This is where we are certainly going. This is the only outcome of our visceral Tribal hatreds.
This will be our legacy. I don't see any way of avoiding a great fall.
A great fratricidal blood-letting.
Millions seem to actually 'want' this.
The good as always will do little or nothing so it 'will' happen.
Something will replace us our system I have no idea what.
However our short lived Empire is finished.
Just a few details to attend to then over.
Still the 1950's, and part of the 60's were fun.
I lived it was there for it. I saw it with my own eyes.
The Empire at it's height. Now the stuff of legend.
Tail-fins Doowop cheap gas color TV, and 10 cent comic books.
Our dads had jobs summer camp ice cream polio vaccines.
For real space satellites. Beatniks integration.
Good King John was on our Throne.
It was a kind of Paradise.
A Paradise Lost.
There were ugly murderous under-pinning's to our Empire as all others. However nobody threw parties like we did, and never will.
ReplyDeleteThe memory of what we were outwardly still makes everyone in the world want to be American.
An American of our great myth.
No one would want to be like the coming masters that will replace us. This without having an AK-47 on full-auto pressed against their head. No one would say they 'want' to be Chinese Russian or even a fucking Brit or Frog!
Like the old Cold War saying,...
"In America you can always find a party."
"In Russia the Party always finds YOU!"
Our world of self-delusion will admit none of that. It will perish amidst its evasions and fatuities. It is like a convoy lost in darkness on an unknown rocky coast, with quarrelling pirates in the chartroom and savages clambering up the sides of the ships to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them. That is the rough outline of the more and more jumbled movie on the screen before us. Mind near exhaustion still makes its final futile movement towards that "way out or round or through the impasse".
ReplyDelete"That is the utmost now that mind can do. And this, its last expiring thrust, is to demonstrate that the door closes upon us for evermore.
There is no way out, or round or through."
-H. G. Wells, "Mind at the end of its Tether"
I understand that the usual aftermath to an imperial collapse is a dark age, eventually followed by some kind of patchwork feudalism. Same old pyramidal social structures, characterized by inequality and injustice, widespread illiteracy, and tightly constrained creative possibilities for the vast majority of people; what a drag; how lethally boring it all is.
ReplyDeleteThe arts that tend to thrive in a dark age are epic poetry and personal adornment, notably jewelry, and (of course) weapons-making. Architecture, sculpture and painting, not so much. So as artists we’re basically screwed. We are creating for an audience of the remote future, should any of our works have the great good fortune to survive. This is basically a time capsule salvage operation.
Our original dream, that of achieving personal emancipation with social and sexual liberation in the context of a prosperous industrial society - it’s all over. Back to the same old dreary grind of history, filled with wars, plagues, famines, cruel punishments and persecution.
I would be very happy never to have to return to human society. We have a penchant for ruining our best possibilities.
Z
P.S. - speaking of time capsules, I’m contemplating what form that might best take. Books and other small durable objects seem to have some survivabity. Temples are more visible hence vulnerable to vandals.
ReplyDeleteZ
We only see "cycles" because of a limited sense of history.
ReplyDeleteThis is the end, and I doubt it will take more than a few decades to see the conclusion. I don't think people are fully aware of the speed with which events occur today and of their global magnitude.