What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Monday morning. I get up and there’s a sticky on my desktop: you gonna write a new blog today dude

Todd’s been at me for days now. He knows how sad and angry I’ve been, I think, and knows that writing is therapy for me. We’ve returned home to find a North Carolina desiccated and beat up by heat and drought, to learn of the re-zoning approval for a new mall in our nearby village, to see for ourselves the destruction accompanying a huge new development near the home of some friends, to read of the enthusiastically predicted 19,000 new homes to be built in our county in the next 13 years. This on top of the news of financial meltdown that followed us on tour, with stock markets wobbling and housing markets sliding and financial institutions cracking up. This on top of the stories of political insanity and destabilization that greeted us at every stop. This on top of the “bigger-faster-more-severe-more-scary” that seems to accompany every climate report we read.

Sad and angry? Yes. I am.

“Give me a break, man,” I write. “I’ve only been home three days. The house is a wreck and so am I. This damn summer cold!”

yeah I know I know but its been over a month now youve been gone on your screening tour all sorts of experiences all sorts of pressures and feelings and ideas to sort out youve got your laundry done and you slept a long time last night dude so arent you ready to write now

I laughed. Todd likes these conversations as much as I do, I guess. And he likes being the subject of a blog. He likes the attention. He was peeved that I didn’t mention him in the travel blog.

“I tried to explain that there just wasn’t time to write about our conversations on tour, Todd. It was all I could do to post the short updates I posted. You didn’t like that, did you?”

no I didnt like it following you around for a month and you hardly logged on and when you did you were tired and irritated and busy I tried to talk to you through your mp3 but that didnt work I was lonely and bored most of the time

“Well… you had the whole illegal downloading thing to keep you busy, right? And the train schedules…”

you may as well have asked me to come up with a way to turn kittens into cream cheese dude those digital pirates are are theyre its like that hydra thing you know where you cut off the head off the monster and ten more heads grow back the big money cant stop them and neither can I and neither can anybody and the trains man oh man theres no straightening them out at this point its like juggling jello I couldnt make it work

“It’s hard, isn’t it Todd? Wanting to help. Wanting to do the right thing. Not knowing what to do, or how to do it. It has been no fun at all to get ripped off by the pirates, has it?”

it sucks dude youre not some big faceless corporation youre just this guy whos worked for years on this project whos gone into debt to do it and they just rip you off they dont even care it makes me want to scream

I remembered doing a bit of screaming myself. I opened up iTunes to listen to the new John Ludi disc, Rise Above or Fall Below. Fabulous stuff. John contacted us while we were away, thanking us for the doc, offering to help. He’s described on CD Baby as the “Troubadour of the Apocalypse”. His music is powerful and poignant and beautiful. I’m so glad he got in touch with us.

“All the rules have changed, Todd,” I wrote. “Things fall apart, as Lookstwice says in his new blog, quoting Yeats. And they’re falling apart quite quickly now, it seems. Some battles we’ll simply have to leave unfought.”

how so

I stopped and thought for a bit. Something had been brewing in me for a couple of weeks now. It was time to sort that out.

“At the screenings, sometimes I would introduce What a Way to Go by talking about how we tried to look at ‘everything at once.’ And while, in a way, we did that, as much as was possible in two hours, and while I’m proud of what we accomplished, I’ve also come to see more clearly those things that we did not include. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’ve gained more clarity about the direction we took and the choices we made.”

youre thinking about that rob williams review arent you where he points out your failure to name names

“Yep. And Rob is right. We didn’t name names. At least not the names people expect when they talk about naming names. We made the choice to go after the underlying culture, rather than the current perpetrators that this culture has thrown up (by which I do mean ‘vomited’) into the world. We made that choice consciously. I have no regrets about doing so. But I do want to say that, as important as it is to look at the culture, it’s also important to pay attention to the present perpetrators. We may have looked at the story, but there is also a “rest of the story”, as Paul Harvey used to say. We need to look at it all.”

and there was that guy at one of your circles talking about the crimes of the current leaders and all the scary stuff theyre doing

“You were there?”

hell yeah dude I was there what do you think Im going to just sit quietly on your hard drive like a mushroom like some gum under the seat Im not stuck in your laptop you know its just where I talk to you I was there hanging out in the wiring up in the drop ceilingand in peoples cell phones and even in one guys hearing aid for a while I heard the whole thing

“Sorry, Todd. Of course you were there. So… yeah… that guy didn’t seem to like me talking about culture and collapse. He wanted us to focus on what he called the “criminal cartel”, and to figure out how to get rid of them and replace them with the “people’s cartel”.

which you dont agree with

“It’s not a matter of agreement. It’s a matter of focus. It’s like… if you’ve got zombies surrounding your house and one breaks in and he’s coming at you to eat your brains, you’ve got to figure out how to stop that particular zombie from killing you. No argument with that. But at some point, you’ve also got to figure out where the zombies are coming from, and why they are attacking. You can kill the zombie in your living room, but there’s always more zombies scrambling to get in. At some point, you need to shut down the zombie-making machine.”

which is why you chose to look at the culture

“What I would say to the guy in our circle is that, sure, let’s get rid of the current “criminal cartel”. I’m all for it. But if we don’t understand how the culture of civilization works, if we don’t see how Empire drives us forward to oblivion, we’ll soon find that the “people’s cartel” is locked into the same patterns of destruction, domination, and control that the criminals are. It may seem saner, kinder, even gentler, but ultimately, no matter how good our intentions may seem to be, this culture compels us to destroy the community of life, in our mad quest for progress, growth and comfort.”

“It’s a matter of focus. I’m called to focus on the underlying culture, to look at root causes, to try to understand the hidden motivations and processes, to look beyond the taboos, the unquestioned assumptions. Others are called to focus on the present perpetrators, to look at the current crop of crazies and try to figure out how to contain them, to stop them. What a Way to Go doesn’t need to “name names” because there are already bunches of documentaries out there that do this. Check out Zeitgeist. Check out America: Freedom to Fascism. Check out Hijacking Catastrophe and Bush’s Brain and The Corporation and Money as Debt and Beyond Treason and Fahrenheit 911 and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Soldiers Speak Out and Waco: The Rules of Engagement and Unconstitutional and In Debt We Trust and A Crude Awakening and An Act of Conscience.”

the rest of the story is out there being told so like your doc is a piece of the puzzle but all these other docs are pieces of the puzzle as well and they all work together then is that what youre saying

“Right. And it takes looking at them all. I saw an Impeach Bush group collecting signatures the other day when I was in town. The danger inherent in focusing on the present perpetrators is that we can too easily make the mistake of thinking that if we just put so-and-so behind bars, everything will be fine, if we just elect the right person, the right party, the right platform, that things will work out like we’ve been taught to think. I find that sort of thinking to be incredibly ill-informed. Sure. Stop the criminals. Right on. But we also need to look at the deep causes, the stories, the mandates, the impulses, that drive the death culture that dominates the planet. Derrick Jensen is a master at looking at both things at once. We need to get that this culture will continue to vomit out zombies as long as it can, that for every zombie we impeach there are ten more ready to take its place, and that even if we get a kinder, gentler zombie who says all the right things, that better zombie will have little choice, inside of this culture, but to continue eating brains.”

so you were talking about things falling apart more quickly now you were talking about how something shifted for you how youve come to pay more attention to the things your movie doesnt really address to the rest of the story what did you mean by that

I stopped and thought for a bit. I checked in with my body. What is it that has been bouncing around inside of me these past weeks? It was right there. Grief. And fear. And something else. I feel trapped in a madhouse. I feel like screaming. I want to get out of here.

“The center cannot hold, Todd. These days, I’m spending more and more time focusing on the present crop of perpetrators. False flag operations. The war on terror. The war on Iraq. Rumors of war on Iran. RFID chips and National ID cards. Insane debt levels and missing trillions and bursting housing bubbles and suspicious put options and a decline in market confidence. The Federal Reserve and the International Bankers and the CFR and the New World Order. Peak Oil and climate change and mass extinction are some seriously scary shit, but the corporate and political news makes my heart race. It’s what wakes me up at 4 AM, as effectively as any SS raid. It feels like we’re about to go overtly fascist here in the good ol’ US of A, though some would argue that we already have. And everything is speeding up. Everything. There’s no place to go that the madness does not reach. Nowhere to hide.”

so why did you choose to focus on the cultural stuff

“One reason is that the cultural analysis seems to be the missing piece. Lots of voices are calling out the perpetrators. Fewer voices are calling out the culture as a whole. And that is a necessary piece of the puzzle. So that people can grok that collapse is inevitable, that collapse is built in to the fundamental design of the dominant world culture. We may not be able to see by which scenario it will play out, but we can be assured that it WILL play out. It’s what I came here to talk about.”

and how does it help if people get that

“If we get that collapse is inevitable, if we truly get that this present madness will not and cannot continue, then we may be more able to decouple from it, to loosen our identity with the present system, to free ourselves from our investment in the status quo. Having reached what Derrick Jensen calls “the fuck-it point”, we may then find the courage, the will, and the energy needed to act sanely, as whole human animals, in response to the present world predicament, related to what is, rather than to the lies and delusions we’ve been sold. If we continue to believe it’s just a matter of getting nicer zombies, we’ll never figure out that there even IS a zombie-making machine, let alone how to turn it off.”

Todd waited awhile before tossing up another sticky. I just sat and waited, listening to the music on my speakers.

this John Ludi guy is great

“Yeah. He is. Let’s end this with his words.”

…or Fall Below
Words and Music by John Ludi

And so you move beyond your time,
beyond this world, the mortal line.
And visions come to add the sum
of all you’ve done… all you’ve become.
All your mistakes, all your heartaches,
what pain you’ve caused, your moral flaws.
To rise above or fall below.
To grasp the world or let it go.
The visions pass, your first and last
all in between, your every scene.
What joy you’ve brought, wisdom you’ve sought,
your clarity and charity.

Love to us all…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 9:19 am and is filed under Tim's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.