Plague Journal, Clairvoyant Puppets
III – We have all had a taste for the West’s disease:
Art,
Love,
Religion,
War –
We know too much about them all
to believe in them now;
then too, so many centuries have worn them down…
The epoch of the finite in plenitude is past;
the substance of poems? Exhausted. —
To love?
Even the riffraff repudiates “sentiment.”
Piety? Search the cathedrals;
only ineptitude kneels there now.
Who still wants to do battle?
The hero is out-of-date;
only impersonal carnage holds sway.
We are clairvoyant puppets,
scarcely capable of performing
our curtsies before the irremediable.
The West? A potential without a future.
Excerpt, All Gall is Divided by E. M. Cioran p. 64
The Glasgow Climate Change Summit is over. President Biden returned home after scolding China and Russia for their absence. What was done, really done, aside from the endless talk? Perhaps just showing up was enough for now? The nations agreed to curb methane emissions, to end deforestation by 2030. How are we, in America to do that? And 2030 is eight more years to study, to debate, to delay, anything but volunteer one’s sacred cow to be gored… We and nations of the West in particular are Capitalist to the bone. Profit uber alles!
By 2030 coastal homes of the less affluent Pacific Islander nations will certainly be under water. We and other nations have fallen short on what has already been promised. What about the $100 billion a year promised to developing nations to combat global warming? What about “the net-zero carbon emissions globally, to slow the rising temperatures that have led to lethal fires, floods, droughts and heat waves around the world?”
To read the New York Times summation of the Glasgow Climate Change Summit, CLICK HERE.
