I've Always Liked Chris Hedges. Yeah -- except for that time back in 2008 when he said atheists were as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists. Remember? But what the hell -- Everybody blows their wheels every now and again. I mean he earned a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School so we know he spent a lot of time, and allocated a lot of head space, to the study of gibberish. It was only natural some of that lunacy leaked out.
But after The Big Blowout I guess he called the mental health department of Triple A and got back on the road again. His latest essay, We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy, is another example of great Chris Hedges writing.
But he consistently has a problem with using the correct tenses of verbs. He insists on using the present or future tense when he should be using the past tense. We're not losing ... we've lost. He gets delusional, " -- if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power (Yeah, that'll happen) we will lose our liberty."
And there he does it again. It's "lost" our liberty -- not "lose" our liberty. What's with this guy? Maybe he's like the climate scientists who privately admit among themselves it's too late to do anything but in public don't want to scare the people completely out of their minds.
According to the page views at OpEdNews, the most "popular" essay I've written was, From Now On -- Our Biggest Mistake is Believing We Are Free. It was about Obama signing The National Defense Authorization Act on December 31, 2011. We lost our liberty a couple of year's ago on New Year's Eve. The moment the ink dried anyone could be picked up and held indefinitely. Anyone. Just because we haven't been nabbed yet doesn't mean we're walking around free.
Years ago I had a large fish, a Tiger Oscar, I kept in a hundred gallon aquarium. Twice a month I'd buy a dozen "feeder" goldfish and dump them into Oscar's tank. Over the next couple of weeks he'd "rendition" every single one of them. Once, when Oscar was down to one goldfish, I went to the pet store for a new supply of feeders. The goldfish that had survived two weeks of a ravenous Oscar had a distinctive black spot on its dorsal fin. I came back home, dumped in the latest batch of feeders, and Oscar began ... renditioning.
Two weeks later Oscar was down to one fish again but before I went to the store I noticed it was the surviving goldfish from the last batch. The one with the black spot on its fin. Goldfish aren't ... um ... able to express themselves very well, and it was definitely a case of anthropomorphism on my part when I thought the fish looked pretty damn anxious. I got out the net, scooped it up, and put it in another tank. I figured any fish who survived a month with Oscar deserved its "freedom."
Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, journalist Alexa O'Brien, RevolutionTruth founder Tangerine Bolen, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir, and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla, tried to get the Courts to take Oscar out of our national tank. The U.S. Supreme Court decided to refuse to hear the case. Oscar will always be swimming amongst us. We are able to pretend we are free right up until the moment we are eaten.
So why does Chris Hedges say we are losing instead of we've lost? Oh that's right. All is not lost. All we have to do is rapidly build militant mass movements, overthrow corporate tyranny, and break the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power. Check and double check. Whew! I thought we were in trouble there for a minute. Does that mean we have to get together with other liberals-progressives and talk about what we're going to do? Because if that's the case I'm going to have to tell you another story.
Years ago, when I worked for a special effects company I came to work one day and everybody was just standing around. The big problem was there was a huge piece of equipment that had to be moved. It was very expensive. It was very heavy. The owners of the company were over in the corner of the soundstage talking about the best way to move The Big Heavy Expensive Thing. All sorts of plans were brought up and discarded. This went on all morning until one of the grips stood up and said, "EFF IT!" He motioned to all of us to follow him and we went over to The Big Heavy Expensive Thing. It took over a dozen of us to pick it up and move it to where it needed to go. The owners of the company were aghast. "What if you dropped it? What if you broke it?" they cried. "We didn't." said the grip. "What's next?"
Look. We all know what has to happen. We either pull off a National Strike or we don't. We either begin the first steps towards a revolution or we don't. There will never be a National Strike; therefore, there will never be a revolution -- peaceful or otherwise.
Next question...What are we going to do about Global Climate Change? It doesn't make any difference what we do. We can all take shorter showers, switch out our light-bulbs, recycle, take public transit, reduce our personal carbon "footprint" to zero, and it won't make any difference. It's Capitalism that's killing the planet, not your electric toothbrush. The corporate-controlled countries committed to extracting all the carbon out of the ground and into our atmosphere have no intention of stopping. There will be no revolutions to stop them.
Next question...How do you want to spend the last hundred years of human existence? That an easy one for me. Most of that time I plan on being dead.
Next question...Regards from Beautiful British Columbia.
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