The People Suck
Posted September 9, 2009 by roger_peet in Inspiration
The world is over.
A goat with its throat slashed may buck against its bonds, but the blood will drain out and it will die. A gentle hand might give it a pill to ease the suffering. Like the goat, we've swallowed the pill, and so it comes to this. Buy an efficient lightbulb. Drive a "hybrid" car. We have eaten the host that was laid on our tongue, the host embossed "HOPE". We've supped from the poisoned chalice to wash it down.
Our sad flapping jaws will keep on hurking out positive affirmations like trained seals clapping for the ringmaster. Our prating of determination and principled struggle and positivity of all sorts sounds now as do the grunts of a dental patient turned loose to the street with a toothless gape and gums full of anaesthetic. For it's Hope that has killed us these many long years, and it will continue to kill us, though it will seem like famine, and it will seem like war. It's hope that strangles the life of the earth, hope that fills the land and water with poison, the hope that something might be better for our children, and the hope that our pestilential children might somehow impossibly behave other than humans have ever done. Hope places around our necks the thin, piano-wire garrotte of sustainability, and chuckles in syncopation with our breathless gasps. Hope throttles us with our efforts to bring "justice" and "peace", to fight "oppression", for we stand in the shadow of one hundred thousand years of world-rending growth and ecological annihilation and proclaim that without darkness, we would never have been able to understand the properties of light.
There is, however, no light. There is only we, the rancorous mob, fat with plunder and eager for revenge, knowing there must be a way, a way to make things better. The thin wax fat and the fat wax arterosclerotic. We eschew the grinning skulls of our failed predecessors, and presume that we are ever so much better and more civilized than everyone else. If we suffer, it is for righteousness. If we die it is for the cause of our humanist corpse-worship. The world beyond humans can, as the saying goes, suck it.
We are willing always to turn the blindest of eyes. Seven billion we are now. Seven billion and soon Ten and then Thirteen and on from there. All the gabbing of the left for social justice will only bring forth further generations of mewling tyrants to grab for themselves that to which they perceive themselves entitled, further generations for those with less scruples to practice their strafing on. There will be a revenge, but not for us. The world will devour us like a wolf in winter grubbing for marmots.
George Carlin, the twentieth century's preeminent social theorist, wondered why society produced such a bevy of horseshit-swilling ideologues and twee annihilationists. From where do they spring? Wherefore such an unending parade? He considered the eternal self-replication of self-assured fuckwits of every stripe, left to right, and declared: "I think it's because of the people. The People suck. Yeah, the People suck. Fuck hope! Fuck hope! "
Raise a glass to the last honest man, my friends. And another. And another.
Comments
it's a good question. i've been following these posts from this writer for awhile, and usually have been appreciative of the effort to get the word out about tragic extinctions and violence against the environment. but the utterly despondent flourishes here strike me as un-productive and wanting for vision. because actually, there IS a reason we are making these prints and books and gardens and friendships. and i think the idea that most people are basically selfish is a myth that the ruling class would like us to believe. it is certainly a disempowering notion.
funny, cos this just made me feel a bit better! I'm exhausted after a 13 hour work day on just a few hours of sleep, and I took a peek at rogers post and realized, well, that someone is seeing it more bleak than I am!
Thanks Roger.
I'm gunna go toast with some bourbon now!
I find it liberating to live without hope. I've always found hope to be a mental tic that prevents deep consideration of our contemporary situation. Derrick Jensen quotes someone or other in one of his books to this effect: "Die while you're alive and be completely dead. Then do whatever you want; it's all good." This is how I want to live my life, without illusions, and that requires of me an occasional overwrought belch of generalized contempt. Thanks to the infranet, everyone gets to smell it!
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Wait... then why are we making all these damn prints?
Posted by: shaun at September 9, 2009 12:14 PM