Photo:  B. Carlisle

Welcome, Maurice 2011-

R.I.P. Lionel 2011-2012

Songs of the Prophets

Recently I completed a second full reading of Strauss and Howe's remarkable study of the cyclicality of history, The Fourth Turning, which stands the recent linear view of history on its head.  Just like there are four seasons in a natural year, and four seasons of a man's life, there are four seasons of a saeculum (about 80 years, or the length of a person's life):  Crisis, High, Awakening, and Unraveling.  Further, there are four generational archetypes that move through that saeculum:  Hero, Prophet, Nomad, and Artist.  Each Archetype finds itself with a particular role to play during each season of the saeculum.  Strauss and Howe make a convincing argument, tracing the saecular seasons and their generations back through Anglo-American history to the War of the Roses; but the Saecular Games were known as far back as Roman, and even Etruscan times, and it was said that every person, should they live a long life, would take part in the Games (or at least be a spectator) at least once.

Today we live in a time of Crisis (the Fourth Turning), the Winter season of the saeculum.  During saecular winters, it is the part of the Prophet archetype to provide leadership; the Nomad, to provide the hands-on know-how to get the job done; the Hero, to provide the muscle; and the child Artists, to bear witness, to be helpers, and to simply survive and carry the promise of a future for humanity through the Crisis bottleneck.

The Prophet generation provides the fire and passion necessary to rouse the Heroes to decisive action, and the vision to achievable goals necessary for the survival of the nation.  They are tempered by their saecular seasons to look inward, towards the inner (spiritual) world instead of the outward.  Strauss and Howe personify the Prophet generation in the figure of the Gray Champion.  Examples of the Gray Champion include Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, and Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams.  These men were not soldiers.  Too old to fight, they provided the spiritual leadership for their Crisis season, while the Nomads provided the managers (generals, such as Washington, Grant, Patton) and the Heroes provided the muscle (the G.I., or "Greatest," Generation is an example). 

Today, what generation corresponds to that of FDR?  What generation is our Gray Champion?

The Baby Boomers.

I make small effort to conceal my scorn for this pampered, indulged, self-important, narcissistic, greedy, and hypocritical group.  Unfortunately, they are what we have to guide us through these early days of Crisis.  These former hippies and yuppies, who sang the songs of protest against "The Man" during the last Awakening (or Second Turning), who preached "make love not war," who tore down the civic edifices built by the G.I.'s and rebuilt them to serve their own interests, who nurtured the rise of destructive neoliberal and neoconservative politics, now threaten to bring the entire roof down on everyone as they lead us down the path to war, poverty, and complete and utter environmental degradation.

Now, don't get me wrong:  there are some Boomer Prophet voices who preach much-needed common sense, and who actually are the exception to the usual Boomer "do as I say, and not as I do" example; and I listen to their words.  But even they are not immune to the personality deficiences of their fellow Boomers -- including their constant, narcissistic need for validation.  This tendency damages their credibility, further eroding what little influence they already have.  Their songs are thus usually drowned out by the greater noise made by the Gingrich's, Obama's, Romney's, and Clinton's of their generation.  This is important, for it is their words that should be inspiring the current Hero generation -- the Millenials, or Generation Y, if you like -- to a rebirth of civic spirit, leading in turn to a fresh approach by the Heroes to the enormous predicaments we now face. 

But this is not happening.  As it stands, Generation Y has no stake in the current paradigm.  They have been locked out of the American Dream, the crumbs of which having already been gobbled up by the desperate Gen Xers, my own (Nomad) generation.  Gen Y has no sense of civic duty.  Why should they have one, anyway?  The example of the Boomer Prophets is one of greed and hypocrisy.  To follow Boomer ways is to follow the ways of sociopaths.

The next decade will see change and turmoil the likes of which no one now can really fathom.  Unfortunately, we have not the leadership anywhere in our society to steer us, and none on the horizon.  I fear the Boomers will suffer mightily, as will the Millenials, in the Crisis; and many will not survive the bottleneck to see the world on the other side. 

I have given up on the Boomer Prophets, whose songs from my youth now ring hollow in my ears.  I fear the wrath of the Millenials, who as their bleak future slowly reveals itself will find it hard to forgive the Gray Champion his failings.  Whatever valid criticisms one may have of them -- and there are many -- FDR and Lincoln led the country through some of its darkest days.  We need leaders of their calibre.  It is our lot in the current Fourth Turning to do without, or to look to the examples of the past for leadership.

Wassail, friends.  And I mean it:  be hale.  Dark days are upon us.

Day Shall Come Again

Winter holds us fast in his grasp.  2011 breathes its last.

2012 is upon us.  A new year, rising from the ashes of the old.  I have little doubt that it will be only a little less apocalyptic than the Maya foretold.  But we shall see.  I make no predictions tonight, other than this:  whatever darkness lies ahead, there will be another dawn.  It may not be sunny to some, but dawn it will be.

I vow to see it. 

"Last of all Hurin stood alone.  Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried:  'Aure entuluva!  Day shall come again!'  Seventy times he uttered that cry..."  -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Chapter 20:  "Of the Fifth Battle:  Nirnaeth Arnoediad"

Wassail, friends, and Happy New Year.

CANZUSUKI, and Why I Sleep Fine Nowadays

Last week, at one of those Eurozone-y meetings that seem to take place once every 26 hours, British Prime Minister David Cameron kind of told his Continental peers to suck it.  Bless his heart!  Now, the Brits had never adopted the Euro in the first place, but they became part of the trade zone anyway.  Now, with the seemingly imminent breakup of the Euro -- or its morphing into some kind of Franco-German Reichzone -- we see which way the UK leans.  With its usual detached-ness from the Continent becoming more marked by the day, it mirrors the detachment of the US and its other close (read:  English-speaking) allies from the rest of the Real World.  The unofficial nations of CANZUSUKI (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland*) are quickly becoming a bit irrelevant on the world stage, as history unfolds.

It's beginning to look a lot like the 1930's.  Or, at least feel like it.  There is a sense of futility and dread behind all the headlines.  We don't need the media to tell us that there's a shitstorm of global proportions brewing.  (Well, maybe some people do.  They're fucked.)  We're well past the beginning stages of the next Fourth Turning -- that is, the next Crisis.  The last was World War II; the one before that, the Civil War; before that, the American Revolution.  Eighty-year intervals, without fail.  So yeah, it's time.  How's it going to happen?  I believe war with Iran will start it, with either Israel acting unilaterally, or a NATO attack to knock out supposed nuclear sites.  This may have the effect of drawing Russia and China in on the side of Iran, and, well... there you go.  WWIII.  Easy-breezy-Ja-pa-nesy.  Won't that be fun?  I love to hear those of a hawkish bent boast about how we'll be able to mop up the Iranians before you can say knife; it reminds me that they said the same thing before we invaded Iraq, and before we invaded Afghanistan.  Will the country as a whole be able to make that same connection, when Hillary Clinton comes on TV to justify attacking Iran (which has not attacked another country in two or three hundred years, unlike ourselves)?  Yeah, sure.

I'm too old to fight in their wars now, thankfully; and by the time my daughter gets old enough to serve, the Crisis will be over, and whatever's left of the United States will begin a new era under a new paradigm.  You know, that is extremely comforting; and I am also comforted with the knowledge that I have done all I can humanly do to prepare for the changes currently under way.  I sleep more soundly, knowing that it's the fate of my generation -- Gen X, the modern equivalent to the Lost Generation of Hemingway, Tolkien, Patton, Truman, Eisenhower -- to do the hard work of managing our country through Collapse; to keep the Baby Boomers from destroying everything, and to keep the generation after us -- the Millenials, the next "Greatest Generation" -- from destroying the Boomers (though the latter may deserve it, as a whole).  It's what Gen Xers, the underprotected latchkey children of the 1970's and early 1980's, were raised to do, albeit indirectly.  We're survivors.  The events of the larger picture are out of our hands; we just have to make it through to the other side, and shepherd through some of the younger folk along with us.

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend.  Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again." -- Robert Jordan

Wassail, friends.

*I included Ireland, though like as not they will go off on their own, as is their wont.
 

Foradan

Literally "north-man."  Here, the meaning is more Winter-man.  Sindarin, of course.  Simply Sindarin.  I did not bother to look up the Quenya.

The trees slip deeper into sleep with each passing day.  Some still hang on, mainly the younger ones.  Their green leaves will be frostbitten soon, and they will not forget it.

I slow down as well.  I am done for the year.  No more big projects, aside from getting through this month's madness, to quiet, contemplative January.  I am Foradan, withdrawn as the December sun.

I realized that I have given myself a divorce from my country.  I hardly recognize it any more.  I am more familiar with the natural world:  the ebb and flow of natural energies, natural rhythms, sighing earth, listening trees, seasonal suns, and my own place within the great Ring.  Doctrine, dogma, rhetoric, debate, are all rendered pointless, insignificant, by the whir of a chickadee's wings.

Wassail, friends.  And bon hiver.