Remember Gregor Samsa? If you’ve never read Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, the name would mean nothing. In Kafka’s story, Gregor awakens one morning feeling unable to get out of bed, to speak, to even roll over. His body feels odd. He is unable to make any normal human sounds. He discovers that he has become a giant cockroach. When he does manage a great effort to turn himself over and off of his bed, his entire sense of being and his former way of interacting with his environment have all changed. Nothing he does helps him to communicate his sense of being, nor even to be recognized by his family–his mother, father and sister. This was a great European existential fantasy of our early twentieth century, reflecting the alienation, hopelessness and numbness of many with their unresponsive governments and social structures to the human needs of their citizens, who were even becoming alienated from each other.
Enter the modern Gregor Samsa. Me, Michael Hovey, present alienated and angst-ridden cockroach, living on the Left Coast of the American Empire in a comfortable southern California suburb, replete with thousands of gas-guzzling SUVs and sprawling suburban mallscapes of corporate entities, such as Walmarts, Target Stores, Starbucks, McDonalds, and the like, anchored by corner filling stations of global corporate energy companies. All the while, hundreds of thousands of people are being slaughtered as global corporations and government dictatorships jockey for control of the finite fossil fuels of the Middle East. Somehow, the minions of gas-guzzling commuters and transporters don’t get it, that a finite fossil fuel that took TWO HUNDRED MILLION (!) years to evolve into its present form is being used up within a couple of centuries. Two hundred million minus two hundred equals one-hundred-and-ninety-nine million, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-thousand, eight hundred years to produce MORE oil. I don’t think we have enough time!!!
Well, this long-range thinking that only needs to envision a couple of hundred years into the future is absent from the minds of “profit now/worry later” global corporate CEOs and technocrats. The thinking is “earn every profit from every last drop of petroleum until it is all gone…then think about a replacement.” Oh, you’ll see glitzy ads from the energy companies telling the public how conscientious they are and how concerned they are about the environment and humanity, but let’s face facts. People are dying in wars for oil and other natural resources (even water!!!), while Exxon Mobil raked in the highest quarterly profits in the history of profit-making.
Yes, I AM A COCKROACH, or something other than human, because the creatures around me are not behaving like humans. As for myself, I don’t believe in paternalistic gods dictating who will live, who will die, who will prosper and who will suffer, with no sense, common or strange, about what the criteria is. Maybe this god throws dice, in spite of Einstein’s assertion that god does not play dice. Of course, this was before we undersood enough about quantum physics to learn that the rules of Einstein’s four-dimensional universe don’t work for the world of quarks and other things subatomically small. I digress. The point is that points are now vague. Existential anxiety is up, because there is a real question as to whether humanity deserves to survive. It may not be for us to decide, no matter how intelligent our self-righteous arrogance convinces us to be. It may be that the earth will simply cure itself and get rid of us through its natural immune system which extinguishes species who are simply not adept nor adaptable enough to survive the earth’s ecosystem. We are arrogant enough to believe that we can detrimentally affect the ecosystem of the earth to destroy all life, but I think this is an insult to a planetary ecology that has persisted without our help or harm for billions of years.
We are late, self-reflective comers to the game of special survival. And, we only think we are as capable as we are. Are we? How do we know that we know what we know when we we can’t know that we know what we know when we are knowing it? I don’t know.
I was born just a few years beyond a half century ago, raised in the southern California suburbs in a white, male-dominated, Protestant Christian family and culture. Like most children brought up in the religious and social indoctrinations of church and school, I believed that our government was honorable. I believed that a god existed as a paternal spirit, having created our first ancestors of one of six days in a place called Eden, destroyed most of us, then killed his son to die for our sins, whether we were aware of such sins or not. I remember attending school with a very few people of color. Even in our high school of four thousand students, only two of them were black, and a few of Asian or Hispanic heritage. This was life in a post-World War II, suburban illusion, a bubble. I was part of an average American white middle class world of school and church, boy scouts and YMCA, football and TV sitcoms. We didn’t know about social evolution, the many dissenters who argued, risking life and limb, to gain rights in a nation that developed by a band of wealthy white European males who wanted to preserve their wealth and property, and be free from the taxation of a foreign monarchy. There was nothing to free black slaves, to treat women as equals, nor to treat the Native Americans as anything more than unChristian savages. Such was our original U.S. Constitution. And, only landowners could vote in federal elections. This was a new republic back then in 1776, but it was far from being a democracy. Even to this day, there are many wealthy Republicans who fight against democracy. Not Democrats, but democracy itself. This is, but should not be, a shock to many Americans.
The US military has supplanted the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, under the false facade of fighting a “War on Terror” without end. Immediately, within just a few days of the first attacks on Afghanistan, major deals were signed among global corporate energy giants to build pipelines from Kyrgyzstan, across Afghanistan and down to the Caspian Sea, which has become the new central global port for transporting oil and natural gas. Kyrgyzstan is said to contain more oil in reserves than are contained in the Iraq reserves, plus to be a massive source of natural gas. In Iraq, the oil has been conveniently kept in the ground while oil prices have risen dramatically, creating the largest profits for Exxon Oil in the history of corporate profiteering. Vice President Dick Cheney met with CEOs of energy and other corporations to divide up Iraq’s resources and infrastructure among themselves, BEFORE Iraq was invaded. These “secret” sessions have led to a no-bid contract for Cheney’s pension provider, Haliburton, to control the contracts for Iraq’s reconstruction after the US military bombed it to pieces. Haliburton was also given a no-bid contract to oversee the whitening reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the Army Corps of Engineers, a poorly equipped and unready FEMA contributed to the wasting of neighborhoods there, and in communities along the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines. To date, Cheney has not been held legally nor ethically responsible to the American public nor the US Constitution to reveal the details of his “secret” meetings….. I can’t go on. I’ve said enough to have the president and vice president impeached, but they are gleefully wrecking every aspect of the US system and its economy, with no one doing anything to stop them.
I do not trust the Republicans nor the Democrats to be of any help to America. They are raking in the global corporate profits into their campaign coffers and are beholding to corporate technocrats, not to the American people.
It’s time to start a new party–the Cockroach party, comprised of all of us who feel alienated, hopeless and disgusted with the American imperial system that has the Bandini touch. Everything this Bush government touches turns to shit.
I’m tired of eating it. It is time for change. Amen.
