Nuclear Doom And The National Guard

I just saw the movie, The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant poetic novel. To sum up the emotional paroxysms enlivened in me is impossible, so let me just say that The Road makes me want to SCREAM at the stupidty of humanity, our mindless gutless soulless race toward demolition.

We live in an incredibly backward time, where our ‘great’ advisors think that free market capitalism--based on selfishness, accumulation,and the rapine of the Earth--is the ultimate form of social wisdom and that nothing better can ever be found,. And we have an equal number of great imbeciles cloaked as wise men who think that Might Makes Right is the best way to position our nation against others. In other words, the realpolitik of Machiavelli is not only alive and well but also the dominant form of philosophical thinking among our weapon-happy leaders, who somehow don’t get the fact that 2,000 ICBM’s in silos is already far beyond the pale.

I want to SCREAM at where this is taking us. It is taking us to the start of The Road, where nuclear winter annihilates everything green, down to the last leaf and petal, and slaughters off most every animal on the planet. No birds. No deer. No seals. Nothing.

Saddest of all, I don’t think anyone who watches this movie can intelligently claim it is not possible today as a result of a plausible nuclear war. A year from now, you and I and the rest of the population could be (a) dead, (b) dying from radiation sickness in a world without birds, flowers, or sunlight, (c ) starving to skeletons or subsisting as cannibals in an insane barbaric hell.

What makes me even angrier is the HORRIBLE COMMERCIALS that I had to endure in the theater before seeing this poignant soulful literary masterpiece of a trenchant evocative prophetic movie. Stupid commercials saying buy buy buy more more more shallow ridiculous trinkets. And worst of all--get this--a HORRIBLE glitzy pitch for the National Guard, geared obviously toward teenagers and young adults; a long cartoon world mindfuck of a commercial that made being in the National Guard look like being a star in a cliché action-adventure movie, complete with fancy filming, mythological music, and heroic voice over. It was amazingly sad. That callous. That dangerous. The entire commercial was vomit-worthy propaganda. To their credit, a large number of people in the audience booed when it was over.

In my five decades, I have never heard a movie audience boo an ad in a theater before.

If we don’t change this ugly and perverse focus on militarism and shallow consumerism; if we don’t wake up and nurture the hidden landscape of our souls, the lush inner emotions neglected while we suffer deadlines, chores, money envy, and the fear of evil, anthrax, bombs and a million other neurotic tertiary things that fire-eaters use to manipulate us; if we don’t stop raping Nature and building big boxes everywhere, crowding out everything but our own narcissistic urges and complaints--then we are going to blow ourselves up. We are going to turn this once beautiful planet into a global graveyard of corpses--the bones of every mammal, reptile, bird and fish will litter this world and not a single seed will bloom.

Howard Zinn died the other day, an irreplaceable activist and leader. The Los Angeles Times obituary quotes from his thoughts on the US reaction, led by George W. Bush, to the 9/11 attacks:

"They have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the 20th century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-howard-zinn28-2010jan28,0,5610858.story

Watching an utterly stupid patriotic commercial for the National Guard, and then a movie that warns of the peril and lamentation of nuclear holocaust, affected me BEYOND DEEP. It dug Zinn’s words into the sanctum of my conscience forever.

I honestly think we are going to wipe out the ecosystems soon, forcing Mother Nature to start over. And I want to say, if there is a Goddess up there, or anyone listening to me from the great beyond--outside this fucked up selfish human-clogged world--I want to say I am SORRY, and YES I am complicit, and yet I am YELLING out and trying to stop it; but the momentum is WAY beyond me, and far beyond those around me who share my feelings. The ignorant train of mechanization and monstrous greed is set on a headlong pace.

I am so sorry. I SCREAM and yet the crushing hulk of war and fear moves on. They will have their way.

All I can do is enjoy every leaf, every ant, every precious moment of the miracle of existence. I am so thankful to have lived in a time before humanity wiped it all out.

I will keep speaking, futilely I’m afraid, and I will keep immersing in the miraculous beauty as long as fate allows me.

Thank you, Goddess, for my life and times.


OWL