A Green State of Mind

by Terry Gerych:

Horror movies build suspense. The classic case is where a victim fails to flee, even though there’s obvious danger, or if he or she does flee, he or she clumsily trips and falls, stumbles, or crawls such that he or she is easily caught by a murderous assailant. The viewer is annoyed by the stupid or clumsy response, but mesmerized, and the filmmaker often milks the suspense for all it’s worth, dragging out scene after scene for several minutes, giving the viewer plenty of time to experience a suspense buildup and climax.

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The call for unity, especially within the nation-state, has the appearance of benefiting all those involved. But any type of unity can very easily be a movement toward transcendence that creates absolute terms. These absolute terms can be in direct conflict with the objective reality and can be a form of oppression and exclusion. However, this objective reality can only be known by humans through sensory experience and the mediation of structures of meaning. The philosophical genre called poststructuralism has devoted its efforts toward analyzing how structures operate, to such an extent that it may appear that structures actually create reality. On the other hand, there is the rising work of speculative realism that work towards an examination of reality as it exists in itself outside of experience and structures. The examination of reality in itself, in tandem with poststructuralism, can show that reality is much more varied and strange than what humans are able to know. Alongside an understanding of the functions of structures, it is possible to reveal that any call for unity has its origins from a specific political and social agenda and not from a stable basis in reality or truth. In fact, in most cases, a claim on truth can go against how reality and structures actually operate.

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by Susan Donderewicz:

The following is a transcript of a presentation made during a meeting on community economics in Steuben County in May of 2008:

I’ve been given just fifteen minutes, so I’ve narrowed my topic to the history of civilization. With a special emphasis on the future, since this is part of the progression, it just hasn’t happened yet. When I envision an economy of a particular time and place, I picture a machine, and the first place to look is how the machine is powered, what makes this economy go. The ancient Egyptians had an economy that created the pyramids, the Sphinx, all those ancient works of art. I refer to that bulwark of historical accuracy, Hollywood, for a glimpse of how that system worked. The “Ten Commandments” showed scene after scene of the masses of people working hard from dawn to dusk, their lives were nothing but endless work. I thought as I was growing up that this was because they used primitive methods to provide for their basic needs. However, during my Hippie experience, I lived off a garden using a pickaxe, cutting wood with a bow saw. It took about half a day, on the average, to fill my needs. The rest of my day was free for courses at the community college, visiting friends, etc. So why were the Egyptian masses working so hard? Where was all that effort going? The Egyptian economy was a machine shaped like a giant pyramid, with the huge majority at the bottom, a lesser number of immediate supervisors just above them, on up to a very small group at the top: a hierarchy. The people at the bottom powered the machine with that labor beyond which they performed for their own benefit, this excess they unwillingly contributed upwards through the machine to the controllers at the top. The huge amount of wealth and power wielded by the people at the top originated from the workers at the bottom. Very little benefit came back down to the workers—supervision, for sure, and police presence, quite probably. The Egyptian economy was powered by the exploitation of the masses.

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