“6/16/2009, 12:34pm EST”
Mayor Mike cancels summer
Mayor Bloomberg announced today that summer in New York City would be cancelled due to budgetary constraints. “It simply costs too much to run all those air conditioners.”, Bloomberg said at a press conference given today. The city plans to set the dial to cool and rainy until winter, even going so far as to establish a deal to sell excess rainwater to the sun parched southwest.
Good stuff, and it reminds me…
Humans have somehow got it in their heads that they are both masters of the universe and subject to the whims of forces ultimately beyond their control. This blatant cognitive dissonance is sustained by the small-picture, often psychological utility of each contradictory stance at different points in space-time.
We trumpet human dominionism whenever we are exploiting something else, and then we talk, amongst ourselves, about how “life is full of surprises” and “the more you know, the less you know” and “life is one long education.” Meanwhile, our “ingenious” “solutions” are only solutions for so long before they are revealed to be even greater problems than the ones they meant to resolve. (Fossil fuels and global warming, anyone?) David Ehrenfeld’s The Arrogance of Humanism is a phenomenal and timeless expression of this idea (see Seminal Reading link in the sidebar).
Despite our many self-indulgent pretenses, we do acknowledge that we cannot control the weather. Duh. Yet passages like the above are still funny to us, because they call out the lies we live. They call out the fact that we are emperors without clothes, and what can we do but laugh about our own failings?
Well, maybe we could try to change. If we stopped pretending to be great in order to justify our various thefts and usurpations, we would still have things to laugh about. I promise.
Never leave home without it.
