More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

The thing about that Woody Allen quote is this: because Woody Allen is a comedian, most people read this as “just a joke.” Lemme tellya how bad things are. Things are so bad… But comedy and tragedy often arrive in the same limo, and while this is a joke, for me it’s so much more: an accurate and useful poetic description of our collective predicament. Given the past year’s news about climate chaos, given the ongoing extinction event in which we live, given the culture of civilization’s seeming inability to reduce its population and its jackbootprint, given that culture’s apparent determination to dominate, exploit, control, use, monetize, and rule the world at all costs, we find that human extinction is now, well and truly, on the table as a topic for legitimate discussion. But even if we™ manage to take a different path, we will surely meet despair and utter hopelessness along the way. Either way, it seems, we are in for the mother of all resets.

Woody gets right to the heart of it, I think: we may have a choice we can make. (I add “may” because we do not know whether anything we do at this point will interrupt the great forces already in motion.) To avoid extinction, says Woody, we can choose despair and utter hopelessness, which I will define here as “shutting down the global industrial-agricultural machine, ending our war against the living planet, and feeling the consequences of our actions.” It would mean admitting our failure in the matter of ruling the world. It would mean ceding our imagined “full-spectrum dominance” and entering into some sort of co-creative conversation with that big old goofy world. It would mean surrender, Dorothy (or rindete, as the case may be). This, of course, is rather a difficult sell.

And yet I think he’s exactly right. And since I know that I can survive both despair and utter hopelessness, having already done so, and since I’m less certain that I can survive extinction, I’m voting we choose the path of despair. It’s not like we™ like this system anyways, I would observe. We just think we’re stuck with it.

You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for

Billy Joel, You May Be Right

The thing about making that choice is that, from what I can see, the sooner we make it the better. If we™ shut down the global industrial-agricultural machine, we’re likely going to find out, and rather quickly, just how important the living planet is to us. Yet every day the machine chugs along we have less and less living planet left. If we want to shut it down (and the machine is going down regardless, I think… either we shut it down or, as Brother Maynard sings, “Mom’s comin’ round to put it back the way it ought to be”), then we might as well get it over with, reckon? The longer we wait, the more difficult things will be.

And that’s what makes me a Mitt Romney man. I mean, really, were I voting, he’d be my guy. If the single thing that assures our extinction, and the extinction of most of the life on this planet, is the continued functioning of the global, industrial-agricultural, fossil-fuel-burning machine, and if the way to avoid extinction is to shut down that machine as quickly as we can, then isn’t Romney our best last hope? I kept asking that as I read Matt Taibbi’s piece in Rolling Stone: like… why is it we’re against this guy? Really. Because if we want the American economy dismantled and thrown onto the trash heap of history (hoping that the rest of the global industrial economy will follow suit tout de suite), this Romney dude is the one most qualified for the job, isn’t he? All these other candidates? They’re just trying to prop up the machine in one way or another, trying to make it work better, trying to keep it chugging along. Not Romney. Given his track record, he’s clearly got very different plans.

If the choice really is despair versus extinction, then I say let’s choose despair. Let’s put Mr. Romney in office with a clear mandate to burn down the mission. It sounds insane, perhaps. The cessation of the machine is going to be rather a pain. But the continuation of this machine is going to be even more of a pain, I think. If Woody Allen is right, there’s only one clear choice: