The dangers of mass extinction have finally, reluctantly gotten the attention of station managers who allow political candidates time. Lucas Studios have many pirate alehouse scenes in their galaxy where jocular deals get made. Our society has many people with thick skins, some of them cynical, on the march in the circuits of the city. Not all of them will comply with the idea that the government’s role is central and necessary to Extinction Rebellion. But if you look at the Mission Statements of groups that have built a trusting legacy in Our Commonwealth, such as clinics, Community Colleges, Public Education generally and of course the new and noble Clubhouse Movement for the mentally ill, you have a social fabric which could potentially receive, retain and act upon, knowing what to do, public safety regulations in the gathering gloom and attempt to intercept the dangerous trajectory ahead. In other words, they might be able to understand a phrase like, “the last generation of automobiles,” by which I mean by choice of prosperity and celebration of survival, rather than the hoary image that ends Nevil Shute’s classic On the Beach about nuclear war, “she died behind the wheel of her big car.” True those of us who have thought about all of this a long time are talking to people with handy wisecracks who have never listened before.
The idea that we have to change itself isn’t really that dreadful. Despair over the maturation of Metropolis is misplaced. There is, however, a very poignant and burlesque sideshow that foreswears against mitigation, some of which makes very good reading on the level of calling itself by anti-fascism. The blowhorns that shouted the loud and clear Wuhan freeze are not going to take being ignored sitting down. They have a very good identity for themselves in Washington State Higher Education. A filipino writer with the lovely name of Tolentino exasperates his narrative of colonial film-makers from Hollywood with the tragic story of a young leader who, after announcing the beautiful American spirit of liberty and freedom is killed by our troops, his clothes, boots and worldly possessions stripped from his body leaving his corpse to be gathered to the ancients by crows. Ho Chi Minh tried it, too. In this legacy their charm school scoff at white liberals for liars, sneering of what becomes of all America’s Imperial seduction.
In reality, outside the forlorn brays of marginal but relevant intelligencia, the fact of the matter is that Black Rage against white liberalism is a lot like an Oedipal Complex. It is Freudian, not based on anything real. But it is so powerful they pushed aside all evidence of testimony and material showing they were siding with the AIDS attackers in return for permission to devour me in their showdown with lover affairs by collegiate white dandyism. Always with the tone of reminding me of larger matters.
Ah, okay, the queerbait omojuns it can read the perilous smoke signals. To be real, I just want to save Extinction Rebellion some time by helping with the language skill needed to communicate what can be done based on some years of experience and thought. I imagine, after we succeed, if we do, that a lot of people will have a lot to sit down and say to one another, lovely meaningless chatter, healthy, daring and real. That will be splendid. The better voices, what shall they say? Exquisite? Punch drunk? A very narrow in between, recanting, re-stating and arriving so really, is that all we have to say for this rapture? How I long to hear the laughs.
The last generation of automobiles can surely be our best, divesting from the long held presumption that cars and war are as one. The wonderful arrival of the Black Ecology Movement can surely understand, from all the tribulation of people living out of cars the potential for Intelligence programs using the planet’s vehicle address system. The hoods can open and shut on community gunlock programs in Central America as we mind the ecosystem. But we have now been warned in Wuhan. We are living on a cusp.
The original problem of our penitentiaries was Vagrancy Laws by which slavery was re-incurred under another name. Innocent men and women were many times many times sent there as sinners to glower in their pains. This is the language of Dante’s Inferno. Ah, but how we have not come to reckon the Shakespearean Catholicism of the ravenous parochial scorched earth program that lashed with the AIDS attack. There are also many warnings about the fatal incompetence of the Left. No sooner had I seen the State Parks of Pennsylvania ruinously trampled by a Rainbow Gathering but the Grateful Dead made an appeal to Save the Rainforest. Sadly, this is a united situation, what Great Greta Thunberg calls a failure of the left, right and center.
Cut off from orders during Hurricane Katrina, and note that crowds flocked to stadium, honeycomb style shelter, the troops froze, denying themselves plenipotentiary, unable to summon the courage to say: put the boats on the trucks and rescue the elderly down the road. I feel the same freeze in myself even learning the simple task of setting the table. For years, my midwestern mom barked at me, “DON’ T TRY IT!” anytime I wanted to do something self-assertive. And what did she say when I wanted something really badly but, “NO! Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah.” Penis Gabriel sings, “Subway sounds, the sounds of complaint, the smell of acid on his gun of paint as he carves out anger in a blood red band destroyed tomorrow by an unknown hand: My Home!”
Yet we know the hands that we are reaching to have voided our concerns before. Obama ignored the chance to refuse a bailout to the carbon machine, as Reagan had chided Jimmy Carter’s Solar Energy Bank. Mitch McConnell comes over, in his touching flare for moral dignity and humanity, as the Wozard of Id in a National Lampoon. The question, right out the book of laughs, is still: Who speaks for the silent weak?
