Blue, Yonder (story)

He was floating somewhere and all around him “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Grateful Dead version, was echoing about. He always thought that the song was about death and it turns out he was right: Seasick sailors coming home; the highway is for gamblers; the saints are coming through.

The song made him think of Babe the Blue Ox, a gigantic creature. This outsized beast of burden - so kind and so noble. Even Paul Bunyan seemed a cheerful sort, with his black mustache and red-checked flannel shirt spread across his broad chest. Paul Bunyan made him feel excited about adventure! Stomp, stomp, stomp - off they went off into the wild blue yonder! No more cryin' by the kettle on the wood stove. Paul and his loyal blue ox would chop, chop, chop it all down. Whole groves of trees snapped in two before him like they were toothpicks from the dispenser at Marc's Big Boy.

Every now and then, the man got a glimpse of what was going on way down below. It didn’t look good. Fires issuing greasy plumes of black smoke. Lines of automobiles emptied of people strung along hundreds of miles of cracked interstates. Also, he heard things he never had before. A coalescing rising of sound (were they voices in languages he did not know?) would gather and then project itself across the infinite space in which he was suspended. He heard the cluster travel by at great speed. He believed it was the sound of the souls of animals his people were responsible for killing. Killing stupidly, not really for any particular reason. Out of boredom, perhaps. And here came another one. The gathering of a million voices and then the hurtling across space. It was like when he went to the batting cages as a boy and the electric pitcher arm would blast the ball toward him at such velocity that it seemed as if the machine was saying, “fuck you kid.”

He was probably going to run into his best friend from his band Boring Films Discorporated in this echoing blue space world. Why not? Maybe they could even sing a song together! He, the friend, had gotten out early, before the shit really hit the fan. But of course, for him it already had, right? The fan, the shit hit. Obviously. What was he thinking? He was already hospitalized twice for depression before he was 25 years old. He thought, who really did like this, the way it was all set up, anyway? Who was really into it? I bet if I could actually talk to Paul Bunyan, he would say that he was depressed. He suffered from migraines. He couldn’t take it. Every time he felled a forest, all the rabbits and deer and bears and little hoppy frogs who lived on the edges of the lush ponds disappeared also. It was terrible. Babe the Blue Ox was sad, too. What were they doing?!

The great ox should have stopped Paul Bunyan from chopping down all those trees! Paul pushed across Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas chopping, chopping, chopping. The giant blue ox should have stopped him! The animal could have charged him and caused him to run off a cliff somewhere west of the Mississippi and maybe we all wouldn’t be in the soup now. And the song came ringing back in.

You must leave, now take what you need

You think will last

But whatever you wish to keep

You better grab it fast

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun

Crying like a fire in the Sun

Look out baby, the saints are comin' through

And it's all over now, baby blue

Maybe Holding It Barely Together Is OK

 It's interesting how there is a message not to panic and break down in grief or terror or rage upon witnessing the galloping collapse of the climate system and its terrestrial effects of floods, heat waves, drought, wildfires and superstorms. This message to "hold it together" comes from deep within ourselves, where the instinct toward survival resides, and from the greater society, which operates on the unthinking imperative to maintain its current trajectory. Personally, I'm going to endeavor not to pressure myself to squelch grief or terror or rage at what is occurring, unless it threatens me with total dysfunction. The stifling of extreme emotion upon witnessing horrors and idiocies is part of what landed us in the soup in the first place.

As the imperial and global capitalist projects ramped up and spread across the world, predicated as they were, upon "ethnic cleansing," genocide, slavery, ecological decimation, the grimmest of extraction enterprises and the severing of the sacred from the natural, settler colonial people so often chose to or felt forced to choke down their revulsion or stupefaction or sadness over what they were witnessing or indeed, what they were engaged in. Western society provides us with a nearly endless variety of ways to cut ourselves of from our felt emotional truths, of ways to numb out: drugs, alcohol, shitty food, fanatical religiosity, tv, internet - not coincidentally, all of these non-coping mechanisms are also highly lucrative businesses. Another not great method is to become overly philosophical and cerebral (as I am hopefully not in danger of doing with this brief essay). And many settler colonial people, when confronted with the frightening reality of their own emotions, go several steps further and embrace the violence of the culture that initially provoked the terror. People become fascists, mercenaries or amoral businessman and politicians.

And so, at this unprecedented moment in human history, as much as I want to avoid suffering and do not want others to suffer, it is crucial to distinguish between natural emotions and notions of "wellness" based in absurd expectations about what terrestrials like us should feel at the prospect of our own species' extirpation and the unthinkable ecocide manifesting in events of mass death, such as the estimated one billion sea creatures who died in the recent Northwestern heatwave. Rage, terror, disbelief, frustration, ultra-heartbreak, and wailing, howling sadness are fine. If, through a variety of methods, including art/music/community/ritual/talking/isolation or through no special method, we can experience these feelings and not fall into total dysfunction, I say: let it rip.

Laura Sean Tucker The Five Fox & Friends Death Trip

The business model of Fox News is to prey upon, as a sort of vicious parasite, the brains of aging white Americans, to weaken their capacity for critical thought, to lure them further and further into frothing rage, toward the brink of reeling madness, to reduce their vision and range of empathy down to a tightly creviced tunnel into which no light may enter but the pixelated, glib glares of LauraSeanTuckerTheFiveFox&Friends now calling out the orders for a slogging, joyless march toward Death - first of the heart that loves, next of the life spirit and finally of the inert and stupefied body. Kaplunk.

DONALD TRUMP REFRIGERATOR MAGNET POETRY

    Donny says all of them! Mix & match! Have fun! Melt your brain!

AMERICA FIRST

A TOTAL DISGRACE

EMBARRASSMENT

RADICAL LEFT

THE GREAT STATE OF…

ELECTION FRAUD

US CONSTITUTION

GUTLESS AND CLUELESS

SOCIALIST NIGHTMARE

NEVER GIVE UP

BIG-SHOT

STONE COLD LOSER

FAKE NEWS MEDIA

FRAUDULENT PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020

BORDER CRIME

PRO-LIFE

BRAVE MILITARY AND VETS

SECOND AMENDMENT

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

GREAT PATRIOTS

GREAT FARMERS AND MANUFACTURERS

GREAT COUNTRY

GREAT NATION

GREAT VACCINES

GREATEST CHAMPIONS FOR FREEDOM

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

BIG TIME ENEMIES

CHINA VIRUS

FAKE NEWS CNN

CHINESE SPY

PERFECT PHONE CALL

SO MUCH LOVE THERE

SACRED LANDSLIDE VICTORY

"It Was Worth It" (a monologue)

It was worth it. You know what? Getting Netflix, highways and cars, big houses, grocery stores, a.c., factories, cheap shit from across the world, abundant hamburgers and cold cuts, first person shooter video games, cool personal guns and planet-masticating weapons, streaming porn, cool sneakers, yachts, personal smart phones, and fast planes that can fly you from Milwaukee to Paris for a nice dinner was... worth it... Fuck it. I'm not ashamed to say.

If I had to do a pro/con assessment, I'd have to say, living this way, in this 21st-century "first world" lifestyle has been so great, has been so overwhelmingly blissful, so... almost... celestially blissful, that, yeah... if we go the way of the dodo and if we take a few billion more species down with us and if all that's left of this great ole place in a hundred years is just ash swirling in bubbling, soupy rubble... Then you know what, I still say: It was worth it. God dammit!

Because we lived free. We were free, god dammit. And if the price we had to pay was to end up like the guy who wears a barrel with suspenders who's stuck inside of a wind storm howling through the Oklahoma plains forever... Well then, fuck it. We did it. And if I could coin a phrase from good ole Frank Sinatra... we did it our way.

On Paul Kingsnorth's Recent Ideological Turn

The continuing rightward drift of Paul Kingsnorth (cofounder of The Dark Mountain Project, essayist, novelist and self-described "recovering environmental activist") is interesting to observe. On his Facebook page, he posts articles from conservative magazines such as "Unherd" (my nominee for most sanctimonious publication title in recent years), The Spectator (edited by Boris Johnson from 1999-2005) and The American Conservative, co-founded by Pat Buchanan in 2002 and currently edited by Rob Dreher, who also appears to write most of its articles at this time. Rob Dreher is a conservative who focuses a fair amount of his energy on crusades against gay civil rights (writing apoplectic posts about Chick-fil-A when they agreed to stop funding anti-gay campaigns, as one example among an ongoing list of such work) and writing articles bemoaning the "woke-pocalypse" (my term) and what he considers to be out of control and overzealous people working on behalf of misguided notions of "diversity." Kingsnorth is maintains a strong intellectual relationship with Dreher, who recently published an extensive interview with him, as well as a glowing review of his most recent novel, "Alexandria."

Kingsnorth is a smart guy, a very good writer and somebody with views on localism versus capitalist globalization & the destructiveness of the global industrial consumer capitalist economy I agree with. However, upon reading the articles promoted by Kingsnorth on his FB page, I found the substance of them to be reactionary and facile in their analysis of the ongoing cultural crisis of the West. A comment I wrote about one of the articles promoted by Kingsnorth sparked an exchange between myself and him on his Facebook page, which I'll detail below.

Last summer, when Kingsnorth posted an essay by John Gray that dismissed the 2020 anti-police violence uprisings in the US as the unconsidered work of mostly over-educated upper middle class white intellectuals and also stated that he (Kingsnorth) didn't have an opinion on what was driving the protests, I commented. I said that he should take a stance on a basic human rights issue such as police violence against unarmed Black Americans if he were going to promote an article which holds a very contrarian stance on the topic and we had a somewhat heated back-and-forth. Kingsnorth's point was that he should not be required to take public stands on every human rights issue facing the world currently, that such a demand is unreasonable. That is true. But he promoted an article that does take a stand on such an issue.

Responding point by point to the shallow takes I've encountered in pieces by Dreher and stuff Kingsnorth has linked to from Unherd would require a lengthy essay, if not a book. For now, suffice it to say, the angle being peddled by them is that movements for social justice, such as BLM and groups fighting anti-trans bigotry, are not actually responses to long standing oppression and exploitation of disenfranchised people, but are cause célèbres dreamed up by bored, naïve and perpetually adolescent people of upper middle class white status. I don't find much, if any, evidence to support that take. And I find it to be analytically lazy, unsubstantiated and extremely out of touch.

Part 2 - Kingnorth's Christianity & Mine

Kingsnorth identifies the malaise that grips the West as found in our lack of recognition of something greater than ourselves, than the merely human. In Christianity and in certain aspects of conservatism, he believes he has located that something. Indeed, England has a Western pre-capitalist Christian tradition that the US does not and it appears to be from there that he is deriving much of his inspiration. His essay "The Dream of the Rood," goes very deeply into this theme of the culture of "Christendom" in Europe that preceded the Enlightenment.

Having grown up Catholic, my experience of Christianity was radically different than what Kingsnorth is positing. While I did gain capacities for ethical thinking from my Jesuit education, for which I am grateful, I'm not sure that Christianity provided me with a lot of the awe or reverence for the sacredness of the Earth the Kingsnorth claims it does. On the contrary, Catholicism quite often was projecting my thinking into the abstract and the speculative, asking me to initiate a dialogue and build a relationship with an invisible 3-part being whose most important stories occurred 2-3000 years ago in the Middle East - in a landscape that looked nothing like the Wisconsin where I grew up, among people whose history I knew nothing about.

Paul Kingsnorth is on his own journey and I shall not be accompanying him. In his recent essays, there is a portentousness, a feeling of strained naivety and of the authoritatively patriarchal that repels.

Don't Bread Me (10-minute play)

A: It’s all right there. On the flag.

B: On the flag? The yellow one?

A: Yellow like a rose.

B: Or a forbidden love.

A: A what?

B: The flag. The flag shows a coiled snake hissing.

A: And?

B: And?

A: And what is it saying?

B: “Don’t bread me.”

A: “Don’t bread me?”

B: “Don’t bread me. I don’t want to end up in anybody’s skillet.”

A: No, asshole. It says. (Pause) It says: “Don’t tread on me.”

B: Of course. Of course. I know what you’re talking about. I know which flag you’re talking about. For some reason, I was picturing the little triangle-shaped flags that they fly on golf courses… “Don’t tread on me.”

(Beat)

You mean like with a bicycle tire?

A: A bicycle tire?

B: Yeah, like: “Don’t ride your bike over me. I’m trying to catch some rays here!”

A: No. You dick. Dan Bongino explained it. It means don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you. Get it?

B: Got it. So, the idea is that we are each separate snakes coiled and hissing, except for the bicycles, which are piloted by Redcoats or Northerners or Black Lives Matter or Antifa.

A: Uh-huh. Or Momtifa.

B: Right. Or Momtifa. And so, we are a country of coiled and hissing snakes --- in dirt holes, sunning ourselves on rocks, s-ing our way through swamps… well that’s not exactly right because so many Americans swamps were drained to make corn fields or or sugarcane…

OK. So, we are a nation of hissing and venomous snakes coiled around cotton plants and corn stalks and if you fuck with us, individually speaking… the fangs, motherfucker. The fangs, bitch.

A: Basically.

B: So. Then what you don’t do is ride your bicycle over the snakes because the snakes are the good guys. OK. So, my question is: What do you do?

A: “What do you do?”

B: What do you do? What do you do do? If I’m a snake, what do I do… besides wait around to maybe get tread on?

A: Well don’t say it like that.

B: Like what?

A: Like it’s meaningless -- not getting tread on. That’s a big deal. Dan Bongino put it like this… Don’t fu…

B: ... fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you. What I’m saying is that is there anything I’m supposed to do in my not fucking around with you.

(Beat)

I am a snake and I promise not to fuck with you…

A: Unless you fuck with me.

B: Right. Unless you fuck with me… But what else do I do? Building projects? Do I erect a porch on my property? Do I purchase property and then mainly observe it?

A: Sure. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with purchasing and observing property. As long as…

B: As long as long as you don’t fuck with anybody else.

E: Well?

B: That sounds boring.

A: What? What sounds boring? To you?

B: Sitting around looking at my property and not fucking with people and not getting fucked with sounds boring. I’m sorry.

A: It’s not boring! It’s not boring! Not fucking with other people and not getting fucked with by other people is not boring!

B: Ok.

A: And even if it is, it’s the best we got. As soon as you stop vigilance… As soon as you let somebody tread on you, fuck with you, get over on you, run a game on you, con you, fool you, bamboozle, bedazzle, shimmy shake you. Piss on you, ramrod you, regale you with gifts and then fleece you! Limit you… As soon as… As soon as…

B: What?

A: As soon as…

B: As soon as…

A: As soon as you give somebody your trust and they… burn you… well, then you ain’t shit then, Lester, are you?

B: Well. You’re not shit. You’re not not shit. You’re a person.

(Beat)

So, when was it?

A: When was it. When was what?

B: When was it? When did you get taken for a ride?

A: Doesn’t matter.

B: OK. It doesn’t matter.

A: That’s what I said. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened. If I got taken for a ride. If somebody ran a game on me. It doesn’t matter.

B: Right. I know. The fangs, motherfucker. The fangs.

A: That’s goddamn right, Charlie! You bet your goddamn ass, the fangs. And I’ll sink them so far into your neck that you may as well be a wax statue when I’m done with you. Put you into a dinner tux and send you off to Madame Tussauds.

B: Who turned you into wax, Jimmy?

A: Nobody.

B: Nobody turned you into wax. It just happened.

A: Yes. It just happened.

B: And who did you bury out over beyond the hill?

A: A bird… I’d been seeing her perched on the post at the end of our road three days running and I came out one day and she was on the ground. It looked like I could see outer space in her eyes. I took her back home. I brought her back to health. I learned what she needed. Mostly she needed care. She needed somebody to take care of her and give her little bugs and worms to eat. She was getting ready to fly away and somebody took her out of the little shoebox with grass that I had put her in. I found her dead outside of our back door.

(Beat)

And so I took her up over the hill and I buried her there and I came back down the hill and I was made out of wax.

B: Did you ever think that maybe you’re a bird and not a rattlesnake?

A: Could be. Could be.