We might as well get the bad news out of the way first: we are barreling down a potholed highway at twice the speed limit in a rusty old bus without any brakes. In place of a windshield, we’re relying, for navigational purposes, on a high-resolution screen that’s showing us something with more resemblance to Gong Show reruns than whatever it is that’s actually in front of us—which we suspect may be a cliff.
And that’s just a metaphor. The reality is no improvement. We’re on an old spinning rock that’s hurtling through space at a speed so terrible we cannot comprehend it. Our lives depend on a layer of gas so thin that people have made a sport of climbing above it.
That blanket of gas has been keeping us alive since our ancestors lived in trees. (In retrospect, climbing down may have been a terrible mistake.) After the last few centuries of abuse and misuse, it now seems as if, unlike we humans, our atmosphere has a mind of its own, and has decided to wreak its vengeance.
If we take strong, immediate action, we may reduce the level of horror awaiting us and our progeny. The people we’ve put in charge of making decisions, though, are squabbling over what is, to them, the really, really big question: who amongst us will be the richest when, by dint of our cumulative sins, we finally bequeath this Earth to the cockroaches?
Hyperbole, you say? Tell that to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Last week it reset its famous Doomsday Clock at just 100 seconds—closer than ever before—to midnight.
They wrote, in part,
“…this year, we move the Clock 20 seconds closer to midnight not just because trends in our major areas of concern—nuclear weapons and climate change—have failed to improve significantly over the last two years. We move the Clock toward midnight because the means by which political leaders had previously managed these potentially civilization-ending dangers are themselves being dismantled or undermined, without a realistic effort to replace them with new or better management regimes. In effect, the international political infrastructure for controlling existential risk is degrading, leaving the world in a situation of high and rising threat. Global leaders are not responding appropriately to reduce this threat level and counteract the hollowing-out of international political institutions, negotiations, and agreements that aim to contain it. The result is a heightened and growing risk of disaster.”
By any measure, that statement is pretty alarming. Can we find any concrete evidence that it’s true? Let’s see….
Our so-called President has been confessing on a daily basis to having used foreign aid as a carrot to coerce the head of a foreign government to make a public announcement that it’s investigating for corruption one of his leading opponents in the upcoming election. He’s even bragged about being untouchable because he’s sitting on the evidence.
He’s been successfully impeached for his quid pro quo with the President of Ukraine, but his trial in the Senate is stalled because the Majority Leader—who has already demonstrated his contempt for procedure by arbitrarily strong-arming the previous President out of a Supreme Court nomination—is now taking a similarly bold approach to minor details, such as hearing testimony from witnesses.
Defending the President on Wednesday, his lawyer Alan Dershowitz asserted that since “every public official…believes that his election is in the public interest,” therefore “if a president does something that he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
Dershowitz must be a damn good lawyer, despite having uttered such a preposterous argument: he managed to get acquittals for murder suspects Claus von Bulow and O.J. Simpson, and he engineered a pretty sweet plea deal for his good friend, the late child molester Jeffrey Epstein. Also, Harvard University pays him to teach law.
The current tumult has even disrupted the operations of this newspaper—normally steady and predictable as the tides; like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, we have become unstuck in time. Somehow a cartoon which belongs in this issue appeared in the paper we published last fortnight:
In the face of all this chaos, it’s hardly surprising that one Democratic candidate has been campaigning largely on the theme that what we need is a return to normalcy. While the idea does have a certain instant, comforting appeal, it’s hardly a desirable goal. After all, normalcy is what brought us here. Under the cover of normalcy, we saw a slow, creeping drift, over half a century, from Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon to Newt Gingrich’s application of postmodernism to politics, to Murdoch’s declaration of war on truth itself.
Besides, “A Return to Normalcy” was Republican Warren G. Harding’s slogan. Nostalgia for the most corrupt Administration of the 20th century is hardly a good look. What we really need is a return to reality, no matter how grisly and frightening it may be.
Modernity has given us an infinite supply of distractions from the realities of our animal existence. They include any number of amusing little video clips showing ordinary people becoming unhinged by the inadvertent denial of some inconsequential trifle on which they have come to depend to distract them from their own mortality.
Meanwhile, they are passing up the opportunity to witness what is without question the greatest, most gripping show on Earth: After millions of years of evolution, will humans learn in time how to avoid their own destruction?
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The Fortnightly Rant