On the Non-randomness of Mass Shootings in the United States

 Mass shootings in the United States are not at all "random."  On the contrary, they happen regularly and consistently.  People go berserk not inexplicably, but because they exist in environments with insufficient love, support and meaning.  They exist in environments ruled by market values, by the deification of the commodity and, finally, they exist in environments defined by the commodification of the human soul.  In such a context, people will continue to go berserk and commit such atrocities. 

 Also in such a context, politicians' declarations of shock and expressions of grief ("... we will keep the family in our thoughts and prayers..") hold no actual meaning.  If they meant these words, they would be seeking to transform this country into a place that exists within the larger community of life of the planet and  into a place that values human to human and human to non-human relationships over  commercial transactions.

BEINGS

Not only

HUMAN beings

but

BAT beings

WOLF beings

BEAR  beings

PANTHER beings

BUMBLE BEEings

ANT beings

MAYFLY beings

WORM beings

SWALLOW beings

SPARROW beings

EGRET beings

STORK beings

CRAB beings

CRAYFISH beings

URCHIN beings

CLAM beings

MINT beings

THYME beings

LAVENDER beings

SAGE beings

all  

BEING

transforming  

themselves

across time

and space
like us

Keystone XL, the 114th Congress and the Question of Life

The new Republican-majority Congress has taken office and announced as their top priority the approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of the US. Why? After all, the project is a demonstrated Life destroyer. The tar sands extraction site in Alberta resembles a bombed and desolate moon. It is devastating the local communities of First Nations peoples who have for 12,000+ years depended on the neighboring forests, rivers and lakes.* The carbon released through burning the fuel extracted in Alberta would bring a concentration in the Earth's atmosphere that would result in "game over for the climate," in the words of retired NASA physicist James Hansen.

And so again, why? The answer, I believe, is more fundamental than an issue of greed or Ayn Randian ideology. The answer lies in a fear of Life. Life – in its abundance, its dizzying diversity, its unpredictability and its beauty -- is something that terrifies them and that they loathe. They seek to kill it. They are more demented and dangerous than we imagine in our naïveté. They pursue the Sixth Great Planetary extinction with great alacrity. They may not fulminate their loathing with the eloquence of Captain Ahab, but make no mistake: they are his kin and they seek to take us down with them to the briny depths.

*http://www.ienearth.org/what-we-do/tar-sands/

Broderick

Verse – Am/E/Ab/A

The future’s doing tricks in my yard

The ocean’s puking broken toys

Monster legions float above me

I found a snake in a broken clock

Clocks don’t tell me what my name is

My name’s a thing I can’t recall

All the things I said before

Make no sense when I awake

Chorus– Am/E/F#m/E

When I awake

Verse

I confess, I did the right thing

I admit, you’re in the wrong

My shoulders ache like armadillos

Armadillos walk at dawn

Dawn’s a time that smells like flowers

Flowers aching in the dawn

Dawn’s a time that smells like flowers

Flowers aching in the dawn

 Chorus

Aching in the dawn

On the Sullen American Teen

The sullen disposition of the American teen is not a mystery:  He/She senses, looking around at the adults, that what lies ahead is a rigged game where something called "happiness" is chased, but never realized. He/She observes that well-being cannot be realized within a pressure-fueled complex consumer-driven society.  The American teen knows all of this intuitively and resents the adults above who seem to have accepted this state of affairs. Most adults that the teen sees appear as sad figures resigned to a grim fate, as cowardly & broken souls.  And this is why the teens are depressed. This is why they are rageful.  In fact, the teens' depression and anger are a sign of health. They indicate that the youth yet retain the original life spark -- that it has not yet been extinguished. Their withdrawn and often gloomy temperament should actually give us hope:  it is a form of resistance, a posture of rejection of The Lie. 

Two Movie Scenes

1. The scene in "The Departed" when Jack Nicholson as the gangster Costello sits down beside Leonardo DiCaprio as the deep undercover agent William Costagin for the first time. It is at a lunch counter in a corner store in South Boston. One of the most melancholy yet joyful songs ever written, "Let It Loose," by the Rolling Stones plays -- the ragged sounding electric guitar wavers through an effects pedal like a prizefighter bloodied but not beaten. The piano engages the guitar almost as a dance partner – a step forward, one backward, locking arms, an embrace, a release. We feel, at this moment, all the longing of these two men crystallized to a point. Each has pursued his own truth by means of a lie.

2. The scene in "Heat," directed by Michael Mann, when the criminal Robert De Niro sits down to speak with the detective Al Pacino for the first and only time. They share a cup of coffee at a large roadside diner outside of Los Angeles. We sense that there is, somehow, love and respect between these two men. It is tragic they will never be able to become friends; their destiny is to live as enemies and, we sense, to pursue the logical end of this enmity: the death of the other. Their contrasting destinies are shown in their exchange --

Pacino: Don't you want to live a normal type life?

DeNiro: What do you mean by a normal type life? Ballgames and barbecues?

Pacino: Yeah. Ballgames and barbecues.

DeNiro: No. No.

A Turning (for Kirk Hauptman)

"If it makes money, it’s good." 

As children we knew this was absurd.

We knew this afloat on our backs
Free and drifting 
For the first time alone
In cold Lake Michigan in sunlight.

They said --
The standing lamp broadcasting
Ghoul-golden light as it was pronounced -- 
To go against this  

Would cause us to be penniless
And to starve.

We accepted this 

And gradually went mad.

Years pass
As a pale car fade
Into the eastern haze and
We sense now A Turning.

We sense that we may now recall 
What we knew as children.

Sometimes I hear within the chambers of my skull

Metal girders creaking and bending,

Wailing under the weight of something impossible.

Sometimes I can see in my mind’s eye 
The beginning of the fall of a building,

And then the mid-air pause that it holds 
Before it collapses inward upon itself
In a whoosh that is both rapid 
And traceable in real time.