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Sad Spouts Of Ignorance |
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by Mark Morford (via Rev Dave)
Email: DarkMatter (nospam) Hypocrisy.org (verified) |
26 Mar 2003
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Where humpback whales meet the snarling void of war, and human progress takes a bullet. |
We think we know so damn much.
We think we know cause and effect. We think we know basic systems and human nature and the arc of time, what sort of hellish road we are paving right this minute, all those big colorful maps and arrows and diagrams and missile trajectories on CNN, all the clusters of little green plastic army men pushed around a giant map table by embittered generals.
We think we know what will happen to the collective unconscious, to the soul of the population at large when the scowling GOP war hawks issued the order to rain 3,000 multimillion-dollar warheads down on a bedraggled piss-poor food-starved nation in a single day.
Or when we massacre tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians and lay waste to an entire culture and landscape and history, as a 20-mile-long procession of U.S. troops rumble into Baghdad to kill anything with a turban and an Islamic faith and a dusty 1983 U.S.-Iraq chemical-weapons sales receipt, and call it patriotism.
We think we know all about body counts and nation building, and we think we have some sort of sanctimonious monopoly on the idea of what type of freedom everyone should have, what sort of force-fed democracy everyone really needs, whose self-righteous angry SUV-driving god has the right to bitch-slap which self-righteous angry Koran-reading god, and call it Christian largesse.
We don't know anything.
I unplugged recently. I was off the snarling media grid, briefly, strangely, beautifully. It was surreal and amazing and jarring. This is when I realized.
There I was on vacation just last week, watching the pods, the families, the processions of humpback whales just off the Hawaii coastline, huge 60-ton male escorts and enormous 40-ton females and their 10-ton newborn calves, every day, whale after whale, pod after pod, a glorious and breathtaking thing, like a gift, a reminder, a slap in the face to the warmongering bilious timbre of now, of Shrub's cadre of hissing war hawks, of what we think we know.
And they were all spouting and rolling and breaching and slapping the water with their huge dorsal fins, all about birth and mating and migration and jesus goddamn wow they're big, and humbling, and shocking, as you like to think you're all plugged in and world wise and media savvy and you might think you know what the planet is really doing at any given moment, deep down, in the meat of it, and of course, you see something like this and you realize, sure enough, you don't know anything.
But the hawks and fearmongers, they want you to believe you do. They want you to think we are, with this vile needless war, attaining progress, reaching for some sort of truth, bringing the world closer into alignment with what Bush's sneering Christian god along with Uncle Dick's economic advisory team deems right and just and lucrative, never mind all the burned bodies and dead children and the massacred thousands and the billions in economy-gutting expenditures. We are making the world better, they actually claim. How sweet. Nothing like 100,000 full body bags to really make the soul glow.
We bought a book on humpback whales to try and understand, to see what those behaviors mean, to see what it was, exactly, we were watching every day, and we read and read and said wow and hmm and isn't that interesting and we tried to find out why they breached, or why they slapped the waves like that, or why they sang or what the songs might mean. You know, the basics.
Here is what we found out: We read all the science and all the study and all the modern B.S., all our technology and all our sensors and all our collected data, and we closed the book and looked at each other and shook our heads and laughed -- sure enough, no one knows.
Modern science has no clue. Whale songs. Breaching. Slapping the waves with their enormous tail fins, over and over, like a ritual, a call, a play. Some of the biggest most ancient creatures on the planet, timeless and stunning and awe inspiring and once slaughtered nearly to extinction and each and every one karmically and ethically impervious to white angry men puling about war and still we have no idea. We don't know why they breach, or slap or sing. We don't even know how long whales live.
And then we have the gall. We have the nerve to think we know how the world works, what the planet needs, how culture operates. We trot out the Constitution when it suits us and point to the Second Amendment as kids shoot each other in schools, and we think we understand how the U.S. was founded on the idea that the life of an Iraqi peasant is as valuable as that of a U.S. Marine, or Shrub daughter, or shuttle astronaut. Ha.
Monarch butterflies haul tiny insect ass 3,000 miles from Canada to Mexico (and back) every year, through storms and wind and across mountains and deserts, through conditions most major aircraft would whimper at, landing on the exact same trees every single year to mate, generation after generation. We have no idea how the hell they do it. No idea how they survive the journey, the exact path they take, how they know the exact tree every time, or why, or what it might mean. Just another example. Pure mystery. One of thousands.
Yet we think we are just so damn sure. We are just so sure that we rule the whole planet, that we are the uberspecies, that we have the right to slaughter whomever and whatever we like whenever we like because someone might dare stand in the way of our alleged progress, or our oil interests, or our profits. How did all our oil get under their sand? we ask, not at all jokingly.
I know what the whale-tail slaps are.
They are a reminder. No matter how much we think we know, no matter how many die as a result of Shrub's vicious war, no matter what sort of self-righteous good we think we're ramming down everyone's throat, we are, quite simply, raging deeper into ignorance. We know nothing. And the worst part is, we seem to be learning less with every warhead, every Rummy press conference, every dust-choked reporter and dead soldier. The whales know this. Maybe they're just waving goodbye.
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See also:
http://www.saintstupid.com
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