justice and the incurable cycles of nature

See justice. Imagine it in your mind. In whatever form you see it, there it is. See now how it manifests itself, how it becomes something more, since justice itself is not a living thing or a thing with form, like a book or a mountain or an orange. Watch justice long enough and you see how it shrivels on the vine from vast nothingness to a tiny, desiccated kernel of the concept. Watch yet a while longer and see this kernel is gradually held in higher regard than ever the justice was in its full bloom. It can now be seen and so it seems to many to be more holy: A relic, a revered artifact worthy of a marble temple, a crystal display case and visiting hours. But it is no longer justice, for the desire to be right and just, the very act of seeking it and, once holding on to it, protecting it, upholding it…eventually becomes an injustice. We do things that are unjust in order to preserve it, making complicated speeches with clever turns of phrase that rationalize the actions of death and betrayal as necessary, crucial choices in an increasingly ‘evil’ world in order to protect and preserve some higher justice that is important enough to warrant such violence.

Here we have but one accuracy: the world does increase in darkness, and the justice higher but only in that it has again risen above our reach. The darkness grows as we delude ourselves that we seek or assure justice by spilling blood and hoarding wealth, by dividing spirits and making promises to gods, oaths that require the unendurable weight of absolute loyalty. Only by curbing our lust for the kernel, the relic, will justice once again diffuse into an all-embracing abstract that is far more true than any skeleton or dead seed could be.

This is the cruelest act of nature, by which she both dooms and guarantees the world she embraces. She has also doomed and perpetuated herself in so doing. That all things cannot ever be still, that no darkness or light will ever long endure but be corrupted by its own seed until night comes again, as the son grows strong and supplants his father, a place where only his own decline awaits, to be supplanted by his child; ­another seed breaks open with the coming of day. That the sun and moon take turns as lamps for the world, that we eat and yet grow hungry again with absolute predictability. That we are born and cannot avoid death, but watch other life begin knowing that it will die too. It is difficult to imagine that this self-defeating sequence was ever designed to make any sense. Because quite frankly it makes no sense to me whatsoever. I do not call it evil, but I do not call it goodness either, it just is. Some say it depends on one’s perspective, but death and birth happen at the same instant across the universe, neither can come before the other, except within the puny boundaries of our own, individual lives. They are all short stories fated to a quick end. How can we celebrate the ‘circle of life’ when all that it is, or ever will be, is a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth for its own sake? It would seem to teach that nothing can last, that no effort can create anything which lasts. That all things made or born will become dust once more, and from this doom there is no escape. There is nothing but to revel in the brief time we have, and not to crave any boon from phantom gods for yet more life, or a better life than this.

Call me gloomy if you like, but I can hardly think of a better argument to enjoy the life we have here, and now, moment to moment. That’s the way I see it, anyway.

A Million Thanks? Or a Million TANKS...of gas...

During National Military Appreciation Month this May, Buick, Pontiac and GMC dealers across the country are partnering with A Million Thanks to collect individual thank you notes to send directly to our men and women in uniform. The goal is to collect one million notes at collection points located in dealerships.

Ooooh-kay.

A Million Thanks. Appreciation of the ‘valor and sacrifice’ showed by our military. Car dealerships as sponsors of this glorious, selfless act on the part of the American people.

[sound of Jeremy banging his head repeatedly on his desk]

Holy Petroleum Batman…is it just me or is this a sick joke? You’re going to thank the soldiers for dying in Iraq with the support and well-wishes of the automobile industry!?! You might as well thank our hard-working narcotics agents with the support of the Colombian drug cartels! This is absolute madness! For my part, I’m surprised the GMC folks went along with it, they had to know that at least some people would make the very sick connection here.

In case I’m skipping past an assumed yet vital point, let me give a quick once-over here:

The Middle East: The Middle East is a fractious and highly volatile collection of small states, most with no real industrial base and nearly all of whom are governed harshly by theocratic regimes who oppress their own people into varying degrees of misery. Meanwhile these clerics and ministers export their land’s precious (and only) resource, the most valuable on the planet today, to external, world-ruling states for exorbitant amounts of cash, most of which goes directly into the ministers’ pockets while their people starve. Now, this is done not only with the complicity of the power states who greedily consume that resource, but usually with the military and economic backing of those same nations. So, essentially, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Iran and Syria and Egypt (among others) are brokers selling out their people and getting fantastically rich, kept in power by the European and Asian countries, and of course America, so that these huge countries can guarantee themselves a steady supply of oil.

Oil has been the great curse upon the Middle East ever since the invention of the internal combustion engine and the discovery of enormous oil reserves lurking beneath the deserts of Arabia like a great black hell. The wars that have continually torn apart this sad part of the world are often described as religious conflicts (re: Sunni vs. Shi’ia), but the real reason for these wars is the oil, and damn near all of the slaughter is sponsored by the powerful countries who desperately need that oil and want to keep the conflicts at a proper boil in order to maintain a stable but high price on the oil itself…thus guaranteeing gargantuan profits.

Okay, now I hope we can take it as fact that the automobile industry is in bed with the oil industry…otherwise we would’ve had a 100mpg car decades ago. We would’ve had cars that run exclusively on solar power, or chocolate or good intentions or whatever. So, oil makes the auto industry go, in more ways than one. The two are virtually inseparable. Meanwhile, our armies are flung into nightmare scenarios in order to protect that market, to protect the steady flow of oil into western nations. We’re there to fight terrorism? Please. If we left the Middle East entirely, never went there again, pulled out all our interests, assassins, enslaving corporate presences and military units, we would probably never be so much as verbally assaulted by another so-called terrorist again. Now I’m not supporting terrorism, killing innocent people is never, ever right. Let me just get that out of the way in order that some reader or other won’t black out from righteous anger. Terrorists target America and its allies because America has had its foot on the neck of those people for the better part of a century. That’s why our troops are there now. Every other explanation furnished by this administration has been proven false. Please re-read that last sentence as it is, in fact, slightly important.

So, our troops are there to protect America’s and Europe’s vital financial interests in the Middle East, namely petroleum. Light sweet crude. And a presumptuous teenager has started this program (again, “A Million Thanks”) to send thank-you’s to “our troops” probably more as a pipe dream to jump-start a political career in her future (she says she “loves giving interviews”…and mostly on the FOX network), now has fawningly accepted the enormous marketing power of the automobile industry to help her “thank” the troops for their glorious and honorable sacrifice. And there isn’t something wrong with that?

You see, the moment you dispense with the melodramatic propaganda that we’re there to “protect freedom” (since when do you protect freedom with trillions of dollars of firepower to foment civil war over the course of endless years of occupation?), all that’s left is the ugly truth that our young men and women are being led into a meat grinder, and sent home to grieving parents in pine boxes, for nothing of the sort. They are not there to protect freedom, or America’s people. They’re being sent there to keep gasoline in your cars. In your Buicks and Pontiacs and GMC vehicles. And, well, GMC would just like to say…

”Thanks!”