by Mike Bendzela
This is what happens when you revere the fancies of Iron Age sheep:
This is what happens when you christen a parcel of dust Holy Land:
This is what happens when you refuse to give up worship for Lent:
This is what happens when you litter North, South, East, West with prayers:
This is what happens when you ignore 3.8 billion years of organic evolution:
This is what happens when you fail to dismember the Great Chain of Being:
This is what happens when you think the word “ape” is an insult:
This is what happens when you no longer pine for a tail:
This is what happens when you try to burn your way to prosperity:
This is what happens when you can’t stop inhaling the exhaust fumes:
This is what happens when you become addicted to hypersonic speed:
This is what happens when you replace eyes with satellites, flesh with plastics, legs with wheels:
This is what happens when you deify the neoplasm:
This is what happens when you parse survival into fractions of billions:
This is what happens when your cornucopia takes root in the earth’s crust:
This is what happens when leverage, interest, derivatives become shibboleths:
This is what happens when you can order out 24/7 Thai, Ethiopian, Peruvian:
This is what happens when you browse packages of chops in stores with full A/C:
This is what happens when you treat soil as something to be bagged and sold:
This is what happens when you plow under whole ecosystems:
This is what happens when you substitute TV for a nipple:
This is what happens when you skip school to play video games:
This is what happens when you let Hollywood construct your worldview:
This is what happens when you livestream war news as a reality TV show:
This is what happens when a digital map becomes your territory:
This is what happens when you mistake pixels for flesh:
This is what happens when you try to point & click your way to salvation:
This is what happens when you’re too besotted to get up and log out:
This is what happens when you can’t tell bronze from gold:
This is what happens when you vote for convicted felons:
This is what happens when you sundown your way to a decision:
This is what happens when you lie through your root canals about your infirmities:
This is what happens when you split the atom:
This is what happens when the levee breaks:
This is what happens to all your eggs in one basket:
This is what happens when everything finally becomes convenient and disposable:
You only make it that much harder to clean up after yourself.
Notes
Stanza 1: Sheep is the biblical term for followers, not mine. We cling by the billions to obsolete, absurd messianic belief systems which are currently leading us over a cliff. As my anthropology professor at the University of Toledo, David Stothers, said out of the blue in class one day, “All religions are in the same bucket!” We were discussing the beliefs of the Huron peoples, which seemed strange to us. He meant that no one religion is any more “true” than any other. His statement shocked me at the time (1981), but now I think it’s long past time we emptied that bucket (if there is still time left to do so).
Stanza 2: In perhaps the greatest paradox of human development, natural selection has “designed” a brain that seems inherently hostile to embracing the concept of common descent. We cling instead to the debunked model of “higher” and “lower” beings, to Hebrew “created kinds,” and thus fail to see that we are all family, even with other taxa. This is why we disintegrate into tribes. Robert Sapolsky expresses a radical kinship with the animals in his description of how we lost our tails.
Stanza 3: In yet another irony, a species that denies evolution now relies entirely upon a system based on the burning of the fossilized remains of long-extinct plants from untold millions of years ago. We have entered into what geologist M. King Hubbert called the “most disturbing” period in the history of our species, the “carbon pulse“, as Nate Hagens aptly names it. This is nothing short of the displacement of the biological with the synthetic. We have been warned repeatedly by ecologists and others that this is a self-terminating enterprise, as finite fossil energy sources will decline by definition, and accumulating waste products of combustion will alter the chemistry of the atmosphere until the planet is unsuitable for human habitation.
Stanza 4: As for unchecked growth: It must be admitted that we cannot help ourselves. The urge to go forth and multiply (arguably the most unwittingly Darwinian passage in the Bible) is programmed into every cell and prokaryotic organism making up our bodies. Even Darwin noted that any creature given its druthers would eventually “stock” every square inch of the planet, were it not “checked” by predation, famine, disease, and death. We have made this primal urge to grow the lodestar of a world-wide economy, and it only persists because we keep smashing through those natural checks. With a little help from those aforementioned fossil fuels, of course. Which will not last.
Stanza 5: In a perturbation related to the discovery of fossil fuels, agriculture has become disassociated from the sustainable ecological cycles of the earth (nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, water, etc.) and is now a behemoth cantilevered out into thin air via the life support system provided by coal, oil and natural gas. Sustenance is now a mere commodity: We may demand seemingly any comestible at any time. But without the fossil fuels, this mode of being is finished. And, one way or another, fossil fuels will finish. Now, due to a fatuous war, perhaps they have finished. Humanity is “busily sawing off the limb” it is sitting on, as ecologist William Catton has put it, with no thought for the morrow. This, infuriatingly, is in almost perfect alignment with the abysmal apocalypticism of the Abrahamic religions.
Stanza 6: In the hands of corporations, modern media inventions have become delivery systems for mental analgesics. Brains are stocked with cliches and bromides, trivia, commercial jingles, television series one-liners, fake scenarios, happy endings. The proper opinions about contemporary matters are dispensed between commercials, which are simply ways of selling our eyes, ears, and brains to the highest bidders. The various media pinion us by our eyes in order to carefully pour their corporate poisons into our ears. As media outlets now function merely as venues for the transmission of units of product, news of coming urea fertilizer shortages is given the same weight as the latest rom-com release.
Stanza 7: It’s believed that the Acheulean handaxe, that great achievement of our progenitor species, Homo erectus, was at some point totemized. Perhaps it’s inevitable that after extended use a technology populates the brain and dominates our attention. Thus, the internet becomes the parietal cave art of the modern world. Our fifteen minutes of Warholian fame have been economized to fifteen seconds of scrolling. With AI, we’ve reached the apotheosis of totem tech, the perfection of human irrelevance, simultaneously avant garde and sine qua non. It’s the final corruption of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist”: “I always wanted you to admire my googling.” The Acheulean handaxe cult, being based in stone, lasted for over 1.5 million years. How long do you think this electronic blip will actually last?
Stanza 8: Politics is debauchery. Positions of power have become magnets for the worst personalities. But such derangement cannot gain a foothold without the support of a cohort of society that has disproportionate influence. Thus, we are held captive by those who have been groomed for debauchery by religion, marketing and advertising, sitcoms, podcasts, and algorithms. Under the current system, voting is no longer merely pointless: It actually debases you. By participating you are submitting to a system of paid corporatist hacks that doesn’t work for you. Through the back door, though, comes a thought worth hanging on to: Being nothing is a thing. So, “Be passersby,” as the apocryphal Jesus quotation has it. Whatever you do, war will do as it does, regardless of your approval, in spite of your opposition, indifferent to consequence.
Stanza 9: It truly feels like a major rupture in human thriving has occurred.
Images
Rene Magritte’s paradoxical “The Treachery of Images” serves as the inspiration for the meme, which goes beyond the artist’s joke about the representation of objects to show simply that this particular image, a photograph of a model of an extinct human, depicts what most people still deny–an animal, full stop.
“National Museum of Natural History” by Cargo Cult is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
“Peak Oil” by Daquella manera is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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