Plague Journal, Impotence
The fifties were a real high spot in the US
…and you can feel the nostalgia for those years,
for the ecstasy of power, when power held power.
In the seventies power was still there,
but the spell was broken.
That was orgy time
(war, sex, Manson, Woodstock).
Today the orgy is over.
The US, like everyone else,
now has to face up to a soft world order,
a soft situation.
Power has become impotent.
Excerpt America, by Jean Baudrillard p. 107
These words were written in 1983 of the Reagan presidency (1981-1989). Reagan was the founder of modern conservatism, the patron saint of the Tea Party-Trumpers now ensconced in congress. Baudrilliard’s words go a long way to describe the precursor social conditions to our undisquised authoritarian in the White House who rules by presidential decree. Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, was a master illusionist. Citizens of my generation, Boomers raised in the 60s, wanted to believe him. He could turn a phrase, and knew how to command the stage. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Today the President is barely literate, lies compulsively, and is bereft of the leadership skills which usually accrue for a person with 70 years of life experience.
This must be faced, — all of it.
We are confronted with a pandemic that we have not handled well. Dire consequences are in store for our economy. Additionally climate warming is unabated with a hysteresis, a momentum of its own. Irregular weather patterns are bound to impact food supply, infrastructure, and cause mass migrations. Also, the president’s administration is making an enemy of another major power, China. China is being made a scapegoat. It is more likely that joint survival of many communities depends upon our collaboration, and partnership with China.
The burnt orange cone flowers growing in one of Geneva’s street-side community plots, caused me to stop in my tracks. I walked to my vehicle to retrieve my camera. The image exceeds any words of description. The flowers themselves exceed the image. Nietzsche was right! Beauty, good taste is precursor, foundation to morality, to a sense of propriety.
4 thoughts on “Plague Journal, Impotence”
Hi kids !
As being of ‘the sixties’, doing my small part in making the world safe for Earthshoes and massage parlors, indulge me in sharing another view of the time:
I once had the pleasure of keeping company with a professional astrologer for a couple of years. By professional I submit that she had a radio show and many well known clients. She was also quite respected in the psychic community and a stunning redhead. I actually witnessed her psychic abilities, but it’s too lengthy to go into so y’all will just have to take my word for it on both. Remember, we daily only use a small portion of our minds, so let us use that small portion now:
Most people have heard of the sixties as the ‘Dawn of the Aquarian Age’. Not so, it was actually the last gasp of the ‘Piscean Age’ – a big going away party, if you will (including the orgies you spoke of). An Age changes every two thousand years and when it does, big things happen. The last time an Age changed, Jesus Christ showed up, arguably a pretty big thing. As well as all the societal and other changes occurring (city states forming countries and so on). Consider that hundreds of years after Rome fell, which had running water toilets, Europeans were crapping alongside the road and tearing marble slabs off the Colosseum to help build shacks. (A little crude I know, but one does what one can).
The purpose of this pause in my Chautauqua is that I propose we have now entered the Aquarian Age, with this year perhaps the turning point of this event. And I haven’t been thinking of the transition from an industrial to an informational society and all the other social
and scientific changes unfolding. Rather I saw on the news that the mutt-in-chief now has Federal troops in twenty two cities; (thanks George, you did look good on TV with your arm around that fireman – Posse What?) considering in our lives we have witnessed one stolen election, well let’s just let that previously referred to small portion run wild with imaginings. Me, I’d rather be back in 1967.
Blessings
Another view of time indeed. If Nietzsche was right, and if everything eternally recurs, — in 1967 I’d be graduating from high school, a clueless adolescent on the cusp of adulthood with years of…… ahead of me. I really do not want to list the personal traumas that awaited the eighteen year old in 1967. If eternal recurance is the real deal, mercifully there is no way to know.
I was twenty and having a ball !
So listen now, one and all
I submit
A perfect fit
…………
Blessings
Nice!