Climate Change Reveals the Patriarchal Gods as the Deadliest of Demons; the 1% Perpetuates the Crisis to Impose Shock-Doctrine Tyranny; Our Mother Earth Issues Her Ultimate Challenge
Apocalyptic Wonderland: late February in Tacoma. Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss © 2019.
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TO (MOMENTARILY) DUCK the shrapnel already ensuing from the issues implicit in the above typography, I feel obligated as a writer and editor to explain (or perhaps confess) that this is the first time I have ever written the headline before I knew exactly what the story might say. Magic? No, nothing so exotic; merely an exceptionally telling encounter with journalistic intuition -- precisely the kind of power-to-envision-outcomes that in darker times was damned as witchcraft and all-too-often got you burned at the stake.
Apropos which, the story I seined up after I wrote the head is now no doubt predictable: the ecocidal misogyny at the doctrinal core of Abrahamic religion and thus manifest in all societies so influenced or founded; how its adherents' belief in "End-Times" salvation obstructs even minimal environmental protections; how reading Chris Hedges' American Fascists (Free Press: 2006) and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (Viking: 2006) and most of all Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008), which by its subtitle tells the sordid understory of our national paralysis today: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.
But presumably we -- the collective we of readership -- already know all that; and in any case, does repetitive disclosure of the same painful truth not eventually become a form of bludgeoning?
As for the unapologetic paganism my headline acknowledges, those metaphors for our cosmos and our solar system and our planet and our place upon it and within its warp and weft are derived from visions at least as old as our species itself, so I most certainly cannot be blamed for citing their 200-thousand-year integrity.
Though I would most assuredly be derelict in duty were I not to point out how the breathtaking magnitude of such a vast expanse of time becomes mother macrocosm to microcosms of human consciousness and thence to visual representation. Picture a tranquil sea invaded by a contagion of predators; picture a Mother Earth that even during her periodic storms and quakes and eruptions was embraced as the proper head of the household suddenly and now terminally invaded by a relentlessly militant hate-the-planet cult.
An alien species?
(Now that I am old and no longer have a career to protect I can ask such forbidden questions aloud.)
A mutation?
Might then the introduction of patriarchy -- which is prerequisite to Earth-hating -- be an earlier, much more ambitious application of the same tactic employed in gifting First Nations peoples with smallpox-infested blankets? Or invading their lands with missionaries bearing bibles and touting paths to salvation by self-destruction?
Preparing to transfer all I had written in response to letters of the Roman alphabet behaving as if they were runes, I began one last quick entirely routine pre-posting perusal of favored websites. That's how I came upon "Diane Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal" -- an infinitely damning report that epitomizes our circumstances as well as any of the 61 bookmarks from which I chose the eight definitive reports linked below.
Thus in response I posted the following:
If one studies Feinstein's record -- studies it analytically, as a (real/uncensored) investigative reporter might – it becomes obvious her one true cause is forcible civilian disarmament.
Though Feinstein's purposes are typically concealed by her deft manipulations of Democratic (sic) Party rhetoric, it's clear she is intent on ensuring our terminal defenselessness in the face of ever-escalating violence by the ChristoNazis and their allies. She is thereby aiding and abetting the Nazi takeover of the United States even as we the people she claims to represent increasingly embrace socialism as the only alternative to extinction.
Obviously Feinstein hopes her allies in the mainstream media will minimize disclosure of the near-100-percent alliance between the law enforcement and military machines and the Nazis themselves, particularly their burgeoning neo-Sturmabteilung units.
Which means that even as the cops, the secret police and the soldiers are making sure the Nazis are allowed to keep their firearms, Feinstein and her fellow Democrats are devoting maximum energy to reducing all the rest of us to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.
(Exactly as if she were a willing agent of some Ruling Class plot to use the looming environmental apocalypse to facilitate the ultimate shock-doctrine reconstruction of human society into a global concentration camp.)
Which led me to a couple of other realizations: that if, precisely as Hitler's Germany proved it to be, so-called "national socialism" is socialism only for the Ruling Class, the One Percent, and fuck-off-and-die abandonment (or extermination) for all the rest of us, then what we have in the United States is indeed not only socialism for the rich, it is indeed "national socialism" precisely as envisioned by der Führer himself.
Neoliberalism as national socialism. Or vice-versa. Hmm; explains a lot.
Which in turn inevitably brings me back to the Occam's-Razor answer to what has become the pivotal question of our species' existence: why is the global One Percent doing everything in its virtually godlike power to retard and obstruct even the most mildly ameliorative anti-ecocide measures?
Obviously: they intend to continue using the entire crisis just as they are already using it now: as I said, to reconstruct human society into a perfect replica of their mentor's vision: that is, a concentration camp, with themselves in command and all the rest of us damned to unimaginable wretchedness.
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The Eight Promised Links:
'Terrifying': Rapid Loss of Biodiversity Placing Global Food Supplies at Risk of 'Irreversible Collapse'
Trump EPA OKs 'Emergency' to Dump Bee-Killing Pesticide on 16 Million Acres
What You Need to Know About Trump’s Attacks on the Federal Family Planning Program
Groundwater Contamination Devastates a New Mexico Dairy - and Threatens Public Health
Rare L.A. Mega-Storm Could Overwhelm Dam and Flood Dozens of Cities, Experts Say
Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job
Insisting on Resistance in an Age of Ignorance
Its Too Late. You've Lost Your Guns.
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ANOTHER RECENT OFF-DISPATCHES post of mine is also relevant to the whys and wherefores of the environmental apocalypse:
As far as I am concerned, what killed (Carbon Tax Initiative) I-1631 is Washington state's policy as defined by the fact it has the most viciously regressive tax structure in the nation (and probably in the world) combined with the nation's largest state-tax exemptions for Big Business.
Given this history, many decidedly pro-environment voters recognized the 99.9 percent probability our Neoliiberal, Capitalist-owned state government would do as it always does, scheme some sneaky way to exempt the Ruling Class from any I-1631 taxes and -- as with every other taxation measure in the state's history -- vindictively ensure the I-1631 burden was borne exclusively by those of us who can least afford it.
I did not vote against I-1631 -- I will not vote against any rational environmental-protection measure -- but I did not vote for it either. I simply did not vote on the I-1631 question at all. Why? Because having witnessed time and again the state's policy of deliberately burdening the lowest income people with the greatest percentage of the costs of governance, I saw no reason to allow the state to do what I cannot doubt it would have done: weaponize I-1631 as yet another tool for socioeconomic cleansing.
If Washington state wants voter approval of a carbon tax, it should first`impose fairness on the most deliberately unfair state tax system in U.S. history.
Let the demand for tax fairness -- that is, to tax the rich to recover at least some of what they have stolen from the rest of us -- be everywhere fulfilled.
LB/24 February 2019
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