Baysage has anticipated me in his comment on my previous posting, wherein he states that "God has nothing to do with it."
That's pretty much the right story. We have a major problem in that we have allowed our narrative of the future become a brochure for a trip to sunny catastrophe, and we have compounded it by saying that it's God's will.
It ain't.
It is not God's will in the slightest.
The Flood is more like the Trail of Tears that will be cause by our forced relocation east of Eden.
The quote from Kinsella points to the cause:
"one strikeout with the bases loaded is worth ten strikeouts with two out and nobody on."
In other words, it is more profitable to throw the game - Shoeless Joe Jackson here - than it is to play by the rules and win it straight. Wise Guys, a coupla generations of Wise Guys.
Baysage mentions the fact that the state of Washington is going to fund some Microsoft plans with tax abatements, or grants, or some other give-away. This has been going on a long time. Read Lee Iacocca about how it's done. Lee's a great guy, but he did the same scam while he was at Ford, and he comes right out and tells you how the corporates play that game.
It's even more poignant with the auto makers, because they promised jobs when they couldn't even raise capital to build cars Americans wanted, mainly because they were building cars Americans did not want. So now we own part of GM.
The past quarter century and more has been a history of Government Corporatism, where laws were written for corporations. Look at the changes to eminent domain laws since 1980, and look at how they have been implemented. Look at the history of the Poletown project in Detroit where a community was ripped apart for the jobs promised by a GM plant - a plant heavily using robots that never was able to deliver jobs at the promised level built by a company that couldn't build saleable cars.
Once again, back to the Depression and World War II. There were sit down strikes in 1937, 1938. This was one year before WW II. The biggest gains of unions did not happen in 1932; they came in FDR's second term.
The battle was just really starting to be fought, and to bear fruit. WW II interrupted it. The outcome of WW II was a boom for everyone. That boom is over.
Now the battle will be fought again. Corporatism is "winning". I say "winning" because what passes for success is strange nowadays. If Corporatism was a sucessful regime, I think we could eventually live with it. Based on the most recent corporate bail-out, Corporatism is not a resounding success: it is a failure. Corporatism is like a malign parasite that is too stupid to know that it ought not to kill its host. Corporatism kills.
That was the idea behind plants in Mexico. That was the idea behind NAFTA. That was the motive behind Globalization: when you've killed the host organism, jump to another host.
(Corporatism kills because we are too unidimensional - almighty dollar! - and our entire world view lacks robust diversity: even our religious minded people are parochial and crabbed, denying Truth to other worshippers of God! And thinking that religiosity is evidenced by a display of the Ten Commandments in front of the City Hall!)
God has nothing to do with the Flood that's coming. We are doing it all. And we can't stop, because in our stories and narratives, in our minds, it all Book of Revelations, it's all Mayan calendars, it's all Deluge - it's God is angry and He's coming........but He ain't; He's headed in the other direction, away from us.
(If you've seen Forbidden Planet, we are Morbius, and it is not Monsters from the Id, by Monsters from our consciousness that is bent on our own destruction.)
And we still don't have any idea why things are unravelling. We think it's because of some resetting of the calendar in 2012. And when that date passes, it will be some other abstruse notion. We will look everywhere, except where the fault is: within ourselves. It is within ourselves, not because we are "sinners", not because we are "idolaters", and not even because we allow abortion, as ghastly as that may be: the fault is within us, because it is within the grasp of sentient beings to choose the future, then to articulate that future...and we have chosen wrong and we have allowed our leaders to tell us lies about the future. We have allowed our leaders to dumb down education in order that we and our children will be too stupid to recognize lies, so now we believe the meretricious stories. Our leaders find it far better that we believe that God wills to destroy us, rather than we know the truth: that our own educated and privileged leaders will to destroy us!
The next time Corporatism stumbles, overburdened as it is with its too-big-to-fail dinosaurs, is going to be the end of it. If we assume capitalism has its ups and downs, the dynamics of an up is much different than a down: for one thing, when things deteriorate, the plunge down is incredibly rapid - just remember how fast the Dow fell in 2008 versus the time it took to gain similar amounts.
And there is no guarantee anywhere that the economy can climb out of the hole it digs for itself. The next big down is the last one.
God does not will it, but He sees it.
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1 comment:
There's wisdom here. But there's madness out there. To judge by what you read and seen on the tube, people think everything will be as it was. They don't know how right they are. The corporations, politicians, and practices that brought us to our knees are still beating us about the head and shoulders, and we are not only enjoying it, but we persist in believing that this is only way things could be.
I firmly believe you're correct about our collective stupidity. Alas, we've reached critical mass on this. All that's left madness and collapse.
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