Thoughts for my friend, Jeremy W.
Someone will take the fall. Maybe even Trump. But when it is corruption all the way down, how far do we really think we will get? I apologize for the cynicism, but in paying close attention to the manufacturing and management of crisis-oriented capitalism these last twenty odd years, as we have been doing, I feel, have felt for sometime, that though the planet may not be on fire, the species sure as fuck seems to be. I call this autocolonialism, and it is the fate of a species whose anthropomorphisms extended through their expansionist order, such that homo sapiens, who had never been human –aspiring as they might– would either succeed in fleeing the earth, or in their extinction would allow other species to advance and die off accordingly.
As you may know, I have my money on the cephalopods.
Sorry to be so bleak. But this is how I have come to see liberalism as eating itself, as producing this self-inflicted Trumpian defamation for the world to see. But I suspect even Sanders couldn’t escape this level of financial entrapment, of insider wealth that determines much of the planet’s political economy, and which continues to siphon off the wealth of nations, as it has long done. To our humanity are left the dregs. I believe that the tale of late capitalism is that the fabulists who foresaw and told the future were not using language, they were not writers per se. They were the mathematicians of speculative finance; their algorithmic and machinic scope arose from computation and warfare. And here we are, from boom to bust, the attenuation of a species, with it’s increasingly complex and precarious systems of scale. All of this has been given over to political processes incapable of moving beyond obscene modes of petty short-sightedness and rampant, perverse corruption.
©Shaun Tan
Those who have power have no interest in giving it up. But they are not in control. They are the most precarious of us all.
Anominous 