Perspectives: A Review of 2012
(Swans - December 17, 2012) Can't wait to see 2012 come to a close. We got through 12-12-12 and we will wake up on December 22 still alive. Unfortunately, the imbeciles who have been clogging the Web sphere with Mayan prophecies will also remain alive and so we all will have to keep dealing with their millenarian fantasies and eschatological beliefs. I'd like to talk about economic and ecological entropy, but this is the domain of physicists. I'll have to delegate the topic to a real physicist, Manuel García, Jr. He knows more on the subject than I ever will. I wonder what I can add that I have not written in, say, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011?
Want Sharia? You have it. See Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen... You got it. You are put to sleep in the evening and in the morning you wake up with an amputated hand. Don't you appreciate the Arab Spring? Soon enough my wife will wear a niqab to work. Forget Combes and Jaurès. Forget culture. Welcome to obscurantism.
Ignore the latest video games and films filled with violence. We now have CHAMP designed and executed by Boeing. This Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project can destroy our famed enemies' (who are they?) electronic and data systems -- another drone that will take over the world with little or no collateral damage. Next, we will be "champed" but still be kept alive. Culture is involving, indeed.
But does culture change? Twenty-six people have just been killed in a Connecticut school -- 20 of them being 6- and 7-year-old kids. The insane assassin even shot and killed his own mother before going on his rampage. "Guns do not kill people," will claim the usual lobbies. Only people do. Sure enough, but would that massacre have occurred without the guns?
I think of little Ella -- Manuel's daughter -- and her beautiful voice and wonder what her future will hold.
My old Toyota pick-up truck has disappeared. The engine would not start. The local shop kept it for nearly three months. I think that they have towed it to the Toyota dealership 25 miles away, or perhaps it may now be located somewhere in Mexico. Who knows?
Our house in Boonville has become a nightmare -- impossible to maintain with no help to be found, in spite of good pay. So it is. I do not shower. Jan is mad. Jan is deeply stressed and depressed. Her beloved father died recently. So it goes. It's raining a lot.
Signandsight, a small cultural European window of sanity has closed its shutters -- a Web site that provided much knowledge and insight. Femi Akomolafe has disappeared. Charles Marowitz has faded out. A couple of other people threw Swans under the bus. The rain does not abate.
On the positive side, I've renewed an affectionate relationship with my older brother, Patrick (and the entire family), and while I do not read much American media any more, I enjoy les guignols de l'info, le petit journal, and le grand journal on Canal +, when the Internet works and the electricity is not down.
French is coming back. English is at a loss.
Rain keeps battering me. Jan is away four days a week. Mestor, Aida, and Marcel keep me company. Love of dogs and cats is endearing. Still, Jan does so much to keep the boat afloat. She does so much.
Compared to the conditions in most of the world this was not such a bad year after all. May 2013 be a year of peace, love, and justice.
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Gilles d'Aymery on Swans -- with bio. He is Swans' publisher and co-editor. (back)