Large Fierce Mammal

The melancholy ballad from which tonight’s Dark Sentiment draws its title was written by Charles Aznavour and released in his 1964 album of the same name. Translated literally into English (always a mistake, but here we are), it means “Yesterday Again”, and you may know it best in the English translation by Herbert Kretzmer from which it was recorded by Aznavour himself, as well as such notables as Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Shirley Bassey, Mel Torme, Dusty Springfield, Glen Campbell, and Roy Clark — Yesterday When I Was Young.

Messrs. Campbell and Clark recorded the song to great success, but with a slight though meaningful change from the standard English Lyrics, replacing “… alas …” with my preferred “… to last …”, and so to be sung:

The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned
I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.

I have previously written of Tools and their place in one’s Garniture. In a world awash with the skewed and effort wasting perspective of misleading vividness, the cries are out to smooth the rough edges from society in some bizarre paving project on the road to Hell. A wide eyed panic fueled race to “save the children”, reminiscent of a watered down simulacrum of the age old rivalry between the armourer and the weapon maker.

Such is born from a forgetting of the memento mori, for in the all so often voiced words, “Nobody should have to bury their children.” is found a dire and contradictory need to outlive them.

Infantilized forever, unable to talk to strangers on the telephone let alone anywhere or anywhen else because 28 is the new 18. Communications devices your offspring can’t live without are driven by algorithms created by people, for whom language their first English is not, sifting prompts into their meaningless grunts as a substitute for literacy.

Ever-listening digital “assistants”, self-driving automobiles, fleets of grounded airliners designed to lethally distrust the control inputs of human pilots, and ruminations about AI as a logical progression toward Utopia are but four symptoms of a drive to maintain the new laudability of redefining “Human” as innate weakness. Decrying skill, intelligence, and self-sufficiency as an affront to the divine state of Victimhood which explains and justifies everything. Where once, the proto-infantilized would pontificate at length on the perpetual parenting that might come from the timely arrival of alien spacefarers who had already solved, with all their advanced technology, what ails us in our primitiveness, and could therefore bestow their benevolent guidance, we now have dalliances with viewing AI (Artificial Intelligence) as the superior substitute for government.

If we can’t attract, or be serendipitously found by, such saviours, let’s not pause to consider that maybe nobody has ever survived intelligence long enough to get much beyond interplanetary travel, and build our own surrogate parents instead. After all, “They” can do it, can’t they?

Similarly, space exploration is a natural extension of the same one-upmanship and jockeying for military/economic advantage that motivated colonization of North America by European powers, overlain with a different slant — lacking a fire brigade to save us from the house we’ve set on fire, we look to the solution of leaving it for another with a fresh box of matches.

In all of Human history, there is no precedent for a meeting of cultures leading to a happy outcome for the least technologically advanced. What is consistent is subterfuge, exploitation, pillage, slavery, and extermination.

Never forget that, outside of fiction, no infant was ever dropped orphaned into a rain forest to emerge King of the Jungle.