Fukushima radiation, fracking, GMO seeds and food: Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch's Scream paintings capture my take on what I see unfolding in this world.

I vaguely recall a musical, that I never saw, that had as its title (I think, fuzzily) "Stop The World I Want to Get Off."

I think of Ray Bradbury's brilliant short story (or was it a novela?), "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

I keep thinking about the documentary Hannah Arendt I saw in early August with someone who has severed our connection.   The severing is cutting me really hard in this moment but it will pass. Time doesn't heal wounds, in my experience, but it does make them more bearable. Losing him is going to hurt forever. So I can't think of the documentary without thinking of losing the man I saw it with. Not a lover, not a friend after all.  The documentary was as much about this time on earth as it was about her analysis of the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany. A German Jew who escaped a death camp, who studied philosophy with Heidegger and was his lover at times, and a woman, no less, she became a super nova as a philosopher. Her brilliance was such that a female, immigrant philosopher could not be overlooked.

Arendt covered the Adolf Eichmann trial for New Yorker magazine. Eichmann was the main architect of the deadly efficient system the Nazi's implemented to slaughter 4.5 to 6 million Jews and a few million others, like lots of Poles, that tend to get overlooked. After watching him insist that he did not hate the Jews, that he had merely done his job well, done what he was given to do, she said she believed he did not hate the Jews. That he personified the banality of evil.  Evil is banal because evil is what happens when human beings dissociate from their own humanity. Cut off from one's humanity, which involves caring about other humans, one can do anything. One can destroy the world economy by engineering a real estate price escalation, selling securities build on the shifting sands of fraudulent mortgages, investment bankers selling the shit securities to their clients and then covering their asses by betting (investing) against the crap paper they were selling. Is it less evil to destroy millions of lives so one can get richer, when one is already rich than it is to kill millions?  The question seems loaded. Many would say killing is worse than anything else. And maybe it is. But I am so unsure about this.

Nuclear reactors are evil. Didn't they have their start in the bombs we dropped on Japan? Unleashing radioactive danger for hundreds and thousands of years to make money generating electricity using antique nuclear reactors that should have been shut down long ago is also a way of killing people. Is it better if you kill people slowly, torment them with miserable lives and blame them if they don't just suck it up and figure out a way to be happy after being screwed over?

I don't want to live in this world. I don't want to be.

I am the person screaming in those Munch Scream paintings.

And I don't think suicide is any kind of escape. I have a strong sense that it is impossible to escape the cosmos. That if I kill myself, and I often long to, I'll just come back with an even suckier karma and the world will be worse. As ugly as the world is now, and yeah, yeah, I know many believe in unicorns, miracles, prayer and that we can co-create a more beautiful world, I don't want to live in the future, which I am positive is going to suck worse. For a long, long time.