even the environment pushes back
Still surfing randomly through the net, I run across this juxtaposition of <p>The Lord of the Rings</p> with the immediate aftermath of the fall of the WTC, which explicates what has happened to America since WWII.
There was a time when the U.S. really was one of the good guys, the defenders of freedom and democracy, but six years after one of the greatest traumas our nation has sustained, probably only surpassed by the Civil War and the burning of D.C. during the War of 1812, when W took that opportunity to start fucking everything up, this time is clearly long gone. It is questionable when everything went to hell. Some like to say it was when JFK was assasinated. Others point to Nixon’s desecration of the Oval Office. Then there was Reagan’s unholy alliance between the military-industrial complex and the religious right that continues to haunt us to this day. But I wonder if it wasn’t as early as was when the Enola Gay nuked Hiroshima. Maybe lots of American soldiers would’ve died in an amphibious assault of Honshu, but there is something to be said about being on the moral high ground instead of being the only nation in the world to have used a nuclear weapon on a civilian population. While Winston Churchill encouraged the idea of killing civilians to put pressure on the Nazi government, and while the fire-bombing of Dresden was probably just as hellish and gruesome, nothing is as emblematic for the efficacy of terrorism as the nuclear holocaust of Japanese civilians, and the radioactive aftermath that lasted for a generation.
Because isn’t that exactly what terrorism is? The harming and killing of civilians in order to get their government to comply? Wasn’t this the very rationale for dropping the atomic bomb?
But as the Reagan administration demonstrated, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re on their side, you’re a terrorist. If you’re on our side, you’re a freedom fighter.
But it’s interesting how we, caught up in the whirlwind of global capitalism, are worried about how we might fit into the mythologic narratives of the new millenium. Even if global capitalism is Mordor, does that mean we are necessarily the bad guys?
While Tolkien does utilize the stereotypes of race and nation in his narrative, it is clear that this agent of morality is the individual. For example, even the Shire becomes industrialized in the end, but it is the act of certain individuals, not a collective decision by the entire population of the Shire.
While it’s not like California is immune from sprawl, it definitely has tougher environmental regulations than most places in the U.S. Interestingly, while S.F., L.A., and S.D. are highly urbanized locations, nature is interspersed in between. It’s not just Central Park embedded within the grid of Manhattan. We’re talking about mountains, rivers, canyons, beaches without leaving the city limits.
I can’t help but think that parts of California could be paradigms of sustainability, although this could be misleading, considering we are still tethered to fossil fuels, import a lot of our water, and are unlikely to leave the environment untouched as growth continues to explode.