Our Coming Ice Age

"The Blue Marble"  (NASA/ Apollo 17 Crew)

The ice age may have occurred when an enormous meteor hit the earth, resulting in the destruction of a whole species of “larger than life” creatures whose remains we now see in the glass enclosed exhibits in museums of natural history. It’s possible that the earth could again experience a catastrophic collision with another heavenly body. But Halley’s Comet, for example, is not scheduled to reappear until 2061. In between that time, the planet balances precariously between the effects of green house gases to man made dangers like the Hydrogen bomb. If the North Koreans make good on their threats of creating an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hefting one of these babies to our shores, then the nuclear Armageddon that many of us thought was the stuff of l950’s novels like On the Beach could become a reality. Neither Russia nor the United States would turn out to be the real danger, yet by that time it would be too late to realize that it was a rogue state, an outlier, bidding for global hegemony, that posed the real threat. Like their millennial counterparts in the Middle East, the North Koreans are visionaries and their vision carries with it a death’s head, which would sacrifice the world for the allegiance to a leader or cause.  Buddhist monks set themselves on fire in protest to the Vietnam War, but today’s suicide bombers are only the fuse to greater conflagration. We may have another ice age, which puts prehensile man in some future species’ diorama, but it's less likely to come from an attack from the heavens as an eruption from the bowels of mankind itself.

Is Number #2 a Misnomer?

Traditionally number #1 has been short hand for urination and number #2 for defecation. But whatever regulatory authority is responsible for these designations must reconsider their logic. If you have to take a wicked shit that pressing fact is going to be number #1 on your mind while peeing, which only requires a cup or the side of a building, is likely to have less dire consequences. Put less genteelly, would you rather shit or piss your pants? 
However esoteric, this matter is a very real consideration for baby boomers who are fast becoming a major market for adult diapers like Depends. When you think about the clock, we talk about Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and currency, Bretton Woods. The North Koreans for instance recently set their clock back 30 minutes to create their own special zone (“North Korea to turn clocks back by30 minutes to establish own time zone,” The Guardian 8/7/15). It may be important to set a standard, but it’s imperative that the standard makes sense. Prominent urologists are likely to give some degree of latitude to their proctological rather than pathological colleagues by admitting that feces accidents are far more serious than those caused by urine. A blotch on the pants, even a large one, can be attributed to a spilled drink, but a certain kind of odor can only be attributed to one thing. Changing shit from #2 to number #1 will prevent hazardous conditions and also provide a needed reminder, in our increasingly permissive age, that no one should take it upon themselves to poop in public. There's a reason why sub feces aeternitatis has become such a hallowed expression.

Monday Morning Live

CNN reported on a telekinesis stunt engineered by he producers of the new version of Carrie. A young girl goes berserk in a coffee shop. "Up against the wall motherfucker" is a good expression for the powers she unleashes. It’s Candid Camera and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, a put on which caused mass panic, rolled into one--since the customers have not been forewarned that the girl and her victim are both actors. A similar stunt, this time taking place in a beauty shop, was engineered by the producers of the television remake of the The Exorcist. CNN then went on to document a spate of other videos used to create buzz, including one in which a murder is taking place in an elevator, with bystanders looking on in disbelief. What does the average person do when confronted by a murderer or someone with telekinetic powers? The answer is that they usually freeze up. The videos are hysterical, but they replay the sad story of our contemporary world in which outrageous atrocities occur and the crowd simply gawks, grows paralyzed or simply walks away. The mock elevator murder was particularly unsettling since it brought back Kitty Genovese, the young Queens woman who was stabbed to death back in l964 and whose screams for help were met with inaction. After the humor of these staged events has past, we are reminded that  paranormal happenings are a good description of what is going on in Syria, in Egypt, in Somalia, in North Korea—to name just a few examples of very public bludgeonings from which the rest of the world often turns its head.

“Life Begins Here"

Are North Korea and Cuba the only countries in the world which have experienced no penetration by Coke and heard no slogans like 2011’s “Life begins here?" Surely, there are still a few other select enclaves. The plot of The Gods Must Be Crazy hinges on the conceit of a Coke bottle falling from an airplane and fracturing the insular world of a tribe in Botswana. Since 1980 when the film was made, the world has changed even more. So while there still might not be franchises in certain select places, it’s more likely the Coke bottle would be recognizable even the most isolated and undeveloped parts of the planet. The Russians lost the cold war and America can no longer be called imperial, but when you think of it, the Coca Cola company has really done what no other super power, including the Romans or the Turks ever succeeded in doing, which is to conquer the world. Caesar and Suleiman the Magnificent notwithstanding, one would be hard put to doubt the hegemony of Coke on the world stage. We talk of the l000 years of Rome, but will Coke ever die? Coke and especially Diet Coke have their enemies, but they tend to be pacific types who are more interested in turning swords into ploughshares. Yes, there is Pepsi, but that’s one competitor who only stokes the fires of the leader. If Coke ever runs into trouble, Pepsi emptor! Jared Diamond has made an industry out of the study of the Collapse of civilizations, but he should consider a study of the greatest success story of all time, a product which is so ubiquitous that it’s name is synonymous with civilization.

Vietnam Journal VI: Post-Marxism

General Staff in Battle of Dien Bien Phu

Marx and Freud proposed the two great analyses of economics and the mind, both of which are more interesting today for their theoretical insight than their practical applications. Post-Marxism is also a bit like post-modernism in art and literature to the extent that it provides a vast palette of ideologies one having less in common with the other than the next. Communism, where it still exists, has come a long way baby and the variety of Communism that functions in a country like Vietnam has little in common with that practiced by either of its neighbors to the north, China or North Korea, though it's plain that Vietnamese post-Marxism has more in common with that practiced by the Chinese where two very separate socio-economic systems operate at the same time, free enterprise and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Vietnam, the disparity is even greater since a passing view gives the impression of a society in which the Communist Party functions like an employment agency filling political posts while a free market economy swaggers like an adolescent who's suddenly becoming aware of his own sexuality. Under the weight of classic Marxism, Vietnam in the post-war years was an impoverished society, but with the advent of free enterprise under the Doi Moi policy, which began in l986, the economy started to explode. Pyongyang’s subsistence economy might not be desirable, but materialism has its downside too. Nothing is ever enough.