Cultures and wars

[Monte Davis]

Sorry to wander so far and verbosely, but thank you, Murthy, for starting
it.

"Time for retrospection here, for refining the recent history that's being
pumped up fetid and black from other strata of Earth's mind...." (354)
 
Yes, the defensiveness is there -- I rationalize it as some quest for
"balance" or "perspective," always good for a giggle under the Rainbow. But
if others will tone down some of the more tendentious finger-pointing, I
promise to stop reciting the crimes of the victims. 

One reason I value GR more than something like Sontag's
so-often-chanted cancer line is that TRP is so much more aware of different
time scales. If cancer means explosive growth, exploitation of every
resource, and where-will-it-end, then:

Life is a cancer on the crust of the earth ("The persistence, then, of
structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its
reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more
strata-- epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city.")

Humanity is a cancer among mammals,

Agriculture and cities and writing are a cancer on the much older way of
the hunter-gatherers,

And, yes, Western Europe was the focus of a cancer on "traditional"
civilization (however you want to define that).

I agree completely that the remaining pre-urban peoples 
show us roads not taken. Trouble is, by virtue of where they 
are, most of them are dealing with Brazilian settlers, or Zairean soldiers,
or Indonesian administrators, rather than sensitive souls such as me and 
thee and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

>> Not that it matters at this point, because I suspect, despite hopes to
the contrary, that the cancer has spread too far and wide and it's perhaps
too late to save the patient. <<

Since half the time I feel this way too, all I can suggest is to look again
at those time scales above. We (life, humans, the civilized, the
Westerners) have *always* been on the brink, at that moment when you can't
be sure whether you're still running down the stairs or have just begun to
fall.

Entropy sez the fall is inescapable; history sez we keep finding new
ways to open the system and pour more energy through it to find some new,
even more precarious balance. It's our modus operandi, our specialty, and
maybe all we know how to do.

-Monte <Brennschluss: so far, so good>