Excerpt from Dreams

Costs Too Much (p. 422)

From chapter "Stupidity"

A front-page headline in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicleread: “Finance Key to Fighting Warming.” This set me thinking about a question I’ve heard asked in the mainstream too many times: can we afford to stop global warming? Doing a Google search for this precise phrasing leads to more than twenty thousand hits. One of the first is a National Public Radio (NPR) story (nasty, I know, but if you’re going to be a muckraker, you’ve got to rake around in such mucky places as NPR) that begins, “Many scientists say immediate action is needed to stop global warming. But some economists argue that the benefits of any realistic solution aren’t worth the cost. Can we afford to stop global warming?”Yes, that second sentence says what you think it does. The benefits of a living planet are not worth the economic cost. Do they not understand that without a living planet you have no economic system? Who but a flesh-eating zombie, and a fairly stupid one at that, could make such arguments?

Speaking of fairly stupid flesh-eating zombies, after that website I went to a website for Fox Business News(and somehow didn’t immediately die the death of a thousand lies), where I found an interview that actually puts a number to that question of how much it will cost to fight global warming: $267 billion for Africa alone. Given that it’s Fox Business News, you can be assured that they’re putting out this number so that some of the flesh-eating zombies in the TV audience can clap their rotting hands (perhaps losing a gangrenous finger or two in the process) and mumble in a horrid zombie voice (cue Rush Limbaugh), “Costs too much! Costs too much!” Other more sophisticated zombies can also then ask, in an equally horrid and breezily sophisticated NPR– like voice (cue Neal Conan), “Is the price of stopping global warming too high?” to which yet another zombie can intone, with the certitude of the damned (cue Jonah Goldberg), that to stop global warming would require a price “that nobodywould be willing to pay.”

Who, once again, but a flesh-eating zombie, and a sociopathic, narcissistic, short-sighted and not-very-bright zombie at that, and one who cares not even for the future of his own zombie progeny (oh, good Lord, that raises the specter of zombies having sex: perish the thought), could say that nobody would be willing to pay what is necessary to stop the murder of the planet that is our only home? Of course the “nobody” in this statement presumes that those who are already paying the price for this culture don’t count. But that’s how it’s been from the beginning. The peasants have no bread to eat? Let them jump through hoops.

Here is a number coming out of the bogus climate meetings in Copenhagen: $10 trillion between 2010 and 2030 to fight global warming.And yes, I can hear the zombies now, “Costs too much, costs too much!” But this would be less than half of what the world’s governments will spend on the military (in other words, for the express purpose of killing people) in that same time.

And of course any figures thrown out are kind of nonsense. This $10 trillion could do some good toward mitigating the worst effects of global warming (and certainly more good than if the money were spent on machines of war), but the real “cost” of stopping global warming is to stop this destructive way of life. And this surely is a cost that the entitled zombies will not want to pay.

When it comes to murdering people, there is always money to spare. When it comes to using money for life-affirming ends, there is not. Even the Fox Business News estimate of the cost to fight global warming in Africa (an entire continent, with a human population of more than a billion) is less than three times what the US is going to spend per year to murder Afghans. Yet the latter is funded. The former? That’s certainly a price that nobody would want to pay.

Flesh-eating zombies, capable only of rudimentary thought and a modicum of predatory cleverness.

Here are the first two sentences of a recent widely published Associated Press article: “With the world losing the battle against global warming so far, experts are warning that humans need to follow nature’s example: Adapt or die. That means elevating buildings, making taller and stronger dams and seawalls, rerouting water systems, restricting certain developments, changing farming practices and ultimately moving people, plants and animals out of harm’s way.”

What? What? What?

So for humans to “follow nature’s example” means to make taller and stronger dams and seawalls, reroute water systems?

Is he fucking crazy? No, he’s just a flesh-eating zombie, capable of no more than rudimentary thought.

For humans to “follow nature’s example” would be to not fucking burn oil in the first place. Leave the fucking carbon in the ground. That is nature’s example.

Do we still believe that zombies are capable even of rudimentary thought? Rule one for keeping zombies from embarrassing themselves: never allow a zombie anywhere near a writing instrument.

I want to mention one more problem, which is the phrase “adapt or die.” Given the next sentence, the author did not mean that we should adapt ourselves to the real, natural world, which would mean that we should adapt ourselves to the world as it is, rather than forcing the world to adapt to industrial civilization or die. Adapting to the world as it is would mean listening to the world, asking the world what it needs from us, asking how we can mold our psyches and our bodies to the land where we live, the land who nourishes us, feeds us, supports us, how we can mold our psyches and our bodies to this land like lovers molding psyches and bodies together, moving together, resting together, touching, probing, caressing, caring for each other. This is nature’s example. His phrase “adapt or die” is nothing more nor less than the same old statement by Frederick Winslow Taylor, that in the future the system will be first, because the author here is not talking about adapting to the earth, but rather adapting to this system of machines manned by zombies. He’s talking about furthering our zombification as slaves to the machines. Adapt to the machines or die. And it is nothing more nor less than the same old sociopathic dictum of Richard Dawkins: jump through hoops created by this machine culture on command, or die. This is what the flesh-eating zombies at the top (and their propagandists) have been saying from the beginning. They’ve said it to the land. They’ve said it to the people of the land. They’ve said it to women. They are saying it to everyone. Everyone must adapt to them or die. “Christianity or death” becomes “adapt to civilization or die.”