PAGE 16
NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , SUMMER/FALL 2000
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE 21st CENTURY
FROM FRONT PAGE
More placid possibilities than self-ruin are that we might
reconfigure the planet’s entire landmass into a stupendous mega
lopolis to habitate our exploding population (possibly ten billion
by 2030 if the doomsday rock doesn't hit us twi years earlier) and
convert the oceans and large lakes into huge hydroponics farms
as well as domesticate vaneties of edible fish We might also
domesticate the solar system, if not actually capable of human-
ating the planets for habitat, certainly mining them for essential
minerals and fuels, and we will certainly initiate interplanetary
tourism
Electrical/mechanical transplants into the human neural
system are being acclaimed as humanity's next great evolution
— into a 'superhuman' fsuprahumari?) bio/automated organism,
perhaps the first of its kind in all creation anywhere: the bionic
creator purposely transforms itself out of the biological world
This concomitant with the completed draft of the human genome
system, and the legal patenting of biological parts and full life
forms Mutant sub-species of humans might very well be fabri
cated and mass-produced (as well as patented) for this Brave
New World to do the menial wark and drudgery increasingly
shunned by 'natural' humanity.
A way might be found to keep the world's masses of poor
people alive and healthy in exchange for body parts for rich folk.
Herds of healthy poor can be made available for organs and
limbs for affluent recipients, as well as an abundant food supply
once the taboos and antibiotic problems of cannibalism are
eradicated
Male humans might become extinct this century as a
result of being biologically and socially irrelevant given in vitro
fertilization as well as sperm and embryo storage, the rise of
feminism and the obsolescence of hunting. The cold reality is
that wmen can survive as the lone gender and continue to
perpetuate the species (females) as well as do all the other busy
work. Men are good for only one thing really and are genetically
immatenal (except perhaps a few sired as playmates).
The USA might throw off its final facades of democracy
and popular government and reemerge as a militant corporate
theocracy ('Praise the Lord & Pass the Poupon"). The Christian
evangelical movement will most likely utilize democratic grass
roots techniques as well as a combination of corporate media
advertising and pulpit propaganda to gain control of the govern
ment The first act of the newtheolitical state will obviously be
to abolish the last vestiges of democracy vtfiich will include labor
nghts and racial equity. Freedom of religion would be the next
casualty, all religions other than the (corporate)state religion
liquidated. After that edicts banning feminism, homosexuality and
STARDUST
We burst out of our egg into a history infinitely larger
than our own, flung out among rocks and stars that hurtle
from the center of a cataclysm at speeds greater than light.
Our Earth is a mote from that moment of creation, if indeed
that is how the universe began, and it continues to be thrown
back to God knows where We might never know but we will
exhaust the rest of our history attempting to find out It is
doubtful we will more than scratch a few score of the billion
stars in our single galaxy before evolution discards us for
something else or we quicken the process by our own perverse
ingenuity.
We pursue the exploration of space in much the
manner our western European ancestors forced themselves
upon the larger world in fierce competition as merchants,
seamen and soldiers from separate nations in perpetual
conflict. We are a species of insatiable plunderers, though
of course we tell ourselves we are not, that we seek only
knowledge, but our great hunger is for wealth and for what is
useful to us Unless we experience a mass epiphany overnight,
we will most likely behave beyond the ozone the same as our
predecessors beyond the oceans. We will pillage planets and
hammer space matter until it is functional. We have virtually
sucked Earth dry and our vision of the universe is of one huge
orchard of riches
We cover our own single planet like maggots on a
peach Our prospects are the stuff of cheap science fiction:
our only hope might be to send seedlings off the home planet
so that a few might germinate someplace else, if in all the vast
cosmos there is any place else for us.
We repeat the old errors. We leave Earth as relentless
exploiters. If it was absurd for Europeans to spread across the
Earth's oceans and claim foreign lands for kings and countries
never heard of by inhabitants of the far shores, how much more
so spacesuited humans to plant flags on barren worlds and say
that they belong in perpetuity to a far distant particle of rock
indistinguishable if even visible among the lights of space. •
We ought to consider the United Nations as a central
agency for space exploration It would avoid wasteful duplicat
ion of resources and money consumed by ruthless competition
between nations and multinational corporations and make them
as well as the bounties of outer space available for the millions
of Earthlings who are in need of useful and sustainable work,
food, housing, health/medical care and education If the idea
seems outworldly, it might be useful to remember that UN
medical teams eradicated smallpox
Efficiency must give way to poetry No machine or
computer can view Earth with the same personal response as
a human Earth is, after all, our neighborhood, our nest It will
not be our technology that saves us but our distinct human
perceptions
The efforts to go off planet seem to have little to do
with the rest of day to day humanity, yet our era makes the first
babysteps of an adventure that will occupy humanity the rest of
its time in the cosmos We might be the last generations of
humanity to be a single planet species 'One World' history and
philosophy wll be mere prelude to the immense galactic story
that awaits our bumbling erratic first paragraph An age is
superseding an earlier one right under our feet, or more truth
fully, over our heads
And perhaps it might be worth remembenng that it is
not our divine right to eat the Milky Way
- michael M c C usker
I
IGOR KOPELNITSKY
miscegenation to preserve savagely paranoid white male hetero
sexual supremacy amidst increasing majorities of mixed races
and the biological irrelevance of males.
Maybe China will rise as the superior world culture this
new century or the next, and the century just passed — despite
the World Wars, the rise and fall of Marxist/Leninism. the birth
of the Nuclear Age and rise of Cyberworld — will be regarded as
little more than a conduit toward China's future supremacy If
China reigns supreme it will write new histories which will most
likely be as ethnocentric and parochial as classic Roman narra
tives, or as our own perfervid chronicle of the past hundred years
as 'The American Century' — and perhaps also, in the words of
Lafcadio Hearn, who predicted at the end of the 19th Century
that Asia would eventually regain supremacy in w>rid affairs and
appropriate the best Western cultures offer and discard what is
useless or of little merit, we who triumphed for more than half a
millennium will be "missed as much as the Ichythosaur."
The Chinese have long recognized the only immutable
law is that everything changes. Henry Adams at the beginning of
the 20th Century believed the wave of change was a manifesta
tion of a universal law of acceleration — history was speeding up,
which disputably makes morality as well as technology relativist;
moral codes developed in one period are rigidly obstructionist
in a succeeding era, and are usually diffused by the irresistible
dynamics of humanity's swift evolution. The general procedure
is periods of acceleration followed by slower periods of reflection
and synergization which fuel newer epics of accelerated change.
Adams thought the electric dynamo made history obsolete, that
the experience gained by learning and manipulating the strength
of animals, wind and water, was made irrelevant by the rising
mechanical/electronics technology that transformed this new
history into an era of energy that shows no sign of slowing down
as our cyberbotic world recreates itself at speeds close to light.
Humanity eternally pushes at the edge of evolution,
incessantly, impatiently and recklessly remaking the natural
wxld into its own image Homo sapiens sapiens races through
spectrums of time we calculate and measure but little under
stand. propelled into every moment with impatience and hope,
overturning nature as well as our own history, regarding each as
irrelevant, and perhaps the only consistency to our history is our
disdain of nature, regarding the natural world in which we have
spent most of our history as an adversary to be overcome and
altered to our design, whether it be domestication of grains and
animals to cloning them and ourselves for future suzerainty over
the entire planet Probably nothing can stop or even detour the
surge of our species except extinction either by ourselves or our
inability to catch up with an expanding universe.
Humanity's rise through complex genetic spiderwebs of
primates and homonids, developing wit and organizational skills
during the 98% of its span that has been spent hunting as a
clever and rapacious carnivore, its subsequent civilizations based
on agriculture, commerce and warfare, seems barely a breath in
the life of Earth, yet its short reign has metamorphosed most of
the above sea level world to its own taste and style
Archeological evidence points to the possibility that
Neolithic villages were more appreciative of peace rather than
war Villages generally cooperated with each other: shortages
of one commodity would be alleviated by trade with another.
Neolithic humanity at the dawn of civilization might have come
closer to the ideal of peace and harmony through mutual needs
and trade than any later community The end of the Cold War
has opened the prospect of a full circle of civilization, once more
arrived at the realization that peaceful harmony and cooperation
is preferable to incessant and reckless competition that most
often leads to war
Communism and Socialism, the failed creeds of the last
century, are rooted in community and society; not so Capitalism,
a word and concept as cold and brittle as a silver coin. The raw
excesses of corporate capitalism in its quest to dominate world
trade and commerce since the end of the Cold War are under
siege by a rising turbulence caused by intense pressure from
below, the bottom of the resources trickle-down, which is uniting
the majority of overcrowded humanity that struggles for a decent
living on the planet. This upheaval collates every previous civil
rights and working class struggle. It might very well readjust
the center of power and pioneer the first true universally human
community in its long evolution
The reality of attaining an equitable world civilization will
obviously be much more rough and tumble than the vision, given
the dyspepsia of our ill-tempered species. Yet universal amalga
mation might provide the basis for human diaspora beyond its
own planet, a friendly migration into the cosmos by a truly civil
ized species that recognizes itself as a single species — that
none are subspecies to any other; that there are no 'mongrel
races' among us.
It seems likely that women were the real pioneers of the
cultivation of grains and domestication of animals that led to the
agricultural revolution that produced civilization. The focal priority
of this century is to complete the social and personal equality of
women. This transcends most other needs because it is the most
basic correction for humanity to make as well as the most potent
force to successfully fulfill the myriad other needs.
"Star measurer, deviser of great systems," humanity is
still a floundering creature, Loren Eiseley wrote halfway through
the past century. "Deeply written in (our bodies) is the old wxld
of the ice, the tiger and the cave We have been steeped and
ripened in ages of ice and rain," and like most of nature’s great
innovations, "there is an orphan's obscurity" about us as we yearn
"for the lost safety of the old instinctive world" we abandoned in
our relentless assault on the future.
Sir Thomas Browie said the created world is only a
"small parenthesis in eternity." In that sense we are little more
than cartoon dogs laying on roofs of doghouses staring up at
the stars. Perhaps as Astoria artist Paul Evalt conjectures,
from a theorem revealed to him in a dream vision, all reality
is really only 9E2 X.
Gravity nails our flesh to earth yet spins our blood for
balance through the spheres of our brains on a perpetual edge
of the present. Instants swarm at us like particles and protons;
or like locusts flailing at us, wearing us away. We bring to each
instant a baggage of tradition and experience, and a worry about
death. We grasp the passing moment, impose our past upon it
and reel into the next. Every moment is new, like waves from an
immense ocean, each second an uncertainty unexplored and
doubtful and as instantly history, irretrievable except in memory
and myth.
1287 COMMERCIAL ST.
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STRAIGHT HONEST DIAGNOSES.
SIMPLE, COST EFFECTIVE TREATMENTS.
Don McDaniel
LI ihfirtnrinni
(Libertarian)
CONSIDER FOR TREATMENT OF AUTO, WORK & SPORTS
INJURIES. ALSO FOR HEADACHES, NECK & BACK PAIN,
ARM & LEG PAIN, TINGLING NUMBNESS. WHEN YOU
DON’T KNOW WHAT IS WRONG AND AREN'T GETTING
ANSWERS, CALL ASTORIA CHIROPRACTIC 324-3311 IN
DOWNTOWN ASTORIA.
For State Representative
District 1
'/AUTHORIZED & RAID FOR BY FRIENDS TO ELECT DON McDANIEL
P.O. BOX 111 ASTORIA OREGON »7103
I