Degringolade

When I was in college a long time ago, whenever I had to buy books,I bought used books. A lot of people will think that this is just because I was cheap. The truth of the matter is that I always went through the stacks of used books to look for the ones that have been marked most extensively.  

There were a couple reasons for this, when people used to mark up their books they used to tell you what they thought was important, and I found that the people who spent more time marking up their books got better grades than I did.  The fact that they were cheaper was just icing on the cake. And I was cheap, my GI bill didn’t stretch far enough to allow for new books and partying…..I had to make choices.

I have been weaning myself off of e-books except for those on Gutenberg and off-flavor pulp fiction at Baen Books.  I suppose that these two repositories well define my reading habits.  I read old, meaningful stuff from long ago and utter trash pulp fiction while I enjoy a cocktail and/or an edible.  I am not ashamed.  But when I want to read a specific book that slides between these two poles, I go to Thriftbooks and buy used.  

I just received and started a re-read of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” and I am just hitting the parts where the previous owner started marking up the book.  I am fairly certain that the former owner was a young person and the book was assigned reading for a college course.  What amused me was the notes made and how the current perceptions of right and wrong colored the comments.  I was also amused by the tone of moral indignation in the comments.  

I suppose that I am of two minds of the post WWII period until 1960.  No, I wasn’t quite there, but my early almost-adult memories of politics were centered around the demonization of the actions of the western countries while basking in the quite pleasant and comfortable consequences of those actions.  We were rich and quite content with making money and keeping up with the Joneses on the profits from the war.  But for some odd reason, the connection between the demonization and the lifestyle never really was mentioned in polite company.

Now that we are well past that time and those particular compromises that were made to enhance our current lifestyles (and this applies to all of us) are safely out of memory, I begin to wonder how the younglings see the period.  From what I can tell, the vapid and judgmental tone of the previous owner of Mssr Greene’s work takes no account of the efforts made to craft the consumer culture and the sad chain of events that led us to the corner we are in.  But now that the world is getting re-balanced and the last of the colonial powers are being forcefully beaten back, I wonder if the previous reader has trained their thoughts to the consequences of the loss of empire by the European powers and Russia.  

I cannot see how we can pull what most people think of as a win out of the mess in the Mideast.  I wonder if Russia can manage to pull out of the competitive control area that is the Ukraine (which, like it or not, is an empire-related war), I wonder if China will take up the role of imperial core in a more straightforward way.   I am wondering if Iran will be able to edge back control of its hinterland.  The outcome of those games will be the deciding factor of how the folks alive here in ‘murca will maintain, grow, or lose their lifestyles.  

Wars are never fought for morality, they are fought for money.  And the lifestyles that we really aren’t willing to give up are bought with that money and no other.

I recently spent around $25 to purchase what would have been referred to as a “transistor radio” in my youth.  I remember the fight between my mother and my father when he came home from a military “trip” with what was at the time one of these rare creatures.  I remember the “discussion” that ensued concerning the exorbitant cost (If I remember correctly it was around $50 in the ‘50’s).  But I always thought that it was very, very cool and when my Dad got tired of it, it migrated into my bedroom and resided there for years.

Now, if you are paying far too much attention to these scribblings, you might have noticed that lately that the “Current Music” at the bottom of a post has skewed toward classical of late.  That is because Portland has a great classical station and I have been discovering just how little I know of the breadth of classical music.  I listen to it on the radio as a reversion to the habits of my youth.  Though I do use their website to cut and paste title and composer from their website (I could listen there as well, they stream everything).  

I suppose that current obsession has to do with my increased paranoia concerning the way that I am plumbed into the world.  I realize that I won’t be able to fully disconnect, but I would very much like to figure out the ways that the tendrils can be reduced (I will state here firmly that they can’t be eliminated) and I am trying to figure out how to stop new ones from forming.

But this may well be a quixotic quest.  I have no intention of pulling a Kaczynski, but I do want to pull pretty far away from the beast that the world has become.  But this distance will necessarily come at the expense of what is desired by the powers-that-be.  

I am always leery of trying to overlay events (or fantasies of the same) of the past onto events (or fantasies of the same) of today.  But more and more, I am thinking that the parallels of the period between 1938 and 1941 might well be instructive but definitely not a template. 

“The Phoney War” sometimes drops out of sight in today’s parlance simply because it definitely wasn’t “their finest hour”.  Churchill could give a speech like no one else.  But the French had just folded in a big way and Dunkirk was the best last minute ass-saving ever.  

Look, working your war to a big war takes time.  I am not going to be one of the assholes who is forever calling Trump=Hitler.  All that does is take your frontal lobes out of the process and turn your thinking over the brainstem and cerebellum.  In other words, you aren’t marshalling facts, you are just displaying fear and emotion.

But we have a world that seems to be intent on going into a war.  The reasons are different, the actors are different, the technology is different, the players are different.  But all the sides involved are prepping like mad for the war.  Even the peace talks that are on again, off again depending on which side is currently butt-hurt are kabuki to allow for the preparation.  

Even on the other side of the world, 1937 appears to be when we started a low-key economic war with Japan.  So let's use three or four years to work the warmups to a war.  I am not going to go back and review WWI but my guess is that the time period for prep was about the same.

I am wondering where we are in the process. My best guess is that we have a couple of years left before folks start swinging.  It seems to me that there are just too many opportunities for a war to begin and the preparation is all over the place.  I am hoping that the incompetence will prevail for quite a while and all it will cost us is a degradation of the “American Way of Life”.

Sometimes it is difficult for me to take younglings too seriously.  In my youth, I always landed on the never-never land between the prole and the bourgeois.   So obviously I have mixed feelings about what is a right and what is a privilege.  Until recently I was concerned about this and spent a bit of time trying to reconcile the contradictions in my worldview (with moderate success).

How this reconciliation came about is to drop the idea that I could have more and replace it with the idea that I could have enough.  But that kind of thing is kind of hard to do here in the land ‘o the free because somehow we have decided that a lifestyle that is sold to us in an unceasing barrage by the government and business is the minimum that is acceptable.   

Now that I am old and have worked my way past the career/kids/surburbia treadmill and have landed in the genteel poverty of a retired social security pensioner (just so you understand, according to the State of Oregon, I am considered "very low income"), I have the luxury of looking back and realizing that my commie wanna be persona was completely overwhelmed by my civilizational induced need for “more”.   But that is the way she goes, and I am not ashamed.

Let's talk for a while about the nature of “poverty” here in America.  My favorite statistic is the “homeless crisis”.  The best numbers that I can come up with is that 0.23% of the total American populace is homeless.  28% of that 0.23% (0.0644% or ≅216,000) reside in sunny and warm California.  Best guess for Wyoming is around 500 and most of them are on the way somewhere else (winter in Wyoming doesn’t mess around).

Now you are probably wondering where I am going with this.  What I am saying is that I am thinking that the “war on poverty” just might well be won.  Look, just because you don’t have the lifestyle of a 1950’s college educated middle manager does not mean you are poor.  What we are experiencing here is an unrealistic inflation of expectations and what we should own. Why I say this is because I lead a damn fine life being very low income.

When less than one percent of the population is “homeless”, well, in my view of things, society is doing well.  It seems that helping the homeless is a pretty good gig because staff salaries usually eat up between 40-80% of the money coming in.

I tend to look at the homeless problem not so much as a “those poor people are going to die” but as an enshrinement of guilt by a population that cannot understand why “those people” don’t want to live like a fine, upstanding American bourgeoisie.  

I just really haven't been all that interested in writing lately.  I think that I would be content with a simple "through the glass, darkly", but even that doesn't seem to be available right now.  I suppose that lack might be at the core of my recent, abortive attempt at understanding the Tarot, but I came to the probably premature conclusion that I didn’t have the time left me to be able to plow through the intricacies and get enough of an understanding to be able to see forward in an accurate and useful manner.

I think that one of the issues that guide this lack of effort/interest is my forever detested and usually unsuccessful tendency to try and cram the events currently besetting us into a model that was described by “historians” of the past.  Even worse, I have a marked tendency to look farther back than is actually useful in any manner.  

Even worse, reading things like “histories”, when you stand back and look at the output of “historians” you start realizing that the simplification and anthropomorphism (you gotta call it that, when treating the action of societies using the psychology of an individual) you start questioning the “explanations” of the historians.  

Somehow though, these explanations give folks the idea that the results can be reproduced/prognosticated if we just follow the cookbook provided by the hoary tomes of the past.  I am trying to pull away from that simplistic and wrong attitude, but it is a lot harder than it seems.

I am currently working on a different idea. I suppose that the idea comes out of my current re-read (after a couple of decades) of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series.  I figure that this could possibly be at least as wrong-headed and incorrect as reading the turgid prose of “historians” or “non-fiction writing” but I think that the process will amuse me.

I am not being specific here, but my base theory is that every two hundred years or so, the world as a whole begins shitting itself.  The problems during these lovely periods kinda build up to a crescendo and the world purges itself of the peculiar to that time contradictions. These are unpleasant periods when things change and something new comes in to “save the world”.

I am currently amused by the 200-year repetitions.  1250(ish) to 1450(ish) to 1650(ish) to 1850(ish) and now we are about twenty years away from the next shitstorm if this half-assed theory has anything to do with it.

I am running with this because I am thinking that (a) something better might come out of it and (b) I will be well into my long sleep by then.  I suppose that I have never thought of “copping out” as anything other than a venial sin of omission…….it isn’t the first one I have had to deal with.

Look, I fully support anyone who writes about how to downshift into what appears to be a long-delayed end to the party that the human race has been blithely wandering toward for a couple of centuries now.  I do get annoyed with the “end of the world” folks who seem to be rooting for a mad max sort of denouement where they will eke out a new existence as a retrograde and video game version of the time-honored roles of ruler/raider/peasant.  

Nate Hagens has been a good read for a long time.  Hell, in the past I have even tossed a couple of nickels in his direction.  But after a while, my mind begins to glaze and my attention wanders when I read prescriptions planning a path to one of the above mentioned alternate state of nirvana (he tends toward the peasant path).

But I am overall thinking that there will most certainly be times of suckage ahead of us.  Oh, here in ‘Murca, we won’t starve unless you are an idiot.  You might have a “diminished standard of living” but you probably won’t starve and you probably won’t freeze.  Eating things like oatmeal, potatoes, rice, beans and the occasional chunk of meat isn’t poverty, neither is wearing a sweater.

Where I see Hagans being correct is his idea of “The Great Simplification”.   That is what we are looking at in the upcoming period of time.  Prices force simplification.  Oh, you can pretend that you are a noble being living at one with planet earth, but you are embedded in a social structure that runs on status being accorded by what level of profligacy you can achieve in buying/accessing energy and forms of stored energy called raw materials and finished goods.

I genuinely wish people good luck with distancing themselves from the imperatives of that social structure.  But I do want to warn you that the social structure really doesn’t want you to leave.  That social structure has laid down the structure is what got to you through this point and whether you like it or not, rebelling and moving away from milk learning isn’t an easy thing.  When prices force you to desert what brung you here, there will be a lot of anger and sadness going about.  

I suppose that I am trying to get ahead of the game here in talking about this.  I am not telling you how to run your life, but giving up on worrying about what the rich folks do is going to be one of your first steps.  Just establishing what your base loads of needs/wants and figuring out how to best get there is the first step, but please, don’t give yourself airs about your morality and nobility, you’re just another person doing the best you can.    

I am thinking that things are going to start accelerating downwards in the next month.  I am hoping that someone will figure out that we are going to have to change the way that we live, but that pitch sure doesn’t sell here in the land of entitlement.  There are going to be limitations on what is available and we will need to adjust.

But right now the drinks are still being served and folks are still concerned about their Sunday brunches.  I suppose that while I realize this awkward little fact and to be blunt I sure ain’t looking forward to the process as I am fond of my sunday brunches.  

Look, I think that things aren’t going to be going up anytime soon.  That doesn’t mean that things are going to be going to shit, it just means that you will need to spend some more effort and money to get what you need.  It also means that wants will need to be more rigorously prioritized and maybe just maybe a champagne brunch isn’t in your future for a month or year or so.

There really isn’t that much out there that you “need”.  But somehow, through our wealth and general obliviousness, we have not just blurred the border between needs and wants, we have pronounced that having such a border is just this side of immoral.

You don’t need that much.  You probably want quite a bit.  I’m just saying that you better get used to that little bit of unpleasantness.  

You’ll be fine.