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EDITORIAL: To the Ostriches

With the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds before midnight, the mood is, of course, best summed up by Yeats, whose poem The Second Coming is being quoted more and more often.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats

In this issue, unfortunately, we must deal with subjects like racism, ignorance, exploitation, and fascism — and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust started by the death thrashings of the American Empire, which hopes that, perhaps, if it triggers a global conflagration, in a devastated world, the USA will be the last nation standing.

What is the logical end result of building a society based on greed? Obviously, it is poverty, inequality, oppression, injustice, violence, thievery, and perhaps even annihilation. Without piracy, pirates can’t make a good living.

As the New Yorker cartoon by Manikoff says,  ‘And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.’ 

There are great opportunities for the US and Western corporations to make profits from manufacturing and selling weapons, from skyrocketing oil prices, from rebuilding what they blew up, from using AI to pillage the entire cultural inheritance of humankind.

And if all this sounds a little melodramatic to you, you ostrich, then look around you at the signs and portents. Notice a war or two in progress, a genocide, a disastrous attack on the world’s energy supplies?

No, you did not dream it! A baby eating toad is now the president of a psychopathic colonial nation founded on the basis of genocide and slavery.

We can hope and work and vote and agitate for a better world; for the restoration of the land, for opportunities to work and create useful and worthwhile services, we can work to remove the suckers of this dangerous vampire squid from off us all.

Remove the parasite of global capitalism and save your lives and souls! Save your families and your town, and country and planet!

But, still, even in the face of this horror of nuclear brinkmanship let us celebrate what there is to celebrate, which is plenty while we are all still alive.

In the small spaces and in the unmonitored and unsurveyed freedoms we have that remain, we can concentrate on love, friendships, parenting and teaching, growing and cooking good food to share, on playing music together, on art, poetry, photography and sensible debate. We can still express human emotions thoughts and and philosophies, and design and build small and big things and maintain them. Above all we can treasure and look after the natural world.

We can talk about what has happened, what is happening, and what we would like to happen, and then, please God, let’s work collectively to make it happen.

Ars Notoria Magazine

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