Ain't poker the best metaphoric symbol for our culture?? We have this fascination with gambling and always focussing on who's number one. Poker epitomizes the process of selecting number one's from out of the hordes in ways so quick to identify and so easy to embrace. We bet on our capacity to beat the other guy/girl down in the immediate time frames using nothing but our ingenuity and capital assets. Hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people invest their life resources, their childrens' children's stake in the future, in a gamble to come out number one now. In essence poker players bet their lives in this culture against all possible odds, that just this once one of them will get to be at the top of the hierarchical pyramid.
This is important to consider. Only one person can be number one. Only a dozen or so people can receive any payback at all, out of the thousands who coughed up amounts that would feed them for a year, or buy a new car or appliances for the family, or provide health care, and so forth. This is the US in a nutshell; the willingness to sell out our children to get something now, and not something that is lasting or sustaining--but something transient and temporal. The viciousness of the game is in every possible way indicative of the viciousness of our consumer culture. The craveness of actually playing with money, nearly always someone elses when you have broken through the first few layers, a symbolic form of meaningless actual value, is quite revealing. Poker is the hucksterism of the revival meeting the carny's call to step right this way.
Why is this so appropriate as a cultural meme? Well, think about our relationship with the finite resources of the earth, and our addiction to energy that forces us to gamble away our childrens' children's future. Think COAL. There is only so much coal on the earth; it will take another quarter of a billion years to make more. And yet we are willing here and now to dig it all up and use it at any cost in order to get that last bit of life out of our capital investments in playing the game. The irony is hysterical in that it takes so much coal to power up the production of poker playing. And like the players at the table, who are only living in the immediacy of each and every hand, forgetting about their children, their families, their lives, we are constantly choosing to forget the future. In 2003, thanks in large part to coal burning, climatologists found record-high levels of climate altering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the planet. A forest, by contract, can store twenty time more carbon than grasslands or croplands or pastures. Its leaf litter slows erosion and adds organic matter to the soil. Its dense vegetation stops flooding. Its headwater streams purify the creeks and rivlets below. A contiguous forest ensures species diversity that assures the future of necessary decomposers, nutrient transference, initial protein provisioning, and so forth. A forest, in short, does all the things that the mining and burning of coal cannot do. A forest is for the future.
Peak oil is past, and the need for energy resources is ever greater. Coal is becoming the cheap oil of the now. But unlike oil, coal is a solid mineral form of carbon and requires the removal of the earth to make it accessible. To do this destroys the surface of the planet. All the forests, and grasses, and species are removed and what is left is waste and toxicity. The water that runs off through this landscape is hazardous and toxic to all live. It is carrying silts and metals and debris that choke streams, kill lakes, and fill up river bottoms. The more we take our energy now, the less we will have in the future. We are playing a game of poker with the planet. And we are forgetting that the planet is the house. The house never ever plays with its own money. The house always wins, no matter who comes out on top in a tournament. The house doesn't care who number one is, since the house will stand, while all others die. The house does however require a steady flow of life and people who are willing to gamble with their future. When the people stop coming the house cannot survive. When we finally use up the coal and the last few number one winners are left, they will realize that the house can no longer sustain itself. The Earth will be bust, it will be bankrupt of its sustainability for living beings. We will have lost the big bet, and our future generations will simply cease to be.
You have discovered arachnoanarchy
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