The Swarm: a novel
By Frank Schätzing
William Morrow, 2006
896 pages

The Swarm is a massive (896 large size pages) attempt to awaken us to the ecological danger that looms. It is packed with scientific fact that will send the curious general reader upon many a surfing expedition. It is a readable translation from a German original. It will keep you turning pages and give your emotions a workout; it will also introduce you to a spectrum of technology – clearly described – that will broaden your perspective.
The anti-Americanism is a reflection of just how low W., Cheney and company have brought us and probably justified. It is the pivot upon which the book turns.
The best I read, and I read a lot, say we have gone over the edge and that the ecosystem of which we are an integral part is broken. Schätzing gives us a happy ending that will or has increased sales, but there are a few things that the book underlines that are much more significant than “they lived happily ever after”.
1. We seem totally unable to sustain a long view – this is well dramatized by the total memory of the ocean species Schätzing creates.
2. “People are losing their significance. Everyone’s replaceable. There are no ideals any more, and without ideals, there’s nothing to make us more important than we are.” (p. 299)
3. “The problem… is that our first simulation was based on largely linear assumptions. But real life isn’t linear. We’re dealing with developments that are chaotic, and, in some cases exponential.” (p. 333)

Our present crisis – human created – has introduced us to chaotic and exponential effects. 9/11 and Mumbai are bookends to such effects. Having written seven books in the last four years about what Schätzing has conveyed so well – our sleep in relation what is coming – I got the chills, of ten, as I read The Swarm.
The oligarchy in control has lost control. The chaotic and exponential changes that we are facing due to our environmental insouciance – an environment we don’t control and don’t understand – will overwhelm us and guarantee the contempt of those fated to live in our wake.

We are everywhere surrounded by the provocation of needs, tits everywhere, or the suggestion of tits leading the charge that evokes that “gotta have” need for so many of the things that clutter modern life.

Buy me and get a tit free seems to be the suggestion, and then we wonder why teens are sending nude pictures to each other via cell phone and camcorder with increasing frequency.
The hypocrisy is so tick that I’ll tip my hat to anyone who still can feel deeply guilty about a transgressive act.
It is all posturing.

A superficial play-acting that has nothing to do with the inwardness (innerlichkeit) of genuine guilt.
All of this must be swept clean if we are to avoid the increasingly psychological chaos that is emerging, adumbrated by the daily terrorist mass murders in the lands of Allah, mainly, and the mass murders that now seem to occur in clusters in the west.

Chemical, biological and nuclear terrorism loom just beyond the visible horizon and its perpetration will come from within society, not from some far distant land that we are spending trillions of dollars to stir up.
If the cleansing is frightening enough, say a reduction to less than a billion on the planet, two possibilities loom: a genuine charismatic re-invoking of discrete limits based on nos that have weight or resonance, or, a real transformation of consciousness based upon epigenetic mutation that is lurking somewhere deep in the genetic code.
No-one has enough data to choose between the emergence of the progressive or regressive outcome, but the data grows about the planetary shit storm that is coming and those with good ears can now hear the tolling of the midnight bell.

The wise, if choice is still available, will pick their partners for the apocalypse carefully.

Every time I hear Barack Obama referred to as America’ first black president, I wonder how people buy into such a myth, as I have seen pictures of his very white mother and recently deceased obviously white grandmother.
To call him black is to cast dishonour on half of his heritage. Something that I can’t imagine someone as sensitive as Obama doing.
Tiger is not black and he has made that clear. He is mixed racial origin. Obama shares the same mixed race origin yet he is looked upon as America’s First Black President, and I have never seen him referred to as being of mixed origin, though he obviously is.
If one looks at older American legal cases from the South, one will quickly run into definitions of blackness that correspond to the present illusion regarding Obama’s blackness.
A drop of black blood is enough to turn any individual, for legal purposes, into a black person. The other similar situation that comes to mind is the laws propagated by the Nazis which of course in that situation was a matter of life and death. In both of these historical examples, the amount of black or Jewish blood that allowed one to be categorised as “black” or “Jewish” was of a smaller percentage than the 50% white blood that Obama carries.
Yet no-one questioned Obama about his being white. The only early concern had to do with whether he was black enough – culturally, socially, politically – to represent the black community. He obviously PASSED.
Is the black community and tens of millions of whites so anxious to crown a black president that they will accept a definition of black that is both imposed by the enemy and cancels the main formative influence on his life: his white mother? He was the victim of what Bill Cosby has been campaigning about: the absent black father, yet it is the father’s identity he bears, not that of the white mother who raised him and imbued him with her values.
I find all this very strange and indicative of a large unresolved American relationship to its racial history. Coming from a religious background that is racially based: to the orthodox, only those born of a Jewish mother are Jews. It is a view I share as I do not recognize converts as Jews and Sammy Davis, Marilyn Monroe et al. are not Jewish in my eyes as they were not born, as I was, of a Jewish mother.