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Our thoughts cannot escape themselves: they return like carrier pigeons to their origins — death, annihilation. We are the first the creatures to think of our own oblivion. I read about Australia, Iran; I think about oblivion; we all do. The end of one life is the end of its world; the destruction of the world is the end of the interconnected life of the globe. Death is fractalized: the death of a star is the death of the soul; the fever of a little child is the fever of the earth during climate change.
The pundits on The New York Times say we need a grand plan; of course government officials, or ex-government officials say we need a grand plan. Planners plan; bureaucrats bureaucratize. Trump, to his sort of credit, is the first truly unpredictable president of the modern era; the first president to eschew the totalizing impulse of the paper-work state (sometimes mistakenly called the ‘Deep State’). This is not to say that I like or admire Trump. I simply acknowledge that he’s slipped beyond the mesh of modern game-theory. Beyond good and evil is something much more interesting.
As much as photographs of suffering wildlife in Australia move me, like they have millions of others, I can’t help but think: the hypocrisy of modern people, who build and maintain slaughter-houses, strew the ocean with junk and toxins, spew carbon into the atmosphere. We should be ashamed, not moved, ashamed.
