Last night I resorted to couch potato status and indulged in an activity I avoid most of the time: I viewed a few television programs. I did so because I was feeling miserable from the ravages of a sinus infection that refuses to give up, and I did not feel like doing much of anything except dying.
Ironically, given that particular feeling, the program I spent the most time viewing was "Last Days on Earth," a History Channel production that you would expect to find on the Discovery Channel instead. The only history aspect concerned past "natural disasters," as unnatural disasters are usually called.
The most fascinating aspect of the program, for me, consisted of brief statements from interviewed men and women in response to the question of what they would do if everybody on earth was about to be exterminated as the result of one of the "natural disasters" depicted. The scenario was this: The end has come. It is the last day. Only hours, or even minutes, of life are left for everyone. Question: What would you do?
One woman said she "would eat as much as possible."
One man said he would spend all of his money.
Another woman said she "would have a baby."
As I listened to these individuals, I tried to imagine what was going through their minds.
If the eat-all woman believes in an afterlife, why would she try to cram as much earthly food in herself as possible before going to another realm? If she does not believe, and she is satisfied that death means eternal obliteration of self, why bother about stuffing her last self-perceived body with food?
If the money-spender believes in an afterlife, does he think he can take whatever he might acquire at the last moment or hour with him to that new realm? If he does not believe, and he is satisfied that death means eternal loss of consciousness, why rush around buying things, knowing that obliteration may arrive at any moment, instead of spending the last few minutes or hours in final enjoyment of what already exists?
And as for having a baby, by which I assume the woman meant giving birth to one herself, how could that be managed within a few minutes or a few hours if she was not already pregnant and in labor? And why, even then, would she want to bring the fetus to life outside her womb when the result was about to be instant extermination?
This may seem peculiar coming from an me, an agnostic, but the only individual interviewed who made any sense to me at all was the man who said he would begin praying and pray to the end.
As I have found many times in the past when listening to and watching televised interviews with a cross-section of the public, I was reminded of the abysmal ignorance, the lack of reason, the lack even of common sense, typical of humanity. Each instance of the same reminds me of how impossible it is for me, with my limited resources, to bring education and sensibility into a humanity that persists in resisting efforts to improve upon the way Homo sapiens thinks.
I relate that reminder to all sorts of developments, such as, right now, the public mania for two of the most corrupt, morally depraved, decadent, pathologically lying demagogues in the history of U.S. politics: Hillary Clinton and "Barack Obama" (Barry Durham?). I watch and listen as these two charlatans engage in deception after deception, and I wonder how people can be so blind and stupid as not to see what is wrong with the snakeoil sales-like speeches pouring out of these two fakers as they talk about their determination to bring about "change." I wonder how they can believe that two politicians who have made themselves the bought and paid whores for the most corrupt corporations on earth, two politicians whose careers and very lives are financed by crooks of vast wealth demanding conformance to their schemes, are going to bring about change? Then I turn on the tv set once in awhile, watch and listen to comments from the public, and I no longer wonder.
H. L. Mencken posited many years ago that given the mentality of the average person, the U.S. would wind up with a moron in the White House. He was wrong. The U.S. has wound up with a series of demagogues in the White House, and at the beginning of next year, that is going to be the same result.