Author: alan

We’ve all seen them, the little openings to nowhere that occasionally slash the side of a new roadway or a newly-widened old one. They’re usually placed in front of cow pastures or other open space, then the bit of formed concrete suddenly gives way to dirt, grass, a ditch then a fence. Many, many of these will now go abandoned, giving a certain circular echo to the once-presumed opportunity in the emptiness. What they are – what they were – are placeholders for a future entrance to a development that is not there yet but one day will be. The one day that’s coming when we will call these relics ‘green markers’ or ‘option stops’ or some such term indicative of the serious moment that crops up when we temporarily get post-irony, again. ‘Starting in the low 300’s’ indeed.

Some might say that one day is here; no one made the announcement but this dog whistle sounds a lot like the trillion-dollar insurance company investment we and our adjacent progeny all just made. These little ciphers in the road to our past should be memorialized as markers for our stupidity, little DOT-sanctioned homages to the greed that once controlled how and where we once lived. I use the past tense because they are over. Finit-O®.

Though this is the end to neither greed nor stupidity. So stipulated. It is only the end of the way this powerful combination once dictated how we lived. Suburbs, gated enclaves only accessible by private vehicle and situated far from an interaction with and vulnerability to other people – also known as life – are things of the past.

Yes, come and play Finit-O®, that fun game where we bid farewell to an entire set of tenets and beliefs predicated on short-term individual comfort but revealed as the path to long-term collective agony, celebrated with curb openings to non-existent suburbs and lionized beneath crumbling gates to exclusivity and literal isolation. And these are not just funparks but monuments to serve as a constant reminder of the greed and stupidity that permitted us to forget our priorities in good times, to elect and re-elect those for whom pillaging earth and man was a preference. Ah, look familiar? That’s because it’s already been different for a while as we’ve entered the end of the beginning of the end… of the beginning. (Almost had you there! Everyone wants to KNOW.) We’re even becoming wise to many of the shades of green.

So… who’s in charge of this grand transition, you might ask? Mobile one to home base – come in, home base.

Using chemicals to grow food is in many ways similar to raising bears who are unafraid of humans – not a good thing. With bears, we know what happens; with pesticides and herbicides, not so much – but like bears, we’ve got a pretty solid idea.

Known alternately as organic farming with a spiritual component and the first modern ecological farming system, biodynamic agriculture fuses the concepts of earth and soul with the ingredients we put into each. This bit of symmetry is no accident. One of the small-t truths is that we expect a sort of harvest from both, and it’s okay to admit this. The conundrum of inputs and expectations is less related to the bizarre instance of food magically appearing in cans on the shelves of our supermarkets that it resembles; it is more akin to the imperceptible marvel that comes from almost any time spent living in Europe and/or parts of South America where, in the process of exploring, eating, drinking and living, wine simply becomes food again. The back-alley alchemy is what we’ve done to food to make it so sterile, anti-septic and often poisonous. Stepping back from this abyss is powerfully hypnotic, tied to increased health, vigor, libido, creativity, connection, community, meaning and almost any other ailment identified by name or fame in TV pharmaceutical commercials.

I often wonder whether this particular blog thing-y is cumulative or just a bunch of unconnected latitudes spanning a distant planet called sane. Then I answer, yes. Viticulture is an easy jumping off point on biodynamic Ag, and more importantly, a dead giveaway to its essence. See [insert abstract noun here] not for what it is, but for what it should be. Imagine a pairing for each of the seven sins but, of course, always consult your doctor.

This is well done, but I mostly enjoy the sound loop.

Generally speaking, there are many ways to create a picture out of the clues, like we might using a few handy items from around the house to fashion an idea with a crafts project. If it’s a big picture you’re interested in, you can do that, too. Start off with using whatever is available, the tools at hand. For information, there are many things in plain sight all around us all the time, which we see and hear repeated so constantly that we forget they are being said, much less who says them and why. “Viewer discretion advised,” for example, or ” As a condition of the $2 billion settlement, the companies admitted no wrong doing.” We get ideas by making decisions about conditions and information coming into our heads. We cultivate the ability to decide whether a thing is viable or just another ruse aimed at concealing the truth. Objectionable logic is just that, but how do we tell?

I was discussing a new-ish film with friends recently. They liked it, generally; I was perhaps a bit zealous in pointing out what I didn’t like about it and why it was such a problem. They were slightly taken aback. The response was on the order of, “Oh, I wasn’t being critical… I was just watching, being entertained.” I let it pass. They are friends. After all, it’s just a movie… it’s just art… it’s just music, it’s all just entertainment. Just like it’s just politics, I guess, no need to discern anything about these and pick out what works from what doesn’t and why. I’m just wearing these shoes – they could be any shoes at all, it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care that they have gaping holes and one let through a sharp rock that pierced my toe. I mean, they’re just shoes, right? We’re not being critical.

But we should be. Do you have a critical knob? Well, set it on high and break it off with something heavy.

There have been a few indirect references recently to the OODA Loop. Beyond its seemingly nefarious applications, why not co-opt it for other purposes? Planetary peril might well be taken as a business and military issue, and if we applied some fundamental precepts about adapting to terrestrially-threatening situations, who knows?

What is certain is that the advertising onslaught continues, it just happens to be coming in the form of a preznitial campaign. I can imagine the gurus sitting around, spurred on by wondering just how much nonsense we can take. We (there is no they) are going to wring the very last few drops of whatever it is we think we want out of the gullible, including but, not limited to, the last unqualified Decider.

Unsolicited advice: If you like people, don’t read Bertrand Russell. If you think torture and occupation are positive goods, don’t watch Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. But fer chrissakes, even IF you enjoy a good joke, don’t put one on a ballot and ask me to vote for it – especially if you know I might.

Wet behind the ears, let’s not pretend we don’t know what green means.

The fractal aspect of insecurity belies appearances, those symbols that stand for many things, and because they hold the past hostage constrict future possibilities. The connection here is simple and direct. The past is a hostage because we cannot properly face it and therefore must edit heavily, not realizing that the most egregious episodes are the most useful. We need them, to face up to them and get acquainted with our worst tendencies. The utility of blocking them out is childish and immature, which we remain as long as we keep those rooms dark.

You can see how this affects the future. It is one reason why we simultaneously recognize and seem so constrained by the idea of change – paralyzed by its appeal, we are frozen between the shores of yesterday and tomorrow. With both so unknown each seems more than a little threatening. But we can demystify one by reckoning with the other, and still be left with plenty of mystery to go around.

Sensing the need for a shift but loath to fully define it, we default to a resistance to progress as though it were natural and not a contrivance. From what? To what? The recriminations flow: what was so bad about… ? What would be so good about… ? And then rush into the waiting arms of reassuring mythos. “Are you saying we are bad? America-hater! Love it or leave it, hippie!”

Two bad choices is not choice.

Image used under Creative Commons license

So we’re not the only ones to be hosting multi-episode train wrecks. Environmental degradation in La Mancha seems to be based on the same combination of greed, marketing savvy(!), corruption and complete lack of consideration for the consequences of unfettered development that we’ve grown to love, plus a little decentralized policy-making mixed in for good measure. In Almodovar’s Volver, the slow turn of the windmills was an easy metaphor toiling in the background that formed the foreground pastiche of return, of coming back. What we keep coming back to again and again is how progress-as-slash-and-burn-development does not work, financially and morally bankrupts a society while laying waste to the patrimony of a country’s heritage.  Turn right at “A new way to live!” and before long what you’re left with is a battalion of hideous pre-fab swimming pools standing at attention. Debate over whether some minor aspects of megalithic construction projects are green or not is a joke. They’re not. At. all.

Waiting for any of this to sink in seems redundant.

An an excerpt from an article, that maybe should have come before the post below but now just follows up on it:

Meanwhile, the emergence of television sounded the final death knell of what media critic Neil Postman called “the Age of Exposition”—that time in American cultural life when the printed word dominated public discourse and “average Americans did not just think for themselves; they thought rationally about ideals, and they were able to express those ideals in a rational way.” By contrast, the ideals that filtered out from television screens were “simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual.” More information than ever was available to Americans, but it was reaching them in an idiom that placed little importance on nuance and broad perspective.

He’s talking about this variety, but I’m thinking of the other, thinking kind. If you try to begin to piece together what is actually going on with a) an economy, b) an election or c) a war, where would you begin? It might be obvious that you couldn’t just take a few periodic snapshots, much less one from yesterday or last week that would lend any kind of accurate picture of a, b or c, but I’m not so sure. Folks seem reasonably willing to take cross sections of any of these and let them stand as generally valid appraisals. I’ve been prone to attribute this to ignorance or skulduggery, but I’m coming around to a third possibility: confusion.

I’ll try to explain, but it all leads back to here, to what green means. In the examples above, to get a good grasp on any of them takes a fair degree of effort, i.e., a tremendous amount in today’s dollars. That’s the kind of inflation we should be talking about. This would go without saying except… it has for too long and compounded annually has brought a kind of collective nadir into view. To understand the present, you would need a relatively firm grasp of the history that preceded it, which would invariably include emphasizing the spots where you’re fuzzy on what happened or are prone to exaggerate that details that fall to your advantage. I’ll admit that this presumes a high degree of self-awareness if you’ll admit that such a thing is required.

It follows that I cannot fully explain this – you’ve got to do most of the work. And here’s the nut. I recently saw a few minutes of the film Pearl Harbor, and it occurred to me not the first time but better about the kinds of information we’ve been feeding ourselves over the last half-century. That fairy tale of how we were attacked and then prevailed, told in ninety plus minutes, is a horribly self-serving stand-in for what happened. Plus, when juxtaposed with the messy and complex reality, the reflection is a very confusing false choice of what to believe. And which would you choose, even if you know wars don’t come in sepia tones? That movie alone is fine; it’s what it stands for that matters. It’s the single input, single output phenomenon that we’re not mature enough to reject, especially when it reflects so well upon us. We’ve got to be able to say “no, that’s not the whole story.” Until then, we are dangerously vulnerable as passive consumers of information from people who have done our thinking for us. Because when you take what someone else says as something you can believe without verifying against what you know, that’s what you are doing. Allowing someone else to think for you.  Who would you trust for that precious mission?

Just consider that for a moment. At this point in time, it is politically, if not psychologically, necessary for adherents to an ever-shrinking ideology to castigate those among them who have passports, who live in metropolitan areas and keep an eye peeled toward world events.

Never mind that the vast majority of Americans live in urban and suburban areas. Abutting this disconnect is a series of long-tentacled myths, designed to help us reach back to that yesteryear when we were all the same, when men were men and all who weren’t knew their places. We, and others, use these affinities to tie us to the words we invent to re-enforce our affection for the products we use, all of a piece with continuing to deny the impact of our way of life on our physical environment. But of course, not only that. It is a route to that place where we don’t have to answer for ourselves or the growing list of resources we require, all the while we hunker with steely grins beneath the banner of self-sufficiency. Sure, many still reside in gated redoubts, hillbilly hideaways with supercilious names that remind of what was. But theirs is the scared and shrinking kingdom, what’s left of the fictitious fifties, still and always under siege from the tumultuous unrighteousness of ‘other’.

Persecution via this sense of ‘other’ is the desire to make change a casualty of the present moment. This is at the heart of what will nourish the xenophobic to their dying last; they seem to be willing to do anything to exempt themselves from any proximity to being an outsider of any sort – when that is where the gold is. The need to step outside of ourselves and the way we’ve been doing things, has never been greater. I’m thinking of actual, real live people here. They = we, in my book. In imagining our multitude of strengths at present, their fear is our weakness. They might try to deny my existence but I cannot but remember theirs.

“Alas,” said Pangloss, “it was love: love, the consoler of the human race, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sensitive beings, tender love.”

“Alas,” said Candide, “I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it’s never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you?”

Image: Camille Claudel, Abandon, 1905. Bronze. Poitiers, Musée Sainte-Croix

And not just lower motivations. There is no great challenge to ask people to stop doing anything other than simply to stop ignoring what is going on around them. It might be a little chaotic ( the horror!), yet will all else fall into place around those individual wake up calls, as I have divined previously. The beep of rolling waves of millions of alarm clocks going off… imagine a game of reverse dominoes. While we are meandering down this path, ask yourself to what degree you must be lulled into complacence in order to accept such contrivances. Have we loaded down the basket just to let it sag right here? We don’t even need to accept these small absurdities – just to shrug, to not get our feathers in a ruffle while we commit another corporate logo to memory. But remember our instincts from the cave.

To defend.

To shelter.

To fight.

We’ve achieved an enclave mentality alright, but it is in need of significant expansion.