Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 6

Habeas Corpus

A crowded bus with its suspension askew rattles by on its way to the factory, the air inside rank with sweat and cigarette smoke and garlic‑ginger farts.  Faces peer out through the fogged and dirty windows, each lost in solitude, reflecting perhaps on fickle generosity, or with anticipation for pungent, steaming dumplings dipped in vinegar for lunch, or the exuberant madness of the New Year's pyrotechnics, or sad little sister's second husband, who beats her when he drinks.

            Transcendence is no longer possible outside the privacy of the mind.  Privacy is no longer possible outside of dreams.  The process of experiencing aliveness has been anaesthetized.  Sensation is numb.  Uniqueness is anomaly.  Solitude and a sense that all is fate, anxiety, joy that lacks laughter, sorrow that lacks tears, depression, pain, despair and cruelty; these are the themes.  Every anonymous death has left a lingering echo.

            The neat lines dividing the periods of history are but an illusion.  There are ox ghosts afoot on the remote, dusty, yellow earth.  Mythical monsters incarnate, their fangs and lips are bloody from having gorged on children.  Spiritual culture is as bleak as an endless sea of dry grass that undulates and ripples under a perpetual wind that howls to the horizon in all directions.  People are adrift in a void of ignorance with nothing left to believe in.  Humiliation and degradation are the constant and inescapable facts of existence.

            In the absence of either rules or common sense, individual functionaries have been reduced to doing only what is expected by those above them in the highly centralized structure, to whom it has become absolutely clear that political power flows from the barrel of a gun.  Social justice is subject to the semi‑coherent whims of aging strongmen, who are hooked to infusions of rhinoceros horn and ginseng and little brown balls of opium, and herbal medicines that taste like a dank basement, enhanced by doses of calcium and crushed pearls, arsenic, saffron and musk, and applications of lion and bear fat, castor oil and carbolic acid, mustard oil and oil of cloves and a diet including turtle eggs and the testicles of goats, to abet the rape of illiterate village girls with pretty faces.

            In excess of thirty million people starved to death. The half‑completed, then abandoned, blocks of inadequately conceived industrial enterprises covered with soot and coal dust remain as a legacy.  The grotesque chunks of frozen masonry are like a fantasy of the post‑nuclear landscape.  Mighty rivers spring to life in the high mountains, only to reach the sea, covered in a black, oily scum, putrid with sewage and tossing up green, orange, yellow, frothy, chemical foam.

            In the grey deep‑freeze of a spiritual winter, old slogans and empty rhetoric recycle endlessly in the editorials.  The evening news announcer begins his broadcast by addressing his audience as "comrade viewers."  The current ideological task, says the television, is to convince the youth that communism is superior to capitalism.  There is only one right idea.  Superiors will dictate and inferiors will do what they are told.  Those who brought habeas corpus cases on behalf of people who had disappeared have all themselves disappeared.


To be continued...

After All

The false prosperity that the West has enjoyed since it began its rise to world dominance at the end of the medieval period was fueled initially by plunder. Think of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru. Think of the British in Bengal and North America.

            Once this dominance began to stabilize in the face of colonialism and the emergence of capitalism, the system ran on exploitation.  Think of the slave trade.  Think of Indian cotton, woven in Manchester and sold back to the Indians.

            Most recently, the system has been powered by unprecedented amounts of debt.

            Initially, this debt was relatively easy to come to terms with, partly by virtue of the fact that its relative size diminished in relation to that of the expanding economy, and partly through inflation, which reduced the significance of the actual amount of the debt in relation to the amount of money in circulation.

            The problem is, of course, that debt, even when created out of thin air, like a Treasury bill, is effectively a promise tied to some sort of resource.  It is based on the idea that something will eventually be produced and sold by someone in order to generate the capital required to pay the debt.

            Unfortunately there are now non-negotiable constraints on economic expansion.  Even the desperate optimism of the political and financial classes will not save the situation. After all, there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West and the asymmetrical distribution of global resources must continue.

Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 5

Too Gruesome to Run

There are mobs of lepers, blind people, the maimed and the crippled.  In addition to whiffs of burning, a close approximation to whatever brimstone smells like, the sharp stink of festering shit and stale urine hangs over these slums of gobbed and spittled pavements and knotted, sooty, noisy, honking traffic, drought, then flooding, disease then hopelessness.

            Confronted by a gruesome, thrusting, leprous stump, a nightmarishly eroded face, pleading, streaming eyes, we shake off the beggar children clinging like tenacious burrs, their filthy fingers in our pockets. The only sanctuary for meditation is a stinking latrine, the noises outside coming from the traffic of whores and soldiers and dogs fighting in the dusty street, and the grinding wheels of the carts, piled high with swaying people and baggage and dirty bedrolls and lolling children, pulled by desperate, frightened, wide-eyed, wild horses and donkeys with toast-rack ribs, the flies swarming over the sores in their hides made by the constant rubbing of the harness, all fleeing for their lives.

            We are having documentaries instead of dreams. Each night the same images: people weeping, others bleeding, eruptions of cruelty and savagery, enduring injustices and callousness, bewilderment, shame, sorrow and pointlessness.

            A man was arrested for riding a train without a ticket.  He spent the next thirty years in jail awaiting trial because his case papers had been misplaced.

            There are thousands of refugees pouring into the city in advance of the invading army. Armed squatters are stealing other people’s homes. A new and more malevolent breed of gunmen is emerging onto the streets. Hundreds of civilians are dying in the bombing raids, more than half of them women and children who are not, and can not be, criminals or terrorists or any other kind of enemy.

            Reporters speak from their hotel balconies, the smoke from the burning slums nicely framed against the clear blue sky in the background.

            “As political alternatives have been eliminated,” they say, “the difficulty of deciding has been compounded by the difficulty of living with what has already been decided. The stagnation of the state has given rise to an alienated politics which oppresses rather than liberates.”

            Thus the stage is set for an epic catastrophe. All the elements of farce and tragedy, from hubris and delusion to final calamity are in place. Officers dine at high table in their ambassador’s ruined residence, their red wine served by liveried waiters, their table graced by attractive women.

            A glad-handing politician in the face of a full-scale legitimacy crisis passes through a hostile crowd followed by a camera. People can smell his sweat.

            “This is your land. These are your houses, your meadows and gardens, your memories,” he tells them. “The nation is glorious, its people steadfast.”

            From which direction will death explode in on him? Will it be a smiling, handshaking, garlanded suicide bomber like with Rajiv? Chopped down by rifle fire from her bodyguards, like Rajiv’s mom? A cool sniper, with or without a conspiracy, as with JFK and King? Strung up in the marketplace like Najibula? Cut down in a cold rain of hot angry lead like Mr. and Mrs. Ceausescu? Bazooka-ed in exile in his Mercedes, like Somoza? Loneliness and pneumonia in a filthy, freezing, concrete cell like Liu Shao Chi?  Whichever, there’s anticipation that unpredictably, one day the crowd will turn like a pack of dogs.

            The photographs show severed heads and dismembered corpses, amid the rubble of ruined villages, each a Golgotha, a Guernica, some with dead cows and horses, most too gruesome to run, even in the back pages.


To be continued...

Thinking the Unthinkable

The era of ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing and consumption is over, done, finished, for good.  Only charlatans, fools and the willfully blind, claim to believe otherwise.

            So too is the exponential growth of technology which is running up against the finite amount of wisdom so far accumulated by the sciences.  There will be further refinements, no doubt, as the last few pieces of the puzzle of the material universe fall into place, but no more big game-changing great leaps, as there were, for example, with the harnessing of fire, the invention of moveable type, the development of steam power, or even, most recently, the emergence of the digital.

            Both phenomena are only blips on the timeline of human history in any case.  We have spent countless millennia living in static economic environments, making little or no technical progress.  The past three hundred years or so have been an anomaly.

            Thomas Malthus was right.  Economic growth in the long term is now out of the question. In a world in which the human population grows faster than the economy there will always be a looser for every winner.  Moreover, the losers will naturally suspect the winners of taking unfair advantage, if not of outright racketeering, and in most cases they will be right.  As world population peaks about midway through the present century, in the face of the inevitable competition for food, water and fuel, the losers will also be largely dead.

            The economic order is neither just nor sustainable.  Everywhere the globalizing free market squeezes the middle class, enriches small elites and broadens the membership of the excluded.  At current rates of consumption and population growth, global economic collapse is imminent.  Do the math.  It’s time to begin thinking the hitherto unthinkable.