Recently, I was asked a couple times what my thoughts were on the impeachment proceedings unfolding in Washington DC. Without a doubt, the trial is dominating many news cycles, and not only in the US but outside of it as well. It is a strange phenomenon that is astonishingly divorced from the pressing issues of its time. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle writ large across ubiquitous screens.

Trump is a vile human being. This much is a given. But let’s be honest. This is a battle among the wealthy ownership class about crimes that this class commits on a regular basis. It isn’t about real crimes any of us would be tried or convicted for, and it isn’t about things humanity should be appalled by, like separating children from their parents and putting them in cages, or carpet bombing civilians, or drone bombing foreign nationals on foreign soil, or training death squads, or deregulating planet killing industries, or opening up untouched lands to mining, fossil fuel, agriculture and timber interests. No crimes against humanity or the living planet, the ones that count, are being addressed here.

In the meantime, the working class and ordinary people in the US continue to contend with little or no healthcare coverage, increasing wealth disparity, increasing debt and increasing homelessness. In the meantime, people who live outside the US, and in places targeted by its belligerent foreign policy, contend with literal life and death situations caused by a bloated and unhinged military state that spends more on its endless wars than on the welfare of its own people. In the meantime, the biosphere continues to be assaulted by the timber, mining, agricultural and fossil fuel industries, plastic continues to be dumped into the world’s oceans, fish stocks are plummeting, coral reefs are bleaching, forests are being felled at record pace, and climate change fueled calamities are increasing dramatically. In the meantime, people who expose the crimes of the powerful are languishing in prison, like Chelsea Manning, with little to no coverage in the mainstream media. In the meantime, people who assist desperate human beings dying of thirst in the desert or drowning at sea, or who want to ease the suffering of sentient beings on factory farms, or who try to defend our water from pipelines that always leak, are being portrayed as terrorists and are facing jail time for it.

One of the greatest gifts the ruling class possesses is distraction, and in this they create the conditions for a pervading sense of alienation. Alienation from each other. Alienation from the natural world on which we depend. Alienation from our own humanity. And this is because it creates a series of unconnected moments where each one has little or nothing to do with the last one. This creates collective amnesia and a sense of powerlessness. It is how a war criminal like John Bolton, a man largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, can be cast as a defender of justice. It is how the real crimes of corporations or the military industrial complex go unpunished. Forgotten, until the next catastrophe.

So forgive me if I simply do not care much about the squabbles among the powerful or the ruling class, but I am sick to death of the distraction, of the spectacle. Trump will likely ride this new calamity out like he has the last ones. But even if he doesn’t nothing of consequence will change in time to matter to the majority of living beings on this planet unless the whole house of cards comes down in a heap. Until then the global capitalist class will go on pillaging, polluting and raping humanity and the living planet, and putting on show after show to distract us all while they do so. Producing shadow puppets on the wall of the cave, chiding or mocking those who question or dissent, and keeping us chained to it all.

So isn’t it time to climb out of the cave that Plato so long ago described? And while there is still time? As an fyi, the ominous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was just moved to a mere 100 seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been.

Kenn Orphan   January 2020

The Tomb of Hafez, which is located in the city of Shiraz, Iran, is widely regarded as a treasure of all humanity. Hafez was a poet in 14th century Persia, who wrote about love and mysticism. He is still beloved today by most Iranians. Besides being a poet, he was also a fierce critic of religious hypocrisy and corrupt politics and used satire to do so.

Kenn Orphan    January 2020

Persepolis was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire (ca. 550-330 BC) until it was invaded, looted and destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 BC. Today, the ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage site, beloved not only by Iranians, but anyone who respects and appreciates history. Each year tens of thousands of tourists visit this marvelous city from the ancient world and archeologists are still unearthing treasures, while working to protect it from the ravages of climate change.

It has withstood 2500 years, so it would be a supreme and terrible irony if it were destroyed completely. But it is a place of great significance, and although the Pentagon has attempted to step back from Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian cultural sites, Trump himself has doubled down on them. Would this be targeted too?

#NoWarOnIran

Kenn Orphan  January 2020

Iran contains many sites that are sacred to Jews, Christians and other faiths, including the tomb of Esther and Mordechai where thousands of Jews make pilgrimage each year. There are also cathedrals, monasteries and shrines that remain active today. Iran has the second largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel and is home to a large population of Christians as well. The same cannot be said of one of the United State’s greatest allies, Saudi Arabia, where all places of worship other than a strict version of Sunni Muslim are banned.

Although the Pentagon has attempted to step back from Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian cultural sites, Trump himself has doubled down on them. These sites are considered a part of Iranian cultural heritage, would they be targeted too?

#NoWarOnIran

Kenn Orphan   January 2020

In his 1930s travelogue, The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron wrote of this Iranian city: “Isfahan has become indelible, has insinuated its image into that gallery of places that everybody privately treasures. I gave it no help in doing so. The monuments have kept me too busy. One could explore for months without coming to the end of them. From the 11th century, architects and craftsmen have recorded the fortunes of the town, its changes of taste, government and belief. The buildings reflect these local circumstances; it is their charm, like the charm of most old towns. But a few illustrate the heights of art independently, and rank Isfahan among those rarer places, like Athens or Rome, which are the common refreshment of humanity.”

Earlier today President Trump threatened via tweet to destroy Iran’s cultural sites. Let that sink in for a minute. A sitting president of the US has threatened to erase the cultural heritage of an entire people. This was the tactic of ISIS who blew up centuries old shrines, mosques, churches and Roman era ruins and the Taliban which demolished ancient towering statues of the Buddha. It is also a war crime under international law.

Iranian society reaches back 5000 years. Its art, culture and architecture have influenced countless societies and remain a treasure for all humanity. That a president would make such a threat should be chilling for anyone with a conscience. Trump’s war on Iran is not against its government, it is against the Iranian people themselves.

Kenn Orphan   January 2020

Like so many these past few days, I have been stunned by the devastation across Australia. The photographs and videos of the fires sweeping through the countryside and surrounding towns and even the city of Sydney show a nation literally on fire. Terrified people clung to the bottoms of boat docks, neck deep in water to escape the flames. Thousands crowded on to beaches while the skies above became a Mars like orange hue.  At the time of my writing this at least 18 people are confirmed to have died, over 14 million acres scorched, and a half billion wild animals have perished. These numbers will almost certainly rise. Indeed, it has made even the most stoic of climate scientists tremble. The fires are unprecedented in scale, bigger than the fires in California or even the Amazon in 2019. And they are particularly alarming as this is only the beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere.

Of course, deadly bushfire behemoths are not uncommon in Australia. In 1926, sixty people perished in south east Victoria. The Black Friday bushfires in 1939 claimed 71 lives. But the intensity of these incidents has increased as temperatures have steadily climbed over the 20th century. Then in 2009 the most devastating of fires took the lives of 173 people, scorched at least 450,000 hectares of land (1,100,000 acres), and killed hundreds of thousands of animals. Today’s fires have a new context that cannot be ignored. As climate change accelerates, so too does the pace and scale of its consequences.

While Australia has been reeling from devastating bushfires, just to the north thousands of Indonesians have been forced to flee for their lives too, but this time it is due to catastrophic flooding. In fact, the capital city itself is sinking into the ocean thanks to excessive extraction of ground water and rising seas. The government has made public its plan to relocate the capital to an inland area on the heavily forested island of Borneo, a grim prospect for the future of indigenous peoples and wildlife in that already beleaguered region. Indonesia is a world leader in the destruction of its own rainforests, much of it cleared or burned for global timber trade and to make way for profitable crops like palm oil. Its unbridled greed has decimated wildlife, including the endangered orangutan. And based on its corrupt history, the government will likely abandon the poorest of sinking Jakarta first.

In many ways the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century might also prove to be the beginning of an unraveling of sorts. And this does not only pertain to the biosphere. Last month’s UN sponsored COP 25 (Conference of Parties) in Madrid, which aimed at addressing our climate catastrophe, was a complete sham much like similar conferences preceding it. Thousands of delegates were joined by hundreds of fossil fuel and banking industry lobbyists and profiteers. They not only attended the conference, but also led several of the meetings. The sickening irony of this was not lost on protesters, who walked out of rooms en masse with hands clasped over their ears once the oil men began speaking.

But around the world the most wealthy and powerful governments remain firmly in denial, and that denial is rooted in the interests of capital. In other words, the shortsighted profits for the moneyed few. As fires ravaged his country Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, for instance, spent the beginning of this disaster holidaying in Hawaii. But this apathy should come as no surprise since he had the gall to stand in the House of Representatives in 2017 clasping a lump of coal and declaring: “This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you.” Now, three years later, it appears that those insensitive and downright stupid words have clearly come to haunt his government.

Only a couple months ago the world’s attention was on the fires in the Amazon. Fires that should not have occurred in a wet rainforest. Fires that have devastated fragile ecosystems and the indigenous communities that depend on them. Fires that were, in large part, intentionally set by loggers, miners and cattle ranchers under the approving gaze of the Bolsonaro regime. Today, mainstream media attention has moved to a different continent, but the scenario isn’t much different. There are very rich and very powerful people burning the house we all live in down to ash to make a quick buck, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they will create distractions, even deadly ones like war, to divert our attention and resources. Or they will simply fiddle, like Nero, or go on holiday when the flames get too close to their gilded mansions.

Kenn Orphan   January, 2020

Title photo credit: Adam Stevenson, Reuters. A kookaburra perches on a burnt tree in the aftermath of a bushfire in Wallabi Point, Australia, on Nov. 12, 2019.