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ADD 1 JULY 13, 12:10 p.m. — This just in from Pittsfield police chief Michael Wynn:

On Sunday 7/12/2020 shortly after 9:00pm members of the Pittsfield Police Department (PPD) responded to two separate ShotSpotter Activations.  The first incident occurred in the parking lot of the Berkshire Peak apartment complex at 341 West Street and the second occurred minutes later near the intersection of Columbus Avenue and South John Street. 

Shell casings were discovered at both locations and early indications are that the incidents are related.  At this time it is believed that at least two individuals were shooting at one another at each location.  No injuries have been reported.

Anyone who wishes to provide information regarding this case is asked to contact the PPD detective bureau at 413-448-9705 or Detective Bertelli-Hunt at 413-448-9700 x532.  Information can also be provided anonymously via the Detective Bureau Tip Line at 413-448-9706, or by texting PITTIP and your message to TIP411 (847411).

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(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY JULY 13, 2020) — THE PLANET begins  by expressing our philosophical contempt for nationalism.

When you look at “Earthrise,” the famous photo taken December 1968 by Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman, you see land, clouds, and ocean. No borders, walls, divisions — those artificial delimiters only show up on globes, maps, and Google Earth. There are no “Americans,” “Chinese,” “Africans.” We are all, we are only, earthlings.

A fence, wall, barrier, or other line of demarcation presumes an inherent rationale for private property, a dubious presumption. Try finding the title to a property. Go to the registry and trace back all claims. The books will take you so far. If those books could somehow uncover the first claim, you would find some person or group simply seizing territory, saying it’s theirs, and erecting borders virtue of Superior Force, a discipline that has never gone out of vogue.

There you have both the beginning of war and the concept of private property. Vast holdings, empires even, were there for the taking, providing one were strong and ruthless enough and had the crossbows, maces, guns, and nukes to defend their arbitrary claims. The millennia that heaped the stamp of law upon those morally unsupported claims makes ownership seem legitimate, but that too is a convention carried by a hoax.

The only way we could have advanced as a species was communally. As the human population grew, loose collections of tribes became villages became fiefdoms became city states, became civilization. Laws developed to check the malcontents. With laws came regulation of social and cultural life, plus an even more important need: To develop portable, stable currency.

Capital. Money to create. Money to spend.

And the Capitalist. Money used to make money.

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In 1970, art historian Kenneth Clark presented his monumental “personal view” of civilization in the 13-part BBC series of the same name. He identified five requirements of civilization:

• Belief in reason
• A sense of justice
• A love of beauty
• A sense of permanence
• A forward-looking mentality.

All in equilibrium.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Industrialization enhanced these qualities but in unequal measure, and the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century ushered in the dominance of “capital.”

“I’ll get mine at the expense of yours, because I will move faster, quicker, riskier, and more aggressively.”

What a perfect companion to Darwin.

The rise of the machines moved the growing population from the farms into urban centers. With this migration came the citified horrors of slums, deprivation, poverty, starvation, ignorance, and neglect. A social worker named Engels wrote about the ravages extracted by poverty. A penniless philosopher named Marx read Engels, though as Clark observes, hardly anyone else did.

But Marx was enough.

There are no nations except those whose borders were laid by pioneers, erected by war, and defended with arms against fellow humans. That’s what we have been as a species, one chromosome removed from chimps but far behind in ethics — an invented moral quality the innocent do not need. Other forms of life also don’t need Original Sin or other superstitious creations meant to account for why modern man hates himself and satisfy the immature mob-urge for certainty. Marx read Engles and provided certainty. The downtrodden fell for the ruse, same as they fell for Jesus … or what and who Christians claim as Jesus no thanks to St. Paul.

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Returning to property, borders, and nationalism, as a practical THE PLANET of course must acknowledge the practical “reality” of local, regional, state, national, and international “territories.” Each one creates and holds dear some symbol, typically a flag. Nationalists load the flag with symbols meant to stand for every virtue of collective belief. On Flag Day June 14, a day that honors Old Glory, the nation hardly took notice. But when we began to lose our collective minds over racism, historical revisionists zeroed in on that other American flag, Stars and Bars, the banner of the Confederate States of America.

ANTIFA, BLM, urban terrorists, millennials, and baristas at Dotties demanded the Stars and Bars join the statues of Columbus, Jefferson, Washington, Grant, and Lincoln in the bonfire of the vanities — a phrase Tom Wolfe stole from Savonarola. They loaded into the CSA flag every evil, hate, and bitterness their hearts could conjure.

In doing so, an infectious hysteria has gripped the nation, an ideological equivalent of COVID-19. They have allowed the symbols to take root in their own hearts, an inversion of hatred for which they were not immunized and for which they were unprepared.

The antidote, fortunately, is to realize that any flag, particularly one for a nation that has been extinct 155 years, is only a piece of cloth.

It Is Only A Piece of Cloth.

It Can’t Hurt You.

It is only this, and nothing more.

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“Every rock has an inherent logic you aren’t aware of until you see a fake rock” — Stanley Kubrick.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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