The penumbra of COVID-19 is a crisis, however, in our mutual isolation, we have the opposite side of that coin to examine: opportunity. This isn’t a Pollyanna message to look on the bright side. It’s a somber Ghost- of-Christmas-Future biopsy to provide some perspective. I should appear to be skeletal, cloaked, hooded, and brandishing an intimidating scythe; please, hallucinate accordingly.
Some people you know may be sick (a cousin of mine is). A couple of people you know may have even died. And the sky on Wall Street is falling. Why is that? Let’s review. This ailment allegedly spawned from China. The Red Dragon was the nation which first had to tangle with it. I’ve heard authorities from Chinese claim it was the result of the American army bringing it to them. I get nothing but propaganda from Fox News calling China the culprit, branding it the “Chinese virus”. Trump has named it “Kung Flu.” Stay classy, Donald. I don’t care where it originated because it’s insignificant. Neither nation would use a bio agent upon the other because the blow-back would be as obvious as it was inevitable. We haven’t dropped a nuclear weapon upon another nation since 1945 for the same reason. Strategic weapons (i.e. the bio or nuclear variety) don’t end cold wars but risk enflaming them, expanding exponentially. Deploying either would be political suicide. After the fallout, blame is irrelevant.
Building upon what little we do know, so many publicly traded companies are suffering. Much of this is due to the closing of schools, businesses, and institutions, but the pain felt on the stock exchange preceded our “social distancing.” This is because before the Coronavirus arrived here China’s population was dealing with ITS viral problem. They were compelled by their own quarantine laws and this, day by day, ground production of goods — so many of which our industries rely on — to a halt. I understand we count on a figure of some 90% of goods manufactured in China for our wholesalers to sell to our retail outlets who then sell to us. This, of course, is because goods are manufactured more cheaply in China than anywhere else on Earth. They won the labor bidding war decades ago (hardly a surprise in a society accustomed to autocratic rule), and, by virtue of that conquest, the Chinese people know comparative prosperity to what they’d known a couple of decades prior. However, that figure — 90% — should open some eyes. China prevails in trade since few nations, including our own, have even the present capacity to produce goods as prolifically. Investors haven’t ventured capital in other places quite like the world’s most populated nation. If they had, the goods you find at your local mall wouldn’t almost unanimously indicate they were made behind the Great Wall. We’re addicted to China. Much of the world is.
There was this 1982 film directed by Godfrey Reggio you may have heard of called Koyaanisqatsi. It featured no actors but was teeming with human life. It had no narrator, yet the story was visible if you looked for it. It was presented by the comparison of time lapsed imagery in the scenes: Great mountains and vast deserts; bubbling oceans and colossal mesas; winding rivers cutting through tall, forested canyons. Juxtaposed against these natural phenomena was the business of human civilization, also in time lapsed cinematography. The busy-ness. Unitarded people in factories producing cars, silicon chips, and hotdogs. Lot’s of robotic gadgetry pumping out circuitry and parts. People accumulating in billowing numbers around escalators to board them. People exiting and entering subway cars. Foot traffic moving in and around malls and airports. Cars stopping and starting at stoplights in urban centers. Blinding traffic through expressways. People dancing at discos. People playing video games at arcades. I’ll spare you further spoilers, but what’s germane is even the recreation in which we participate is circuitous motion. Our cyclical lifestyles are ones of routine. No less cyclical than the pistons that move the axles of our cars, or the cogs, flywheels, and levers of any machine. Reggio was saying humanity is great at making machines, but when we began doing that we were innovating them. Now, we are additionally surrounded by them. Enveloped within them. Hence, addicted to them. The title of the film is taken from the Hopi language. It’s root: “Qatsi” means “life,” “existence,” “way of life,” or “way of existence.” The prefix: “Koyaanis” means “Out of Balance” also translated as “Chaotic,” “Crazy,” or “Turmoil.” Koyaaniqatsi has been alternatively interpreted as “Life disintegrating,” or “A way of life that calls for another way of living.” Hang on to that. This may seem like a departure, but in fact it’s an overture. There’s much I could say about the Hopis, but I’ll save that for another missive. This one is about us.
Ninety percent of all we purchase is made in one place. Likewise, a great swath of our manufacturing jobs have migrated overseas. Our trade deficit is killing us. One day in the foreseeable future we will all be able to step outside our homes again. People have endured worse plagues before, some in the recent past (sans the advancements of 21st century medicine, I’ll add), and people have come out the other side, many without even penicillin. COVID-19 will one day be a footnote in history, but that’s because it’s not so much a disease as a symptom to a much more prevalent ailment. What we ail from isn’t a virus. It’s our own behavior as a civilization. I’m tempted to become the Ghost of Christmas Past and show you the world just as our first civilizations were rising and falling, though again, this must await another missive. Still, prognosticating the future, we must at least examine the here and now.
Natural selection favors diversity within species. Darwin knew it. Dawkins knows it. Any biology teacher would concur just as every biological and anthropological authority would confirm it. If you have a wide variety of traits in butterfly subspecies science agrees that the longevity of the species as a whole is all but assured. Environmental factors that one subspecies can’t handle the others aptly may. Multiply this view to all life in every kingdom, and you’ll see my keynote. But our culture has trended away from this natural law. We tend to specialize. We place our eggs, not in several baskets, but the cheapest one. All cultures don’t do this, but ours does. It’s relatively young. Ten thousand or so years old. That’s a blip in geological time. The oldest person to ever live was Jeanne Calment, a French lady who’d made it to 122. Her voice was featured over a rap album produced in 1996, her penultimate year on Earth. Multiply her age by 16 and it would take you only a few year beyond Christ’s last temptation, his last supper, and last dump. Multiply her age by 80, and that’s roughly how old our culture is. All first world cultures, including China’s, come from these Mesopotamian origins. We all practice the same set of agriculture. Aggressive, wholesale agriculture. We absorb massive tracts of land so that we can make massive amounts of food — more food than we need, though large demographics of people still go hungry even in the first world nations. Thomas Malthus observed as growers increase our food supply their population follows suit to consume it, rather than enrich its lifestyle, and there’s never been a credible authority to refute that.
This practice, seizing land and using it to make food, is paralleled by multinational corporations taking the new psychological real estate — ad time on TV and the internet — to compete against their rivals. But all of them have still homogenized the manufacture of their products (including the TVs and the computers which broadcast ads for said products) in largely one place: “The Sleeping Giant.” We are breaking the natural law of diversity. There are other natural laws. Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, indexes a few and tallies their punishment. If you break the law of gravity? Death. If you break the law of aerodynamics? Death. If you break the laws of thermodynamics? Death. If the entire planet were to break Kepler’s law of planetary motion — everyone on it? Dead. Even Murphy’s law is often more deadly than some of this nation’s legislation, but, as a society, we don’t seem to give much reverence to the concept of biological laws. Of ecological laws. Of environmental laws. We haven’t enshrined Darwin’s observations any more than Einstein’s. Neither’s were made canon. Only theory. The same can be said for the scientists who’ve accumulated observations about our melting environment. Their testimony is cast into litigation by competing “scientists” who publish counterinsurgent opinion so that they may neutralize the findings of legitimate ecologists. This way those funding them can, unfettered, continue to practice the lifestyle that’s feathered their beds and leathered their cars’ interiors.
A ways back President Barack Obama had tried to broker the Transpacific Partnership. The TPP. This trade treaty, which included at least a dozen nations, was filled with pork. It contained very ominous riders which protected corporations from liability, when they should have been as vulnerable to lawsuits as any other person. Real people rightly stood up against it. If corporations are people then they should experience liability like any other person. Obama’s efforts wound up confounded, and TPP was finally abandoned. This is not an editorial on Barack Obama. I’d imagine, had he the negotiating power to do so, he’d probably have pulled those provisions out by the root, but getting a dozen nations to the table along with a gross of multinational corporations, is, I’m sure, no small task. Or maybe he’s a complete bastard who advocated for every rider in there. His position on those corporate-shielding provisos is immaterial. I, too, took issue with the fine print that would have disenfranchised individuals from their rights to legal recourse. But, in light of recent events, I’m seeing the wisdom of such a trade partnership. If one could be drafted which held multinational corporations to formidable account for malfeasance when they demonstrated it we should all take heed because the alternative is this: A life out of balance. A chaotic life. A disintegrating life. I think that Obama’s goal wasn’t so much to harm China as to protect us from the Red Dragon — a nation which, with regard to our own posture, is presently Too Big to Fail.
And now look at congress and the president trumpeting their 1+ trillion concession. Note their haste to provide us with a stimulus package that will A. Not really cover the bills — weeks late and many dollars short — $1200 per individual won’t churn butter for many households. Maybe it will cover a month, but what after that? Another trillion? B. Place a larger mortgage on our children’s children — something congress clamored heavily about when Obama asked for his stimulus package (which was loaded with tax cuts for the rich just to make it palatable to the conservative caucus) — and C. Not amass that great a return on investment — unlike Obama’s unadulterated stimulus bill which would be paying us back today, since it was money earmarked to stimulate investment in infrastructure and sound business ecosystems. Of course all we hear from the Democratic side are crickets because they don’t debate tax payers needed stimulus yesterday, but the point is, when the sky plummeted between 2007 and 2008, where were the (—> insert expletives here <—) conservatives then? They bailed out the banks with tax payer money. The tax payers themselves needed a bailout. Why does the whole nation need a pandemic to get it? We were IN a pandemic. The sky was falling and Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the rest of the Ayn Rand fan club sermoned us about bootstraps and how irresponsible we were being to our grandchildren. That same rhetoric? Gone and forgotten now. Only some of us left twisting in the wind still remember.
Human beings are more like other life than most of us seem to realize. We all employ a business concept called BATNA — Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. It’s why the corporations like Nike choose to set up manufacture in China. They gets the most out of their spent calories. Think a spider behaves all that differently than the executive board of Nike? It too, employs BATNA. A moth lands in its web. A wasp lands further away. The moth is small. It’s worth maybe three calories, but it’s stuck fast. The wasp is only caught by one wing, and it’s flapping frenetically. It may yet free itself. The moth represents no threat. The wasp could kill the spider, but it’s net value is nine calories. The spider needs to spend more calories just to get over to the wasp, but it bypasses the moth — knowing that that meal’s a foregone conclusion — and risks the high ground with the more dangerous insect just to be the dog that got both bones. We don’t operate differently. Not really. We both evaluate risk. Mitch was evaluating it when he advocated this stimulus bill. The congressmen who dumped their stocks to buy safer securities when COVID-19 began spreading evaluated theirs, even if it was craven (and somehow legal) insider trading. Mayhap we might consider regulating our corporations so that the shareholders understand they can’t always go with the lowest labor bidder? Oh, but I kid. Pay no attention to such sacrilege.
Our lives are disintegrating. Trump will not save you with his deceit by omission. Biden will not save you with his. Yes, Joe talks a great game involving programs, initiatives, and what he’ll do on Day One. None of that matters because programs will not save us. Only a collective movement can do that. “No Child Left Behind,” “Meals on Wheels,” “Cash for Clunkers,” “Race to the Top”? All catchy titles. Arguable all decent programs, but none of them address root causes for societal ills. They address symptomology. And symptomology redressal’s not enough anymore. Really, it never was. Only we can save ourselves. Take advantage of the isolation that COVID-19 has provided so that you might look more deeply within.
The prevailing culture on this planet suffers from a profound eating disorder. Many if not most problems that exist in the world today, be they disease (psychiatric and otherwise), war, weapons stockpiling, racism, sexism, crime, apathy, or a spate of others would be solved if we could dial back our livestock and produce. Our population explosion would slow, stop, and eventually, tilt. With less people there would be less demand and more supply, which would benefit everyone. There would be less demand for fossil fuels because there was less people who’d need them. There would be less pollution because there would be less fossil fuel exploration. Our climate might actually turn back from it’s forecasted course because there was less pollution tearing a hole in our Ozone layer, hence the melting glaciers would cease their melt and the increasing the sea level would cease its climb. There would be less violent weather by virtue of cooler climate. There would be less earthquakes because we’d have less demand for natural gas that we acquire through hydrofracking our mountains and the tectonic plates upon which this sit. The price of all goods would gradually fall because demand gradually fell. Housing prices would be back within reach. Rent would stop climbing to strabismic figures. Traffic would be sparser. People would be less stressed out because they’d have more. Psychotropic meds would fall into obsolescence and crime statistics would fall too. The world might catch up to itself. These issues aren’t irreversible. A more utopic society could yet be ours.
Or we have to do what China has done — institute a world wide One Child policy — although I don’t think that would be a popular alternative for a society which embraces family values. There would be less family to value. Gordon Gekko of Wall Street touted the sin of greed as a good thing. I’d argue it and gluttony are what‘s led our culture into a state of decline, one many of us have been feeling since the Reagan years. This is the Great Recession you must fear. The end is not nigh whatever Rorschach of The Watchmen might have you believe because “Nothing ever ends,” a la Dr. Manhattan of Alan Moore’s same graphic novel. What is nigh is our culture’s perpetual decay, and if you’re already feeling the bite of that decay don’t think you can’t sink further. You can drown in a toddler pool if your head is thrust under deep enough. Unless you’re a Trump, or a Walton, or a Musk, or a Rockefeller, or a Buffett, or a Bezos, or a Koch, or someone else inside Forbes magazine you’re a part of a culture that’s against the ropes, swinging blindly, and inuring blow after disastrous blow. Your life is cyclical, surrounded by many other cycles, and some (arguably all) of those cycles affect your cycle. Those are the political ones with which you must align or oppose. Otherwise, you will never break out of your unpleasant cycle. The status quo isn’t working for most of you. Your lifestyle isn’t sustainable, binging on layaway.
That other interpretation of Koyaanisqasti, “A way of life that calls for another way of living”? Mull this one over before “Earth Reopens” and the long confinement in your home reaches its denouement. All species, our own included, should mind natural law — promoting diversity being maybe the utmost cardinal among them — because there are penalties for breaking it even if it doesn’t mean immediate death. Time is relative, and no subculture or subspecies of any culture or species is so exceptional that it’s really too big to fail. Not China, nor those of us pledging to the stars and bars.