“DUBYA"
Are Corporations
Natural?
for
Peter Lamborn Wilson
Fuck
yes they’re natural.
Let’s
cut back to nature and see what we get.
Biotic
nature has only the restraints Evolution’s brought:
––Competition constant, buzzing and
shaping,
––Stomach-size and the like,
––Necessity of gobble-guard,
––Appetite simplicity.
The mathematics of the situation known
as “a wild animal” are that
such
great numbers are pressed against probability that the animal must
be
pure/ innocent/ hopping greed just to keep even, to press back
against
that funnel and hold a little fistful, a bodyful, of life for
awhile.
Desire is of course the motive force
from the gitgo for every
possible
living move, from dart of paramecium to massive whale humpings
in
Sargasso Sea to each thread loop in a large quilt. Desire can be
defined
as, first, mental picture of an alternate state and, second,
urge
to go there.
Generally speaking, conditions keep
desire on a pragmatic level.
Robin
pulls worm from wet earth and is occupied by the eating of same
for
a while, then does it again. Then is full
and, having no working
icebox,
lets desire ebb.
Occasionally a weasel will go “wild”
in a henhouse - in the artificial
enclosure
of domesticity - and slaughter more of those trapped, super-
productive
chickens than it could ever eat. Because
it’s quick, the weasel’s
kill,
part of a pauseless dance, built into a single impulse. Or it may
have
developed a gourmet taste, in the henhouse aesthetic of excess,
for
fresh artery blood, and sometimes for brains.
But usually all the work is done on
the edges, where one desire
meets
another. The balance of nature kindly
fits a fuzzy suit of particular
limits
around a person. Nobody, almost nobody,
goes wild in the wild.
*****
Civilization, of course, starts with
the placing of life outside
the
intelligent temporality of a continual play of necessity –– i.e.,
the
cultivation and control of plants. Corn
becomes stupid.
And, of course, the amazing boss who’s
had the wit to implement
this
–– well, his children become like the corn. But
then a whole lot
of
cross-currents and hybridizations burgeon. Mutations
flourish
uninhibited
by dull or slow survival-reason. weasel-in-the-henhouse
becomes
a social ploy, the generation of heroes. To
a certain extent,
castles
are built in the air.
Human desire is checked by hastily
constructed moralities, by
what
might be called the lassitude of the normal.
Normalcy creates a
texture
that slows desire by its viscosity.
A mock nature within culture is created
that complicates desire
and
causes it to flow and roll and repeat, especially repeat, repeat
past
nutrition and heat, till it’s achieved addiction.
Necessity either disappears or swells
monstrously, depending on your
point
of view.
Power, which began and grew as simple
personal security, wobbles
and
balloons in the ether, replacing air, which is then forgotten.
Water is replaced by gossip, soil by
automation, wild animals by
the
institution of psychology. Then art, the
light of the first rubbings
against
nature’s balance, is replaced by advertising.
Throughout all this, competition, every
more desperately, creates
the
space around each individual in which it can glow and buzz and exert
slavery. The more-or-less of this factor constitutes
the apex of all
the
SUV’s, cell phones, bud lites and ding dongs that make up current
religious
paraphernalia.
Naturally,
hierarchy sets in. It’s the awful piling
up that occurs
when
the details don’t plunge into the submolecular (as with the measure-
ment
of a coastline). With the advantages of
artificial movement that
have
proliferated, it (hierarchy) becomes, after the pretentiousness of
the
church weakens, and altruism is number-crunched, through the thin
saving
grace and perversity of art, it becomes business, which grows,
having
no real rival, and as it grows the hierarchy casts off all cere-
monial
disguise and hunkers naked as –– Corporation.
(The
word, from its roots, implies the death of the spirit.)
If this isn’t a natural process, I’ll
eat a computer.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
So –– viewing corporations as a natural
excrescence, we can act
vis-a-vis
their presence as we do vis-a-vis the rest of nature:
Let’s hang on to the sense of nature
as being separate from us
for
a moment (epoch) more. Let’s think of
the corporation as nature
and
of ourselves and the finer bumblings of civilization as being
“human.” If there are contradictions built into this
view, that’s
endearingly
human, and workable.
CORPORATIONS AS RESOURCE. Yes! Step
one:simply start mining
it. Go in with shovels and bulldozers. Dig it out.
Process the ore.
Distribute
the useful metal product. And if it takes
something suspiciously
corporation-shaped
to accomplish this, let’s call it government. ––
Wait
a sec. Folks are presently biased against
that term, so perhaps
we
can substitute a new one: “charge.”
Organizations for Good Charge
may
freely spring up to moderate any undue centralization of charge force.
The mining process should be accompanied
by other metaphors, attack-
verbs: Clearcut growth and make good things from it.
Gather all lique-
faction
in great jars, distill it and make it available for drinking.
Go
hunting for the wild animals (psychological entities, remember?)
within
the corporate areas. Don’t worry about
overuse of these resources.
Nature
will provide. Extinction, if it occurs,
can be celebrated as the
clearing-away
side of Evolution.
With a nudge here and a little initiative
there (and these moves
are
both human and natural), we can turn our attention to corporations
just
as the good citizens of the 18th and 19th centuries turned their
attention
to the rivers, forests, coal-fields and buffalo herds that
lay
about them.
If any justification for this turning
of the social head is
required,
we can with all the perspicacity in the world look upon
corporations
as our forebears looked upon other categories of nature:
––As a bounty for which we can pretend
infinity, like the passenger
pigeons. (Pretense is, we all know, the prerequisite
to
effective action.)
––As something that deserves attack, since it emanates hurricanes
of monopoly, wolfpacks of thievery, locust-plagues of neglect.
––As, nevertheless, delicious and there.
*****
Should the corporations (Heaven forfend)
be rendered extinct, it
will
be time to examine CHARGE carefully, to seek a balance between
positive
and negative, to let lightning and all its implications “fill
the
gap” the corporations will have left.
Contingency will re-spin what’s spun
out, and that’s all we can
hope
for. Meanwhile, the corporations will
have been a MIGHTY TASTY
SNACK.
O U T L I N
E
I. Adventure in and under piles of bricks
A. Brown
Recluse hobbles into cave.
1. Anybody home? Milk drips from
ceiling.
2. Feet sink in black silt, slight thirst.
3. Weasels per acre.
B.
Sticks cover the poison shore.
1. It’s not really poison; it’s alka-seltzer.
II. Gum frozen on a city bench.
A.
Inside, thinking “shore,” is a magenta arsenic
grain.
1. Pleasure ruins the cold ramance.
2. Corn production in Madagascar (1893)
B.
Ten polyps rise to conquer the scene.
1. Scene III ––Edward enters, with a trombone.
2. Bent woodwinds tumble from police van, I mean wagon.
a) Pitches of pain, or
paint.
b) Grim flinches of the
lymph. . .
c) Howdy, Boss!
III. Soaked in pine-needle liquor, the hermit speaks.
A.
“Imagine cradling a new-born virus.”
1. Drool slicks from his flushed lips.
2. Two or three.
B.
June speckles the highway with frogs.
1. Sachaverell Sitwell drains his coffee cup of ouzo.
a) Heavy footsteps on
the stair. . .
b) It’s Louis Armstrong!
C.
In twos, the creepy echoes linger.
1. Coalescing into butter and eggs, not to mention scant oratory.
with
Sierra Collom
3-31-98
S o
E ven
P leasure
T akes
U s
A long,
G ently,
E ver
N earer,
A h,
R evolving
I n
A
N imbus