Saturday, Jun. 12, 2004 - 2:41 a.m.

On Talking Monkeys

A few years ago, I was talking to My Very Busy Friend. I was saying I was stunned that out of all the rich and powerful neocons in America, the powers that be decided to install as their figurehead, George W. Bush, who constantly embarrasses himself and his administration with the stupid things he says.

My Very Busy Friend responded with something like, “if you put a talking monkey in front of a TV camera as your spokesman, it’s disingenuous to act surprised when he starts hurling feces.”

When I learned from Marshall Rosenberg that enemy images are a staple of the Dominator culture, I reluctantly agreed. Reminding me that indulging in enemy images runs counter to my deepest beliefs took all the fun out of comparing Bush to a monkey. Almost.

It’s also unfair to monkeys. According to the book Next of Kin, about chimpanzees who have been taught sign language, the most frequent phrase they communicate is, “come here, give hug.” If that’s all Bush would say, he’d be quite loveable.

According to Mike Rupert, Bush is going to get impeached before the election because the CIA is mad at him. Meanwhile, other conspiracy-heads are saying that the Bush administration will simulate another terrorist attack in the US as a pretext to suspend the constitution, institute martial law, establish an overt dictatorship, put subversives like you and me in detention camps, and preempt the election. See here, here, and here. I suppose there’s nothing to preclude both plans from being in the works. I hope that doesn’t happen, but I hope they do go ahead and reinstate the draft next year, because I will think that will backfire so badly, and unite the subjects against the empire like never before.

I just finished a huge project, and I present it to you, dear reader, for your approval. It's a summary of the main points from Daniel Quinn's books, including his bestseller, Ishmael. Read it here:

Gorilla Digest

I thought he had some good ideas, but I was frustrated by his extreme repetition, so I trimmed it down to what I thought were the golden nuggets. Here’s a prime example of Quinn’s repetiveness, from page 113 of Beyond Civilization:

“Now all the productivity of that land is being turned into human mass, literally into human flesh. Every day all over the world diversity is disappearing as more and more of our planet’s biomass is being turned into human mass. This is what the food race is all about. This is exactly what the food race is about: every year turning more of our planet’s biomass into human mass.”

If you can say it once, why not twice? Or thrice? Why not repeat yourself? And be repetitive while you’re at it? Still, to Quinn’s credit, he can turn a clever phrase, and sometimes even pull a heartstring, which is why I took the trouble to quote him instead of paraphrasing the whole thing.

As fiction, his books are hit and miss. Ishmael, I thought, was even worse than Walden Two as a polemic disguised as a story via a Socratic dialogue. At least Walden Two had more than two characters. I avoided this book for many years, because I had no wish to willingly sit down and be admonished by a talking gorilla for my environmental unsustainability, especially when the gorilla is just the hand puppet of a human author who thinks a gorilla would sound more authoritative and more irreproachable on these matters. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the book was much more than mere admonishment. To compensate for the bad fiction, it’s a very fast read. The sequel, The Story of B is a hell of a lot better as fiction. I found it somewhat gripping and intriguing, and I actually cared a little about the characters. This book is also superior to its predecessor in sequestering most of the polemic in an appendix. My Ishmael is more like the first one, but with a well-written short story at the end. And Beyond Civilization is a nonfiction treatise written to turn his theory into some concrete advice and a plan of action. However, aside from some praise for worker-run co-op businesses in light of his theory, he does little but reveal the paucity of his ideas for cultural transformation.

I don't agree with all his points, and I think he tends to oversimplify, but I still see a lot of value in what he has to say, and I'm not aware of any other writer who has his angle on these issues. I’m still amazed by his theory that a culture’s mythology, combined with some practices that generate positive feedback, can utterly transform the objective material conditions of the world.

This took a lot of time to prepare, and now I'm so glad I completed it. After last night’s Gaia class, I see this pamphlet as a fulfillment of Dorian Sagan’s maxim, “nature abhors a gradient.” There was a big gradient between those who had read Quinn’s books, and those who had not, either because they were daunted by the length of his works, or who thought themselves above such remedial primers. I intended this pamphlet to take advantage of that gradient, like a life form surfing thermodynamics’ second law.

I feel like it's my work, even though it's someone else's words. Soon it will be my work, as I incorporate Quinn’s ideas into my book (properly footnoted, of course). While I think Quinn’s stuff is quite nifty, I think it’s woefully incomplete, a gap I intend to fill with the rest of FunSmart 1.0.

newest archive guestbook email rings profile Diaryland