ABlog

“Fish, Seafood on Track to Disappear by 2048: Study”: the headline catches my eye as I open my Web browser. I click on the link and read the latest. “I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are—beyond anything we expected,” comments a Canadian researcher, the wonderfully named Boris Worm of Dalhousie University.

Ho, hum, another average day in a passenger seat on a jet on the verge of crashing. I continue to be fascinated by, think it worthwhile to analyze, what my own psyche does with this type of information. I live, as most of us do, steeped in a soup of these dreadful fairytales, these expert predictions of the shape of our planetary non-future. It’s impossible not to feel that the concatenation of likely disasters makes it difficult to get attached to any one scenario involved with the pressing idea that our planet, not to mention our species, will very soon begin to exhibit a dramatic, irreversible failure to thrive. It’s impossible not to think, “Dr. Worm, shouldn’t you run the study again and look at how the collapse of ocean species might interact with the impacts of future wars probably involving weapons of mass destruction; ongoing processes of desertification; the longitudinal impact of the AIDS pandemic; global energy crisis; vanishing tropical forests; implosion of the dollar economy; and the increasing prevalence of a modernized and constantly updated fascism—not excluding current and future genocides--likely to thrive in such conditions?"

I suspend my disbelief in the imminent collapse of everything the way I suspend my disbelief in god’s existence.

Surely something—maybe “the world,” maybe our way of inhabiting it--is coming to an end in our own time. Surely the unsustainable adventure of billions is unsustainable in the very short term.

And yet, I live my life very much as I probably would if we faced nothing worse than garden variety war, famine, tyranny, enslavement, mass slaughter. No use running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I reason.

The first couple of years of the present century were for me a reawakening, with a vengeance, of the nuclear nightmares and other disaster scenarios that haunted me in the 1950’s and later. For me, 9/11 came as no surprise in any but the most literal, local sense. I’ve always been expecting a 9/11; the only news was that it happened on that particular day, and that I and my nearest and dearest escaped direct harm. For quite a while, in my quiet way, I did feel like Cassandra; a lot of my creative work from this period has flowed from a strange sense of utter freedom in articulating the ghastly truth to ears that are ever so ingeniously configured to hear only that which is already known and deemed acceptable. Quite recently, though, as more of the world I inhabit seems to be catching up to my own sense of doom, I’ve experienced an odd, possibly temporary feeling of calm. It’s almost as though I’ve mourned in advance the cataclysm I believe to be inevitable, although it’s not (praise be) given me to know its precise outlines or its ultimate extent. Can it be that I’ve really gotten over the hump of the melancholia that has dogged me for decades as I contemplated the orgy of species extinction, habitat obliteration, and self-savaging to which America in particular and humanity in general seems so fervently, indeed religiously, dedicated?

Then Move-On.Org calls up and wants me to commit to phone banking for Democrats!

"At the new Winvian resort in Litchfield County, Con.., you can spend the night in a restored 1968 Sikorsky Sea King helicopter, so tricked out that Austin Powers might have piloted it. There’s a 17,000 pound mix of the plush and the industrial, of chilled Champagne and crystal waiting atop a stainless-steel fridge alongside an aerospace dashboard.

“Or you can wake up in a cabin inspired by Mark Twain’s ‘Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,’ with a granite bathroom that looks like Stonehenge.

“The price for a night’s stay? Rates from $1,450 to $1,950.”
--“In Litchfield County, a Clash of Titans?” The New York Times, 11/3/06, p. F1

Amid all this there are things I’d like not to forget…before the throng of masked grabbers on my stoop on Halloween, a lone llittle boy who muttered shyly, “Promise you won’t scream,” and fumbled for the button on the electrical gadget that made a plastic breast-plate look as though it were seething with blood. Almost a week past the end of daylight savings time, still the thrill of leaving school in the early dark, and two cop horses, white-footed in the night, cantering side by side up Sixth Avenue.

Botched joke, botched war, botched world, dappled with flecks of beauty.

Speaking of jokes, botched and otherwise, of course I’m enjoying the resignation of Rev. Ted Haggard from his position as president of the National Association of Evangelicals following allegations by a self-described former male prostitute that Haggard had paid to have sex with the whistle-blower over a three-year period. How relevant, then, appears this quote by George Haggerty, from his quite badly written (in the way of so much High Academic Theory) but thought-provoking study Queer Gothic: “The culture gorges itself on the ritual images of the eroticized young man in order to construct its most cherished masculinity. [Lauren] Berlant and [Elizabeth] Freeman observe that ‘mainstream national identity touts a subliminal sexuality more official than a state flower or a national bird.’ Late-twentieth-century [and early twenty-first-century] culture fed on the eroticized gay man because he, in the popular imagination, is his sexuality. He alone can reanimate the ‘national identity’ with the virility it so powerfully lacks….The homosexual…reflects culture’s deepest desires and therefore must bear the brunt of its systematic hatred in the form of homophobia” (191). Talk about the revenge of the repressed!

But I will say no more as I appreciate the wisdom of a comment (cited in today’s NY Times article on the subject) by Rev. Richard Cizik, an officer of the evangelical association: “Let’s not crucify the man before we know the facts.” “VERIFY—THEN CRUCIFY” seems fair enough.