Eating the Planet Like a Bag of Doritos for Jesus.
by Phil Rockstroh

It has been reported that George W. Bush is counting on the judgment of history to redeem the perception that he has been at the helm of a failed presidency. This notion is as muttering-at-the-wallpaper crazy as had Jeffery Dahmer, before his murder, been expecting gourmet chefs to someday champion his culinary choices. In the present day United States, our insulated leaders (who merely reflect the insularity of the daily lives of the nation's people) have shunned reality to such a degree, one would think that they spend their time writing wishful letters to Santa Claus instead of creating policy and law.

There's a well-know witticism from the 1980s about Ronald Reagan that played-off a ubiquitous television commercial of the time that went, "Ronald Reagan is not the president: He just plays one on TV." A similar trope can be said of the present day United States. We're no longer an empire: We just resemble one on TV.

How did it come to be that our ability to apprehend reality is in such short supply, at a time when the consequences of such dangerous folly will prove so tragic and lasting?

At times, in equal degree to the enormity of a given situation, there will come to exist an equal degree of denial. If you ever have the desire for a bit of solitude, when attending a social function, try this. Drop the small talk and utter something along the lines of: "Our actions are causing ongoing and exponentially increasing upheaval in the earth's ecosystem, due to the effects of global warming." Or: "Did you know that the earth's oceans and seas will be all but devoid of life in fifty years?" Then there's the always reliable: "Because of our national dependancy on the crack-house economics of a system based on a need for an ever-increasing squandering of our planets finite resources(maintained by a cross addiction to a global marketplace sustained by petroleum) -- all of which has been inflicted on the planet by a class of hyper-rich, psychotic death monkeys -- you have no more control over your fate than some scrawny, brown-skinned feller strapped to a torture table at Guantánamo."

As stated, if you give it a go, you'll be afforded an abundance of personal space. Such utterances have the terrible disadvantage of being the truth; as such, they're guaranteed room-clearers. The largest social faux pas of all, in the contemporary US, might be to remind a person of their powerlessness.

Understandably, we avoid the knowledge of those things that inflict upon us the feelings of powerlessness we experience when secured in a dentist's chair. In such circmstances, the only question we're concerned with is: Will there be enough anesthetizing agents available to numb out the anxiety and pain? Perhaps, this is what underpins the reason we have become a people who've grown incurious of the larger world around us to point of becoming all but insensate: We need the equivalent of a root canal on a global-wide basis. Worse, the drilling must start at the epicenter of the decay, right here in The United States.

Accordingly, there are a few facts it is imperative we face, immediately and unmedicated. Among them: The changes to the earth ecosystem wrought by global warming are neither a political opinion nor are the acts of a wrathful god in heaven, but are a dynamic of nature set in motion by our actions -- and are wholly indifferent to the fate of mankind.

The capitalist's drive for endless abundance has allowed us to ascend the fast food chain, yet we blink uncomprehendingly at the catastrophic algorithms of global climate change. We -- the progeny of global corporatism -- in regard to our acknowledgment of the dire events and pressing issues of our time, our sense of collective narrative is, for all practical purposes, about as keen as that of the creatures of the Cretaceous Period in regard to their understanding of the earth-altering implications of planetary collisions with comets. The size of our denial is as enormous as the body of a brachiosaurus and our response to the dire situation has been about as adequate as if we were using its walnut-sized brain.