According to the tale, Nero played his lyre while Rome burned. It's become the standard image for ignoring the problem and filling up precious rescue time with frivolity. Here in the dying empire we're doing the same exact thing. Here's James Kuntsler last Monday:
This disintegrating nation is woefully distracted by Web 2.0, iPads, Avatar movies, Facebook, and the idiot celebrity spectacles of TV, not to mention the disasters of job loss, foreclosure, medical extortion, bankruptcy, corporate loot-ocracy, and the squandered moments of politics. We know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place. And we're spending most of our mental energy gaping into the rear-view mirror, which is the last place to look for your destination.
I'm a Nero a lot of the time. Who among us doesn't have several lyres?
2 comments:
I admire James Kunstler.
I used to write those lists of our criminal ways, but that's when I used to believe in the meta-screenplay where some lonely voice in the wilderness ( played by Jimmy Stewart ) tells people about the corruption of their society, and the people eventually wake up and are renewed!!
But it does not necessarily work out that way.
When I finally finished reading "The Natural", I was shocked to see and recall that it ends tragically...so used had I become to the Robert Redford version with the happy ending.
I was so shocked, I did not want to believe it. Can you imagine! Wanting to edit the darn novel in my head and in print!
That's where we are, viewing the tragedy and angry as hell at the lies and deceits we learned since childhood: "Say it ain't so, Joe!"
But I got over the tragedy of The Natural. I got to thinking about "The Hero" in literature in a way I never would have without the shock.
I guess we'll get over this.
But the lists...they're just litanies of disappointment,masquerading as prayers for a return to the "good old days", and no one will listen until that unhappy time we call "rock bottom".
In the meantime, we have to find our new futures, divorced from the childish notions of the past.
New futures. This is precisely what Kuntsler has been preaching for several years. We are at that classic turning point the poet warned us about: the center cannot hold. As you know, I'm greatly concerned that the level of ignorance in the country has now reached critical mass. The chain reaction we are pretty sure is coming will be set off by some random event that will usher in a nationwide night of the undead that lasts until it burns itself out.
And all because we are too shortsighted, too selfish to heed the warning signs that are all but hitting us over the head. Rock bottom is going to be a grim place, indeed, my friend.
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