First off I wrote a bit on my Facebook page page. It's called And all the king's horses and all the king's men .... and I talk some more about why I think we are living through an "interesting" time. Yup, the old Chinese curse. I've tried to write diaries about it, but few people here are interested. But today is my birthday so I will try to say it still another way. I am having trouble as I read the zillions of words about how people are experiencing these times and how much they believe they understand what is happening. I guess I think I understand too, but at a very different level. You see, the thing I understand most is that all those many many myths they taught us to hold this thing together really are not working so well right now. Today the stock market responded to them in a positive way. I hope they know more than they are letting on. The good news, according to them is that the government is buying a lot of bad debt. Well I can hardly wait for the bad news then. Come below the break and listen to an old man rant.
Here's a bit of what I wrote on Facebook about myths that just don't impress me any more:
We sit in the midst of a world wide melt down as we watch the ideas that got us here being given new clothes and being put back to work. Sorry folks, not this time! Global warming, Climate change, energy crisis, food and water shortages, stockpiles of nuclear weapons, genocide, religious intolerance and hate, economic crimes everywhere, torture, and more!
And that is not all. But it sure is enough. Let me go back and remember what happened and relate it to my own tenacious belief in those myths. For it is the myths that are holding things together right now. If everyone saw them the way I do I shudder to think what would happen.
As a youngster, my mom took me to the movies quite often. The second world war was displayed to me in newsreels as well as what we heard on the radio. I can't image what it would have done to me with today's media saturation. So there were the Germans. Then Pearl Harbor. Fatherly FDR giving all those reassuring words. The way we mobilized after Pearl Harbor. The comic books with the Japanese and Germans portrayed in ways that would verge on hate crimes today. Hey is this a great country or what?
My wife and I were thinking about the first Newsreel we saw after US troops found the first concentration camp. Maybe those dehumanizing cartoons did serve a purpose because to a kid my age the pictures of those walking skeletons made it a hard reality that other humans could have done that to them.
Flash forward with me now. I'm in high school and I find out that my guidance counsellors never told me about college scholarships and that the only way to get one now was to sign on for the NROTC. So, after my freshman cruise I become convinced that the USMC option is the way to go and I wind up being trained to kill with my bare hands. Dehumanize someone else until I accept them as my "enemy" and I'd probably have. Thank goodness I never had to. But these are strong, powerful myths and they will control us, no doubt about that.
Ok, flash forward again. I am in Israel enjoying a wonderful post-doctoral training fellowship thanks to the generosity of the American taxpayer (and to the Russians for "sputnik". Uh, the kind of fellowship I had only existed because we were scared by the USSR and their science and technology)> Along comes this "Gulf of Tonkin" incident and I read and hear about it in the foreign press as well as our own. I had been warned that the press lies many times before. The "free press" was another of those myths. But this time the lies were taking us into that ugly war and the next decade or so were going to be real myth busters as I watched the government lie and murder with no holds barred.
So we come to today and my 73rd birthday. Would you call me cynical? Would you say I am overreacting when I sense the Capitalism, that I gradually learned to see as a myth that had less and less redeeming qualities as my life unfolded, begin to crumble before my very eyes sort of like Uncle Karl said it would?
So we write diaries about who did what when and how this choice or that choice is either good or bad. You know what seems to be the biggest myth of all? The one that says humans are special animals because they have this thing called "reason". Having read about alpha males and all that good stuff in ethology I wonder. Konrad Lorentz once told of the dove as our symbol for peace. Evidently if you put two male doves into a cage together one will soon be dead. The wolf is considered a viscous critter. Yet when wolves fight one will often see the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, and bare his throat to the other wolf who is whipping him. They then simply part company. It is over.
So maybe all that wisdom out there is based on something real? If so, it is my birthday. Share it with me. My hunch is that human arrogance can always overcome common sense and we will invent still another myth to explain the suffering that is coming. meanwhile I hope you are getting ready. I think the worst is yet to come.