Farewell

[degringolade]

 

Gotta go to Angela’s farewell at work today. I swear, this closure thing that folks are so enthralled with in our culture is starting to get on my last nerve. I will have to go and listen to shit I don’t want to listen to and talk with people I don’t particularly like. But rituals are rituals, if you want to be in the community, lip service must be paid.

Second two paragraphs today. Michael gave us good food for thought.

Michael:

Alexander Aston, the author of this Brexit article, says: “I don’t know the answers to our predicaments”. How is this admission not just another way of saying that the fundamental problem has not yet been identified? What the author has identified, is a state of affairs - and we are supposed to accept that this points directly at the problem itself. This is bullshit - it may be entertaining, but it is not informative or helpful. So, on second thought, perhaps the article is not so good; I should have said that it was entertaining to read, not “good”.

JOHN

I suppose that I can accept this to a certain extent. But isn’t the nature of a predicament one of not having an answer? If it was a mere problem, we could come up with a solution.

The state of affairs notes is a problem of a sort. A predicament is a problem with a solution space that does not include a what is considered, under the current parameters of the solution space, a positive outcome. The author appears to be constitutionally unable to come up with the answer of: “Considering all the current options available to us and their likely outcomes, we are well and truly fucked.”.

The state of affairs is one us boomers have known about for decades now, but have chosen to ignore. The Limits of Growth was published in 1972 and it outlined the problem brilliantly, and was promptly cast down and trampled on by our generation in the act of raising Gordon Gecko to an icon and a role model. Simply put, the author is afraid of stating the simple fact that the neoliberal model that was supposed to bring us to the future brought us a future that we didn’t bargain for: a future of corporate control and oligarchical power. Saying such a thing might get him excluded from his club at Oxford.

Michael

I am supposed to agree that the “elite” are guilty because I am supposed to start from the foundation belief that I myself am not guilty. Thus, in my view, this article offers no insight into the roots of the “predicament” - only observations that inflame emotion and invite the type of negative reciprocity I mentioned before. Allow me to state something that I myself find much less entertaining: I am the problem - not the elites. What I said above, which is supposed to be naïve, is not naïve; it is me admitting that I am the problem.

JOHN

The hard part when writing on the internet and trying to get your point across is that saying things like “You are a sinner, the same as I” makes for very poor repeat readers. The masses do like to pretend that they are not the problem. Safely ensconced in their McMansions with their high speed internet and their Prius (I always love the way that the name so rhymes with “pious”), most folks who are the target of the article have spent their entire adult life rationalizing that they are not part of the problem.

All I think that this poor sap is doing is trying to get folks to see that the problem exists. I think that it is only until we all of realize that we are part of the problem will the movement toward and unacceptable, workable solution can begin. It is just unfortunate that it will take a while before this “Currently Unacceptable” solution can be started.