The Audacity of Depression

[Lorien]

Rage fatigue, plastic dirt and happy hour in techno-totalitarian America

(snip)

Virgil may be popping open a Keystone Light lager somewhere in heaven, or in maybe a much warmer venue. I dunno. But people are thinking about it more than ever. Among sentient people everywhere there is a deep, visceral unease, and among those most aware there is genuinely acute suffering. I hear this expressed quite articulately not only in places such as this Omni Hotel "writers' lounge," but in working and middle class living rooms and in emails from Americans and around the world.

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign "plans for change."

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society -- halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

More: http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/04/the-audacity-of.html

[knowbody0]

1. i have a ridiculous "knowing" that soon we will ALL

be in tune to a collective spirit calling us toward the greater good. that the insanity must end.

ha ha ha, right?

[Lorien]

2. ....

"we are left to play out the game day by day. That being the case, we should elect to play it out with the best among us, the ones on humanity's side, that hidden and unheralded aristocracy -- those quiet lamp lighters making their way through the deepening dusk of American civilization.

E. M. Forster described them as,

"Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they meet. ... Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to utilize them. ... But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the Holiness of the Heart's Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide open world."

In this they are deathless."

[knowbody0]

4. thanks, lorien

lovely words to sleep on.

[jotsy]

6. Comfort for us nomads, tyvm.

Not that I see myself in such a significant light, but because I've always been made to think I should be embarrassed for not following the crowd.

[tblue37]

3. The dinosaurs went extinct, and they dominated the planet way longer than we have.

We just are not capable of adapting fast enough to the new conditions created by our own success as a species. Cockroaches will inherit the earth.

[jotsy]

5. I didn't make the jump, but did notice the date of April 08.

If the unease was visible among the informed then, the election may have been a distraction and a temporary sense of disaster being averted. The powers that be don't appear to have any intention of removing their boot from atop our throats. We are down, we cannot breathe and it seems their enjoying the heck out of that. There's an old Don Henley song I hear a lot in my head lately, and its last verse especially:


It was a pretty big year for predators
The marketplace was on a roll
and the land of opportunity
spawned a whole new breed of men without souls
This year, notoriety got all confused with fame
and the devil is downhearted, babe
because there's nothing left for him to claim

The Garden of Allah
1995

[Lorien]

7. Kick nt