I have lived a good deal of my life immersed in a world of creativity, some would say fantasy - likely some admixture of the two. However, i’ve also lived many years creating in an engineering environment - think weaponry. It is no small wonder that i would bring personal conflicts from this dichotomy to a professional for help to sort fact from fiction . . . fact: i am no longer physically young - mentally, well that’ll have to wait for another essay; fact: weapons are no defense; fact: poverty is deliberate and manufactured, not chosen; “love is wise; hatred is foolish” - Bertrand Russell. I believe in my heart of hearts that my parents did their level best, however much the facts argue against such an assertion. The only factual result of this personal conviction is that i am compelled to follow suit. I spent nearly the entire day yesterday researching the advantages of relocating to another country, based not on any threat to my safety, or demands by my hosts to vacate, but due entirely to passing feelings of not belonging - fact. This is not to say my, perhaps too, finely tuned empathic capacities are fabricating rancor of others, selfish designs on my native generosity or very real efforts by others to dominate me, but anyone who has visited enough different places can find the same behvior everywhere on the planet. The fact is where i live, i belong, and were i to act on my research and move, then i would as equally belong in that new location. Let’s try a thornier consideration; i just spent 10 minutes repairing already threadbare underwear - here is the question, was i being a responsible citizen of the world keeping one less measly cloth out of a landfill, or was i moving the clock that much closer to my 3rd cigarette of the day? All that therapy wasn’t totally wasted, i like tobacco but am also mindful of the damage my personal choice wreaks on my rapidly aging frame. For years tobacco companies claimed otherwise. I have lived both lifestyles and so my opinion is empirical much like the temperature readings of our planet for the past 6 years - can we safely interpolate that tobacco companies and oil interests care not for facts? that is a question.
If so, this begs more questions. For example, why limit myself to 6 cigarettes a day; that is easy i feel better. However to what advantage is it for the oil companies to continue extracting fossil fuel. Are they protecting children who are starving in so many countries after so many years of ceaseless war, or is there a more sinister reason? We have seen that executive pay has vastly outpaced the compensation workers receive for their contributions to the “economy.” Does this dynamic mean that executives are more valuable to the “economy?” If that were true, there would be no arguments about welfare, homelessness or any of the other maladies our governments are currently blaming on character flaws; we would all be digging in the ground for oil - fat dumb and happy. If these executives were truly valuable, they would be seeking ways to preserve the bounty of our miraculous “economy”. It feels to me as though they got theirs, and they will do anything to guarantee that their dumb luck continues. The equivalent might be someone born into a wealthy country and wanting to believe that somehow they deserve better than all of the other countries. Countries, however are a myth. You cannot go to any nation on the planet and show where mother earth had made lines on the ground saying this side is for X, and that side is for Y. In fact there is no nation on earth whose boundaries have never changed. So why are we in such a hurry to preserve something that has always changed, or better yet shall we just remove the barrier of borders completely? My fantasy is that just like my desire to relocate yesterday was prompted by personal fears, or peering into my scary interior to know if i am repairing underwear for noble purposes is just moving myself closer to my fix, our borders are unexamined internal anxieties we attribute to an external cause, rather doing the hard work of understanding ourselves - oh yeah all that therapy was really valuable.
What i don’t completely understand is why the good doctor didn’t just say, “fuck it. that job is bad karma; dump aerospace and do art” instead of his rational recommendation - to paraphrase “let the job pay for your college, then teach high school English - it’s what your father did”. The fact is it was good advice and no deconstruction after the fact is going to alter that reality; besides just like Bob Dylan said, “reality has always had too many heads.” My family is not accessible to me, though i continue to make futile efforts to persuade myself otherwise; however it is from this earnest desire on my part to be connected that I can well imagine some hapless chump trapped in a corporate boardroom with emotional ciphers regaling the “leader” with tales of conquest, while the same hapless schmuck is asking him/herself “why are my insides ragged? - who are these people¿ - what am i doing here? - can i trust anyone, but my family sure is proud of me.” The problem for me is not my family being proud, that problem would be my own, just like any behavior that concedes power to another. If past is prologue as has been said elsewhere by my betters, we are facing very difficult times and our leaders would like to believe that they know what everyone else should do, except apparently themselves. At a time when scientific discipline is needed more than ever, there is an enormous amount of money demanding the world believe: the sun rotates around the earth; earth is flat; computers connect us to each other; surveillance is for our own good; police serve and protect, armies defend and that it is a good thing to be rich. I once had a relationship to a beverly hills address; knew someone married to the Mayor of Pasadena; and saw Gene Wilder in a restaurant. These are external reinforcements to an internal doubt. Nor does this information make anymore sense in reverse, meaning do i care if any of those mentioned ever took notice of me, Fact: you come into the world alone - a given, ma was close by, but talk about bursting bubbles. Fact: when you die, no one is going to do it for you.
No amount of spiritual gymnastics is going to alter those facts. so why would the in-between time of life be any different? I cannot redeem another human being, or save them from themselves. The only control i have is within my own skin. This fact is of great help at a time when the cowards amongst us who rather than get up in your face and say “do this, because i want you to,” resort to advertising manipulation, click bait, religious conformance or any of the other indirect efforts to make you you do something you thought was your own idea. Our world seems to have lost the capacity for cooperation, favoring instead the competitive model. Is this how pecking order has come to figure so highly in our ambitions: workers want to be bosses; bosses want to be owners; owners want to be rulers and rulers want blind obedience from everyone - everyone that is except themselves. Fact: (however fuzzy) from 6 to 86 men have more wealth than the bottom half of humanity. I read an interesting meme which stated - “that describes a slave ship dressed as worldwide economy.” Google no longer allows my posts propagation, this could be market forces, or market farces depending on which side you fall out on. But i would be willing to bet a large sum of money that were my anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-military anti-digital manipulation rants more generous to the great leaps which technology has provided humanity’s fearless leaders, then my views would miraculously, however slowly scale the mountain of visibility which the digital barons have conquered with their network chokepoints. A vaguely similar parallel comes to mind in the very old movie, H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.” Rod Taylor travels to the future to find an idillic society of Eloi who use no tools, no learning and who worship the Sphinx’s dotting the landscape (think Easter Island monoliths). The rub as the time traveler soon discovers, is when Pavlov’s bell rings, the Eloi become zombies and lockstep into the gaping mouths of these Sphinxes. Turns out when the world destroyed itself, those seeking refuge underground separated into the ones who returned to the surface of the planet to become Eloi and those who evolved into the Morlacks - who just happened to feed on the well bell trained Eloi who were entirely indifferent to their own fate.
The question is whether Mr. Wells was grappling with the hazy outlines of our current human predicament. Did he foresee in his creative zeal, the time honored inclination of a segment of our human population to feed on those they can under the right stimulus response scenario so sadly resembling the clickbait addiction we are today force feeding our young in the guise of technological advancement? That is a question. We now have a leader of the “free world” mocking truth using little more than a loincloth like bluster, and a cowed 5th estate attempting to normalize this behavior for seemingly no more reason than preserving the positions of respect and exaggerated compensation into which they have clawed their way. That is not liberal bias, for it is on both sides of the aisle that this pantomime of public interest is played. Fact: the doomsday clock according to googol now sits at 2 or 3 minutes to midnight. The closest it has been was in 1953 at 2 minutes; it now sits again at 2 minutes regardless of what googol says. One has to ask themselves how does the birth of a Kardashian trump googol’s confusion about where the clock estimating the best guess of our eminent extinction sits. This is same the monster information manager we in the West rely on to filter the same data that drives banks, nuclear triggers, fb and it is unable, or unwilling to be unequivocal about our best guess for survival. That is a fact that drives me inside of myself for truth. To know oneself is not a narcissistic diversion used by the unscrupulous to avoid the hard truths, to know oneself is to discover the importance of other, it is also why our duty to the world is far greater than any self-aggrandizing importance our ego has been trained to wallow in. Nor is self awareness simply to serve our generation alone, but like H.G. Wells grappling with the emergent power of the industrial revolution and fashioning a cautionary tale of our peril for the future, so too must we be looking out over the horizon and work for the survival of those who will be forced to live in the most hideous of all abuses - the barely born from a savagely raped mother earth.
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fiction - the sonnet
a pure fiction is one who looks down
on another - matters not the reason.
for survival we must share planet ground,
not hide in towers and commit treason.
“they” laugh at being stardust - explain stupid
to me, d’be easier to understand.
soon enough the past will be insipid -
for we’d learned their meaning of “take a stand”
laugh at this harangue, and i’d feel better,
not because i am, but because i feel.
Though they’ve stripped much from life, i’m not bitter
I can still feel, which for me keeps it real.
What i feel is not within my purview
what i am, i climb for to see the view
jts 01/29/2018
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
(for the record line 1 has 9 feet) - no fiction
(for the record line 1 has 9 feet) - no fiction
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