Do you remember the world before the internet? I do, and the people in it were smarter than they are today. Considerably. When the internet was a brand new thing, and we all rushed to check it out with our dial-up connection and 56k modem, it promised to make us smarter. Remember that? The internet was going to make us all smarter, make our democracy more responsive to the will of the people, and bring us together to help us understand each other’s differences while we unraveled the mysteries of the universe together with science and technology. Do you remember that bullshit?
In reality, people started getting dumber right away. By the turn of the century the process was well underway. Today, well, look around. To call it “idiocy” would insult honest idiots everywhere. It’s more like an explosion of pernicious depravity and small-mindedness of every kind. The internet did not eliminated prejudices; it magnified them. Instead of helping people understand each other’s differences, the internet allowed socially isolated bigots of every kind to find other people just like themselves so they can feel stronger together. The internet didn’t make people smarter, but everyone thinks they know everything now, and just look at what it has done for democracy.
The internet is directly responsible for this steep decline in people’s intellectual abilities, and the more time you spend online the dumber you get. There is one very important reason for this. The truth only lives in the real world. The truth about anything and everything is always more complicated than people can comprehend, let alone describe. There’s always more to reality than meets the eye, and any attempt to translate reality into information is bound to hide as much as it reveals. Information is simply a poor substitute for experience.
It’s not just that the internet is full of malicious lies and intentionally misleading information, but even accurate information on the internet is likely to mislead if it is not backed up with experience in the real world. That’s just the nature of linear symbolic representation. The internet is made entirely of linear symbolic representation. There isn’t a speck of truth anywhere in it.
The more time you spend online, the less time you spend in the real world. So the more you think you know about the world, because of what you learned online, the less you actually know about the world, because you weren’t there. Instead, you were staring at a screen. You traded your own truth, for someone else’ information. That’s always dangerous.
The internet gives us the illusion that we can know the whole world, remotely, through the information available on the internet, but this is only an illusion. Instead, at best, the internet offers a collection of witness testimonies about the world. On the internet, as in court, it can be difficult to tell a credible witness from an incredible one, unless you know the right questions to ask, and the right questions are the ones that you already know the answers to.
While you may find it difficult to find accurate, helpful information online, your online behavior is a very reliable source of information about you. So, the more you try to learn about the world using tools like Google’s search engine, the more Google learns about how you think, what you think and what you think about. The more time you spend on Facebook, the more Facebook knows about your personal life, your friends, your likes and dislikes. Between them, they can deduce your hopes, your fears, your desires and your emotional vulnerabilities.
This information about you is very accurate, up to date, and provides an ever more complete picture of who you are, as more and more devices learn to recognize you. Your phone, your laptop, the office security camera, your car, your TV, your game console and your fit bit, all know who you are. Soon your refrigerator, thermostat, and light bulbs will recognize you on sight, by the sound of your voice, and by the eccentricities that make you, you, and all of that information is for sale to anyone who thinks they can make a buck from it.
The internet is not a good place to be, and I’m not here to make it better. I’m here because the internet is where despondent and depressed people go to get frustrated, and where frustrated people go to become depressed and despondent. The internet is where capable people become incapacitated. It’s what happens to the lives of people who don’t know what to do with their lives. I’m just here to say: “Don’t let it happen to you!”
Just stop with this bullshit that “we are all in this together.” We are not all in this together, as any musician, restaurateur or bartender can tell you. A few people, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and other high-tech scumbags are getting even filthier rich as the rest of us retreat from the real world into their online cesspit. Dr Anthony Fauci, who would otherwise only be remembered for his leaky bio-weapons lab at Ft. Detrick, can enjoy his newfound fame and gets to play this amusing game of “Simon Says” with a terrified American public. Big Pharma, like Pfizer and Moderna just had a truckload of money dumped at their doorstep, even though they’ve been ripping us off for decades and usurping our democracy with the money they extort from us. They recognize the pandemic for what it is, an opportunity to tighten their stranglehold on the throats of the American people, and to rake in a hell of a lot of cash.
These people do not share our pain. They’ve always treated us commoners as though we were infected with some dreadful disease, and we are, it’s called poverty, and they cause it. Thanks to the pandemic response, they are now completely immune to it. These people don’t mind wearing masks in public because they know that if we had any sense we’d kill them all, on sight, if we could recognize them.
For the cowardly little twerps who sold their souls for the meaningless life of an office drone, the pandemic has been a godsend. For these people, believing that they are “smart” matters to them. They’d much rather believe that the decisions they made in life were guided by intelligence rather than cowardice, but it ain’t so. They chose the security of a soul-sucking job in a suicidal culture rather than risk the poverty, hardship and unpredictability of a life outside of it. A life lived in fear is bound to suck, but the sight of homeless desperate people begging for spare change scares the shit out of them and keeps them in line.
All these people gave up for the pandemic was their commute, and the necessity of having to get dressed for work in the morning. They already spent most of their life in front of a screen, because they were already deathly afraid of the outside world. For them, the pandemic just reinforces their own proclivities and prejudices. Since all they do is “Zoom” each other all day, its no surprise that they’ve completely forgotten about the people who live in the real world. Unless you are in their “feed” they don’t even know you exist.
Among these sniveling desk jockeys, journalists deserve special recognition. Remember this. The reason most journalists became journalists, was because they couldn’t pass a science course to save their lives. If they could’ve passed calculus, they’d have a better job. Journalists don’t know shit about this disease, and they don’t know enough about science to challenge the bullshit story being fed to them about the pandemic.
For journalists, the pandemic has become an excuse for laziness. Why bother investigating political corruption, corporate crime or the environmental crises when you can just regurgitate press releases from the CDC and local authorities ad nauseam without ever having to leave your bedroom? Journalists ignore the impacts of the pandemic response on people in our community, because investigating them would require effort. They continue to tow the line on government-sponsored fear-mongering propaganda because it is easy, not because it is true, and they berate us for non-compliance because they desperately want to believe that their own obsequiousness is “smart” rather than cowardly.
No, we have never been “all in this together,” in this country. This pandemic response helped some and hurt others. It may have saved some lives, but it certainly destroyed others. Perhaps precautions are warranted, but berating people for non-compliance with draconian civil rights restrictions is not, because this crisis deserves an intelligent response, not a cowardly one.
Our ancestors practiced Shamanism. Before Christ, Mohamed, Buddha or L. Ron Hubbard, humanity was guided, for tens of thousands of years, by the prophetic visions of certain, “touched” individuals. Some shamans experienced visions involuntarily, others sought these visions, sometimes through feats of extreme endurance, often by ingesting specific plant or fungal allies. In these altered states of consciousness, shamans communed with the gods directly, and they viewed these visions as their sacred guiding light, which they, literally, carved into stone.
Civilized people did their level best to exterminate shamans and shamanic people wherever they encountered them, and civilized people encountered shamanic cultures everywhere they went looking for new resources to exploit. Those efforts were largely successful. Today, laws prohibit most plant and fungal allies and the visions they induce are derided as “hallucinations,” “psychotic delusions,” and “madness.” Many people who consume these allies do so under the most profane of conditions, as a “good-time” party drug, without respect, understanding, or conviction for, of, or in, the validity, depth and relevance of their experience.
Civilization requires a hierarchical relationship, especially when it comes to important issues like religion and personal experience. Civilization does not allow people to communicate with God without a middle-man, nor does it give credence to the direct lived experience of an individual. Instead, civilization seeks to mediate and objectify every aspect of human experience so as to instill the values of civilization on every individual subjected to it. In this way, civilized people destroyed thousands of shamanistic cultures, and converted them to alcoholism.
Still, our affinity for plant and fungal allies remains strong, our dissatisfaction with mediated experience resurfaces, and our undeniable propensity for ineffable mystical experiences brings us back to our shamanic roots again and again. Many shamanic traditions involve dance and music. My shamanic trance music is inspired by all of them, and rooted in none of them. Instead, my music springs from my own experience with shamanic trance states, and reflects my rejection of civilized musical structures and instruments. The sound is entirely new, completely original, and totally timeless.
This music is the result of my 17+ year musical journey of discovery with the didgeridoo, as well as my odd fascination with the exotic detritus of post-industrial consumerism. It combines my thirst for reverent dance music with my passion for finding interesting new sounds in the strange things I find abandoned around me. In Shamanic Trance Groove I offer a range of tempos and a variety of rhythms that you can you for your own self-guided trance work.
You’ll also find that Shamanic Trance Groove makes a great soundtrack to your physical workout. The sound of the didgeridoo intimately connects to the natural rhythms of the body through the act of breathing, so our bodies resonate deeply to the sound of it. However you choose to interact with this music and integrate it into your life, I hope you enjoy Shamanic Trance Groove and listen to it often.
My partner, Amy Gustin had a great idea the other day. This is not at all unusual for her. A lot of my columns begin with one of her great ideas. The other day, Amy was perusing some books about the cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet while contemplating the flora and fauna of Ice Age Europe, and speculating about the Paleolithic origins of certain pagan European Christmas symbols, when she said this: “Environmentalists should take over Christmas.”
“What?” I replied.
She explained that a lot of European pagan Christmas symbols celebrate the Boreal Forest and an arctic climate. We have Christmas trees. Christmas is the only time of year when snow is popular, and Santa lives at the North Pole and gets around on a sled pulled by caribou. All of these things remind us of the arctic, and they should remind us that the arctic is undergoing dramatic changes due to global climate change.
Can you think of a better symbol for global climate change that Santa Claus? First, he drives a zero emission, carbon neutral vehicle, and he’s been doing it for centuries. Second, everything Santa owns faces imminent destruction, unless we can stop the sea ice from shrinking. Santa, Mrs. Claus, all of the elves and the whole toy factory are headed straight for a watery grave at the bottom of the ocean, unless we stop global warming now.
Suddenly, Christmas made sense to me in a whole new way, and I knew I had to write about it. Global Climate Crisis is the biggest challenge we face as a species; it deserves our biggest holiday, especially since those Sciencism dorks took over Earth Day. Fuck them and their March for Science. The people who gave us nuclear proliferation, and put 250 different persistent man-made toxins in every mother’s breast milk came out and walked all over Earth Day to tell us that scientists agree that global warming is a real phenomena, and by the way, go vaccinate your kids, eat your GMOs and have faith in Elon Musk’s space program. May the force be with you. Nanu Nanu.
We need Christmas if we are going to turn around the climate crisis. Forget about the baby Jesus and the Catholic Church’s first victim of sexual abuse. Jesus has always been a divisive figure, even as a baby, and nativity scenes often stir controversy. Who needs it? If you want to put out your creche, go ahead, just leave the holy family in the box. Go ahead and put out all of the animals. They’re the only thing anyone really likes about your creche anyway. Then go ahead and add a few more animals. Christmas is all about protecting biodiversity, so go wild on the animals.
Coca Cola has done a great job of making the polar bear into a symbol of Christmas, and we should adopt that symbol wholeheartedly. Instead of Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus, put a mother polar bear and her two cubs in your nativity scene. I’m all for wise men, if you can find any, but how wise can your men be if they’re standing next to a hungry polar bear.
Global Climate Crisis effects everyone, and it’s time to make Christmas into a holiday for everyone. From now on, Christmas is about the North Pole, and the gift of a stable climate. Being born doesn’t get you a holiday, in my book. Jesus has a holiday, it’s the one he lived and died for, and Christians should go ahead and do Easter big, but Christmas is too important to let Christians hog it to themselves. Besides, Christmas is better without Jesus.
We’ve still got Santa Claus, but now Christmas is about saving Santa. We’ve got reindeer and sleigh-bells, snow and Christmas trees and we’ve got all of the animals coming together to help their friend the polar bear. We’ve got the Nutcracker to help us crack the nut of global climate change, and we can re-edit the Charlie Brown Christmas Special so that Linus’ big speech reflects the holiday’s bold new direction. Everything you love about Christmas will still be there for you, but now, Christmas has a mission.
A lot has happened since I first wrote these words a couple of years ago. For one, Amy and I had the opportunity to visit Lascaux and Chauvet, as well as many other European prehistoric art sites. We also visited the Arctic Circle and the reindeer herding Sami people in Northern Sweden and Norway. Inspired by these experiences, Amy wrote a new Christmas myth, and I composed a musical soundtrack to accompany it. We call it “Sarah’s Search for Santa.” It is the story of a young girl’s search for the meaning of Christmas, and it is now available as a CD or digital download. We love it, and I think you will too. Here’s a little bit about it:
Sarah’s Search for Santa, A Different Kind of Christmas Album
If Santa Claus is a myth, does that mean Christmas isn’t real? This question sends the young protagonist, “Sarah,” on a magical quest to find the deepest roots of Christmas. By drawing on the animist and shamanic elements of the world’s most popular holiday, Sarah’s Search for Santa traces the origins of the season’s most beloved icon, Santa Claus, and his flying reindeer, back to their beginnings in Ice Age Europe. Amy Gustin, host of the Living Earth Connection, a radio show, blog and podcast that examines the roots of our current global ecological crisis from the perspective of animist spirituality, and musician, record producer and filmmaker, John Hardin have teamed up to produce a new and very unusual Christmas album that the whole family can enjoy.
This modern fairy tale uses spare language, old European Christmas melodies and mesmerizing instrumental music to take us back in time, through the eyes of a young girl, whose parents recently told her that Santa wasn’t real. In Sarah’s Search for Santa, Sarah finds a new ornament on her Christmas tree, left for her by a mysterious stranger who visits her home on Christmas Eve. As she follows the stranger outside, she finds herself in an unfamiliar forest where she meets a reindeer who takes her on a magical journey through space and time to find Santa Claus.
Sarah’s Search for Santa sprang out of Gustin and Hardin’s quest to learn about, and connect with, their own indigenous European animist roots. Their quest took them to ancient rock art sites in France, Sweden and Norway, medieval villages in Germany, and North of the Arctic Circle to meet Sami people and study their culture. This new fairy tale draws from all of these experiences and culminates in a gentle story, set to original music, told in a way that everyone can enjoy, and a child can understand.
“I always loved fairy tales growing up, and never lost my attraction for them” Gustin explains, “I eventually came to realize that the magical quality that appealed to me in fairy tales was the animist worldview. Animism is the perception that the world around us is alive and intelligent. All of our early human ancestors were animists, and fairy tales are one of the last bastions of animism in Western Civilization. Fairy tales remain one of the best ways to express an animist worldview, because stories convey meaning on a deeper level than facts, logic and statistics. In regards to Christmas, Christmas trees, reindeer, Amanita mushrooms and Santa Claus are not unbroken Christmas traditions, but these symbols reemerge because they remind us of our indigenous shamanic beginnings, and these animist origins have a powerful attraction. Reindeer, for example, resonate so deeply with us because they were critical to our ancestor’s survival during Europe’s Ice Ages.”
“The Amanita muscaria mushroom has fascinated me since I was young” Gustin offered, “I’ve bought toys and art with this symbol, because seeing it always makes my heart leap with joy. I have since learned that these mushrooms have an ancient shamanic history that pre-dates their magical association with Christmas. In Sarah’s Search for Santa the mushroom acts as a guiding spirit, and the reindeer eats one before their flight. Reindeer are known to search out these mushrooms and eat them, which ties into the legend of flying reindeer.”
“Sarah’s Search for Santa grew out of a variety of interests: a deep love and fascination with reindeer, the Taiga forest, tundra, and arctic cultures and habitats, as well as European Ice Age art and animals, and a rekindling of my love for Christmas celebrations.” Gustin continues, “At first, these seemed like separate unconnected topics, but by following the golden threads, I discovered that they all connected. The cultures of the arctic provide good models for how our European Ice Age ancestors lived. Reindeer kept Ice Age Europeans alive during the coldest periods of our history. At the La Madeleine rock shelter near Les Eyzies, France, reindeer make up 87-100% of all the animal remains found in almost every layer of excavation. Reindeer not only provided food to our Ice Age ancestors, but people relied on reindeer hides for warm clothing, bones, tendons and antlers for making tools and weapons, and guts and hooves for everything from cooking utensils to storage containers. You can find beautiful depictions of reindeer made by ancient people in the caves of La Combarelles and Font de Gaume in Les Eyzies France, so it’s no surprise to see reindeer reappear in European Christmas celebrations centuries later. Sarah’s Search for Santa reminds us of the deep connection we have with these remarkable animals.”
The painted caves of Southwestern France also inspire the music that accompanies Sarah’s Search for Santa. “The acoustics in these painted caves are extraordinary.” Hardin points out. “In Grotte de Cougnac, archaeologists tell us that ancient people played the stalagmites in the cave like a giant stone marimba. While touring these caves, I realized that the art depicted on the walls only tells part of the story. The sound of these places, and the music people made within them must have had a central role in the rites and rituals conducted there. After visiting the caves, I began imagining what kind of music prehistoric Ice Age people might have made in these sacred spaces, based on archaeological findings, indigenous tribal music, and surviving shamanic traditions.”
“About half of the music in Sarah’s Search for Santa conveys this tribal, shamanic vibe with drums, rattles, overtone flutes and didgeridoo. The balance of the music to Sarah’s Search for Santa expresses the young girl’s sense of wonder, and love of Christmas with sounds that hearken back to medieval Europe: a reedy organ ambiance, sleigh bells, a tinkling glockenspiel, and traditional Christmas melodies played on the recorder.” Hardin explains, adding “Of course, there’s also a little magic that only modern electronics can provide.”
Sarah’s Search for Santa consists of two tracks, pt 1, Sarah Meets a Reindeer, and pt 2, Finding Santa Claus. This full length album is available as a download for $7.00, and as a CD for $12 at johnhardin.bandcamp.com. If you are in Humboldt County, you can also find it at The Rocking Horse, and People’s Records on the Plaza in Arcata, and at Works Records in Eureka.
OK, let’s say we lost 10 people to Covid-19 this year in Humboldt County. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll concede the most recent death of an asymptomatic 38 year old man with a serious heart condition as one of those 10, even though his actual cause of death remains indeterminate, but just for the sake of argument let’s say that Covid-19 killed all 10 of those people.
More people than that get murdered every year on Humboldt County pot farms. God forbid you should mention that fact in conversation, let alone publish it in the media around here, and God help you if you try to do anything about it, because no one else will, least of all our Sheriff. Honestly, has anyone suggested that cannabis farmers take a conflict resolution/anger management course as a requirement for getting a cannabis business license? Has anyone around here even said, “You know, we should make a concerted effort, as a community, to prevent and discourage murder on Humboldt County’s cannabis farms because our sheriff’s department is already overwhelmed with unsolved murder cases”?
Why is a dozen or more murders, of mostly healthy young people, every year, in our small community, not front page news everyday, like Covid-19? That’s because we know how to ignore a crisis and pretend that it doesn’t exist. First, we just don’t give a shit about peon workers from out of the area or our whacked-out meth-fiend neighbors for that matter. Second, we ignore the murders when they happen, and finally, we threaten and condemn anyone who brings it up thereafter. Easy-peasy. We do it all the time.
About 40 people commit suicide in Humboldt County in a good year, and this is not a good year. How many extra suicides will happen this year because people were afraid to touch someone who really needed a hug. For too many of us, life was already too hard, and for many, seeing another human being’s smiling face was the best thing that happened to them all day. Social isolation has been recognized by the UN as “cruel and unusual punishment,” for times like these, when common cruelty is just not cruel enough. If you add the forty suicides a year, to the dozen-plus pot farm murders, you’ve got more than fifty deaths a year, for as long as I can remember, that we, as a community, did nothing about.
Our piece de resistance of crisis denial must be, however, the 50 to 60 drug overdose deaths that happen every year here in Humboldt County. With a little work, we could be the number-one county in the entire nation for per-capita drug overdose deaths, and no one would even care. How did we become so fiercely competitive in the field of crisis denial?
In the case of drug overdose deaths, we went the extra mile. We gave it 120%! Not only did we not give a fuck about the people when they were alive, ignore their deaths, and chastise anyone who mentioned it, but we also added that one crucial step that separates the scum from the sludge. We vilified the victims, and treated them like criminals. We criminalized an epidemic, institutionalized stigma, and rationalized cruelty as “tough love.” Then we locked the door and threw away the key.
This could work for Covid-19 too! We hate this disease, and we want it out of our community. Frankly, the vulnerable in our community, the old, the fat, and the sick, are not that attractive either. Getting them both off of the streets will make our community much safer and more beautiful. Why should the rest of us have to cover our faces and avoid our friends just to protect those losers. No one wants them around, so just let them go somewhere else. We could turn this whole complicated health crisis into a simple law-enforcement problem with just a few strokes of the pen.
We could drive Covid-19 underground so that people will hardly see it in our shopping districts or at tourist attractions, where it might impact local businesses. The media will have the good sense to ignore the deaths, make light of the inconvenience that sick people create for the rest of us, and reinforce these winning attitudes. Meanwhile, we can all get back to living our best lives without the dehumanization of masks or the cruel and inhuman torture of social distancing guidelines.
We can do this! Nobody knows how to ignore a health-care crisis better than the people of Humboldt County, and nobody vilifies the vulnerable more vociferously. It’s time to take a stand and say “No” to Covid-19. We will not let it steal our lives. We will not cower from it. We will survive, and we will be stronger for having survived.
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