I am sorry the new posts have been a bit exiguous here during holiday time. For some reason, I have felt a bit worn out at the end of this painful and distressing year and I was hoping to recharge a bit. This is also why today does not feature a real post about pangolins, spacefaring, or fashionable baroque colors, but is instead a short look back at 2020 (goodness help us) and a look forwards at some of the things that are next for Ferrebeekeeper and my allied creative projects in the new year.

Speaking of creativity, when I am working on big projects, I like to sometimes take breaks and work on other things for a little while. This is obviously NOT the way the great obsessive-compulsive masters of world capitalism do things (they prefer to burn people out by doing things as quickly and cheaply as possible without any breaks), and it is true that stopping work on a particular painting to work on some other drawing makes the painting take longer overall. Yet sometimes a hiatus allows the artist to return to the project with that most valuable of creative tools…a fresh eye. After a break, one can (sometimes) escape the mistakes and feedback loops that were ruining a cherished piece.

I mention all of this not just to hype my own creative projects (and explain why they are taking longer than I wanted), but also to mention that this pandemic year of fallow projects has a silver lining of sorts. As when the master comes back to a half finished allegory after a sojourn in Italy, we can now clearly see all of the flaws and virtues of the great unfinished work.

And looking at our society (after a year of not using it or working on it) obvious flaws of every sort pop out! For example, we learned that we are not ready for a pandemic! If this had been a virulently deadly contagion (or heaven help us, a disease which was hardest on children) we would be well and truly screwed. Our national healthcare system, once the paragon of effective medical research and care, currently resembles a grotesque, bloated leech! And attempts to remedy that problem (or anything else) are stymied by political paralysis. Partially because of demographic change and partly due to sabotage from one of the two parties (and from deep-pocketed special interest groups), our political machinery has stopped working properly. And speaking of giant machines which do not work right, globalized “just-in-time” supply chains do indeed allow for a paradise of cheap products, but the model is brittle and fragile. Everyone with an MBA is taught to see the world through exactly the same metrics. Those metrics do not reward creativity, elasticity, or sustainability. Our short-term business models are poisonous for our long-term goals.

But good things about this giant picture have also become evident. For one thing, the laser-fast targeted vaccines suggest that the long delayed biotech revolution we were promised in the ’80s and ’90s might finally be right around the corner. Breakthroughs in nanotechnology, AI, and materials science (and in cellular biology) mean that vast bio-medical breakthroughs are possible (if we could just evict the parasitic MBA types from making the top-decisions about what to pursue). Likewise the flaws of Reaganomics and Grover Norquist type thinking have suddenly become painfully obvious to everyone with any sort of brain or shred of honesty/decency. Political reform is very possible now too, but the whole electorate must work together to stop the Mitch McConnell (and allied corporate villains) from paralyzing and destroying our society.

Actually with a few political and economic reforms (and with a lot of ecological consciousness as well) society could be at the cusp of an all-time great decade! However we must work together to stop parasitic oligarchs, demagogues, and monopolists from leading us to more disastrous floundering of the sort which has been universally in evidence this year.

Not me though! I have plenty more floundering planned for 2021 (the good, creative sort). I will tell you about it tomorrow (since I went long complaining about MBAs and cartels). Suffice it to say, this will be a long winter at the drawing board for all of us… But we can make it work and fix everything and make all of our dreams come true. It’s just going to take [checks notes]…a lot of hard work, dedication, and organization? Argh! Maybe the outcome of the twenties is still up in the air. We’ll talk more about it tomorrow…

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