Back
in the day, when I was writing punk rock songs for the band it was
more or less expected that such material expressed dissatisfaction
with one’s circumstances. I don’t think I did a very good job of
it, actually. The Ramones who were the local famous band , did it
much better. The funny thing is the Ramones had a world wide
following, but in their home town locales they were not successful.
They were not unknown, but the area they came from is not condusive
to rock bands. It’s not Seattle. Actually it’s pretty run down.
The same holds true for Public Enemy who came from a mile from where
I lived. With them it was worse though.
Probably
some of their popularity came from being pro-black, macho chic, but
from their perspective it really was them against the world. They
lived in an isolated nearly all black community called Roosevelt amid
white suburbia. Both the Ramones and Public Enemy also had talent –
which helps and specifically by talent mean they approached things
from a reliable perspective. The Ramones did the comic book ”trash
art” mentality that gets critics hot and wet and Public Enemy saw
themselves as more then just entertainers, as a news service for the
black population.
As I
said those angles were not for me. I was and am very much middle of
the road. To me that’s an egalitarian approach. I’ve known jazz
lovers for instance who’s insistence on it rubs me the wrong way –
not all, but some. I’ve thought about it for a long time and
basically I’ve come to believe that being a white male just was not
cool. We took it on the jaw. This is not simple however. There are demagogues. Like Rush Limbaugh, who use this isolation, to get rich.
And suffice to say the Republicans have counted on it for decades to
elect the unelectable.
This
condition affected the middle and lower middle class most. If we
worked for a major company the affirmative action kicked in. My
father had his career frozen in the Bell System and I ran into
opposition in the NY Times. No one suggested we couldn’t do the
job. In actuality we did the job pretty damn well; we had to, but
there were just too many white guys and by coincidence it was at this
time that the sins of our forefathers were discovered and we were
expected to pay for them as well. This is how life works. Power comes
from numbers and it also finds it’s own justification.
While this
was all going down however the psychological effects were very
subtle. Looking at Reagan you’d think that it was morning again in
America, which was a code phrase meaning, “White guys are back on
top” but Reagan could not do that – even the great communicator
could not change history. That’s something that we disregard at our
peril. As I’ve tried to indicate recently the only satisfactory way
to view events is as a totality, meaning for every cause in a cause
and effect relation the effect is drawing the cause into being as
well. Les Paul and Mary Ford had a song “The World is waiting for
the sunshine” and history awaited it’s Napoleon till he showed
up. The inevitability of it all is a little frightening, but I tend
to think that is how the masters and shakers view things. In other
words, Bill Gates might have done things legally, but if he didn’t
cheat someone some else would have.
The
dirty little secret is this. While Mary Tyler Moore was turning the
world on with her smile, the guy next door was commiting suicide in any of
a dozen ways. And no one noticed. No one ever notices. Ghosts aside,
no one ever notices the dead.
Except me,
because , to coin phrase, everyday, I live with the dead. I lived in
dying communities. Perhaps because of the isolation I experience
being a harelip I saw differently the effect of people discovering
there was no place in society for them. It was like the very poor in
the depression never noticed it because things had always been bad,
so too for me, having been officially handicapped and outcast early
on I didn’t notice it when the plants closed.
So now let’s
let some air into this room, and speak of the future. When Francis
Fukuyama and others in the late nineties came up with their new
millennial world I didn’t bother to read them. I got the point
which was on page 199 at the bottom in the foot notes (Yes there
will be collateral damage, but that can be dealt with later) Another
phrase that came into being as a code word to mask evil was
“Roadkill.” As long as the roadkill isn’t them, people have a
marvelous ability to disregard it’s very existence. As the Germans
said of over one hundred extermination camps , “We didn’t know
what was happening.”
However
small the details though, Fukuyama, to his credit, attempted to
address them in his next book, only to discover that the very technological advances that had brought us cells phones also brought
powers of discrimination that will prove very problematic. Since I
don’t have to speak to the general public and was not trying to
prove a hypothesis I was in a better position to see them early on.
As you are
probably unaware, the Tamlinmediaco has been around online since
1995. We’ve covered the stories with the amount of info available
to the average person who reads the papers and like every other start
up we claim to tell it like it is and not like big media wants the
story told. Unlike anyone else I tended to doubt success was
possible, in part because my educational level is fairly high and I
know well what it’s like to communicate with people and see their
eyes glaze over. It’s not only they can’t understand, it’s
they don’t care. It’s all too abstract. What can I say?
I can still
joke, that like Twain, my writing will only be understood in the far
future when humanity comes to it’s senses, if ever.
So anyway, often I’d
close an essay with a dream sequence, or my attempt at Joycean
escapades.
This time I will
conclude with an anti-dream sequence – in other words – with a
factual story – which of course the majority of you won’t get the
point about.
From
approximately forty thousand BCE to three thousand BCE the
inhabitants of Europe worshiped a Goddess . Usually, like our modern
Christian God, she had three forms, the mother, the harlot and
the crone. In some places she was called “Anu”, a name which
survives in the Christian Saint Anne, who is the mother of the mother
of God. Woman as a possession at that time was a basically unknown
concept and so lineage was traced by the maternal line. With the
advent of agriculture, the technology of the day, came cities and
people no longer needed to be hunter gatherers. It also meant that
males could keep an eye on females and thus lineage was traced from
the father, as it is today.
The
advent of cities also brought other concepts, like wars, police
forces and a pantheon of Gods who were at first identified by Weather
characteristics. These were called the Thunder gods because they
made a lot of noice and wind. This is Zeus.
Incidentally
to show how all these things fit it was discovered in the nineteenth
century that the king of the Gods of ten had similar names. Yoga or
yoke, and Deus, or Day are two very old words. They are Sanskrit and
go back maybe ten thousand years or so.Deus is easy to trace. It
became first Zeus, in the Greek world and Jupiter in the Roman world,
but always retained the notion of the supreme deity.
Suffice to
say four thousand years ago most of the world lived in the middle
east. Europe for most of the prehistoric era had about a million
people, but they were spread out across the entire region, which
incidentally was covered by a single forest. In the Balkans and
what is now Turkey there was a proble. First it’s impartant to
realize that the Dardanelles, or Istanbul has always been the
dividing point between east and west. It’s not hard and fast. The
turks are very westernized despite being Muslims. And at times it
been suggested that the new dividing line is Paris, but I think
that’s taking things too far.
In any
event as the thundergods assumed their supremacy there was a
countereaction. The thundergods were a different kettle of fish as
you can imagine. They legitimized rape, theft and murder, as long as
you could get away with it. For about a thousand years there was
conflict between the two groups the female and the male deities.
Cults grew up including the Cult of Cybele who’s male initiates
proved their sincerity by castrating themselves, and the Cult of Dionysus which featured the chasing of a symbolic God by a group of
women who then murdered him. This religion is considered one of the
antecedents of Christianity incidentally. It is the wounded God who
dies and then returns to life, syndrome. The Cult of Diana and the
Cult of Venus were two cults that survived right into the Roman era.
Eventually, as you know, the Thundergods triumphed and along with
them the domination of the male in western society.
The
worshippers of Anu , the mother goddess, however would have nothing to
do with these more bloodthirsty offshoots of what is traditionally
called the war of the sexes. Realizing that “Civilization” was
not going to go away they began a great migration. First they
travelled due north to what is now Moscow, then they went westward
across what is now Poland and Germany and Denmark. They stayed in
Denmark for a while and give their name to the county (Danes –
people of Anu Mark – realm) then made their way south and west to
Britain and Ireland. Since Europe was not densely populated at the
time they were continually stopping to settle. The generic term for
these peoples was the Celts.
For
whatever reason they didn’t have any problems assimilating with the
native religion of the north, which were highly patriarchal and the
south which were basic nature religions.
Okay,
thankyou for reading this and now I’ll tell you why I mention is.
Because when the Celtinc migration got to Ireland thy had an obvious
obstacle- the Atlantic ocean. Ireland has a place in the hearts of
many an anthropologist because it was at the end of the known world.
Even the Romans never got around to conquering it and as such the
legends there are very old and comparatively untouched.
What happens
though is virtually everywhere there is conquest by one people by
another. (It is a fact of life that we ignore at our peril. Actually
my personal belief is that if the individual cannot save their
society they must save themselves.) As we have discovered though our
wanderings through myth, such tales are meant to pacify the vengeful
Gods. They are acts of atonement done to convince the Gods of the
conquered people that the conquest was not so bad and it had to be
done anyway. Furthermore, to show what nice guys they are the victors
promise to set aside a day or so to remember the people they
slaughtered.
This also
helps when junior asks ,”Mommy, who was here before us?”
So in
Ireland in Gaellic the phrase is the “Tuatha de Dannan” which
means “the people of Danu”. Most societies don’t afford the
little people such a large role but Ireland, as we’ve stated is a
little different. Another name for these little people is “the
leprechauns”.
Suffice to
say the Atlantic proved a great obstacle, but there the people of Anu
waited. One mught suggest that after four thousand years they
finally traversed the great water.
Facts, me
dearies , just facts.
There was a fellow that used to write for the London Times who I
quite enjoyed. His name was Anatole Kaletsky. I no longer read the
Lindon time. More then most I quite admire Murdocks skills as a
newspaper man. But in the same way one might admire hotpants and low
cut blouses on a woman, but not on ones wife, I didn’t care to see
what he did to the Times.
Kaletsky was an economics writer; he tended towards being a
technician. He had, among others, two endearing qualities: he did
not shy away from stating what he though would happen, nor from
admitting when he was wrong, and two, he had a fairly decent
vocabulary. I recalled him to my thoughts today because several years
ago he had been to the World Economic summit at Davos and aside from
the usual comments he turned aside and noted that not only were many
of the participants of great age, but that they were in good health
for the most part – thus he concluded that if one wished to be
healthy one might try being a millionaire. Most amusing.
To
conclude; technology has
brought us to that moment when we stand before the Atlantic ocean
wondering how on earth we shall get across and if not it will be a
long wait. Specifically the introduction of GM foods began surreptitiously several years ago, apparently – there’s no
confirmation or denial. And I can appreciate the moral dilemmas we
face. Again specifically if it is possible now to give a person a two
hundred year lifespan how do we go about it?
In case you're interested - to make a tomato last in frost it's given genes from dolphins, which are relatively immune to cold water. DNA is fascinating in that it is a code in every living thing. The key is it is a code - not a chemical. So you can transfer code bytes from the "animal" kingdom to the "vegetable" kingdom and it still works.
Speculatively however nature has all sorts of ways to control populations. In some cases thousands of offspring only survive in small numbers. Or consider the fact that all out war is no longer feasible.
As I've indicated in several places recently the end point, as far as how far the aggressive part of the population can push the rest of us is, as always, starvation. You can take people's homes but if you bring them to the point of starvation you must either lock them up, terminate them, or face violence from street mobs - note for instance in Rome the situation of the poor was never allowed to deteriorate that far.
However I'm afraid some of us will not demand things to get that bad before they do something about it.
The human genome project is
complete. The possibilities are intimidating.
It is one of the cases
where the essential question is posed.
Who gets to live
and who gets to die?
And we will not be able to
avoid answering it forever.
Tamlin
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