Celebrating the nature that really isn't nature, but we celebrate it anyway.

Today is Earth Day, that marvelous study in hypocrisy. This is not a criticism since hypocrisy is the mortar that binds together the blocks of dried bullshit that constitute the infrastructure of Wall Street and its subsidiary, the Beltway.

On the surface, Earth Day celebrates nature. But in reality, the nature we celebrate is not the green, verdant temple our poets and minstrels praise. The nature we celebrate is ours, our wonderfully destructive human nature.

Creationists have it half right. The world is divinely created, but God isn’t responsible. Rather, Earth was created by a demigod named Jehovah, who was long on anger and revenge and short on love and compassion.

After Jehovah created Adam, he created the first woman, Lilith. Lilith took a look around and decided that the Garden of Eden was a waste. She also had no intention of subordinating herself to Adam. Adam bitched to Jehovah, who replaced Lilith with Eve.

This pissed Lilith off, who transformed herself into a Serpent and had a little chit-chat with Eve, thus forcing Man to work for a living.

The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and Jehovah is getting bored. This is why he gave us dominion over nature; He figured we’d trash it. He gave us mountains to top, aquifers to drain and forests to clear cut. Our destiny clear; it is to turn Mother Earth into a barren crone who can’t stand the sight of our species.

So while our leaders pledge themselves to the preservation of nature, they fully understand that this pledge in no way impinges upon the state’s right to destroy it in the name of national and corporate security.

Where would our firebombing of Dresden have been if landmark preservationists had objected How much Agent Orange could we have dumped on Vietnam if the Department of Environmental Protection (EPA) had declared it a carcinogenic?

What Man doesn’t pave, he either defoliates or blows up.

Man has dominion, and dominion is all about power, which is only concerned with the “now” and not the consequences of its actions. For the powerful, the future is a chimera that never comes because the next hour, the next day and the next millennium are only real when they are “now.” This is freedom in its purest form—the freedom from consequences.

We breed children to clean up the messes we make, and they end up making their own messes.

The secret to a successful Earth Day celebration is to keep it unreal. We praise what little nature is left without noticing that which we have destroyed.

It’s a celebration of the hypocrisy that has gotten us to where we are today.

--Belacqua Jones