ANTHEM FOR AMERICANS
STEPHEN LEATON
Lao Tzu said that we should all be like drops of water. That perfect leaders fall to the lowest level to become one with the stillness of the lake. That they lead by example, not of great deeds, but by humble service. If everyone does this, all will be in union and life will be quiet, contemplative, and perfect.
Christ and Budda and Jain and the Sikhs all said in one form or another the same thing to love your neighbour as you would like to be loved. If everyone did this then all would be in union.
Buddhists do not like to kill anything – not because they may be a resurrected human in a lesser form but because they believe all living things are sentient and worth the living of their own lives. In a similar way, vegans do not want animals to be hurt or used or eaten. Just plants.
But life is odd. Plants, it seems, are also sentient. Plants live on sunlight, but only with nutrients from the soil, a melange of the living and dead. And albeit slowly strangle and fight their neighbours. Some overtly eat insects.
Almost all life uses or preys on some other life or the corpses of dead organisms. The very few archaic microorganisms which eat raw elements are leached from other matter, some of it organic remains. Minerals. Perhaps rare earth minerals.
In real life, people do not act, at least most, like selfless drops of water. Some. And only sometimes. They are two-faced to their neighbours. They are greedy.
Christianity for example owes its being to the killing of a man. A man who’s own religion had wars and killings in its past. David slew Goliath, a man disabled with a disease that left his sight poor. God gave Moses commandments on the top of a mountain and then when Moses went back down to his people, God smote them for disobeying the commandments that Moses had not had a chance to relay.
The natural rule of nature: the strongest in the circumstances that survive will live to breed and carry on. We are the product of plagues. City states, nations, democracies, monarchies, republics, dictatorships, are all formed from war and conquest - our ancestors perhaps fought or just survived cowering. Luck in time and place and side was everything.
Oligarchies form the vast swathe of human history. Whether kings and nobles or dictators and cronies. Or men that, if they were monkeys who stole all of the bananas in the zoo and kept them from the others who died starving, would be studied as psychotic.
This is where we are all the time.
Now, right now, at our turning point in history, this greed, this desire to rule and conquer, is on us directly again all over the world, even in our cosseted western countries. The Lords of Shouting are always there. Telling us what to do for our own apparent good. But the shouting is infected with the oligarchs’ disease. The plague of desire to take and to destroy, the chorus that it will be built better than ever.
And so it is our turn. To stand up and do what is right.
Should we bend a knee and submit?Should we stand and answer that we should resist and apply the tenets of Christianity Islam Jainism Taoism Judaism. The teachings of the Sikhs and Zoroastronists, the Confucianists, the Druze, and Hindus?
But do they not tell us to turn the other cheek, to be good people who do nothing when to do so allows the evil to triumph? Will we stand by and do and say nothing when the climate twists our planet for the sake of the fortunes and power of a few? When those that care are still trying to lead by being drops in the ocean?
The meek will inherit the earth they all say. Perhaps. Some will. Those who are not meek but who survive will as well. But inherit what earth? One where all the life that feeds and feeds on life has dwindled. Where the ice caps have descended and ascended once more and where the lands and oceans between roar and cry with burning furnace winds of dead dust. Deserts above, below and between. Where our world has become Mars.
Or is it time to admit that true leaders must also join the Lords of Shouting? Must urge the people to live the way life has to be lived. For the balance to be found, not in joining the water as little drops, but by fighting and feeding and eating this evil like our immune cells eat the cancerous.
What we need to do is this: go in an entirely new direction. A half-way house if you will, between obedience in the name of acceptance, and breaking free with more violence. Take an unexpected swerve in history, in civilisation.
The answer is that we must eat more anchovies. Delicious in a caesar salad. Marvellously transformed and transforming laid on top of a lamb roast as it cooks. More nutritious gram for gram in all nutrients except for protein than salmon. Not as stinky as garlic. It helps reduce the risk of certain types of cancers.
Will this be enough to fight the cancer of the autocrats and oligarchs? Perhaps. The jury is still out. And will remain out because juries have been banned in the interim due to the emergency the Lords of Shouting say is declared. Brazil nuts? Sure. A great source of selenium if you can’t get anchovies. But you cannot rely on brazil nuts alone. For the humble two inch foraging fish, the anchovy has more selenium per gram plus it's got all the other stuff as well. And brazil nuts in a ceasar salad? Really? Are you a monster? Forget about it. And when was the last time laying a brazil nut on top of a lamb roast as it cooked improved anything?
No. If anything must be saved in this coming climate crisis, where 99.9% of species will perish, it is the lowly anchovy. Let us raise it on high.
Rise up, meek Americans. Rise up and make little pods of brackish water and stock them with the eggs of the anchovy.
Form a religion. Ask for tithes before it is too late. Is ten percent of everyone’s income enough to keep the stocks fat? Where does the money come from to build the canals that the mighty anchovy will need to cross from one brackish pond to another? Open the Big Tap and set the California water free to flow! Will the sea itself become too salty as it dries up in the blasting furnace of the sun and is deposited as ice in polar regions for the anchovies in the wild survive?
Perhaps. Which is why the tithe must rise to twenty five percent, or thirty seven to sixty four percent in the case of certain egregious nasty nations.
All are Welcome in the Salty Church of the Anchovy. Look after the anchovies farms and the Great Anchovy will look after you. Become one with the ways of the anchovy. Join its schools. Be as one, a leader by swimming as one indistinguishable fish after another in the giant diaspora as it sweeps the low lakes and brackish streams of the land, forever growing.
Join your voices with the cries of those who call upon all who remain on the earth to feed the anchovies even if it means your life. Shout it, so that all can hear and understand. Shouting it from the clifftops and the shores, the fracked mountains, the burnt stumps of trees.
Become a Lord of Shouting. Be a recognised Divine Speaker for the Great Anchovy and require that all peoples obey the needs and directions of the Great Anchovy even if their meaning and necessity is not clear to you, a lowly fish in the school. You cannot hope to understand the mystery of his delicious finny ways unless you believe and unless you take the official certification course only $299.00 if you act before the midterm elections.
And then lead your school of followers and enter the final races of water directing you into the caves of the Great Canneries where you can become one with the Great Anchovy and live an everlasting life after death whilst we, the Lords of Shouting if you have not joined us, will capitalise on the needs of those who were foolish enough to invest in the doomed brazil nut economy, that dried and wizened in the great climate warming.
Join with us and reap the rewards of sale at an artificially controlled monopolistic supply of canned fish goods, with a small sideline in hard cheeses such as your parmesans, your pecorinos and your firmer aged cheddars.
Deny the tempting canned Chicken of the Sea Tuna from the barbaric enclaves of the remaining few Canadians and demand they buy anchovies in cans from us, and watch their tuna mountain rot.
Deny the Chinese and the Mexicans the ability to sell us corn and maize, brazil nut wontons, and noodles of bewildering varieties and cuisines. Eat not of the Sweet and Sour fried porks and chicken. Lust not after the guacamole and salsa of the arid Mexican desert. Eat only of the Anchovy and the hard cheeses of Wisconsin and do not be fooled by inferior products from Alberta even if the labels claim they are much healthier and less processed.
To stray is to anger the Great Anchovy and risk his personal gaze of banning wrath, because it is a him and not a she and most definitely not a they, who will smite you down into an anchovies paste, which, when mixed with butter, is put into glass containers with metal lids and sold as disgusting Gentleman’s relish to the bastard English, if any remain.
Join us at sunset and shout at the sky shaking your fists and pray to the Great Anchovy. A brighter future, a glorious wealthy tomorrow, after a short interlude of necessary pain.