The Children of Hegel
Whoa... I need to catch my breath as I look out the window of an ancient childhood take inventory of the moment ponder the question: what is this world we have become? as we wound our way through the serpentine flow of history which started as a clear stream, with direction only to slow to a trickle then halt in a moribund morass of sludge which has ground we the people to a halt, and history no longer flows free but threatens to backup like a sewer and we the children of Hegel are stranded stuck stuck in an eternal synthesis in a fused bipolar cycle which is the worst of both worlds no thesis, and no antithesis Marx, Hegel, and Fukuyama never saw it coming the sucker punch of technology - Heidegger’s enfolding and we have become the slave of it what we failed to envision is the possibility that good might fail and that in the end, before the end of times that evil would prevail fed fat on the cancer of malignant capitalism we descend anew into the Dark Ages the questions remains... Will we emerge or destroy the very foundation of the earth we stand upon?
Two issues. Heidegger warned that technology might not be what it seems. He sensed something sinister in it, and wrote about it in The Question Concerning Technology. He called it an enfolding. I hope to have a lot to say about that later in future posts.
The second issue. A nation of vision, strength, and no little amount of moral integrity has become a debauchery of greed and indulgence, and we are ruled by a plutocracy. Reagan’s light on a hill (say what you want at least he was no cynic and believed the rhetoric) is now a dim, and flickering, flame. We are fading, and the grand experiment in democracy is in peril. Oh, I know, we were never perfect. Far from it. But we thought we could be. We had that audacity. God bless us for that. We believed we could become something good, and better all humankind.
I must say a word about capitalism. Note I used the term malignant capitalism which I want to define rather narrowly. The one lesson America has not learned is moderation. Everything is supersized, everything is breaking news, everything is over the top. Capitalism in and of itself is not malignant. But, when it becomes the focus, and when the business of America is business (or making money – there is a difference and that is our present state) something bad happens. Unchecked, and monitored it becomes grotesque, and the traits of it that were virtuous become a vice. Just like the hunting rifle of old has turned into a weapon, and dangerous parody of what it once was.
Poetry, at least in large part, is about the sound. Years ago I started a poem that consisted of words that just felt good when you said them. They are also words which are a bit dusty from lack of use. That is the first poem.
Memories are windows to the past but sometimes the view is out of focus, and you are not sure what you are looking at.
