Joe,
I have just found your article "Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson", and you have hit the nail very nicely on the head. Why is no one warning the American people about the vegetables that they are becoming? Is it money and power? Yet money and power must surely be inherently boring things, if we are to judge by the dullards who are attracted to them as well as the emotions they inspire within me. I have only ever known one millionaire who was worth talking to, possibly because the combination of his advanced age and his great fondness for recreational chemicals caused his brain to work.
Unfortunately, the general public seems to equate wealth and power with wisdom, even when confronted with such stark examples as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, and a squillion other of the gilded brain-dead, spread across the social pages like smeared excrement. Were you aware that a year or two ago, Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie (or Lindsay Lohan or someone) were guests on some Fat Camp reality TV show, giving enemas to the participants on US TV?
I live in Australia, and read about it in the media. This is funny on a visceral level, but my intellect rebels and cringes at the thought that these people are role models for anything. So ineffably tasteless, so vapid, so rampantly attention seeking. Does this one episode signal the death of an important American brain cell?
I have an interest in cars and watches, and judging by the sorts of unreadable, impractical, pretentious, elitist, unusable nonsense that certain rich people delight in buying, many of them are total idiots. I worked with a person who had made a mountain of money selling his previous business to a huge and bumbling world-wide consultancy, and he took a certain delight in showing me his $31,000 diamond-studded Rolex Oyster. He was an engineer, and a bit of an embarrassment to the profession in my eyes. Oysters are watches to be worn when swimming or having adventures or getting sweaty. A diamond studded Oyster might leave nasty marks on the skin if the wearer gets chundered in the surf. Diamonds might get lost if one bangs it on a rock. What a clown! How much would he pay for a solid gold hammer?
Your book Deer Hunting with Jesus
Given that the human race is facing possibly its greatest crisis for a very long time, environmental destruction, the apparent loss of ability to think is doubly alarming. Do we trust the people down the road to drive their car less, and limit their purchases of cheap shit from China? Bravely and barely coping with a flood of new electrickery devices, can our potato-headed suburban mums and dads be brought to realize that their over-consuming, over-working lives of quiet desperation amidst the dullness of the suburban sprawl are wasting resources and the lives of animals and plants? Do these people realize that famines are just around the corner? Materials shortages? Are people aware that a severe shortage of such a simple thing as lead, or any of a multitude of other substances, might topple the world into a state of famine by interrupting the movement of food, if not the production thereof?
People do have a sort of dim awareness of global warming. The media is alarmed. How do we communicate the horrible truth that global warming is unlikely to be the thing that destroy civilization, and that mass starvation, knowledge loss, infrastructure loss will be the big killers?
Ah well. The only activities I see that are of any merit are trying to reverse this suicidal destruction, trying to restore the endangered art of thought, and partying -- which in my case does not involve noses.
Cheers, and keep writing,
Alan
Australia
------
Alan,
Regarding your question: "How do we communicate the horrible truth that global warming is unlikely to be the thing that destroy civilization, and that mass starvation, knowledge loss, infrastructure loss will be the big killers?
I may sound like the negative fucker people sometimes accuse me of being, but my answer is -- We can't. Reason doesn't stand a chance against happy hour at Hooters. Hell, even I would choose Hooters over Hobbes.
Anyway, here's my take on it all (brace yourself for a little over simplified jackleg neuroscience here):
To observe the world around us, and then draw rational conclusions about our behavior and the long term outcome of our behavior, both as individuals and as a species, requires at least a modestly well tuned intellectual life. And to prevent pure intellect from reducing life to a practical and efficient reptilian battle of the fittest, we need a spiritual life. Unless you are Dick Cheney, of course, in which case all you need is a case of Pacemaker batteries, a lock on the gun cabinet and an attendant to pack you in ice every night.
The rewards of an intellectual and spiritual life are not immediate, but rather cumulative. Its gratifications are long term and its evolution is the epitome of human existence. (Well, along with oral sex and draft beer). First there is the impulsiveness and self-centered interest of the child, not to mention childish fears such as fear of the dark. Then over the years, a slow maturation process as one develops an inner intellectual spiritual life. And one realizes he or she is not the center of the universe, nowhere near it. For instance, it occurs to you that Brad Pitt has to have body guards to keep him from getting raped by female throngs or that Paris Hilton actually gets PAID BIG MONEY to go to parties and make an ass of herself!
In such a world is it any wonder ordinary people just give up, say, "Fuck it, I'm going to the Costco bakery and buy TWO banana fudge cream pies and eat 'em both at one sitting, I don't care how big my ass gets."
Years later, as a result of the conscious development and interaction of these two things -- spirit and intellect -- there is the emergence of insight, the ultimate goal and most satisfying of human mental experiences. It is the thing that makes for solid evaluation of the physical world, such as Newton's insight as to existence of gravity, the thing that makes for deeper understanding of the world around us -- and it is the thing that makes old men wise and come to a satisfying end. As in, "OK, so I'm gonna die next week, but at least I figured out how to make the boat trailer turn signal lights work. It only took 40 years, but I did it!"
All of this involves a sustained attention span and an effort to delay gratification long enough to acquire the necessary elements of an intellectual-moral-spiritual life. A "long term gratification schedule," I've heard the psychologists and behavioral scientists call it. All of them seem to agree that the delay caused by three minutes of television commercials fall a little short. And even then most people get up from the sofa and pile up a gratifying plate of nachos during those three minutes.
Obviously the card deck of both brain chemistry and natural cultural inclination are stacked toward very short term gratification. I mean, hell buddy, there were only two cards to begin with, right?
As demonstrated by the plate of nachos, the brain as a matter of evolution, is very efficient at finding the quickest route to fire up its satisfaction and joy circuitry. For instance, when early Neolithic man had to trek many miles for a handful of wild grain, his brain reward circuitry was on a very long schedule and marked by arduous effort, in order to obtain the joy and satisfaction of eating. And he thought to himself as he plugged along, "Twenty miles for a goddamned handful of seeds? There's gotta be an easier way."
When the combined insight of hundreds of generations of these humans led to the planting of the grain instead of chasing it down and eating it one paw-full at a time, then storing it so as to be constantly available, they all burst into song, the chorus of which ran roughly:
We ain't gotta trek no more, no more
We ain't gotta trek no more
We'll sit on our ass til the grain runs out
Then raid and steal some more
Obviously the piling up of earthly goods, however humble, had kicked off a new behavioral pattern that would eventually lead to the Oyster Rolex. But at least the food staple problem was solved for the moment. Solved for 15,000 years in fact, but in geological time, fifteen millennia scarcely constitute a moment.
The brain's efficacy in finding the shortest and most dependable method of obtaining food left the upright hominid with time to seek other life perpetuating, life easing and enhancing avenues. The Assyrians of what is now Iraq invented beer, the wheel and believe it or not, the first weapons of mass destruction (for which the hapless Saddam Hussein would take the rap 2,608 years later). These WMDs consisted of fleets of multi-ton iron tipped battering rams, backed by legions of archers capable of launching 100,000 iron tipped and venom dipped arrows in a single minute. There most certainly must have been a paucity of snakes after the reign of King Sargon, whose armies were also among the first to include an engineering corps to build roads and even divert rivers, employing the first iron picks and shovels of the sort later used to dig Saddam out of his "spider hole" in 2003. The irony of Saddam Hussein having always pointed to King Sargon as Iraq's pinnacle of glory and achievement seems to have been lost on Saddam himself -- but then too, a man who collected pornographic velvet paintings and owned three sets of electric scrotum shockers probably wasn't much interested in such subtleties as irony.
Imagine! All of this because the brain circuitry seeks the shortest route to security and comfort and assurance of survival of the species.
Well, we overfed, over everythinged Americans have sure as hell reached critical mass on that front, haven't we? And you Aussies are running a damned close second, even if you have yet to master the art of water boarding. In any case, now the brain candy is piped directly into the brain by media, and consumer driven media has become modern human culture itself for the overwhelming majority of first world people and increasingly for second and third world humans too. I can tell you from experience that if you've never seen a four-and-a-half foot tall, 160-pound Mayan woman in puffy running shoes and sporting a silver nylon wig while grinding achiote seeds and watching María la del Barrio (a Spanish language soap opera) on TV Azteca, well . . .
Gratification is now instant and effortless. Can we agree on that? It is also intellectually and spiritually empty because there is no longer the arduous effort involved in obtaining material goods, and no need to develop a mental life to solve problems of daily survival. You gotta suffer at least a little bit to both sing the blues and get a clue about life. I don't hear anybody groaning out there in cupcake suburbia -- yet. Much less any deep questions as to the nature of existence.
From Middle America's viewpoint, survival and existence appear to be assured -- a no brainer. After all, the coffee maker comes on each morning (mine just did) the car starts and those once rare and much sought after sugars and fats flood the pleasure circuits day and night. Ordering pizza by TV remote is only about a year away here in the States, and that makes up for all those cameras being installed here in the surveillance society, believe me. The Neolithic seed trekker's ghost may be bitching about being born 15,000 years too soon, but from here on my couch, laptop before me, a cup of Columbian java and a sausage and egg croissant on the TV tray, the future of the planet is the least of my concerns, just as it is with most other Americans. Hell, it's the Fourth of July man! Independence Day! And even if this dependent bloated stupor ain't exactly the picture of freedom and liberty, so the fuck what? Hell, I just bought a pony keg of beer to celebrate whatever the hell it represents.
No, Alan, I do not expect this situation, this modern human existence and culture, to change. Not until mankind's toxicity, mankind's constant munching, mining, sawing, bulldozing, chemical cooking, plastic molding, hydrocarbon burning, smelting, digitizing, water sucking, pollution generating, sea poisoning, earth destroying activities finally reduce the environment to the point where the poor foolish old hominid species finds itself asking:
"What's for dinner, honey? Cockroaches or lichens?"
"We're all out of both, dear. Better go over and kill the neighbors and take theirs. And we could feast on the neighbors' carcasses for at least a week! Maybe even throw a big feast and invite your boss at the rat meat farm!"
And then we will begin all over again (though with far fewer of us left) to make the same slow arduous trek across time and planet -- but over a new landscape, passing through small medieval like villages where hirsute people peer suspiciously from their homes in abandoned rusting Hummers, and rattle their spears against the vehicles' windows -- and we will pause perhaps amid the collapsed ruins of the Pentagon "What a strange five-sided ruin! Legend has it that this was the Stonehenge of its time, where rituals for now vanished gods of war or potency were conducted -- pause to wonder what all those plastic boxes with the black screens were used for -- and to speculate on whether the lizard darting in the rubble is edible or poisonous -- and to build a campfire of old tires for the night, the good burnable stuff such as books having been used up long ago.
Frankly, sometimes I wish I could be around to see it all. There's a lot of good material there for some future writer, even if he has to do it with a burnt stick on a cave wall.
In art and labor,
Joe
