JOHNSTONE

It's hard to grasp just how badly humanity is handicapping itself by excluding all solutions that can't generate a profit. There's a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we're limiting ourselves to a very small, very shitty fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we're omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the fuck alone. We're also shrinking the incentive to cure problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments.

Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution because there's no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there's no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The trouble with "western values" is that westerners don't value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.

In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It's the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Brian Stelter went from a mainstream media gig to a gig at Harvard. Jen Psaki went from a gig in the Biden administration to a gig in the mainstream media. Mike Pompeo went from a gig in the Trump administration to a gig with a DC think tank. It's a big club, and you ain't in it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Lizzy's face on the papers blowing in the wind

Lizzy's face on the screens

Lizzy's face on the street billboard

with a homeless man leaning against it.

Lizzy's face on the Jumbotron

Lizzy's face on the defense industry tweets

Lizzy's face on the arrest warrants

for the criminals who said "Not my king."

Lizzy's face on our money

Lizzy's face in my face

Lizzy's face on an artillery shell

funded by the British taxpayer

and fired by a man wearing neo-Nazi insignia.

Lizzy's face on the telly before it cuts out

because there's no power

because it was either electricity or groceries.

Lizzy's face on the food banks

Lizzy's face on the price hikes

Lizzy's face on the blankets shivering bodies cling to

when they can't afford to heat their homes.

Lizzy's face in their mind's eye

Lizzy's face in their prayers

Lizzy's face in their nightmares

as they huddle close together for warmth.

Lizzy's face on the news man's face

on the politician's face

on the banker's face

on the billionaire's face

on the warmaker's face

on the empire's face.

Lizzy's face on the nuclear missiles

Lizzy's face on the drums of war

Lizzy's face on the melting permafrost

and the gasping oceans and the plastic in our blood.

Lizzy's face in my chest like a nauseating lump

rising up through my throat and out into the toilet

spraying out my mouth and all over the bathroom

and all over the universe get that dead bitch the fuck out of us.

Puke Lizzy's face out of our animal bodies

so we can run free like wildebeests hatching hearts and songbird throats

no longer frozen by the bank boys and bastards

and the grayness of the false world they painted in our minds.

Let our animal bodies remember our animal ways

and forget any context wherein Lizzy's face everywhere made sense.

There are lovers who need loving

and a world that needs saving

and a whole lot of signs

that are in sore need of vandals.

_________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

Look with nature's eyes,

with atomic eyes,

with Eden eyes,

with primordial eyes.

Stand on nature's feet,

on terrestrial feet,

on stardust feet,

on Big Bang feet.

Touch with nature's hands,

with sapling hands,

with reverent hands,

with unprecedented hands.

Think with nature's mind,

with undomesticated mind,

with wild mind,

with ineffable mind.

Let trees erupt from your cells.

Release the bats from their cages in your skull.

This is the place where scriptures and doctrines turn to gum leaves

and we can't remember what was written on them

but we marvel at their beauty.

Let the stillness teach us how to move.

Let the spaces between our thoughts teach us how to think.

We are humble students of the great Emptiness

upon which this universe has been scribbled

by a baby god

in crayon.

The baby's laughter echoes through our caverns

and withers our precious minarets

and turns our manifestos into tadpoles,

bouncing innocently and nonjudgmentally off all our houses of cards

and going burbling down the stream

while our empires implode behind it.

And now here we stand

with crumbling egos on a dying planet

surrounded by frogs the size of Volkswagens,

the size of skyscrapers,

the size of moons.

This is a strange, strange place,

and it is only getting stranger,

and none of the tools in our toolbox are fit for the job.

I have buried my old toolbox in the backyard

with a horse's placenta and a box of Time magazines.

A tree now grows there which has leaves that drip oil

and fruit which tastes like the Reagan administration.

Those old tools have no use here.

I walk away from them,

on nature's feet,

into the hatching of this new world.

______________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

We never really had a chance to build a healthy world. Our ancestors went from running away from monsters with sharp fangs to burning witches and heretics to fighting world wars to giving birth to us, and that wave of fear and chaos carried forward right into our own psyches and into the psyches of everyone else on this planet without skipping a beat. If you look at where we came from and how we got here, it's amazing we're even as functional as we are.

And that's what we're dealing with here. A heritage of trauma stretching back into an unfathomably vast expanse of time, incarnating in the current form of some eight billion homo sapiens. If you zoom out and look at the big picture with this understanding, it's difficult to find real guilt anywhere, in anyone. Even in the most abusive and traumatizing among us.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I can't stop laughing at the fact that we have a King now. "Hello I am the actual, literal King. Please bow to me and put a crown on my head."

It gets funnier and funnier the more you think about it. Having a queen was really stupid; having a king is too stupid. People aren't going to buy it, I don't care how good your PR is.

Reading by Tim Foley.

That's why the more you learn about the world, the more fake and stupid our civilization looks. It's because it is fake and stupid. Our news, our entertainment, our jobs, our legal systems, our political systems, our education systems, our financial, monetary, economic and commercial systems; the way our entire civilization is structured and organized has nothing to do with what's true and good and everything to do with keeping human organisms compliantly turning the gears of capitalism and empire.

Reading by Tim Foley.

A few days after the invasion began this past February a guy named Arnaud Bertrand put together an extremely viral Twitter thread that just goes on and on and on about the various diplomats, analysts and academics in the west who have over the years been warning that a dangerous confrontation with Russia was coming because of NATO advancements toward its borders, interventionism in Ukraine, and various other aggressions. It contains examples like John Mearsheimer explicitly warning in 2015 that "the west is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked," and Pat Buchanan warning all the way back in 1999 that "By moving NATO onto Russia's front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation." 

Empire apologists love claiming that the invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansionism (their claims generally based on brazen misrepresentations of what Vladimir Putin has said about Russia's reasons for the war), but that's silly. The US war machine was continuing to taunt the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine right up until the invasion, a threat it refused to take off the table since placing it there in 2008 despite knowing full well that this threat was an incendiary provocation to Moscow.

This is to say nothing of the US empire actively fomenting a violent uprising in 2014 which ousted Kyiv's sitting government and fractured the nation between its more Moscow-loyal populations to the east and the more US/EU-friendly parts of the country. This led to the annexation of Crimea (overwhelmingly supported by the people who live there) and eight years of brutal warfare against Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas. Ukrainian attacks on those separatists are known to have increased exponentially in the days leading up to the invasion, and it has been argued that this is what provoked Putin's final decision to commit to invading (which was a last-minute decision according to US intelligence).

The US power alliance could very easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost concessions like enshrining Ukrainian neutrality, rolling back its war machinery from Russia's borders and sincerely pursuing detente with Moscow instead of shredding treaties and ramping up cold war escalations. Hell, it could likely have prevented this war just by protecting President Zelensky from the anti-Moscow far right nationalists who were openly threatening to lynch him if he began honoring the Minsk agreements and pursuing peace with Russia, as he was originally elected to do.

Instead it knowingly chose the opposite course: continuing to float the possibility of formal NATO membership for Ukraine while pouring weapons into the nation and making it more and more of a de facto NATO member with closer and closer intimacy with the US war machine, and then either ordering, encouraging or tolerating Ukraine's aggressive assault on Donbas separatists.

Reading by Tim Foley.

This war has in that sense become the Gulf War of the 2020s: a "good war" that rehabilitates the image of US interventionism for a war-weary public. Just as the 1990 Gulf War was used to get Americans over what warmongers called "Vietnam syndrome" — a healthy aversion to interventionism following the horrific disaster of the Vietnam War — the war in Ukraine is being used to wear down the public's collective immune response to interventionism built up after the 2003 Iraq invasion.

"It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all," the elder President Bush said after winning his war/propaganda operation in the Middle East. 

Of course, we all remember what happened after that, don't we?

Reading by Tim Foley.