Running On Fumes: A Journey To The End Of Empire

[chlamor]

Running On Fumes: A Journey To The End Of Empire
By Phil Rockstroh
May 10, 2005, 07:51


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Rising gasoline prices terrify Americans because they threaten our sustaining, cultural illusion of our freedom of mobility...a commercial canard that has turned millions into corporate slaves. Our masters have the mobility -- we have a long commute.

How, in any way, shape, or form, are American freeways free?

A commuter has as much liberty languishing in a traffic jam, as does a cow in a cattle drive. Incongruously, a large number of Americans continue to see themselves as cowboys -- as, all the while, they allow themselves to be treated and prodded along like cattle...though they may see themselves as rugged individualists riding over the expanse of the open prairie -- their corporate cattle masters see them as mere commodities on the hoof whose hides and hinds only exist for their value on the so-called open market.

Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner by which an oil-dependant existence has dehumanized us all. For example, any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which, to momentarily stop, or even slow down is to risk death, should be regarded as an affront (if not absolute anathema) to the mind, heart and soul. When the landscape, through which we pass, is reduced to a meaningless blur -- our lives grow indistinct as well. We are incessantly told, and, sadly, far too many of us have been convinced, that the same disastrous fate will overtake us if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit.

<snip>

Riding American interstates one feels the confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy...so much barely-submerged fear and aggression...Yet, through it all, the yearning to see what lies over to next horizon remains in our hearts. Even though, sadly, what lies over the next horizon has become as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was experienced at the last. Here: The realities of global capitalism are displayed, in stark relief: it's all based on oil -- sustained by brutal imperialism and the wholesale destruction of the natural world -- and, for all our self-impressed proclamations that these things are the progenitors of freedom and human advancement -- they, nevertheless, have left us Americans, the supposed beneficiaries of it all, spoiled, stupefied, and alienated -- both from the banality and garishness of the our nation's commercially tortured, community-devoid landscape as well as from our own inner-most longings.

[Technowitch]

1. Link? (n/t)

[chlamor]

3. Here is the Link

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_17514.shtml

[Speck Tater]

2. civilization is a social disease

<snip>

Many primal peoples tend to view us as pitiful creatures, too--though powerful and dangerous because of our technology and sheer numbers. They regard civilization as a sort of social disease. We civilized people appear to act as though we were addicted to a powerful drug--a drug that comes in the forms of money, factory-made goods, oil, and electricity. We are helpless without this drug, so we have come to see any threat to its supply as a threat to our very existence. Therefore we are easily manipulated--by desire (for more) or fear (that what we have will be taken away)--and powerful commercial and political interests have learned to orchestrate our desires and fears in order to achieve their own purposes of profit and control. If told that the production of our drug involves slavery, stealing, and murder, or the ecological equivalents, we try to ignore the news so as not to have to face an intolerable double bind.

<snip>

more at http://www.primitivism.com/primitivist-critique.htm

[ixion]

4. deja vu... I was just thinking this on my walk this morning

If the same criteria were applied to a society that are applied to individuals, society would be seen as a brutal, heartless, psychotic killer.

Why? Simply because it has no regard whatsoever for the life or well-being of an individual, or even another society.

For all civilization's (and I use that word loosely) claim's about making life better for individuals, historically, it's only made it worse, if not outright dangerous or all-together unbearable.