This is my favorite of all the pieces that you've ever written.  Not because you haven't written better stuff.  You frequently write some pretty astute things in my view.  But you were just plucking things out of my head with this one.  So I appreciated it (even if I didn't necessarily agree with it 100%).

First, I just re-watched the Big Lebowski.  Great film.  And yes -- a teaching for our times.  Sometimes you eat the ba'ar, and sometimes the ba'ar eats you.

I am a living example of all your cynicisms.  I do not like being reduced to a two-dimensional being, to become a character in your non-fiction writing.  I find being a two-dimensional character constraining.  But I find a grain of truth in each of your cynicisms, and a grain of that truth living inside me, as far as my own political thoughts.

Driving home from Court today, before reading your piece, I heard an Obama-FISA bit on the radio, and thought back to recent comments I've read and made here.  Thought, "Who will I support now?"  Wrestled with the notion that I am a man without a party.  This is a notion that this site, and progressive blogging in general, have always left me with.  I, at once, feel connected with far more people who share my views.  And at the same time, I feel, all-too-frequently, utterly powerless to effect any change whatsoever while living in the present system of government.

Am I a supporter of the Democratic Party?  Do I even believe in democracy?  Or the representative democracy that has been put on display here for the last 200+ years under our present Constitution?  Does politics even matter?  I thought all of this today.  Just driving along and drifting like a tumbling tumbleweed.

In the end, I'm left with no answers.  I know little.  I grow tired.

I am moved, again, at this point in life, to drop out.  To stop.  Stop trying to believe in this imperfect system.  Stop trying to believe that any system could really replace this imperfect system and make it much better.  I am moved to be a spectator at this particular train wreck.  I am moved to believe that it is folly to ever imagine that human beings can govern themselves well, without a great deal of injustice being a by-product.

All these things.  They are just feelings passing me by while I think on the highway, like the mileposts.  Just kind of on the periphery.

As I've come to understand our planet -- our species -- just in my own imperfect understanding, I'm led to believe these things.  We evolved some 250,000 to 100,000 years ago.  We've been around, as we are now as biological beings, a long time.  Between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago, we evolved socially, to something different.  We became societal beings in social groups beyond the size of the biological groups that we had evolved to live in.  Simultaneously, we started to temporarily step outside of the ecology for these 12,000 to 6,000 years.  And politics as we now know it, and as it has evolved during this period, is just one facet of the technology and knowledge that we have developed to try to live in this post-ecological phase.  It is imperfect.  It cannot be perfect.  Because it is a fiction designed to allow us to live in this unsustainable post-ecological existence.

It seems to me that this 12,000 to 6,000 year period is drawing to a close, in some ways.  That we are reaching the limits of a post-ecological existence.  That scarcities of energy and resources will force a reduction in our vast population.  I don't mean this as an apocalyptic statement, necessarily.  I haven't the ability to predict when, with any accuracy, will mark the end of the ability of our planet to support this post-ecological era.  My own sense is that it is near.  But, call it next year.  Or call it in 1,000 years.  Population growth and resource use cannot continue.  And whether the post-ecological period is viewed, historically as the last 12,000 to 6,000 years, or the last 13,000 to 7,000 years seems academic to me.  And these ideas about our species current placement (just my worldview) has a pretty dramatic impact on my view of politics at this point.  Am I a cynic?  I suppose you could characterize me that way, and I wouldn't argue a lot.  But that'd just be your opinion, man.  And thinking all this, rather than just labeling myself a cynic, makes me feel a little more three-dimensional.  So I like thinking it.

The problem, as I've come to view it, is not whether a Republican or a Democratic or a Libertarian candidate gets elected this year.  The problem is that we do not have a system that even approaches us being able to make group decisions that would allow us to try to rationally return to an way of living within the ecology.  Can a one-child policy quickly reduce population?  And if it were adopted, would I not abhor a governmental decision that forced an essentially biological/individual decision on human beings?  Should we favor voluntary suicide to quickly limit our populations?  Or must we embrace life-affirming philosophies that preserve as many of us as is possible to a coming global instability based on resource depletion?  I cannot begin to answer these questions as an individual, and I give them some amount of thought.  Who will invent a system that allows us to answer these questions as a mega-tribe?  No one.  Obviously.  We are so incapable of addressing these things.  It is not bad.  We are not stupid.  I love my fellows.  But we are great apes.  We might function well in small tribal groups, with decisions about how to sustain the group.  We evolved for it.  Not to say there weren't resource questions then.  Or inter-group conflict about resources.  But there wasn't planetary wide resource exhaustion -- a crisis that is despoiling of the very things we require to live, and may well not only result in a fall back to an old level of supportable population, but to something much less.  Or to zero.

Will our current political system result in some amazing advancement in technology.  Star children, are we?  Maybe that's the most positive, hopeful view.  Am I not a cynic, if I subscribe to a hope based on Star Trek.  Or Star Wars.  Where we become a parasite to infect other solar systems?  Is that positive?  Based on our evolutionary track record?  (If you can step outside your species, your planet, try to imagine being a sentient being, viewing our harshly treated planet, and viewing us escaping it in your direction -- and imagine what you would think about us -- yikes).

So is all this lack of faith in the people, or belief that people can only do right if manipulated, or systemic view that our body politic as now constituted is corrupt and corrupting and therefore unworthy of support -- is all that cynicism.  I dunno.

But give me a White Russian.  Take me bowling.  And just let me abide while you save us somehow -- through writing some of us into action.  I'll try to enjoy.  I may even vote.  Well, I dunno.


"Have you no sense of decency, sir. At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" -- Boston Attorney Joseph Welch, taking down Sen. Joseph McCarthy.