The Journal

 

Serving the Metropolitan Area

 

Since 1872

 

 

June 5th

 

LAUGHING OURSELVES to DEATH!

 

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

 

Syndicated by Acme Features

 

 

"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?"

 

   - Chief Seattle (1853)

 

          If there's a consolation to this age of downsizement, devolution and disparity between America's have-nots and have-everythings widening like the San Andreas Fault, deep between the surface, it might just be that... for all the desperately energetic endeavors of Entropy and plain bad government since twenty-two November, six decades back... we still produce.

          Our fields and plains still teem with fruits and grain, coal still waits to be yanked out from beneath the West Virginia and Wyoming soil; pigs in pens are squealing in Missouri and in Iowa, gas awaits fracking there in Nebraska.  Iron dwells beneath Minnesota's Mesabi Range, with plenty of hands on hand to shape, dig and fashion, if America will only let them. World trade summons great tankers to our ports, laden with Mideast oil, Jamaican bauxite, African diamonds, even exotic foodstuffs like Smyrna figs, seal-veal and the kiwi fruit, all paid for by Chinese IOU’s. God's reason for the seasons lies upended beneath a horn of Israeli oranges in winter or Chilean strawberries in midsummer. I've heard it said... and frequently by Virtuecrats as see in world trade a centerpiece for Heavenly retaliation (though few, themselves, pass up opportunities to taste of these forbidden, foreign fruits)... the meanest parking lot valet or countergirl in a Qual-Mart perfume section enjoys more variety, at less expense, than any Roman Emperor or Moghul princess in the course of history.

          As America still runs the world (except where our homegrown termites have abdicated to the blue berets of the UN) and the world runs on stuff... only a heartless contrarian would think to ask: "well, what happens when the world runs out of stuff?" We're  not – for the moment – pondering issues of the capital and labor and the World Trade Organization, but talking about natural resources... stuff as comes out of a planet, stuff that exists more or less at a constant, minus extractions, while its human population keeps growing, and its appetites for stuff and creative ways of extracting and processing stuff keep skyrocketing...

          The doomspeakers at environmental, population and energy lobbies have an old but not wholly unmeritorious argument as regards the too many people as are walking up and down over the world.   Eight billion human beans on our planet as of last week – a planet that can tolerate maybe that many millions and the plague as didn’t thin the herd by one mangy ol’ heifer, comparatively speaking.  Oceans running out of the big fish, forcing Japanese to put raw pork, whale, chicken and even… ugghtofu cutlets atop their sushi.  Dictator Xi holds in his fist the rare metals as keep our high tech teching against the day he decides to punish Taiwan for wanting to stay Taiwanese.  Pits are running out of tin and copper and, where population growth is highest, higher rents for have-nots, kited adjustable mortgages and property taxes for have-somes will set into being tremors as cannot be contained by any false populist orthodox politico... left, right or center. Wasn't Seattle or, even, Karl Marx as observed that "landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce," it was that ol' Invisible Finger, Adam Smith - as knew all too well that desperate people, shoved up against a wall somebody else owns, devise desperate strategies.

          Now and again, some wise-use libertarian presumes we can invent our way out of all of this peril by trusting Big Science... some of these can be persuasive as an alkie pleading with you not to take his keys away at two in the morning, once the bar's shut down. Trust those dudes in the white coats... as brought us glowing proletarian rats with human ears growing out of the backs, that aluminum-burning car they're still sorting out lung cancer lawsuits on and them Challenger and Columbia disasters, as occurred because Morton Thiokol, as spent millions lobbying to get its contract in the first place, skimped on eighty cents worth of rubber sealing while them others couldn't design anti-heat tiles strong enough to withstand a slap of foam. Trust the experts as those in San Francisco gumment who work hard developing robots to gun down dark people as might be suspected of criminality, taking away more American police officer jobs or depopulating the factories once we decide Chinese and Mexicans are too expensive.  Those Wall Street slicks who rammed through tax cuts for the rich to hire more Americans which they used, instead, to buy more robots; trust our educational system as churns out what seems like ten lawyers and a hundred hedge fund hedgers for every engineer, truck driver or schoolteacher; trust them others as devised the Obamacare website and then those other others as promised repeal and replace, then forgot the replace!

          Remember Biosphere? Not the Pauly Shore movie... toxic enough, in its own way... but the real deal, conceived and financed by this billionaire from Rand Paulistan, name of Ed Bass, quarter of a century ago? Biosphere was this dome in Arizona’s desert with the people, bugs and animals breathing out carbon dioxide, which would then be recycled by plants, as also provided food for Biospherians to eat, recycle their wastes into fertilizer for more plants and so on.

          The crew finally entered in September '91, hung on for two years, then were hauled out, near starved to death and babbling from the oxygen content having plunged from its normal 21 to 14% and being replaced by nitrous oxide, which is the dentists' laughing gas. Most wildlife died off ‘cept roaches... didn't need men in white coats to tell you that!... and these so called "crazy ants" as killed off most of the vegetable life with the exception of hallucinogenic morning glories and bananas.

          More food for crazy.

          "When you see the complex dynamics here," remarked a Dr. Bill Harris, who was allowed to reopen part of the facility, years later, as a postcard show and museum of memorable catastrophe, "you start to understand that the climate models may have some large error bars."

          "If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit," Ol' Chief Seattle could've answered. "For whatever happens to the beasts (crazy ants, termites and cockroaches excepted), soon happens to man. All things are connected."

          I find it hard to contemplate... though... rats, roaches and morning glories having much grief over the passing of the human species, as will likely happen long a’fore the Earth's vermin go to their strange and verminous rewards. Maybe the former two will miss those strange, two-legged slobs as left tasty crumbs lying round! Prob'ly won't miss our traps and poisons they’ve had to evolve somewhat to escape.

          Now I don’t hold with all of what Austin Tillerman predicts - we haven't yet seen anything like a third of Earth's oxygen supply replaced by laughing gas, volcano vog and Toyota exhaust, but the less-than-one-percent drop as has occurred over the last half century's melted much of the North Pole, and threatens to have Miami, New York and New Orleans, following Venice, California into becoming another Venice, Italy... at best... or Atlantis, at the worst. And, despite twenty-four hurricanes last season and record forest fires like that conflagration some wag named the Camp Fire… as if all them Californs were supposed to toast marshmallows and sing Polly Wolly Doodle beneath a grinning crescent moon… entropic state and county commissioners still keep rezoning exurbian and extra-exurbian former farmland and second growth forests into five and ten-acre plots as use up whole lakes and rivers keeping cemetery lawns watered, sprouting McMansions as cost so much nobody can afford to buy them except CEO's as have moved all their jobs off to China or hired R2D2s to weld their widgets. And maybe a few Russian Mafiosi.  Some of these people bein' the talking Charlie McCarthies as, out'n the other side of their wooden mouths, promise a limitless future of gasohol while failin’ to mention the dollar-twenty ear of corn an’ eggs four bucks the dozen already.

          Meanwhile, our own family farms have been so jacked-out with foreign retaliatory tariffs and loaded-up with debt that most are selling out to Cargill, Archer-Daniels and the others as still have the juice to turn profits-by-volume (with the help of a few creative subsidies). "The only difference between an American farmer and a pigeon," opined former Texas Agricultural Commissioner, Jim Hightower, "is that a pigeon can make a deposit on a John Deere."

          Dream, as we may, of stepping out of Biosphere One into an Art Deco future, that door's locked, keys tossed or confiscated by the bartender and sump-pumps won't work 'cause... as Mr. Zimmerman once remarked... "the vandals took the handles." The earth is precious to God, Chief Seattle wrote President Franklin Pierce a century and a half ago, "to harm the earth is to heap contempt upon its Creator.

          "Contaminate your bed and you will, one night, suffocate in your own waste."  

   

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