We seem to be staggering towards the abyss. As in a Roger Corman horror movie, ghostly voices can be heard prophesying that the end is near: we must tumble in. The signs of doom are everywhere, but since punishment for our sins is the point of the exercise, we’ll have to take our medicine and endure a whole lot of tribulations before the final fall. Donald Trump is the beast of this particular apocalypse. His evil number isn’t 666 but 270 in the Electoral College. Although he’s been virtually tied with President Biden in the opinion polls, those who hate him most feel certain he will regain the presidency in 2024 – if only because those ungrateful humans, the voters, deserve to get stuck with him. Trump is a destroyer of worlds. He will destroy democracy for sure. How? We are told he will unleash FBI on his political enemies and prosecute them as common criminals. That, we must admit, is almost completely unheard of. Trump is a dictator who aims to smash the constitutional government of the United States. Immediately after, he’ll move the White House to the Mar-a-Lago golf course and appoint bearded reality TV characters to the cabinet. But what, one may ask, is his subversive plan? We are told that he will fire 25,000 federal bureaucrats and bend the rest to his presidential will. And that would be completely unheard of. It might occur to some that the man was president for four years and none of these horrors happened. In fact, except for the shouting and gnashing of teeth, the impeachments and the pandemic, it was a fairly peaceful time. But that was Trump playing the dictator’s apprentice. We are told that this time he really means it, because this time he knows what he’s doing – there will be no escape from his clutches. He will deport everyone whose name ends in a vowel. He will force little school kids to eat fossil fuels. He may even cut taxes again… The sense that we are approaching the end of days extends beyond the egregious Trump. In Europe, the “far right” is advancing. Populism is on the rise. The old political parties we knew and loved – the Tories, the Gaullists, the Social Democrats – have disintegrated. How can democracy survive? Evidently, it can’t. Hitler and Mussolini, we are told, are rising from their graves. Their names and aspects have changed most strangely, however, as the old totalitarians have reincarnated in a rather tame and uncharismatic crowd: Britain’s Nigel Farage, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and France’s Marine Le Pen, among many others. Still, they are far right, says the media over and over again. Extreme works too – just like the people who built the concentration camps. See how that works? Of course, as always, there are doubters. Can a Brit called “Nigel Farage” even give a proper Hitler salute? Will Meloni really invade Ethiopia and Greece to honor Mussolini’s memory? And Le Pen – let’s face it, isn’t she a bit too stodgy and bourgeois to start a coup? Never mind that. Those questions reveal your inner Nazi. To all right-thinking persons, the populists are way too popular, the right has become way too far and extreme, and the end of European civilization must be all too near. In any case, it won’t be politics that bring about the end of the world. Instead, we’ll be killed off by the weather – or as we now prefer to call it, the climate. The thing about the climate, we are told, is that it changes, something that, apparently, it never did before. In the good old days, clouds stood frozen in the sky and it was always a balmy noontime. Then industrial capitalism intervened, spewing particles everywhere for no good reason and turning the green unchanging earth into a hellish hothouse. Nature’s revenge will be biblical. Stupendous events will assail the human race. Miami Beach condos will lose their beachfront. Siberia will lead the world in resort hotels. Sun blocker manufacturers will surpass Amazon in capitalization. Change has come to the climate, and nothing will be as it once was. The science of climate change, we are told, is settled, in a loose and flexible way. Greta Thunberg, for example, told us that we had exactly five years to fix the climate if we wished to survive – but she said that six years ago, and here we are. Glacier National Park put up warnings that the glaciers would disappear by 2020 – then quietly took the signs down in January of that year, because the damned things were still there. Without a doubt, these delays caused much disappointment, since as consumers of industrial products we all deserve a holocaust. But never mind that. If we can celebrate moveable feasts, we can suffer a moveable Doomsday. Given enough time,
Subscribe
Login
0 Comments
