These semi-animals
which were well adapted to the wilderness,
to war, to prowling about, to adventure
–suddenly all their instincts
were deprived of value and ‘suspended’…

They felt incapable of the simplest undertakings,
in this new unfamiliar world their former guides,
the regulating and unconsciously certain guides,
deserted them –

These unhappy creatures were reduced
to thinking, to inferring, reckoning,
co-ordinating cause and effect,
to their ‘consciousness’,
to their poorest
and most fallible organ!

On The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, Guilt, Bad Conscience and the Like

The morning sun illuminated the intersection in front of me. In the distance a black pickup was making the turn onto Randall Road. A large American flag was flying from a staff fixed to the rear bumper. This mute, but articulate symbol is surely a gesture of resistance.

In the above quoted lines the writer invites us to imagine, to empathize with a “semi-animal” coerced by unyielding circumstance, to venture forward into an environment where few of the skills, the verities long depended upon any longer serve to ensure well being. Imagine individuals adapted to the wide grassy plain, who now must live in suburbia. A new world exponentially strange!

“These unhappy creatures” inevitably must feel reduced. None of what they believed as true is suited to this uncomfortable, alien surrounding. Wherefore my formerly dependable guidelines, those authorities by which I found safe harbor… What has happened? Where am I? What am I? Do I have value?

I have been thinking about the hyperculture in which we now live. The physical world is networked by supply chains, systems depending on algorithms residing on computers in “server farms.” Should these facilities even be called “farms”?

But the disruption most deeply felt in this unfamiliar world, a plurality of life-styles no longer closeted, now assigned names, are openly examined in the light of day. Class and gender bending…  Did father ever know what was best? Was that none other than a role which we all conspired to perform? Often it was mother who knew best.

I can understand more clearly, how one might desire to have that American flag fixed to the rear of a pickup truck.

Survival is always a momentous undertaking.  I mean, — thinking, inferring, reckoning, mapping cause and effect to the currents of consciousness…