You are standing in midst of the Brazilian original forest, look up in the sky, out of a green hell, a yellow snake flies into your face, curls her tail quickly around your neck, looks grinning in your face, snaps forward and tears your eyes out and afterwards swallows you and you are dead as dead can be. Okay, I must admit: The Brazilian forest is the whole planet, the green hell is the USA, the snake is the US-capitalism of globalisation, the grinning is not the one of a snake but of George W. Bush, your eyes are the two sides of human ethics, and the dead body at the end is the species Homo sapiens.
Do you really believe, that there is just one politician, CEO, Nobel- price holder or philosopher, able to prevent our world from being "done" as a result of self-destruction? Naivety has its price, too. Just note the following: The World of Homo sapiens will be "done" by the year 2025, it may well be tumbled, will have come to the end with its Latin - and in any respects you could think of. The planet may be "done" for reasons of economics, ecology, resources and energy, due to a break-down of cultural life, or collapse due to all imaginable stupidities in politics. Nothing, absolutely no measures humans could guess, will prevent the final down-fall of humanity. Why? Think of the snake and than have a look at the following arguments:
Think of England has just treated us to the latest ravings of Harold Pinter, one of England’s coterie of angry old men, on the unspeakable evils of Bush-Blair-Hitler. Move over, Mr. Pinter, your time is up. A whole new generation of talented, insane leftists is taking your place and revealing your anti-American rhetoric and poetry to be as tired and dated as your plays. The time for the Ms. Delavys of the world has come and they will not be denied. Don't fight it, it's hopeless. There is really nothing left for you to do but retreat quietly to your bedroom, curl up and die.
This stuff defies analysis and so Diversely We Sail is pleased to announce its first contest. You are invited to share or link us to your favourite short piece of anti-American or anti-Bush bile. Extra points will awarded if the source is American and demonstrates artful pathological self-contempt. Depending on the response, we may consider collecting them into an anthology. If we do, we promise to share royalties, unless you are an American and therefore personally responsible for the total destruction of the biosphere and all life in it. In that case, we will use your share to throw one heck of a party.
15 comments:
Wow. I'll try but I think it's going to be hard to topple Ms Delavy's 'maxims' for sheer mouth-foaming.
Maxim number 4 is all you really need to know:
"Reduce to the max". Reduce the world population from seven and more billions to below two billions. Otherwise, the world will be done by "mass-phenomenon" - even before our coming generations, our youth, will have reached the year 2100.
Save the children by not having them!
Here's my entry, since it seems most appropriate for your blog.
Cindy Sheehan pleads for Canada not to become as evil as the US:
I have had a chance since Camp Casey in August to travel the world. I have had the honor of meeting hundreds of fellow souls who are just plain sick and tired of the way BushCo is cavorting around the world and comporting themselves as fledgling 3 rd Reich tyrants (Hitler didn't need warrants either) who are threatening the way of life of every person who inhabits our world. I was only just in Canada and got to meet many of our brothers and sisters north of the border.
From Italy to Canada to Great Britain and everywhere in between, our brothers and sisters who live in these nations are extremely tired of their governments who support BushCo in their war crimes and crimes against humanity. PM Berlusconi of Italy recently paid the price for his support of BushCo's policies by being uninvited back to his position. I knew he was going to be defeated by just traveling around Italy and hearing and feeling the frustration and fear for their democracy that Berlusconi's neo-Fascist rule was destroying.
By many accounts, Stephen Harper was put in place as leader of Canada by the collapse of weak coalitions and scandals that led to this man now leading a minority government there. He is wildly unpopular from coast to coast up north and there is a growing sense of unease about his emulation of a very unpopular person in the USA but even more in Canada: George Bush.
Canadians have to be the healthiest looking and most polite citizenry that I have encountered in my travels. The British people that I have met are very polite but nowhere near the graciousness of Canadians. Canadians are truly civil, and they mean it. Canadians have been proud of their country's role of world peacekeeper and as the beacon of peace and hope and refuge for us Americans who feel that our country's aggressive militarism endangers us and harms our reputations and souls. Now Canadians need to wake up to the fact that their new minority, disliked government is leading them down this same slippery slope to the fascistic militarism of their immediate neighbors to the south.
The first day that I was in Canada, their defense minister, Gordon O'Connor, signed the extension of the NORAD Treaty with the Bush Regime without any debate or votes in Parliament. The citizenry was outraged in their courteous way. Not so coincidentally, Gordy just so happens to be a former defense industry lobbyist who has been using his position to promote the " Canada First " position which ultimately removes Canada, once and for all, from their world peace keeping role. With Canada's support of the Haitian Government's overthrow and support of BushCo's travesty in Afghanistan, Canada was already heading down this path of destruction.
So Peter, where you "outraged in your courteous way?"
Before you get too carried away, what you actually you beat us to is graciousness towards Cindy Sheehan.
For sheer pith and the taking of comfort in one's beliefs, it is hard to outdo Suzanne Somers. Asked to comment on the recent loss of her home and possessions in a fire, Ms. Somers said: "My nature is to look at the glass half-full. I don't have a son or daughter in Iraq.
How about a whole book of Bush-hating cartoons from Doonesbury?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0740762001/downandoutint-20
No, wait a minute. This is much better. From a "vote if you think the president is a psychpath" blog entry:
http://samthornton.blogspot.com/2006/12/is-george-w-bush-sociopath-you-evaluate.html
Many wonderfully unhinged rants from the amateur psychologists. Here's the final paragraph from Paul W's post on the results:
"I'm tired of this boy-chimp-man; bone tired. I do not understand the media's kid-glove reporting of a guy who respects no one and nothing; an automaton with a fifth-grade vocabulary and second-grade attention span who has dragged us through the mud of world ridicule for going on seven years."
I think that we ought to increase world population, to around 60 billion or so.
However, the vast majority of the population must live in democratic/capitalist cultures, and we're not having that many kids, so we'll have to resort to cloning, and subsidizing families willing to raise up a dozen or so young'uns.
By following this plan, we'll ensure global peace and prosperity for anyone willing to work hard and get along with their neighbors.
As for idiots who think that the Earth's "carrying capacity" is less than a trillion humans, the less said about such ignorant fools, the better.
Here's a nice rant by Arundhati Roy:
"The tradition of `turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)
That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys — the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) — are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO — so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee — so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?
Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives."
Oro,
Just curious: how do you know that the carrying capacity is 1 trillion? I might be an idiot, because if I had to swag it, it would have been lest than 1 trillion. But of course I've never done the math.
Second question - what's the rush to see 60 billion? Do you suffer from the opposite of claustrophobia?
Oro:
How much energy is required to keep one human alive?
How much fresh water?
Multiply by one trillion, and what do you get?
You're going to have a hard time topping (or bottoming) Ted Rall.
I don't know that the carrying capacity of the Earth is one trillion or more humans; my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that it is so, but of course the weevils are in the details. I do know that the Earth's carrying capacity is at least 60 billion humans, IF we postulate that said humans live in mostly American-style cultures, e.g. highly productive and efficient with resources.
I'm not in any special hurry to get to sixty billion people, although such a number could live comfortably in a population density similar to the eastern suburbs of L.A., which are quite nice and not especially crowded, by populating only North and South America, leaving the rest of the world uninhabited, for farmlands and wilderness.
What I am impatient to have happen is for Africa and the Middle East to wake up, and stop resisting the good, (democratic capitalism), in favor of the unworkable, (traditions, nepotism and cronyism). An extra 50 billion people in the world's positive cultures would tip the scales definitively, either through persuasion or force.
Energy and fresh water are very minor details. The sun puts out more than enough energy, we just have to go get it, and the Earth is 2/3ds water; we just have to make it potable. We already have the necessary technology accomplish both things, we merely lack the need to do so.
However, I have no doubt that there would be some very serious problems that might have to be solved for one trillion people to live comfortably. In the past, AOG has suggested that body heat alone would create a huge climate problem, and one trillion people breathing and passing gas might alter the chemistry of the atmosphere enough to create existential problems.
I have total faith that we can solve such problems, although it might take engineering on a space opera scale* to do so. But with a trillion productive sets of hands to draw upon, the costs become minor, per capita.
* Such as that written by the sublime E.E. "Doc" Smith.
Oro:
...body heat alone would create a huge climate problem, and one trillion people breathing and passing gas might alter the chemistry of the atmosphere enough to create existential problems.
That could be a problem if all 60 billion are going to be Americans.
I like the way you phrased that: a trillion people passing gas causes "existential problems". I can just here an announcement like this on an airplane:
"This is your captain speaking - I've been informed by the chief attendant that the rear lavatory will be closed for a brief period, as we are in the process of resolving some existential problems. Thank you for your patience."
I dunno, Brit, those look like Scotsmen to me, or possibly Canadians. Plus, MY EYES !!
Sweet Gaia, my eyes...
Duck: Ha !
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