Wallowing in Filth

This sty in which we find ourselves has one more problem, a problem for which sties have always been renowned: it is very dirty. Not merely in the usual way. The farms have grown so large, so productive, so destructive, that they have covered, or are swiftly covering, the entire planet with their filth. Whether we speak of our “spent” radioactive fuel rods which will require artificial cooling for the next ten thousand years to prevent them exploding, or of carbon dioxide levels which have already begun to trigger a pan-species genocide deadlier than that which exterminated the dinosaurs, or any of a dozen other impending catastrophes, it is easy to see that our shit, the farms’ shit, the combined national shit from every nation, stinks worse than any dungheap we’ve ever made before.

We have created a vast amount of filth in which we will not be allowed to wallow indefinitely. Our time is limited; but then, our time has always been limited. We are only animals, after all, mere beasts of burden, who exist only on the whim of our betters, and only so that they may profit from our labors. It is only our time, the time of the animals, which is limited; not their time, the time of the farmers. 

Wealth can, of course, contrary to the repeated claims of the celebrities on television, buy a palace on a mountain, far from the effects of climate change or the nuclear fuel dumps – just as wealth can buy more safety, better food, better health care, a longer life, a more beautiful face. You cannot have these things; your children, your friends, your lovers cannot have these things; but your owners can.

Wealth cannot buy happiness, our owners have taught us to mindlessly repeat. We all know, however, exactly how happy we are when we have no wealth - no food, nowhere to sleep, no clean water to drink, no clothes. Happiness without a bare minimum of wealth is possible only through insanity. 

And we all know that there are those who have so much wealth that they are quite literally unable to count it, and yet whose only occupation is amassing more of it by stealing food from the mouths of our children. These are our owners, our betters, the success stories, the billionaires and trillionaires, those whose advice we listen to, whose interviews we attend closely, and whose books we buy; these are the farmers who we long to become, and for whose pleasure alone we toil as our parents toiled and as our children will toil.

Wealth can ensure that while we, mere beasts of burden, suffer from climate change, from pollution, from recession, from financially broken families, homelessness, famine, drought, diseases which we cannot afford to treat, there will be a few who continue to be above such dreary concerns, whose access to luxury and pleasure will continue to be almost without limit, indeed will continue to grow, day by day, as the billions starve, even as we gasp our last; and we should be grateful, to know this as we die, for it is, after all, their comfort, after all, their benefit, their profit, their joy, that is the one and only purpose of our every animal breath – at least, that is, until we have succeeded in defining, not just in words but in a solid reality, a useful and worthy meaning for that elusive little word, “postcolonial”; a word which can be defined simply enough in words, yet has proved rather harder, thus far, to construct in experience.

"Postcolonial" means “after we have all had enough of farming people and enough of being farmed.”

Postcolonial means what happens next.