Newer more uncertain ground and a wider variety of pasts

Walking through forests of palm tree apartments
scoff at the monkeys who live in their dark tents
down by the waterhole drunk every Friday
eating their nuts, saving their raisins for Sunday
Lions and tigers who wait in the shadows
they're fast but they're lazy, and sleep in green meadows...

The rivers are full of crocodile nasties
and He who made kittens put snakes in the grass
He's a lover of life but a player of pawns
yes, the King on His sunset lies waiting for dawn
to light up His Jungle as play is resumed.
The monkeys seem willing to strike up the tune

Excerpts from "Bungle in the Jungle" by Jethro Tull

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man's gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old Earth can give
and he ain't put back nothing

Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
for what he never knew
Now Man's reign is through
but through the eternal night
the twinkling of starlight..
so very far away..
maybe it's only yesterday..

Excerpts from "In the Year 2525" by Zager and Evans

        When going back to college a few years back, there were three movies which were shown which I will write about a bit here. The university had “movie nights” for their foreign students (both colleges I went to in Europe did) in which they showed movies at night which they thought might be of interest from different countries, and sometimes had discussions about them afterwards. Two of the ones I will mention were of those type, on topic to related subjects being taught in the program, but one was not. It only relates to them superficially though it is a funnier movie, not too serious, and a good place to start.

        The first movie I regret not going to see then was “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” It was not a part of any formally organized movie night, but it was shown in the dorm and all the foreign students were invited. And alcohol, which was very cheap in Estonia, (so much so that thousands of tourists from Finland go there regularly just to get drunk, among other reasons of course,) that was to be a big part of it too. Serious drinking for a seriously funny movie.



        I thought about going but decided not to in a large part because I had recently seen it by renting it off of Netflix a few months prior to then. I would have had to have gotten very drunk not to remember all of the jokes beforehand, especially since I had seen the movie many more times before that years ago. The reason I regretted then and now not going was because it was with a group of people that I was to be studying with, later got to know a bit, and a movie like that is a good way to get to know people better, in a relaxed sort of way.

        The second movie I regretted not seeing was a far more serious movie, a part of the unofficial curriculum of the college program, and one I also was on the dividing line about seeing up until soon before it began. I was simply not in the mood that day to see what I knew to be a very depressing movie. It is an excellent movie by any measure and far more worthy to write about now than a Monty Python movie, but its practically impossible for it not to be disturbingly upsetting, especially if you are in a bad mood to start with. I don't regret it as much now because I did get to see it when I was in Sweden, and since it was a Swedish movie filmed both in Estonia and Sweden, it made sense to see it later when I did. Eventually it turned out there was enough time to eventually get round to it, and after I had been living for awhile in both countries where it was filmed.

        The movie was “Lilja 4-ever” and was set in a vaguely defined area called “somewhere in the former USSR.” The idea was that it could have been set in any number of countries. And the areas where it was filmed, due to standardized Soviet housing, also could have passed for any number of cities in a number of different former Soviet countries. The tale could have been also from a number of countries as well. It was one of those kinds of movies that could never be made in the United States. It was raw and real, and more honest than most movies I have seen.



        It was about human trafficking on one hand, but it also showed the aftereffects of the breakup of the Soviet Union in a devastating light. A real unvarnished look at the destruction of societies due to “economic shock therapy” and “collateral economic damage” from bad policies and corrupt governments. Poverty may be poverty, but how it is inflicted, how it is addressed or not addressed, and how a society can break down, is all shown there between the lines.

        When I say it is honest, it is because it does not exactly show Sweden in a good light either (not that I want to piss off both countries I have studied in: Just like the vague “somewhere in the former USSR” of the first half, the flip side second half could well have been set “somewhere in the West” and could have been any number of Western countries as well). It is not just the traffickers or even the pimps that are bad in the movie, but it is also a bit of an indictment of society as a whole itself which creates and perpetuates these things. That is why I say it is a movie outside of those that can be made in America. (Ask Obama, we don't indict our own societies elites, no matter what. Literally, no matter what. We're not Spain, or Argentina or Peru.) The worst in a way was not the traffickers but those who would get off on raping someone chained to a bed. The doctors, the stockbrokers, the “respectable” members of society whose funds and lack of humanity made and make the trade possible, the market.

        There have been American movies about the drug war which have tried occasionally to be as honest, but that is another area which not only is insufficiently looked at in fiction, but as dishonestly in government as well. The movie “Traffic” was notable trying to cover different aspects of the problem. Few if any movies explore these things in a societal context, as how all the parts of a society function together creating the problems, the connection between the moralist politicians and criminal organizations that “accidentally” work together and promote each others interests. The only more cancerous “adversarial partnerships” to societies as a whole has been between those who would start “pre-emptive” wars and the terrorists they battle, as well as the greater numbers they create as an “accidental” side-effect. They feed each other so much and so completely, they need each other and after a few years depend on each other even when not overtly helping sustain the other. They use the “battle” to their mutual elevations and reputations, as well as their very livelihoods and purposes.

        The third movie that I will mention relates to the other two and connects them in a way. This one I actually did see then. I also did not want to see it at the time because like the Monty Python movie, it was a British comedy which I had seen recently via Netflix. I also, like when “Lilja 4-ever” was shown, was not really in the mood to go. But I could not not see it. It was too perfect to where I was. That movie was “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

        To see that movie at that time with people whom I knew who grew up under Communism, to see the ultimate black comedy about a nuclear war with people who for half of my life were “the enemy” and most of my country would not have really minded to see dead, “nuke worthy” so to speak, and laugh about it together as something of the past, was too great an opportunity to pass up because of not being “in the mood” for seeing a movie. Americans in general don't know the difference between the former Soviet Union and Russia, nor that some of those countries are our allies now.

        Indeed, one of our esteemed Congress persons recently said of Russians, simplifying complex International Relations to something his constituents could digest in a way as to produce the desired excrement of reactions, “they're still Communists.” He nor they care about what the word “Communists” meant, just like the word “Socialist” is just as inappropriately thrown about these days without concern about the little things, like what the words actually mean. Meaning is irrelevant now, most neither know nor care. Simpler to say, “bad people, those people, bad. Grrr. Hate hate hate them, they hate you.”

        Thats always good enough to get you elected or rile people up even if you don't have elections or honestly count the votes if you do. For the record, Estonians are now the “good guys,” Russians are still sometimes the “bad guys” depending on if Russia is not doing what the American government wants recently, and the world “Communist” applies far more to China (in which it is actually) which is now so rich and powerful that no American politician would dare point that fact out in a negative way to his constituents if he thought it might get picked up on, any more than one of them might criticize Israel these days. They own us, or at least them. And through their corruption, now they own us.

        Now if we had what Reagan entertained was possible, and many neo-cons wish was still possible, a “limited” nuclear war in Europe, Estonia, now our allies, would still be just as dead. Only now, if we survive, we would put up a monument or a plaque somewhere to say we feel bad about losing them in the war and what a shame it was and all that. They have, usually without consulting their public's opinion about it or due to any of their actions, been “good guys” to us at times, and “bad guys” and back again. And usually likewise, off and on on how bad we would feel if we felt we had to “obliterate” their lands with nuclear weapons.

        Slowly the world may be learning it doesn't matter where you might live in the world, you are just as irrelevant. No matter which side you choose, and you usually will not get a choice, you are ultimately on the frontlines and will be just as dead as those countries literally on the frontlines and traded back and forth every couple of generations as to which side would mourn you or feel worse about the fact your whole country was incinerated, which inevitably it would be.

        At that time we could watch the same classic Cold War comedy about mutually assured destruction and the death of humanity knowing that at that moment anyway, we were on the same side now. Though it is a comedy, it is a sane movie about an insane set of circumstances, which has surprisingly little abated since the end of the Cold War. Not this year perhaps, but no one of power would want to rule it out either.

        Whether the Communists, the Terrorists, or eventually, seemingly, the Chinese, (whatever political or economic system they may be under in 10 or 20 years,) we need someone to play the “other” to keep up our weapons industry, our sense of purpose, or need to fight something and someone, afloat and forever as propped up as Citibank and AIG, no matter how much it bankrupts us or is likely to kill us, or anyone and everyone else. We know nothing else, and the final punch line, laughing at our own fatal stupidity is still as timeless as ever. Still though, we are very privileged when we are able to laugh about it together with others who were former enemies. It is the sliver of hope in the darkness.



        In that very room, a not unintelligent instructor seemingly pondered over how Gorbachev's reforms always seemed to lead to events which made the Soviet Union further disintegrate. Was he inept or incompetent as many Russians and others whose lives have been destroyed by the “economic collateral damage” which came after the Soviet Union fell believe he was? Were his reforms a logical course of action to take given that the results were the opposite of what was intended, contributing to the collapse he was purportedly trying to stave off? Was he a traitor to his people selling his country off to the West and to gangsters within it, as some allege?

        Not that I could read his mind, or see things as he saw them, but the answer that came forward seemed to me self-evident. He was buying time. Each of the reforms, though ultimately making things worse for the survival of the Soviet Union in the long run prevented catastrophes imminent in the short term. Buying time does not get you monuments usually, nor heroic songs written about you, especially when your country is no longer there at the end of your term. But it is the best thing one can really ever achieve. More time makes everything else possible.

        The myth is of the great and final grand victory over the enemy ushering in a final peace. That is the greatest bullshit story of all time if you look at history. Peace gives way to more wars, and sometimes not long thereafter. We, especially in America, celebrate the “Warrior” far more than any “Peacemaker.” Buying more time is what most people do collectively. It is not glamorous, not earth shattering or earth healing, but it is what each person in a society can contribute to equally and enjoy the benefits of equally. To keep things on track to go another day, live another day to die a different day. It is never ignoble and sometimes the best you get. And it is far from insignificant.

        A different instructor would say later in a room just down the hall from that one, a great truth about what was accomplished by that “failure” of Gorbachev's efforts. Though not talking about that specifically, he hit the nail on the head of the most important thing to buying that time, what it was which gained us the time to be reflective about it now. The biggest concerns he said about the collapse of Soviet Union from the point of view of the US were “loose nukes, loose nukes, and loose nukes.”

        We, the world, in a sense got lucky. Though it is hard to justify much of what came later after the collapse of the Soviet Union, opportunities lost for partnerships, stronger alliances, staving off the general disintegration of public services, the corroding eventually of many societal organizations and structures, Gorbachev's “ineffective” measures to keep an admittedly bad system going a bit longer while a new system was being worked out from scratch, it worked at the time. From the point of view of what else could have been, it could not have worked more brilliantly. It bought the added time necessary. A potentially fatal catastrophic event of a flood of nuclear devices into the wrong hands was almost seemingly miraculously averted.

        And it is in that seeming miraculousness about dodging such bullets that keeps us from ever learning. It is the blindness humanity never seems to overcome. We can say before something happens, it can happen any number of ways and be prepared for many of those equally. But after a few years, then a few dozen or hundred, it becomes fated. We can look back at history and say, “See, wasn't he stupid for not seeing how it was going to turn out?” Literally, we say that thinking God ordained that it must or would have turned out that way.

        One of the most disturbing notions to me about how America has slowly become immunized to the horrors of torture, how it has become debatably reasonable to do, that even a Supreme Court Justice can feel no shame in publicly saying that there is nothing illegal about torturing people so long as you do not charge them first, was that Americans began losing sight it could be any other way. That it should be any other way. Day by day, year by year, whatever atrocities are going on become less and less shocking and more and more normal. Its just, after awhile, how the world is. What can you do?

        Religion, even science, becomes a blanket settling in that things had to have happened the way they did. God meant it to be this way. Saying it should have occurred otherwise is blasphemous after a few years. Many but not all people can be bothered by leaders who get messianic, thinking that God is working through them, guiding them, that whatever bad things he does is justified because it is simply God working his will on Earth through him.

        It seems crazy when directed at the future, to many people. The future most believe can happen differently than these people expect. But after a few generations, in those instances where the world was not destroyed, they look more sane every day. Surely, we will think, such things were necessary to “keep us safe,” that they were vindicated merely by the fact that we still exist, and that “our existence, our children's new existences” were divinely inspired and occurred on schedule, and happened all according to “God's Plan.”

        The flip side of that coin is believing, silently, those who were killed, tortured, raped, murdered, villages wiped out, lands stolen, peoples and cultures wiped out to extinction or near extinction were necessary for our “higher” cultures to replace them. And that bias is in every single fiber of our cultures. We no longer see them or are aware that such biases exist.

        I watched a show about religion recently which mentioned how the notion of “a single God” replaced the “primitive” beliefs of the past. It was not a controversial thing to be said in even in a scientifically responsible documentary. Surely the numbers of Christians and Muslims which numerically make up the majority of humanity would agree that their religions are more “evolved” than “pagan” “primitive” religions which have more than one deity. Who would dare argue otherwise who could not be easily discredited within those cultures, if not ostracized or even killed for trying to promote that their own religion may be equally as “primitive” of a notion, if not more so?

        The biases that are most dangerous are the ones we don't even see that they are there. We change the definitions of words when we do not like what they say about us, exempt ourselves and cultures from how we judge others and other cultures we do not like or disagree with. And worst of all, we are losing the ability to gauge how much hypocrisy is inherent within it which allows two sets of rules to exist, one for the rich and powerful, one for the poor and weak, one for the chosen ones, one for the pagans or primitives, one for Gods own, and one for the forsaken. It all is just becoming normal.

        It may seem too obvious to need to state, but if one believes that the future can go in any number of different ways, it should not be much of a stretch to think that the past could have happened differently as well. Those who did the horrors of the past ought not to be given an automatic pass after a few generations, that they were doing God's will. That it had to happen that way, that it was fate.

        However much time is bought now or by others in the future, I cannot help but feel sometimes it is wasted if we never learn this most simplest of lessons generation after generation after generation. The past did not have to go the way it did. There were other roads. This way was not necessarily the best nor the most just nor the most holy nor the most right. Learning that, feeling that, living that belief every second of every day is the best assurance that new routes will be taken and new patterns of behavior will become better norms, and that the worst of history which we repeat every day and every generation helplessly, will fade out of us in time.

        The song “In the Year 2525” was for me a huge leap in perspective. It was played often on the radio when I was very little and is among my earliest memories. For people to actively and often contemplate cultures many thousands of years into the future, to grow up with pondering such notions, is to give themselves a greater perspective on their own cultures. What religions and governmental systems, ideologies and theories existed 10,000 years ago? How unthinkable would it be if they were still around today? How insane it would be to think ours will still or should be still around 10,000 years from now? As I wrote once in a poem, “as maturity carries with it ingrained superiority saving me from feeling now I am tomorrow's ignoramus.”

        We need to know and remember constantly that we are today the ignoramuses we will ourselves one day see ourselves as, should we get the time to learn more and to know better. If we do not get further, get a better perspective on where we were now, what better use could time be for? If not for nothing, it will be far short of what it could have been. And to believe it always could have been better, always, no matter how good it was, is to better enable it to one day reach more fully toward becoming something better.