The Apocalypse Has Happened and Will Again

Guest Post by John Coster

I recently became writer/poet in residence at Fort Juniper in Amherst MA. It’s a little cottage in the woods built originally by the poet Robert Francis. Some notable American authors have lived at Fort Juniper, and Robert Frost, for whom the nearby hiking trail is named, spent many evenings by this very fireplace during the pinnacle of his career. I mention this not to brag, but in hopes of adding a little credibility to to my opinions and eventually some money to my bank account. “Writer in residence” is so much more respectable than “songwriter” or “harmonica player”. Since my first book concerned a number of encounters with a creature answering to the description of Bigfoot, you can easily imagine that I need to add whatever credentials I can to my not so recent Harvard degree.

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During my first weeks here, when I was expecting to work on my second book, a work based on the lives of some of my Revolutionary War ancestors, I was hampered by a bad flu that hit me while I was recuperating from some complex surgery on my left eye. I felt like my head was exploding, and my eye ached horribly so that I had difficulty sleeping. It was hard to read or work on the book I had set out to do, so I listened to a number of lectures on some of the more obscure and controversial aspects of ancient history, a favorite subject of mine. As if the pain in my head weren’t bad enough, I also listened to the old radio on the kitchen counter…it looks like a relic of the 50s and no doubt brought the news of the day to some of my more illustrious predecessors but picks up most of the local stations.

NPR is broadcast from right down the road at the main campus of UMASS, and the throbbing nonsense on the airwaves added to my misery, but I’m a glutton for punishment, a cultural ambulance chaser. I couldn’t resist. There I was, stuck, badly in need of money, but having to postpone the few paying gigs I had and certainly not enjoying the company of the opposite sex in spite of my romantic retreat. So I continued on, listening to lectures on ancient Egypt, the end of the Ice Ages, lost civilizations and other mysteries of the past. Eventually I saw that their might be an interesting connection between the great tide of bullshit washing over the land and those dimly remembered floods recorded in so many ancient texts like the Sumerian tablets and the Old Testament. I began to see that the present clusterfuck in America can be viewed from a much deeper historical perspective, one that suggests how urgently we need to dismantle the current power structure. I felt compelled to write this piece. If you find it useful, use it.

The recent release of a crippling NSA virus into the world’s Microsoft based computer systems is an illustration of how weapons can be turned against those who create them. Indeed, any sane thinking person can easily see how modern life is increasingly threatened by systems of authority supposedly designed to promote our prosperity and security. The ongoing crisis at Fukushima and the looming disaster of nuclear waste leaking from the Hanford site in Oregon are just two examples of how modern man has combined the highest reaches of science with governmental levels of stupidity and irrationality suggestive of some biological equivalent to a computer virus that blocks our ability to make sensible decisions.

The absence of these ongoing disasters from the mainstream media unfortunately doesn’t make them less dangerous. Build nuclear power plants in earthquake zones with no plans as to how to store the waste for the requisite centuries? How does one account for such foolishness? If there were a Darwin Award of the Century for any national endeavor, those who engineered these calamities would certainly seem the likely winners. Although, when we look at the behavior of our political elites in the era of Trump vs the warmongering Democrats, we might well conclude that there are other contenders.

We have knuckleheads in positions of authority who believe that threatening other nations with a first strike nuclear capacity is a sensible defense strategy, who think that climate change is a hoax and that the speed with which you consume natural resources is a mark of economic growth, rather like the notion that you will increase your savings to the degree that you increase your spending. Meanwhile, the loyal opposition rages and fills the airwaves with nonsense and inverted representations of “truth” that Orwell himself could have hardly imagined.

In Syria, Assad is supposed to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by gassing strategically irrelevant civilians so that he could give his enemies an excuse to bomb and invade. Russia, without a shred of evidence, is endlessly reported to have “hacked the election” although hacking itself has zero to do with any of the Democrats well deserved rebuke. It is just a handy word to obscure the likely reality that leaks (not hacks) from disgruntled Democrats, quite possibly the murdered Seth Rich among them, revealed the corruption in the Clinton campaign. Down in the rabbit hole where public opinion is manufactured on behalf of the Red Queen, exposing criminal behavior is the only crime. Confronted with Snowden, Assange and other whistle blowers, the Red Queen cries, “Off with their heads!” and the corporate media join in on the chorus.

I suppose that some of our modern lunacy may simply be the result of power and self-interest following the money into whatever blind alleys it might eventually lead without the kind of moderating factors that were more influential in the past, like religious belief or cultural identity. Since short term profits sufficient to produce individual lifetimes of enormous wealth may be gained by socially and environmentally destructive endeavors, it’s easy to see how the financial system, particularly at the abstract levels where vast flows of money circulate, has created a parallel universe. Within this realm, the fittest to survive may, in fact, thrive in the short term by promoting ultimately self-destructive projects and ideas, even absurdist views of reality completely at odds with the nuts and bolts of day to day existence. When this parallel universe converges with the natural world and us creatures who inhabit it with all our biological and (dare I say) spiritual needs, danger signs start flashing.

Has this increase in financially driven largely unconscious policy-making ushered in a new age, the era of homo ignoramus? Even as earth sciences, paleontology, and archaeology advance and we begin to uncover more and more of humanity’s forgotten history, our political and media “elites”, inhabiting as they do this parallel self-created world, display about as much historical perspective as the average fruit fly. The talking haircuts whose salaries they pay discuss warfare and tensions in the middle east but display little knowledge of what happened six months ago, much less of the colonial history of the region or the US role in destabilizing countries like Libya and overthrowing democratic governments as in pre-Ayatolla Iran.

These voices of corporate media consensus live in the eternal now of their own propaganda. No wonder the New York State Board of Regents decided to end the requirement for an American history course. Good little worker bees don’t need to know history. Hell, the president of the United States doesn’t even have to know American history. At black history month celebrations, Donald Trump revealed that he had no idea what century Frederick Douglas lived in. Behind the scenes, the corporate managers who own the politicians recklessly ride the currents flowing through the world’s financial system unattached to the long-term consequences for the real economy and underlying ecological systems, the “externalities” to use the term favored by economists. Obviously, even those who most benefit from bad and even disastrous decisions made for short-term gain will eventually experience harm from those externalities themselves but usually not till after the rest of us. In the meantime, they are psychologically shielded by a kind of contrived ignorance which is the special privilege of the rich.

As sensible people worry about humanity’s capacity for self-destruction through warfare and the kind of ecological suicide represented by the nuclear disasters referenced above, certain other perennial dangers are ignored. Ignored at our peril. The forces of creation to which mankind has adapted over the millennia cannot be controlled by public relations firms or political speech writers, but they can be forgotten…temporarily. Particularly among urbanized populations in the developed world, the rhythms of nature are barely noticed beyond the minor annoyances of bad weather. We may have gained some control over the smaller fluctuations of the environment, the ebb and flow of diseases, of agricultural pests, and the effects of the weather on our daily lives.

But these smaller fluctuations have throughout history been punctuated by events of catastrophic magnitude. To such events, modern humans, homo ignoramus, lacking the kind of historical perspective previously encoded in mythology and sacred texts are increasingly vulnerable, probably more so than were our ancestors. Indeed, particularly among the opinion makers currently dominating much of the political system and the so-called “national security” bureaucracies, the various errand boys and girls for the juggernaut of the financial system, obliviousness to certain perennial dangers is a cornerstone of the shared worldview. These are the oddly dystopian Pollyannas of the corporate state focused on flattening out the landscape in order to consolidate the vast flows of money that form the basis of their alternative universe. Their ignorance is an existential threat to us all.

Let’s step back a little and consider some of the universally accepted (with rare exception) but widely ignored facts about our history. We know that humans biologically indistinguishable from ourselves have been around since long before the end of the last ice age. Whenever I go out walking in the forest here in western Mass, I can spot remnants of a time when this landscape was covered by a gigantic sheet of ice. Up on the highest hills, enormous boulders sit were the retreating glaciers left them about 12000 years ago. What we also know is that the departure of the ice age was not a gradual process, but rather a series of dramatic rapid changes.

One current theory that is gaining ground holds that a meteor impact in North America precipitated the breakup of the ice sheet, unleashing vast floods that altered the climate, the underlying landscape, and patterns of the ocean’s currents. Temperatures rose then briefly fell again in the period called the Younger Dryas before warming once more at the beginning of our modern era. Some believe this cataclysm may have extinguished the Clovis culture that we identify by their stone tools, all that remains of these earliest known settlers of America.

It certainly could have played a part in the mysterious disappearance of ice age mega-fauna, large creatures adapted to the cold, giant sloths and bears, the dire wolves, saber-toothed cats and mammoths with which our hardy ancestors somehow managed to coexist. Do the worldwide stories of great floods preserve the memory of these actual events and the time when vast amounts of water locked in the ice returned to the ocean? I suspect so.

This cataclysmic period also raises the question of whether or not more developed civilizations may have occurred much earlier than we realize and subsequently been destroyed, almost obliterated by planetary upheaval.. Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval and others have raised reasonable questions about the accepted timeline of human history. Certainly, there is a growing amount of evidence to suggest that a more advanced civilization did exist much further back in the past than has been generally accepted.

Traditional archaeology cannot account for the mathematical precision, encoded astronomical observations and engineering that resulted in the Great Pyramid. Still the biggest building ever constructed, the structure is astonishing because of its size (two and a half million multi ton blocks of stone), precise measurements and alignments and because of the advanced geometry and geographical knowledge delineated by its dimensions. The notion that precisely cut stones bigger and heavier than anything ever since moved by man were the result of slaves with copper tools, ropes and pounding stones is ridiculous.

It is proof of magical thinking, not among the ancients but within some modern academic disciplines. A people little removed from our neolithic ancestors hunted and gathered and gradually developed agriculture, then… abracadabra…they constructed an enormous monument aligned to true north more accurately than the Greenwich Observatory incorporating the golden ratio and a measuring system based on an understanding of the planet’s actual size. How did the ancients carve out and move stone blocks of several hundred tons? We don’t know, but there they sit massive and irrefutable, in Giza and Baalbek and high in the Andes, the most solid evidence that remains from these earliest known times of written history.

But evidence of what? Did some survivors of a lost culture from before the deluge seed these known ancient civilizations? We don’t know. Now, in Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, we have a massive megalithic temple site dating to the 10th millennium BCE. So much for the Sumerians as the first organized civilization! Oddly, the date of Gobekli Tepe is pretty close to those cataclysmic events at the end of the ice ages. How did such an elaborate organizational effort emerge so quickly from bands of hunter-gatherers? Again. we really don’t know.

And what about that mother of all lost civilization stories, the tale of Atlantis? This comes from no less rational a source than Plato himself, arguably the most important figure in the development of western thinking, the guy that won every argument and unlike his mentor Socrates avoided execution by the state. Then as now, nothing pissed off a politician as much as a well-reasoned argument! Plato says his ancestor Solon learned from Egyptian priests that 9000 years before, a great civilization called Atlantis was swallowed by the sea, punishment for their arrogance and decadence.

Nobody believes that Plato knew about ice ages and mastodons or the rise in sea level as glaciers collapsed, but here he is placing the sinking of Atlantis right at the end of the ice age when massive floods and rising seas did, in fact, alter the planet! Coincidence? The Egyptians had very long memories, and maybe we should not dismiss the furthest reaches of their own chronology as imaginative mythology. Their king lists descend further back into the past than their known history, closer to the time when, if geological studies of water weathering are correct, the Great Sphinx was carved out of the Giza Plateau.

I don’t know whether aliens or lost civilizations or some race of mutant geniuses produced the wonders of the ancient world, but it is now beyond dispute that humans knew much more in the past than we have hitherto believed possible and were capable of extraordinary feats of engineering. It is also beyond dispute that much of our ancestors’ expertise and science was lost. The notion that technical progress is itself a progressive self-sustaining process is completely counter to the facts.

Of course, no one would deny that if the North American meteor theory proves correct and a similar strike happened today, it could be a civilization-ending event. Our interconnected world is much more vulnerable, particularly since we have created enormous caches of nuclear waste which depend on our sustained maintenance to contain their lethal contents and not disrupt the very web of life. The idiots who talk about surviving a nuclear war ignore all the secondary kinds of contamination such chaos as full-scale war would create. Still, 12,000 years is a long time, and maybe it’ll be another 100,000 years before the next big cataclysm. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to beam ourselves up to Andromeda by then. If we just prevent the worst sociopaths in the military industrial complex from blowing us up, we should be OK, right? Wrong!

Homo Ignoramus is busy setting booby traps for himself all over the planet because…. well, that’s how he can make a fast buck. And these traps do not need something as unlikely as a giant meteor strike to set them off. As a matter of fact, the garden variety natural disaster such as in the past might have devastated only one region, now has the potential to do much more harm than ever before, particularly since homo ignoramus while focusing the energies of the state to accommodate those who profiteer from warfare and financial fraud is leaving us all vulnerable to very real dangers. While a pathologically misinformed media distracts us with absurdities like ‘Russia hacked the election” and other nonsense serving those whose personal gain is always at the public expense, the cosmic dice keep rolling and will at some point come up snake eyes.

Consider some of what is known and agreed on about apocalyptic disasters that have happened even in historical times. In the 17th century BC the volcanic island of Thera blew sky high plunging much of a center of Minoan culture into the sea and covering the rest with lava and ash. If Plato’s account of Atlantis is wrong, this event could well be the source of the story. Life on Thera before the eruption does appear to have been highly civilized and even lavish for the time. Frescoes of graceful figures and sporting dolphins suggest a world of gentle beauty, a kind of Maxfield Parish reality of sunlight and blue Mediterranean skies, one that was destroyed in a moment that was for the people of that region the end of the world.

I suspect that the plagues of the old testament, the days of darkness and great pillar of smoke rising into the sky may have their basis in this real event which to this very day can be seen recorded in the growth rings of bristle-cone pines in California. Even in North America. the weather was affected. No wonder many ancient religious texts that speak of an angry god intervening violently in history originated in lands that would have experienced the effects of the Thera eruption, even at a considerable distance.

More recently, the violent eruption on the island of Tambora in the south Pacific brought on the year with no summer,1816, when crop failure and starvation ravaged parts of Europe. Later in the 19th century, a solar flare of sufficient magnitude to wipe out our modern electronic grid occurred, the Carrington Event as it is now called. In 1908, the Tunguska Event in northern Russia demonstrated what a relatively small meteor could do. 800 square miles of forest were flattened in an instant. It not hard to imagine the havoc such an event could cause today if the affected area were near a major city.

Even before the interconnectedness of digital culture, the interconnectedness of the world’s weather patterns and cosmic events had the capacity to globalize disaster. Whatever blend of imagination and real events has carried the story of Atlantis down through the ages, remnants of ancient cities including much of Alexandria do now lie under the waves, the result of changing sea levels and sinking land masses. It is still a matter of debate whether or not recent discoveries of ruins off the coast of Japan and India signal the deeper past that researchers like Hancock and Bauval argue for.

What is not debatable is that apocalyptic forces periodically interrupt the gentler rhythms of life on earth. Which brings us back to the present odd moment when scientific advances seem paradoxically to have ushered in an age of ignorance and foolish behaviors that THREATEN OUR EXTINCTION, not just because we might blow ourselves up, but because we have dramatically increased our vulnerability to the kinds of disasters we have survived in ages past.

How do we account for this? What do we do? No public official, no matter how corrupt, wants to bring on disasters that threaten their own families as well as everyone else. I think the deeper systemic problem lies in the financial system itself where laws intended to prevent the divergence of money flows from the real economy of valuable goods and services are weak and ineffective. I think it is about that parallel reality of numbers and dollars which can be manipulated and in turn, can manipulate our thinking and language itself.

The growth of the police state and authoritarian government which concerns so many these days seems to me to reflect this irrationality of decision-making at the highest levels of government. All of the entrenched bureaucracies of the current system are well fed by the current paradigm. Government jobs in the “security” complex pay handsomely and even the lower level enforcers of the system have benefits and personal security way better than many of us can hope for. As the ethical underpinnings of our constitution, basic matters of individual human rights give way to the rules and regulations of overreaching self-serving bureaucracies, the whole legal framework of society begins to tear at the seams.

The recent history of illegal and profoundly unconstitutional wars waged by the US is the most glaring and obvious manifestation. There is no way to mount a reasoned and constitutional justification for many of our recent military adventures. You don’t need Noam Chomsky and a team of linguists to decipher that part of the Constitution that forbids waging undeclared wars. But if you want to violate the Constitution these days, all that’s required is a little cognitive dissonance and a self-serving willingness to ignore the plain meaning of words, and of course a little help from the main stream media.

The most offensive purveyors of official propaganda don’t dispute facts, they just ignore them. But how do we organize ourselves as a society in any sustainable and functional fashion when we reduce the language of governance to evasive phrases that only serve to mask an underlying incoherence. We don’t. We fall victim to the corruption of our own language, to the implied assumptions that are never spoken lest they be examined critically and reveal criminal intentions of those who profit by concealing their agendas from the public. Our public policies become incoherent like our public language, a series of broken sentences.

The current hoopla about “the Russians”, whipped up by some of the most cowardly disgraceful characters in Washington, is a dramatic illustration of the descent into a kind of intellectual chaos that reaches into that gray realm where insanity and pure evil are hard to distinguish. I do not recall in my lifetime so much journalistic frenzy based on nothing but innuendo and unsubstantiated accusation. We the sheeple our supposed to bleat out our indignation that the Russians prevented Hillary from winning the White House. Why should we believe this? Because we are told various unnamed intelligence experts say it is the case.

Meanwhile, what little credible and even plausible testimony we have contradicts this official but illogical narrative. Julian Assange denies it and other believable sources claim the compromising material was leaked by Democratic insiders dismayed at the Party’s efforts to shut down Bernie Sanders. Though little covered by the media, the leaked emails are significant enough to now form the basis of a class action suit against the Democratic Party by Sanders supporters who argue that they were essentially defrauded since their contributions to party operations were based on a belief that party officials would remain neutral. Somehow amid all of the bluster and sanctimonious outrage about Hillary’s email being revealed all discussions of the content and possible meaning of those emails are drowned out.

Whether or not Donald Trump had ethically compromising dealings with Russian billionaires may be a valid question, but framing the issue in cold war terminology as if “the Russians” were some existential enemy determined to threaten our existence like the dreaded communists of old is inexcusable and dangerous. The level of hypocrisy required for such neoMcCarthyism is staggering, given the American role in on the ground campaign organizing for Boris Yeltsin not long ago and the CIA’s unchallenged position as all-time champion of regime change in foreign countries. It is also further evidence that the age of homo ignoramus, a-historical man, whose evolution seems most deeply rooted in America’s political culture, is endangering the survival of the species.

In that eternal now of financially driven propaganda, there are no past lessons to warn us or visions of the future to motivate us. This is less the case for Russians, many of whom can still remember the horrors of WW2, if only through their family stories and tales of the grim Stalinist world that followed. These are a people trained by history to place a high value on defense with very little interest in expanding their vast territory.

Granted, I’ve ranged far afield from the ancient world, from meteors, and mastodons and the story of Atlantis. I’m not about to start wandering the streets with a sandwich board proclaiming that the end is near though, for us mortals, I suppose that always is the case. Indeed, I am still an optimist, hopefully committed to improving the human prospect and convinced that my own country in its finer moments, however fleeting those moments are, has been a decent example to the world. But all of that matters little.

Apocalyptic events have happened more than once in human history and will happen again. It’s as certain as death and taxes. Criminal gangs have ruled in various times and places, but never before have they had such reach or such devious tools at their disposal, or for that matter have they been so oblivious to and removed from the powers of the natural world. Attila the Hun knew how to ride a horse in bad weather. With our present levels of technology, we might actually be able to protect ourselves from the fatal disasters of the past.

Who knows, we could perhaps divert an incoming meteor or alter the pressures of a threatening volcano. We can certainly protect our electric grid from being disrupted by a solar flare. But our society is more complex and vulnerable than ever to those cataclysms that periodically interrupt the long dream of geological time. As much as we need to promote harmony between nations and struggling populations, we need to understand that our cosmic environment with all its wonder and unfathomable beauty can be more hostile to us than any human adversary. We will certainly fail as a species if we do not evolve enough to act accordingly. We cannot tolerate or long survive a power structure that denies this reality.