In the distance, you can see the ancient volcano called Mt. Kenya. Peaking at 17, 027 feet, she is the 2nd highest mountain in Africa after Mt. Kilimanjaro.
I took this picture on a journey I made to Kenya back in 2001 to attend my grandmother's funeral.
My grandmother had lived all her 104 years with this view of the mountain and we buried her in the deep red volcanic soil she had cultivated to feed her family.
Through famine, war and oppression, she single-handedly raised 12 children because my grandfather had been a casualty of the Mau Mau uprising that raged in the forests visible in the picture. In the dense underbrush, the famous Mau Mau warriors conducted a deadly guerrilla war against the British settlers and against African civilians who had not show adequate loyalty to their cause.
My grandfather was the first African teacher in the province and he was a christian man. His teaching was seen as cooperation with the British colonialists and he disappeared one night never to be seen again. He was probably tortured before he was killed as was customary for the Mau Mau.
By the time I came around as her 14th grandchild, the turbulence had faded away and my grandmother would come to look after me from time to time when my parents were away. She was gracious, patient, tough, gentle and wise. She loved to sit in our yard and look through the pile of National Geographic magazines we accumulated. Even though she could not read, she was thrilled by the pictures that showed her the lives of people from around the earth.
I remember her marveling over the images of elderly Europeans, South Americans and Asians in the magazines when they were pictured tending to their gardens growing potatoes and cabbage just like she did. She was delighted to discover that her life of stooping in her small farm eeking a living from the soil was practiced by all kinds of people of all colors and types.
Over the entire span of the 20th century, she tended her garden with unceasing toil and she was glad to discover that she had not been the only one.
Bob Marley's albums formed much of the musical backdrop as I grew up. His songs were anthems to us African kids trying to forge an identity in the midst of the rapidly deteriorating continent we happened to be born on. The idealism he represented seemed so attainable and yet so far from reality in the increasingly despotic world we saw around us.
Bob Marley 1945 - 1981
Bob Marley was of course a Rastafarian and because of him, everything related to Rastafarianism was stamped with an undefinable coolness we were all desperate to imitate.
Restafarian cultural markers like wearing one's hair in dreadlocks was considered extremely enlightened. When I was around 16 years old, I had a single dreadlock growing out the side of my head as a tribute to Bob Marley. This long prong of hair jutting perpendicularly to my right gave me the appearance of an injured wildebeest but I was none-the-less thrilled to be part of a subversive subculture even if only within the confines of my boarding school.
Once, while on an official school trip to a musical event, we ran into a group of genuine Rastafarians who towered above us with their massive tangle of hair. We stopped in our tracks in wonder and admiration. We were envious of their stylish looks, their lofty thoughts and their palpable coolness.
For their part, the Rastafarians stared at us quietly and for a moment, time stood awkwardly still.
Years later, I suddenly came to understand that particular moment when the Rastafarians stood silently looking at us. We, being in strict school uniform, were dressed in sharply creased pants , splendid maroon blazers and in place of dreadlocks, closely cropped hair. They (as I now understand from experience having come across a hoard of smartly dressed boarding school youth and feeling ungainly and unkempt), were struck with envy at the discipline and order that we represented from our elite boarding school. In their minds, they saw us inhabiting a world that they would never be part of and that we would emerge from the ivy-laced halls as the nation's powerful princes when our scholarly pursuits were done.
We were of course both mistaken.
The Rastafarians were not the angelic free creatures they appeared to be. They were probably stoned out of their skulls and held no lofty thoughts in their heads beyond the rolling of the next fat reefer. For all we knew, those guys may not have even memorized both the studio and live concert versions of Buffalo Soldier...tsk-tsk.
As for us, we were not the grand marquis that we appeared to be either. Rather, we were lower-to-middle class kids whose parents scrapped their fingers to the bone to send us to the school that promised to form us into princely analogs.
Back to Bob Marley...
He was brilliant as a song writer. The first four lines of his masterpiece "Redemption Song" are sublime; probably as lyrically transcendent as the American anthem, Star Spangled Banner.
Look how the third and forth lines fold back over the second line by having the events of the latter lines chronologically occur before the line that precedes them.
Old pirates, yes, they rob I. Sold I to the merchant ships Minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit.
An artless writer would have put it thusly:
Old pirates, yes, they rob I Minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit, Sold I to the Merchant ships
You are probably asking yourself why I compared it to the "Star Spangled Banner".
Look at that same structural device being used here:
O! say can you see by the dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
The last five lines describe events that are chronologically before the first line giving us the same poetic effect that Bob Marley does in "Redemption Song".
Bob Marley's song introduces us to the character who speaks of himself in the pidgin form of first person, "I". Marley packs an entire biography into these four lines in a way that could leave you muttering to yourself for weeks.
Marley's character tells the story of being stolen from his home by pirates and thrown into a holding pit. Some point later (probably feeling like an eternity), he is brought out of the cell and within minutes of emerging squinting from the darkness, finds himself sold to the slave ships headed for unknown shores and an unknown fate.
Wow...
Why am I in an existential meltdown that is sending me back to Bob Marley searching for a state of innocence and realism?
I think this is the answer to that question.
The country of my youth (Kenya) recently had the massacre of about 1000 people over a vote that went sideways. Apparently, the most expedient way to resolve the miscounting of votes is to hack men, women and children into bone-flecked slabs of flesh.
The country of my middle-age (Canada) seems unable to resolve whether it is committed to fundamental freedoms like the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. The other day, a new freedom was discovered in Canada that gave a kitchen worker the right to work with public food without washing his hands.
Oddly enough, even though Canada has the perspicuity to discern the subtle human rights that would release citizens from the inconvenience of sanitary hand washing, the country is ambivalent about the freedom of speech even though this freedom is one of the main bulwarks against the true inconvenience of being hacked into bone-flecked slabs.
Does Bob Marley have any answers?
Not really...he is just a lot of fun to listen to while reminiscing about the innocent days gone by.
I know that the image and spirit of Bob Marley have been co-opted by leftist groups along with pot-legalization groups and every group of crackpots and tin pot dictators that have ever assembled under the sun but when I listen to Bob Marley, I hear him calling people to take responsibility for their own lives and that, to me, separates him from the crazies who huddle under his umbrella trying to gain legitimacy from his legacy.
Listen to another of his classic songs "No Woman No Cry" and enjoy a few moments of pleasure with me.
Click the image below to go the Youtube version of the song.
The vote ended up being a referendum on Mormonism versus Evangelicalism.
As soon as Fred Thompson wilted, evangelicals focused on Huckabee and found him to be charismatic and genuinely witty.
When I heard Huckabee talk about his experience with fighting democrats in Arkansas, I was quickly interested in him. I knew many Republicans would have a similar response. The boom that followed was predictable.
Democrats:
Hillary tried to look like she won but she is facing a tough battle. Obama did well and should be proud. I think his speech at the end of the Iowa round was a little too lofty and by making the campaign about history was a little much. People were saying that it was soaring but I did not see that.
To be truly historic, history should not even have been on anyone`s mind.
Many of the productive farmers of Zimbabwe were killed and most fled the country. The agricultural economy of the country collapsed. To add to this, Mugabe began using food distribution as a tool of political manipulation and soon people began starving and dying of malnutrition.
For a country that was exporting food up to the time of Mugabe's restructuring, it is a bitter irony to see the re-emergence of Marasmus and other diseases caused by deficiencies in basic nutrition.
For its part, the European Union, instead of calling Mugabe to the mat for the wholesale destruction of his own country, welcomed him to the European / African summit where his brutality has been downplayed and his policies legitimized. He used his platform there to call for Africans to become more unified in order to give Africa more pull on the international scene.
Hah...with a population starving to death, the dictator worries about his voice on the international scene. Wow.
The compelling story of the destruction of Zimbabwe should be a warning to the rest of us as to how swift the total annihilation of our societies can be at the hands of those promising us a secure future through governmental policy of taking what rightfully belongs to other people.
Zimbabweans voted for Mugabe who promised them a secure future through the confiscation of other people's property.
Their lives are now in shambles.....the future barely a thought in the daily struggle for survival.
A few years ago, Buchanan wrote an article detailing the population collapse in Russia and the political effects that this collapse would have in relation to Russia's democratic development and the relationship that Russia had with China.
The article gained prominence when it was picked up by Pravda (Russia's state newspaper) and since that time, political shifting in that country seems to have followed the patterns described by Buchanan well over four years ago. A good example of this is the state-mandated procreation campaign that has been championed by President Putin. In response to Russia's imploding population, the country has resorted to fascist rhetoric and methodology to try reverse the trends that are pointing to the dissolution of the motherland.
The prescience of Mr. Buchanan's look at Russia makes his examination of the United States worth looking into.
In excerpts from his book posted by Drudge, Buchanan suggests that America is decomposing in an existential meltdown leaving global forces like China and Islam to scramble for control over regions of the earth that the weakening US is unable to influence.
The US is indeed suffering from an existential crisis. Much of what passes for political debate in the US is no longer about the interests of Americans as a citizen block but rather the interests of sub-groups inside (and increasingly outside) the United States. Having conducted its political discourse in this tone for nearly 40 years, it is not entirely surprising that a single unified narrative of America and the promise that she represents no longer exists.
Without a single national narrative, the country has balkanized into competing interest groups with evidence of this discernible in legislation (from the bench and otherwise) that increasingly pits seniors against youth, women against men, civilians against soldiers, race against race and class against class.
Whereas the American political system was designed to operate on a competitive model, players in the political system, in efforts to gain advantage, began converting what should have been the competition of ideas into the competition of grievance. Each grievance having a constituency, the political competition became that of encapsulating as many grievance labels into a party platform in order to command the greatest number of votes.
It is wrong to suggest that there was a time in American history that such political machinations did not exist and that only recently have grievance politics come into play. There has always been a place of grievance politics in America but in my opinion, only in the last 40 years has the discourse surrounding sub-group politics been loud enough to almost entirely drown out the American story.
With a generation emerging within the US that has no direct contact with the singular American idea (think of the people emerging from colleges where courses are offered by the names of Womyn Studies, African-American studies, Queer Studies and others that directly oppose the existence or desirability of a single American people) it is possible that the America of 2015 will not be able to define itself and its reason for existence the way that the America of 1861 and the America of 1939 was able to.
In 1939, German Americans did not represent a voting block impeding America's decision to go to war with Germany. Why? Because American Germans were not cultivated to be a voting block with interests that opposed the interests of the rest of America. There did exist a single American narrative at the time that most Americans including Germans could identify with.
This is sharply in contrast to the current American inability to show a united face to the world due to obstreperous political entities countering the self interest of the US in its fight against Islamic terrorism.
So what will become of America?
Is Buchanan right when he prognosticates America's fall from preeminence?
There are two prongs to this question.
The first is: Can America maintain its dominance as a global power?
The second is: Can America maintain its economic strength and the attendant high standard of living?
Addressing the first is the emergence of political realism that has taken root in American politics. More and more people are resisting their classification within subgroups and identifying with the larger American political body. It is now common to see women fighting the establishment on behalf of men, blacks fighting the establishment on behalf of whites and a general push towards justice.
This trend may set a course on which America may be able to unify its story. If people are able to trust that their interests are the same as the interests of all other Americans, reasoned pursuit of the country's interests may reestablish itself and the parties that represent the grievance groups will decline in influence. With a single sense of national purpose, America could retain global dominance simply by being the voice that holds to the strongest and most compelling standard of justice backed up by a population that itself holds to a high standard of justice.
Regarding the second prong to Buchanan's query, I believe that America's increasing productivity is the key. People outside America have been struggling to understand this counter-intuitive trend.
With industrial manufacturing growing in China and elsewhere at the expense of American manufacturing, it was thought that productivity would be seen to decline alongside an increase in unemployment numbers. This has proven to be wrong over and over again.
This indicator suggests that the American population still believes in work, risk and innovation even though political forces have been working hard to erase incentives to do so. This bodes well for America's future. Productivity is everything when it comes to sustaining a standard of living.
If the US sees a true reduction in political balkanization, the resultant reduction in special-interest liabilities may result in the reduction of disincentives to productivity in the US.
Americans have the privilege of choosing what their futures will look like through the electoral process. If enough people overcome identity politics and vote for America-First politicians, the country might retain its strength for many years. If identity politics plays a major part of the upcoming election, the one of last few remaining chances for America to reclaim a unified voice for America's promise will slip by. posted by Wild 9:26:00 AM |
The young woman named Toni Vernelli, an eco-warrior of the first order, represents the beginnings of a phenomenon that will likely burgeon in the next 20 years. More and more young people are emerging from education systems that have bent every educational discipline to include a hyper-sensitization to the ecological impact that humans have. This bombardment on the impressionable minds of the young will likely cause an increasing number of people to discard the idea of having children for the sake of preserving the resources of the Earth.
After a large enough sector of the population decides to sacrifice their own procreation for the sake of the planet, it is likely that an atmosphere of taboo will surround any decision to have children and offspring will be viewed as an evil to be stamped out.
It is not certain that the present examples of eco-sterilizations represent a true change in humanity's view of procreation but here is my reasoning that suggests that it does:
One of the women in question is 27 years old which means that she started grade one in 1986 and emerged from high school in 1998
Going through high school in the 90's meant that one had to ingest the first wave of hyper-environmentalism that was being propagated. The 27 year old sterilized woman is a product of the environmentalism of the 90's
Hyper-environmentalism has only become more stringent and pervasive since that time and so the youth emerging from high school now will have ingested the 2005-2006-Al-Gore eco-religion
This progression leads me conclude that we are going to see a large wave of sterilizations of 25-27 year old women and men as they emerge from the modern enviro-sensitizing high schools.
One could extrapolate from experience what political action would follow the sterility revolution in our society. It is possible to imagine the government power being used to mandate and provide sterilization. I can imagine a land where nearly everyone is sterilized and only a worthy few are licensed to have children.
Prior experience with the eco-movement has shown us this tendency.
Here is an example: Recycling plastic was something done by the Volvo-driving, granola-eating, nature-walking people who wanted to enrich their lives with activities that made them feel like they were giving back to the earth. In some jurisdictions, this niche activity found its way into the halls of power and it quickly became a government-mandated imposition on all people with in that jurisdiction whether they believed it was a beneficial activity or not.
Back to the subject at hand, this would not be the first time that human societies have rejected procreation whole scale.
History is littered with the remnant of societies that abandoned child bearing and rearing which resulted in the weakening and even extinction of those societies. Rome, the epicenter of the Roman empire is but one example of a society that abandoned child bearing and rearing as a standard human activity. The resulting hollowing out of their population (along with other factors no doubt) ended up in the ruination and collapse of the empire.
The only difference between circumstances in the past and this current looming wholesale sterility is that in the modern age, technology makes it possible to completely sterilize every human being within society whereas in the past, crude or non-existent birth control methods always allowed for some children to get through the gates.
Our modern trend to sterility may result in a strong downward spiral of the human population already markedly visible in parts of Europe and North America.
His main line of inquiry was aimed at our capacity to know religious truth but his scalpel tore out the connective tissue of all human knowledge. David Hume's work led to a fundamental skepticism that marks most western minds to this day.
The human mind is indeed a limited thing whether singularly pitted against difficult puzzles of our universe or collectively carrying accumulated knowledge.
To start, it is best to describe the human mind to be a device that employs an array of transducers to experience the universe in a way that is particular to the needs of the human being. Because of the nature of man, the universe is necessarily going to be a particular thing to man. The universe may be more than we can perceive and it may in fact be less than we perceive but its expression to our human minds is reasonable in as far we measure 'reasonableness'. We do indeed have the faculties to fathom our place in the world because the information we gather through our senses uniformly follows understandable laws as does the phenomena that we perceive only through instruments and inference. While it is true that the human mind cannot fully know all that there is in reality, it is not true that the human mind cannot know more about reality than the information our five senses can provide. It is plain to see that much of what we do know (and feel confident is true) is the accumulation of knowledge held in minds of other human beings as experiential information but delivered to our own minds as conferred knowledge.
To suggest otherwise (as Hume does) is to suggest that any suspicion or thought formed within the mind of a man has absolutely no chance of bearing confirmation in reality. Our own daily experience shows us that notions formed in our minds very often can be counted on to match what reality delivers. This is a strange argument but please bear with me.
A scientist for example may directly observe the effects of an atom-smashing experiment and thus hold experiential information in his mind. The scientist's paper that is released for study by the rest of us would merely represent conferred knowledge but is reasonably accepted as actual knowledge. Counting on this information very often will bear out our own examination of reality.
This suggests that there is a reasonably dependable continuity between the uptake of information from reality, the holding of the information in the form of human thoughts and then the measuring of those human thoughts against the reality from whence it came. Similarly (in the example given before the last one), proposals of reality formed exclusively within the human mind (excluding what is deliberately designed to be fantasy) can be measured against reality and found to match quite well. There is a continuity between the substance of reality and the corresponding thought form in the human mind whether it is gathered from reality or whether is formed exclusively within the human mind.
David Hume was (and is) famous for attacking the basis on which much of religious thought was formed. He proposed that any claims that Christianity in particular made regarding ultimate reality were simply fiction because the human mind could not cross the bounds of experiential knowledge to understand questions such as of origins, purposes and God.
In my humble view, what David Hume supposed (and wrongly so) was that there was a separation between the universe and the information about the universe.
David Hume's limited supposition may have been due to the limitations of the time in which he lived.
We who live beyond the space age, beyond the atomic age, and beyond the human genome mapping age know that our universe is not primarily composed of matter but rather that it is composed of information. In other words, what appears to be matter and everything else in our universe is nothing but the imposition of information on nothing. (I suspect that even energy itself, properly understood, will reveal itself to be nothing but information but this is the subject for a blogger living far into the future to comment on).
The basis of generic skepticism is that there is an unbridgeable gap between the human mind and reality due to the disparate nature of reality and information.
David Hume's skepticism (along with the skepticism of most other thinkers who followed in his tracks) is going to be unable to travel along with us into the age of the Universe-as-Information.
Reality and information are turning out not be separate after all.
This suggests that when you know something, it is very likely that you can really know it.
(Wikipedia was an important source of information for this post) posted by Wild 3:19:00 PM |
