mass society, wringing the planet to death -- the Individual seems like an anomaly more than ever -- even those "Individuals" that we worship on the covers of People magazine and E! aren't so much 'individuals' as branded commodities, reproduced and disseminated.
perhaps we, as neo-apes who try desperately to make sense of the world, have always thought of The Times as Dire ...
But I can't think of any more Dire time, save WWII and the cold war ... maybe the last Ice Age ...
Really, our Dire times started with WWII ... which had its roots in the Great Pointless Maelstrom of WWI.
Not even a hundred years ago. The century of mass suffering. The Age of the State. The Dusk of the Spirit in the Gaping Maw of the System; the flurry of love and hate and hope and desire and fear within us all reduced to a number, a statistic, a demographic... IBM had some hand in the Holocaust: punchcards, allocating resources, juggling numbers, delete, delete, delete--
well.
Buddhism is the only religion that makes sense to me anymore. The Smiling Fat Man had the cajones to assert that all life is Suffering and Ignorance, and evermore would be ... that it's all impermanent and transitional anyway.
Utopia is a dream. Even in a utopia we'd sweat and cry and feel hungover.
There's no conclusion, or resolution to this admittedly formless rant, so i'll shut up.
mass society, wringing the planet to death -- the Individual seems like an anomaly more than ever -- even those "Individuals" that we worship on the covers of People magazine and E! aren't so much 'individuals' as branded commodities, reproduced and disseminated.
perhaps we, as neo-apes who try desperately to make sense of the world, have always thought of The Times as Dire ...
But I can't think of any more Dire time, save WWII and the cold war ... maybe the last Ice Age ...
Really, our Dire times started with WWII ... which had its roots in the Great Pointless Maelstrom of WWI.
Not even a hundred years ago. The century of mass suffering. The Age of the State. The Dusk of the Spirit in the Gaping Maw of the System; the flurry of love and hate and hope and desire and fear within us all reduced to a number, a statistic, a demographic... IBM had some hand in the Holocaust: punchcards, allocating resources, juggling numbers, delete, delete, delete--
well.
Buddhism is the only religion that makes sense to me anymore. The Smiling Fat Man had the cajones to assert that all life is Suffering and Ignorance, and evermore would be ... that it's all impermanent and transitional anyway.
Utopia is a dream. Even in a utopia we'd sweat and cry and feel hungover.
There's no conclusion, or resolution to this admittedly formless rant, so i'll shut up.
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