They thought everyone knew they were the good guys. And now that millions of people are ignoring their imaginary borders, including bombers sent by foreign clones who don't like them, they don't know what to do. When the very ground and water revolt against their pissing and dumping too much on what they thought was their god-given private property, and zoning changes don't help, they don't know what to do.
       They thought nature was in the zoo and on educational TV. They still don't realize Mother Nature has her own merry-go-round, older bigger and more presumptuous than theirs, and that She doesn't believe in their gods or their flags or their property rights, is sick and tired of their "freedom," and doesn't give a damn about their business interests, either.
       Hey, humanity! You're in a mess, and you don't know what to do. What you've been doing doesn't even SEEM to work anymore, and you don't understand it. There are TOO MANY of you and you've got TOO MUCH junk and you're bumping into each other and fighting each other for space and resources that are running out, and you still don't get it. It takes realism and logic and organized thought, and you've always hated those things. But the mess is real and smiling and coloring it "green" won't make it go away. You can't keep "sustaining" growth and "sustaining" development. You've got to UNgrow and UNdevelop. And you don't know how to think about it, because the problem is real, and your habitual thinking processes aren't.
       Hey, humanity! Pay attention! There's no god who loves you. And all the diplomacy and positive thinking and smiling that win you points with each other don't even phase natural reality, which is deaf, blind, and even dumber than you. There's not REALLY even a Mother Nature, arms crossed, clucking her tongue, who might give you another chance. There are only natural forces that (luckily for your ancestors but not your descendants) accidentally formed a construct of real substances and conditions that you could have lived in comfortably for eons, if you hadn't fucked it up. But it's a SYSTEM - accidentally but logically organized, and freedomanddemocracy won't fix it. And neither will praying. And neither will the Democrats or Republicans. And neither will buying low energy light bulbs and hybrid cars and even MORE hi-tec "green" gadgets to very slightly slow global warming - only one facet of the problem.
       If your whole world eco-system can be fixed at all, it'll take a hair-pin U-turn in human thinking and behavior, a huge reduction in human numbers and human encampment size (a 100-year project 100 years late), and a new and inhumanly logical compact with the ecosystem, IF the ecosystem can be restored. It will take logical realistic organization and international cooperation, which can't be "free" and which group humanity has never been any good at. It won't happen.
       Hey, Humanity! You say you don't know what to do? Oh, you didn't say that? You said you're going to, by golly, do whatever it takes?
       I bet.

-Glen Roberts

Ever After

       So many fairy tales end with the wedding eminent or just over and the last words: "And they lived happily ever after." Wow! Even if things go relatively well, it can't be for ever after. In fact, the happy couple will grow old and die; that much is for sure. But also one is sure to die first, after being a burden for awhile.
        But before that, even, the most beautiful girl and the handsomest boy become old and ugly, fat and gross, bored and hateful. Often, if not usually, but pretty often, the "happily ever after" part ends the day after the sappy ceremony, which is why the fairy tale always ends the day before the day after.
        The strangest thing, though, is that the con job keeps working. Even though most of us know better, probably a majority still feel an urgent, irrational duty to hurry up and embrace their own phony fairy tale endings and join the crowd by getting married before it's too late.
        Too late? Too late for what? Too late to punch headfirst through the movie screen and into their final though tediously stretched out abysmal destiny?
        Of course there's denial, and not having a denial bump brings the dreary picture into sharper focus for me. If I was normally groggy, I'd think nothing of it. But I'm not, so whenever I read of a character or actually hear a real character fretting that he might fail to do, before it's "too late," what he appears to consider his human duty: to hook his life to another's - to double the complexity of life's tarpit - before youth goes off and leaves him with the forbidden freedom to buy a gun and a bullet and kick back with no obligations until, at the first hint of pain, he can freely choose to pull the blessed trigger, I almost cry.
        The only thing dumber than the marriage wish is that other much romanticized but actually just Darwinian compulsion to spawn a successor to carry on one's misery when one, oneself, can't stand it anymore.

-Glen Roberts

Talking Back To Walt Whitman

        "Take me, Lord," the religious say, when they're ready to "go," but a more accurate prayer to Mother Nature might be, "Drop me into the grinder, Ma."
       No matter how fervently they believe otherwise, the pre-dead, when their prayer ends, aren't going anywhere. As thinking beings, they're just suddenly going to drop into nowhere. So there's nothing important to pray or say about that.
       Once dead, though, the thoughtless lumps of newly dead matter still bearing the names of certain thinking beings of yore will slowly drop into Mother Nature's meat grinder, a disintegrating and redistributing process that provides building materials for grass and other new or growing entities, including lumps of un-dead matter hosting other temporary thought tracks that think they're going somewhere.
       T'would be truer then, on one's death bed, were one's last words, not to any other "lord" but Mother Nature, "Drop me into the grinder, Ma."

-Glen Roberts

The Use, What's It?

Equal Opportunity

The Underside

       There's an old counter-myth about the devil being the good god and the supposedly good god being a fraud - evil cross-dressed in a brass halo. There's a lot to it.
       There's something like that going on in the real world of political and social classes, where power is usually inherited and can be risen to only by those stupid or cunning enough to go along with the crooked game being played, while honest potential leaders must accept suppression or, against all odds, take up arms.
       I've got a note buried in my heap of "Notes to Nowhere" about the necessity of at least ceremonial stupidity in "high" places, which credits some bigshots with the low cunning and purely political determination it takes to just continuously pretend to be popularly stupid for ceremonial purposes.
       But I don't really think city hall and capitol hill pols, their courtiers, the embedded rich or even their embedded bards are often faking their regressiveness. The topside definitely stinks of a kind of evil behind its mask - not just religious in nature (only the brass god's minions care much about that) - but anti-intellectual, counter-ethical, and philosophically inept.
       Good realistic writers have always been onto this reverse negative reality. Realistic literature disguised as fiction is rife with reliable blue-collar heroes, gutter saints, and even low-life losers, lunatics, and crooks who are better than the puritans who despise them. There's a whole genre of gin drinking, wise cracking p.i.'s fired from the police force, endowed by their creators with convincing contempt for the establishment cops.
       The masters of noir regularly tease their readers' suppressed rebelliousness with barely masked offers of hope that the supposedly bad anti-heroes will get away with their crimes against the supposedly good establishment. And, in some of the very best books, they do. I relate better to Wolf Larson, Ahab, and Merseault than to Robin Hood, but there's catharsis for me in even a fairy tale revolution that defies the cloudy throne to mete out fictitious reverse justice that real world media and politicians would ceremonially deplore.
       Of course, in the real world, the supposed underside doesn't always or even often fit any good devil role, though you can't tell about people whose worth has been wrung out of them or who think they have to cover it up in a world that won't stand for any smart talk. But sometimes even anti-heroes escape from the bookshelves and earn real underside acclaim. The officially unrecognized idolization of The Great Randy, Jello Biafra, Fidel Castro, and now Hugo Chavez are dramatic examples.
       But it's only logical, or reverse logical that the best examples - the real elite among good devils - have to be more completely unknown (like me, of course), because, while it's only bullshit religious morality that's reversed in the Satanic mass, it's a whole reversed value system I'm talking about, and the grasp as well as the granting of worth, recognition, and influence are among the concepts mirror-reversed.

-Glen Roberts

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