We Made These Beds…
To anyone who still strays past here, if any at all my apologies for the long break in posting.
Since my last posting the world has changed some more (what a surprise!) and I’ve been getting older (!) and events have become even less easy to unravel and decipher.
We are in the middle of a major crash, some say an invention of those who would benefit most from it (my how many surprises can one mind take in one day?). Vast and obscene atrocities continue to be committed in the name of all the usual suspects, war on terror, the prodding of one dangerous loony dictator and the cuddling of another continue unabated. Our freedoms have taken a few more severe knocks, and our world is a little closer to the brink of utter catastrophe.
And yet we still hanker after the same tired gains no matter how small, no matter how puny. While our cultures become poorer every day with an ever growing diet of absolute dross on our media. The spinners go on spinning and the broadcasters go on pocketing profit from our foolishness and our lack of gumption. Our health and education systems failed a long time ago yet we cared none and did even less to save them. Our basic democratic rights have been almost entirely wiped out, yet we smile for the cameras and allow ourselves to believe it’s for our own good!
We cheered when finally someone who looked really worth voting for became the president of the most powerful nation in history, yet we see little real change. I never did expect change to be fast, but patience is a fragile virtue. After that it sinks into the black hole of despair. And maybe we are all in despair right now, maybe that is why we are so inactive. I wish this was the case but we have been inactive for a long time.
As an Iranian I thought I saw the seeds of counter-revolution germinating in my country in the lead up to the placebo elections there recently. I thought I saw the same patterns as the original revolution of 78-79 unfolding. Yet still nothing. The king is back in his castle and all is business as usual. My countrymen are still tortured and left to rot in Evin and how many other secret or not so secret political prisons. The so called president continues to bully support out of a sniveling, sycophantic clergy. The youth, our last best hope seem to have slowly shrunk back into their little underground scenes and the rest live under the same oppressive paternalistic government as if they have given up hope. News from Iran has lost its bite so the media no longer look at it for us, for what little worth they have when they do. And here we are again, back at starting point wondering where the revolution went.
Still also worrying about our planet and doing less than zero for it. Letting the politicians and big business of every colour and shape feed us the opium of reassurance so we can go on for a bit longer destroying, wasting and bleeding our planet dry. Hoping that the ice caps won’t really melt and destroy every coastal settlement we ever built, hoping that the rain forests will somehow manage to survive and that the fish in the sea will magically revive and be plentiful again. Anything, any last straw we can clutch at to make us believe we didn’t really fuck up as badly as all that. Making ourselves accept thinly disguised lies, transparent to a babe in arms comfort us, so we can keep driving those huge 4×4′s and keep wasting water as if the rains will somehow miraculously replace the billions of cubic tons of irreplaceable water that we waste and pollute annually. As if!
And so it goes. Appeasement rather than solution, ignorance rather than clear-eyed analysis, chatter rather than communication and reality shows instead of reality. Even our definitions, my old bug bear, keep shifting so that torture is now unashamedly referred to as “Enhanced Interrogation” and we do not feel so bad anymore. “Oh no we did not spend the last years since 9/11 torturing random bastards and destroy their lives for good, we questioned them using enhanced interrogation methods to get to the intell we need to defend ourselves! I heard it from the mouth of our former Secretary of State, so it must be true. You bet ya!”. We made friends of monsters in order to fight other monsters we ourselves invented and empowered. We got in bed with oppressors from one place to help take out oppressors from another, all the while ignoring genocide, starvation, growing fascism world wide. We let the Communists wear suit and tie and become “democratic” so that a Putin can carry on the work where Stalin left off. All the while convincing ourselves that selling Russia by the pound to the ex-party members who are now devout gangsters was allowing the people express their freedom.
In Iran the Shah’s organ of primary terror, the SAVAK is still in place, with hardly a step missed, unchanged, unpunished and unrepentant continuing the hard work of enhanced interrogation for the good of yet another bastard dictator. What changed except a few touches of powder and rouge? Nothing of any significance, except of course we are that many inches closer to the final disaster, that many years nearer the precipice of mass suicide.
This stupid, blind species of cave gargoyles we call human is still where it was a million years ago except that it is now equipped with a mobile phone, GPS, PDA and a 4×4 and no where to go.
