Dear Joe,
I found your website today via some link or other -- maybe via the Information Clearing House. Read some of your essays and had a good giggle. Here's my view from the other side of the Atlantic. Nice to see someone articulating the American nightmare -- er, dream -- as I have found the capitalist circus all my life living in different parts of the western world. I was working in a 'responsible' job until I got bullied out about six months ago.
Since then I have been living on the edges of society without recourse to state funds (even though I paid national insurance for 10 years), an overdraft that needs filling, and done a couple of job interviews to go back into satan's lair. So I spend a lot of time reading, writing, listening to Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa bootlegs (pre '73 of course) dreaming up potential business ideas, and watching the capitalist dream crumble, and the hateful propaganda of the BBC/Ch 4 bumble on.
The thing is I have no real compunction to go back into the workforce. I detest it and always have. I have no problem in working to get my daily bread and a roof over my head but do not subscribe to the unnatural work 'ethic' that Protestanism and the state have spent many years shaping. Like probably many other people I hate spending my time in an office with air conditioning perpetuating an economic and social system of psychopathy, with seemingly intelligent people scrambling over to stick knives in each others backs to 'get ahead'. You know what I mean? The fake smiles, the enforced 'team player ethic', all of that capitalist workplace crap that employers and their paid flunky psychologists have been working on since 1900.
I know I have to get free of the debt trap but even getting back into a job on the same level of money slavedom hasn't happened thus far and I'm under 40! My right wing dad always said become a lawyer. And I was like eight, going nah, I wanna be a social worker or an artist, much to his apoplexy. Now I think it doesn't matter if one retrains, because wherever you are in this system if you are an independent thinker and scorn the non-critique 'happy consumer' society -- you are always an outsider. Plus given the incipient conditions of the future in terms of a 'species number adjustment' to our anthropogenic externalities.
I trained in the biological sciences in the end and always found the palpable cognitive dissonance in my professors unbelievable. Here I was learning about how we face imminent collapse through the loss of biodiversity, rainfall pattern change, atmospheric pollution, desertification, erosion, pesticide and fertilizer pollution, genetic modification crossover, hormone poisoning, etc. and they just carried on -- business as usual, man. One lecturer even used to refer to birds as 'machines' -- wow, how's that for a reductionist Newtonian thrust?
When the changes innate in the future scenario of energy needs outstripping energy supply, and the industrial structure starts to show how precarious it is -- I do wonder how certain societies are going to take it. This place over here has a really high level of bad feeling simmering underneath the surface. You ever wondered why English football hooliganism was such a problem? It's the territoriality over here, bro. Millions of people in a grotesque class system which really hasn't changed much I feel in essence since the 16th century and even before that. There is a seething anger here under the surface, which is kind of kept in check through sports/advertising/consumption/status identification and purchase, and people getting into the income boundaries of an unsteady 'middle class'. The majority of people in the UK opposed the war in Iraq, yet the executive just went ahead and did it with the demented apes at the top of the US pyramid of political power.
Potential revolutions have been put down mercilessly by the state over here before in history and I imagine if another one bubbled through they would do the same thing. However, the English state knows the potentials of the future and in some weird way is trying to engender a notion of 'sustainable development' with energy use. It is kind of sinister in that you don't really know what they are looking to do because on the other hand they are introducing really disturbing and overarching legal reforms (that effectively abolish parliament) and ID cards very quickly which do not leave much room for a proper balance between state and individual anymore. They are also asking the public what they should do about energy policy -- and this is the government which has the resources to hire the best brains in the country to put forward good ideas. But of course those ideas that fit into the absurd capitalist framework. A politician over here recently said we need to make a contracting economy! Hey! Someone has taken a Green party idea and said let's go with it -- but is it real, or is it political point scoring?
Personally I feel that the current political scenario will never deliver what is required to make the changes needed for a decent future even though there are noises to move towards having biological capital as the core of what we do. Science tells us we cannot live in this way forever, but those who wield the real control have no reason to give up their control of the system of capitalist consumption, usury, and money control. Can you imagine the invisible super wealthy elites in Europe and the US letting go and allowing an ecologically based economy? I don't think I can -- still we live in very interesting times, and while as yet (thankfully) I'm not starving or homeless, I watch, like you do to see where this decade ends up.
Keep up the great work.
Pascal
Leeds, England
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Dear Pascal,
I am glad to hear someone else is as "lazy" as I am. I simply don't care any more. A little over a year ago I got up one morning and suddenly admitted to myself that I really don't care about any of it -- not the media, the lifestyle, my house, owning a car, my job creating war magazines for the newsstands of the empire, none of it except the liquor cabinet and my guitars, and a little dope when I can lay hands on it.
The price of it all is just too dear. The mind-numbing fatigue of the commute to work, the pretense of ease every waking hour, even as you see the planet raping, spirit killing corporate spectre behind it all. But still you participate in the complete knowledge of the death and global plundering involved in a simple act like driving a vehicle to the store and buying sacks full of unnecessqry junk, which, like the very clothing you are wear, is made by unseen legions of slum dwelling slaves at the edge of the empire.
So now, on good days at least, I find joy in other things, old man stuff, like tickling babies, and ftalking to riends who see the same truth I see. And we lift a glass or three and lift our voices in song against the approaching night of civilization and our own mortality. And we talk of past glory and unlikely future revolutions.
Throw in a good dog and a willing old woman and it ain't a bad life. But still ... but still ... there is that approaching darkness, isn't there? The one nobody is talking about but everybody feels, even as they revel in the blessing of empire.
Fuck no. I don't wanna work ever again. So buy my book when it comes out and maybe at least one of us can sit on his ass forver. I promise I will do justice to that task. And I will atone later in hell for all those trees murdered to publish it. ;-)
Zolidarit!
Uncle Joe
