Let 'er Rip Means Let THEM R.I.P.

 A few people have been commenting on the current "death by semantics", or what Orwell called "doublespeak."

I used that image just in October, but it's too on-the-nose not to use it again here.

T. Ryan Gregory wrote,

"Death by semantics. It's spread in the air, but it's not airborne. It's a major global health risk but not an emergency. It's still a pandemic but not the emergency phase of a pandemic. It's a variant of interest but not a variant of concern."

Laura Miers added, 

"Death by semantics and bureaucracy . . . while there's NO DATA reporting the record disease, disability and death, and the carnage isn't reported on paper. As we collapse, we'll pretend we can't possibly know why, and the bureaucracy will paralyze us," 

in response to Dr. Red Bison's post:

"I grok this in my bones. The Before Times no longer exist. They're going to kill us with bureaucracy. I'm told to prove I got Covid in Feb. 2020 and Oct. 2020 when there were no PCR tests available. The powers that be know this--THEY told US."

Barry Hunt called it,

"A pandemic powered by politics, power, greed, organizational capture, laissez-faire, libertarianism, exploitation, hubris, ambition, D-K [dirty knees?], cognitive dissonance, anti-science, bots, trolls, rogue nations, useful idiots, fellow travelers, eugenics and gatekeeping." 

Coco added, 

"Convergent evolution of wrongdoing."

Absolutely. 

I've written about bureaucracy and Arendt loads of times, most recently pointing out that,

"The 'ethos governing professional circles effectively shields their members from pangs of conscience.' That's the brilliance of bureaucracies that Hannah Arendt talked about so much in Eichmann in Jerusalem and Origins of Totalitarianism. The system allows for people to skirt any responsibility, not just legally, but in their own conscience. Eichmann oversaw the murder of millions of Jewish people in the Shoah, yet he was comfortably and authentically able to view himself as a hard worker who did a great job of following instructions! IT'S EXACTLY WHAT PUBLIC HEALTH IS DOING! The system allows all the people involved to be divorced enough from the outcomes of their decisions to actually make policies that effectively kill and disable children AND allow all the medical professionals involved to sleep well at night!" 

I wrote a bit about this absurdity and its aftermath last April, trying to follow Camus' lead to embrace the absurdity instead of wasting efforts to make sense of it all. It just doesn't make sense. 

"If we stay on this trajectory, accepting the virus into our bodies, then future generations will have microclots as part of their 'normal' vascular system. It will no longer be unusual. And strokes and heart attacks in teens and children will be just something we live with. And executive functioning -- the incredible working of the prefrontal cortex that enables us to sit and listen, plan ahead towards attainable goals, stay focused for extended periods, control emotional responses, and organize ourselves in a functional manner that is unique to human beings -- will become less effective, making learning strikingly more difficult. We're devolving. Classrooms may become chaotic and unmanageable, or even more so. Our ability to take responsibility - to have the ability to respond rather than just react - might also be lacking.

And it's not just children affected of course, but children will have no knowledge of it ever being any different. This virus is affecting the brains of lots of adults already, making many simple thinking tasks impossible for many who are screaming into the void for help. Sometimes I think that we may as well be drinking absinthe all day and wandering around in a stupor painting bizarre images - all unfinished. And yet a few of us "doomers" persist in trying to wake us all up to the reality:

Well, now this interesting thing is happening."

Camus watched the destruction of young men sent to fight a bloody war, arguably sacrificed to stop an atrocity in the making, and we're watching the destruction of children allowed to be infected over and over in a way that benefits absolutely nobody. 

It's madness. 

And I painted a picture I call, "Treachery of Capitalism" or "Houses of the Unholy". Better out than in, right?

It's about Covid and climate change and religion (that's the Vatican in the top right with a dollar sign in place of the cross, representative of an institution that accumulates wealth amid abject poverty). The people all have Covid heads to show the virus is taking over our heads both in the attention of the prefrontal cortex to anything from an unease to a terror in the limbic system, as well as the physical change from the virus that causes inflammation of glial cells which fuse together compromising neural activity. The trees are charred and majestic mountains cut in half, stripped for minerals to feed a consumption that refuses to be limited, buying into a freedom of choice at the expense of life itself.  

The animal is the grisly wolf from Hildegard of Bingen's "Five Beasts" which came from a vision of each animal representing a time period; the final epoch of the grisly wolf is divided by greed. Its braided tongue is meant to wrap around the world to hold it together waiting for a saviour, but I severed it, rendering it useless. The writing at the top, 'Ceci n'est pas un grand protecteur', an homage to Magritte's "Treachery of Images", is in reference to what appears to be our natural inclination to hope to be rescued from it all. For centuries, God was going to come save us, any day now. Now we've got more of a superhero mentality going on. We're still steeped in the mindset that only a rare few can do anything heroic, and the rest of us have to just wait. 

So we wait for the answer or wait to be told what to do next. 

Fun fact: Hannah Arendt was forced into an internment camp for five weeks in 1941. One day, there was some confusion about whether or not they were allowed to keep German citizens imprisoned, and she told the other women, Now's our chance! We need to just insist we be let go because we're German! But many of the other women wanted to wait for more official instructions. Arendt showed her papers and walked out knowing that the chaos of the moment would soon revert to normal routines and that window would be closed forever. She was right, and the women left behind were killed. She wrote of the Shoah, 

"The world did not keep silent, but apart from not keeping silent, the world did nothing."

She quoted Tadeusz Borowiski, the Polish poet to discuss the problem with hope:

"'Never before was hope stronger than man, and never before did hope result in so much evil as in this camp. We were taught not to give up hope. That is why we die in the gas oven.' Hope stronger than man--that means hope destructive of the very humanity of man." 

Samantha Rose Hill explains,

"Arendt describes how 'hope' becomes a dangerous barrier to life that breaks down the importance of social ties and human relationships. When hope prevents action, and optimism forces individuals to turn back upon themselves away from the world, not only does the distinction between public and private life collapse, but humanity is extinguished."

Nobody's coming to fix it all. Nobody that can do much more than you can do, that is. I'm bolstered by the massive ceasefire protests going on around the world. It shows that the majority of us want a better world, and that CAN happen if we keep demanding it. But it will take persistence to turn the heads of people who can craft legislation. We can't stop before that happens.

Right now, the middle management enforcing the rules, insisting on the same types of classes and exams as pre-pandemic years and refusing to even suggest N95s, are unthinkingly following orders, able to take comfort in a diffusion of responsibility as they authorize allowing our children's brains and bodies to turn to mush from a very preventable disease. We have learned nothing from the 1930s and 40s.

But maybe it's not possible to learn from history since we are programmed to survive, focusing primarily on immediate access to resources, including minerals, fossil fuels, and the conforming to anti-mask rhetoric that seems necessary to amass social allies, even when this drive threatens our very existence. Maybe our actions are merely a long line of effects of the first spark of life that led us willy-nilly down this glorious and horrific trajectory. We may have been granted free will through the chemicals swimming in our brain, but I don't believe we have accepted it and the responsibility that comes with intentional actions. We would rather be tossed hither and thither, with a greater illusion of freedom granted from avoiding taking responsibility. 

Our entire human civilization could soon be just a blink in the eye of the jellyfish and sea sponges. The end of a civilization means that all the sense of immortality through "leave behinds" - the artwork and books and technology and sanitation systems we hope remains to prove our brilliance to future generations - are all for naught. We have clearly made some grave mistakes along the way. But it's easier to indulge in fears than create a vision of hope, so maybe I'm just too limited to be able to imagine what a hopeful painting or post could possibly look like at this epoch in our evolution.

Political doublespeak keeps us calm and orderly while it all goes to shit.