Posthuman Blues

Ranting (and some raving thrown in for good measure)

The "world situation" has become so overwhelmingly repugnant -- thanks in major part to World Leader Pretend Bush, Jr. -- that I can almost sympathize with the growing hordes of masturbatory "end times" junkies. The United States has spawned an ever-escalating Orwellian drama that will only end in catastrophe. It's nastily ironic: we make it through the Cold War and breathe a furtive sigh of relief at the prospect of not disintegrating into radioactive ash at any given moment . . . and then Dubbya gets his hands on the control panel. That good old Cold War sense of imminent apocalypse is back, this time with a walloping dose of postmillennial paranoia just to make things interesting.

And that's merely the political end of the spectrum. While we try to ignore the near-daily headlines about dead Americans in the anarchic wasteland that used to be Iraq, the climate's going fucking crazy. Europe is burning as I write. (I bet you didn't know that. I'm not making it up; do a Google search, for Christ's sake.) Our polar icecaps are actively melting, like the prelude to a particularly lame Kevin Costner movie. Yet somehow we're still enamored of patriotically themed cellphone faceplates and macho bumper-stickers.

The United States is in the throes of a profound disorder, dutifully obliging every attack on decency and human freedom doled out by the insane asylum formerly known as the White House. We have lost our capacity for wonder; we are pragmatic, gutless drones in a windowless neocon hive. We die and we are replaced. Some of us may kick and scream, but in the end it's futile. So we stand on the beach and await the fallout from overseas, readying our syringes behind the wheels of our SUVs and fume-belching pick-ups.

Scientists have begun predicting our species' extinction with a certain morbid glee. Stephen Hawking gives us a thousand years, tops. Others, no less informed, offer us 100 years. Or even 50. The unsettling truth of the matter is that we deserve to perish. Not because of Bush, but because our capacity to tolerate Bush and so many others like him is, apparently, inexhaustible. The only hope left to us is that we can turn the tide of obsolescence in our favor, so our postbiological descendants can, in some sense, take us with them. Otherwise the human experiment, so profound from ground-level, will have been as quaint as a bloom of mold in a petri dish.

The level of sheer terror infecting every waking moment of our lives, as evidenced by the news media's increasingly idiotic and obvious evasion tactics, is stunningly revealed in the film "28 Days Later," in which a virus dubbed "rage" obliterates an entire country in a month. Most of the survivors -- if that is the proper term -- are savage zombies who feed on the virus' human aftermath. I cannot think of a more relevant analogy for the Bush Regime's treatment of human life in the gut-wrenching wake of its invasion of Iraq.

For whatever it's worth, I add my voice to the small fugue on horrified onlookers: the current administration must be stopped. Our government's imminently casual approach to wholesale murder and environmental abuse is not an ethical abstraction. Maybe once it could have been, and we could have afforded to view the world political stage as a reassuringly nebulous entity. But times have changed. Time itself is accelerating. The shadow of climatic plunder and biowarfare hovers over our cities like the malignant motherships in "Independence Day." Only the aliens aren't monstrous amalgams of insect and reptile flesh; they're smiling politicians and aspiring technocrats. They run our corporations, our medical care system and our schools. They profess to fervent religiosity, yet they nurture war and relish destruction. The takeover isn't imminent; it's over. Decency has never been much of a contender, and the invasion spearheaded by our unelected "President" stifled even the mildest show of dissent within seconds.

We are approaching the end of history in recognizable form. The new world will require its own ontology, its own schematics. We must bravely face the fact that we may or may not be included in its plans.