September 2007 archive

The sky is falling. The sky is falling. There is no escape. We are all doomed. The United States is going to hell in a hand basket. There is no way to stop our inevitable destruction. Face it. Anything we do will turn out badly. There is no hope.

Give me a break.

Each and every day one or the other of us puts into play another theory on our demise, each prediction forecasts our imminent collapse. I suppose that we are expected to panic, to jump off a bridge or a tall building. But, next day after each such rant, almost all of us awaken, the sun rises in the east, and another day gets underway. Life goes on.

Before Freud, there wasn’t a subconscious and identity just meant your name and parentage.  Once we found the key to our internal door however, it only took five minutes of poking around in there to realize it’s not that simple.

In the twentieth century, after Freud, identity came something else – your sense of self, the idea of yourself that you carry around with you.  It’s your psychic skin – your mental avatar. It orients you and shapes you and it’s taken for granted.

  But you’re not born with it.  Babies don’t know who they are, picture themselves or have a sense of self… so how do we get it?  Where does it come from?

French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan tells us a ‘just-so” story about how we first get our identity.  It’s a story that strips things down to raw consciousness, and holds some fascinating clues to the human condition…

“Free Hugs” signs went up this morning in Madison, Wisconsin at the Capital building downtown during the busy farmers’ market.

The weather was a beautiful 70 degrees without a cloud in the sky.

My step-son Eddie and I spent about two hours walking the perimeter of the market while Firecrow played photographer.

Jump for more hugs:

Last week I diaried on Kunstler’s The Long Emergency (Wikipedia), first here and then at Big Orange … and the day after this went up here, a slightly shorter version of this essay became a diary at Big Orange.

One aspect of Kunstler’s work, and the one where he is on strongest ground, is the argument that the coming explosion in crude oil prices, as we pass peak oil and start descending down from the peak, is the end of Suburbia.

Of course, one reason I was so quickly persuaded by this argument is that I had already come to the same view. The 1950’s to 1970’s were Suburban Spring, the 1980’s to the Naughties have been Suburban Summer, and now we can look forward to Suburban Autumn.

Or, since I come from a northern climes with deciduous trees, the Fall of Suburbia.

The outdoor tank serving as the home for a family of harbor seals was relatively quiet.  Only a few straggling tourists wheeling strollers filled with cookie-crunching toddlers were pointing fingers at the slowly lolling seals.

The very oldest, Smoke, swam by, her blue-white cataract eyes open, and her well-worn pattern through the water predictable and safe.  Always safe. She glided to the far end of the tank and diffidently sank to the bottom where sleep awaited.

One of her offspring stood silent sentry upright in the water above her. As vigilant and expressionless as a Buckingham Palace guard, his gaze never faltered, his posture never changed.

“Our opponents in the main are Iraqi nationalists, and are most concerned with their own needs – jobs, money, security, hope. And the majority, therefore, I would suggest are not bad people.”

General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British Army, speaking about the Iraqi resistance (via) during a recent speech at the Institute for International Studies (IISS) in London.