The Virtual Rambler

Number twenty seven: 20^th August 2012

Excess

Consider gas giants such as Neptune , with its 700 mph winds. Reflect on those Yellow dwarfs and Black holes. Ponder cosmic explosions and stellar expansions that we can only dream of. And what can we make of The Big Bang , when violence on an inconceivable scale and unprecedented levels of energy are posited to have arisen out of nothing ?The Cosmic Dawn came about with excess. Did this give way to a “self-stabilising” process or one of incessant instabilities ? Before and during earthly evolution , excess was the norm , a driving force behind all of the extinctions , explosions , dryings and delugings that preceded humanity’s brief hour upon the stage. Mull over the Aztecs cranking up the human sacrifice rate in their latter days. Now muse upon the fate of their uncompromising invaders. The Spanish Empire imploded in a frenzy of inflation , spiralling military expenditure and Counter_Reformation. Some moustache-twirling German bankers known as The Fuggers were also involved. And since then ? The Industrial Revolution ! The Nuclear weapons race ! As things are out there in the excessive reaches of outer space , so it proves to be for all human societies : waning energies are presaged by hypermanic activity in a doomed effort to re-assert vanishing powers. And in either case there’s much dark matter lurking in the shadows.

Woe betide the wayfaring stranger who ventures abroad on an average U.K. Saturday night. After Business-friendly government saw fit to extend operational opportunities for pubs throughout the land , the Alcohol industry gratefully responded with Student Nights , Mad Bull Nights , Karaoke Nights and Vodka Slammer Nights. The subsequent Cossack behaviour throughout those extended opening hours led to city and village centre hullabaloos on the scale of VE Night , every night. Groups of half-dressed girls shrieking and cackling , lines of foul-mouthed youths staggering through the streets from bar to bar. Public urinating and vomiting , bottles flying through the air. For For the stay-at-homes , the choice of a hundred T.V. channels’ advertising schedules , punctuated every now and again by ‘popular’ program formats. That is , more game or ‘reality’ shows , more sport or cooking , more canal or train rides , yet more sport , some clinical pathology and more documentaries about the Nazis.

Long before our supersaturated vocabulary of Olympian commentary came into being (“Unbelievable” , “Awesome” , “Incredible” , “Fantastic” , “Indescribable”) , this planet has been subjected to several more distant excesses. Cataclysmic tectonic – or meteoric – activity laying waste successive terrestrial environments and , in due course , all of their former inhabitants. A trigger for the wanton energies of Evolution to move into top gear and a riot of new life-forms appears in the fossil record. They came to re-colonise a purged globe. Many were destined to extinction by subsequent competition and others to develop and flourish like nobody’s business ... or rather , like Business itself in our own days of global capitalism , to achieve a temporary systemic dominance. Making hay until the next transition between “that’s just how the world is” and “look at what there used to be”.

Marx predicted the destination of free-market capitalism as an all-encompassing , mad dance of unbridled desire and financial speculation that would prevail over all the inhibitions , thrift and prudence of the ‘respectable’ society of his day. He was more prescient here (in Das Capital) than in The Communist Manifesto.⁽¹⁾ Political Economists , along with satirists and country songwriters , are better served by diagnosing the ills of existing systems than in their proposals for future social or domestic felicity. Moreover , the desire for more (as everyone in marketing and professional football knows) tends to have no limits. Enough could never be enough for certain rockstars , First World War generals and for those at the hard heart of the Finance Industry.


Wig

⁽¹⁾ Look him up , old Karl , or better still , read Das Capital itself. A biography from 1999 by Francis Wheen paints a Marx who was as fond of a good joke as his namesake Groucho.

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 – Possessions, 20^th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting Stoics, 20^th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time, 20^th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't Allow, 20^th November 2013
Virtual rambler #43 – A Literary Nexus, 20^th December 2013
Virtual rambler #44 – Taking Liberties, 16^th January 2014
Virtual rambler #45 – More or Less, 20^th February 2014
Virtual rambler #46 – Under Control, 20^th March 2014
Virtual rambler #47 – Waiting, 20^th April 2014
Virtual rambler #48 – They Rose Without Trace, 20^th May 2014
Virtual rambler #49 – Bigger Impression , Smaller Footprint, 20^th June 2014
Virtual rambler #50 – Terpsichorean Instrumentations, 18^th July 2014
Virtual rambler #51 – Socially Mediated, 19^th August 2014
Virtual rambler #52 – Rambling Into The Sunset, 20^th September 2014