You might envy me for my telepathic
abilities, especially now that I've found I can read future minds, but this is
not an easy spot to occupy. Imagine, wherever I go, whether it's the
Family Dollar Store on Pearblossom Highway with its sparse staff
and desert dwelling customers or the crowded sidewalks of Melrose Avenue in
L.A., I see people living their everyday lives as if a tsunami of change is not
towering over their heads. Uncomfortable as this makes me feel, it has to be that way, I guess. Just as management does not want inmates in
the psych ward to be agitated, so society's handlers prefer the relative peace
of quotidian worry to panic and hysteria. But my fate is to see World War
III taking shape right now. We're well into the preliminary stages; in fact
we're walking calmly up the chute to slaughter as I write. I could easily
become one of those guys on a corner with a sign heralding "The End,"
but my wife would leave me. Wait, she's already left me. A couple
of them have.
I'm doing full disclosure because
my topic today is the evolutionary struggle between men and women. Is it
coincidence that the numerous attempts, since the Industrial Revolution, to revive matriarchy, at least on a power-sharing basis, are culminating now,
just as the last possible exits from World War III close around us, in the symbolic man
vs. woman matchup of Trump vs. Clinton?
It
isn't easy to distract people from an apocalypse; you need the strongest
distractors. The ultimate showdown between man (brutish, impatient,
celebrating emotion over intellect) and woman (patient, emphasizing logic and
strategy) is almost distracting enough so that we don't notice that neither
candidate seriously addresses the conflicts flaring up around us.
The candidates do promise
"defense" against our enemies, but they offer no recognition that
U.S. policies created these enemies and in many cases nurtured and supported
them. They offer no recognition that our overly large and neglected
population needs enemies and war just to establish a coherent, defined society.
Certainly neither candidate deals with
the fundamental concern that, just as the 10,000 years of human
"civilization" before us showed no progress in figuring
out alternatives to war, so our species has failed again, in our time, to figure out
an alternative. This is big news, perhaps the biggest piece of unreported
news today, along with the genetic engineering and AI robots that are lining up
to come to our rescue (i.e. replace us) after we kill ourselves.
From this point of view, the current
presidential race is not a struggle between man and woman- it's a sideshow to
distract us. Whether the brutish man or the diplomatic woman wins, either way we
will be manipulated into war.
What about men and women?
After the war, my glimpses indicate, people will be concerned with the
endless variety of genders possible through genetic engineering. With
mastery of human/parasite relations (see Prologue), we may be freed from sexual reproduction,
possibly freed from sexual desire, a confusing prospect indeed. Why must
my mind be filled with such profound conundrums, only a few decades removed
from relevance, while my vote can go only to one of two people arguing relatively simplistic and badly defined issues?
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