Phil Rockstroh: Lost in an Anthropocene Wonderland

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


Lost in an Anthropocene Wonderland
December 20, 2013

The Anthropocene Epoch – dating from when human activity began to have a significant impact on the global ecosystem – is crashing toward a disastrous end amid melting icecaps, rising sea levels and dying species, but the human race can’t stop its rush to ecocide, as poet Phil Rockstroh observes.

By Phil Rockstroh


According to a recent, exhaustive study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy and headed by a scientific team from the U.S. Navy, by the summer of 2015, the Arctic Ocean could be bereft of ice, a phenomenon that will engender devastating consequences for the earth’s environment and every living creature on the planet.

Yet, recently, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said (in defiance of common sense and even a modicum of sanity) that the U.S. military will escalate its presence in the Arctic, due to the fact that “(the) potential for tapping what may be as much as a quarter of the planet’s undiscovered oil and gas.”

Secretary of Defense? More like Commissar of Mass Suicide. This situation is like a family of self-destructive drunks inheriting a brewery. Sans hyperbole, it is exactly like making the choice to exist as fatally self-involved consumers as opposed to multidimensional human beings possessed of heart, mind and soul.

I mean, just what kind of suicidal clowns flounce through life gibbering on about bacon straws, cupcakes, online images of kitty cats, and the latest Playstation model when the specter of extinction looms and their psychotic leaders are doubling down on the criteria of doom? This is like giving Charles Manson the codes to nuclear missile silos. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/20/lost-in-an-anthropocene-wonderland/

[pscot]

1. We just can't stop

[PuraVidaDreamin]

2. This essay, despite its description of our grim reality, is quite beautiful.

I love how his words flow.

"Consumerism, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is one of the few activities in the capitalist paradigm whereby fantasy and human libido merge (albeit a facsimile thereof). The mall, the big box store, even upscale stores and department stores are phantasmagoric agoras, much like the fairways of old style roving carnivals wherein the modus operandi of carnies was to bamboozle gullible, repressed rubes by bait-and-switch scams involving the commodification of curiosity and desire.

The social repression, attendant atomization and ennui inherent to existence in the corporate/consumer age give rise to a form of a pent-up longing for release. And that is where the bait-and-switch comes in, vis-à-vis Edward Bernay’s and his mercenary misappropriation of his uncle, Sigmund Freud’s theories regarding the dreamscape of desire (i.e., Eros)."

[xchrom]

3. du rec.