Am I unusual in feeling that there’s something increasingly schizophrenic about our public life? According to the New York Times, BP’s apocalyptic oil spill continues to kill giant sea turtles by the boatload and destroy the unique biodiversity of Louisiana along with threatening the rest of our east coast ecosystem, all without any real censure or punishment from the US government—but you’ll be relieved to know that six-pack abs and shag rugs are back in vogue! Then there’s the fact that the Pakistanis are drowning (if the cholera doesn’t get them first), Greece may topple even faster than the euro, most of Thailand is still under a state of emergency, and China continues to bulldoze its way to the top of the global dog-pile at terrifying environmental and humanitarian cost. Our own politicians are unabashedly in the pockets of big business and no one is protesting the outrageous economic practices that led to the massive meltdown in 2008, at least no one with any political clout. But there’s good news to balance it all out: apparently the White House pastry chef is taking a stand against the industrialization of our food supply by growing his own rhubarb on the South Lawn. Take that, agribusiness.
Does it all seem like a Monty Python skit to you too?
The human capacity for self-destruction shows itself on micro and macro levels, in the individual psyche and in societies as a whole. Maybe the doomsday cultists like Jim Jones and Shoko Asahara (who led the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway 15 years ago) are just giving expression to the strange fact that we find a kind of satisfaction in hurting ourselves, or hurting our neighbors, which is the same thing in the end. The suicide bomber’s first victim is himself.
Or is it a kind of myopia? Great civilizations have disappeared before: the Mayans, the Incas, the Roman Empire, the Phoenicians, the Mongol Empire, the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Ottoman Empire. But, come on, that won’t happen to us. Today there’s an oil spill, but they (whoever they are) will figure out how to clean it up, and the solution won’t involve us having to sacrifice anything. Harnessing the largest source of energy in our solar system, that big ol’ ball of fire called the sun, is “impractical” (so sayeth our policy makers and corporate scientists) not because we don’t know how to do it, but because it would put the energy companies out of business. We may be mortgaged up to our necks after the housing bubble, but a reduction in our standard of living is literally inconceivable: we’ve lost the imaginative capacity necessary to envision a different possible future.
As easy and satisfying as it is to rail against the oil executives at BP with their multimillion dollar salaries and tenuous relationship with the truth, perhaps we should keep in mind that we made them with our greed for SUVs, two-dollar tchotchkes, McMansions in the country, and petroleum-made plastic grocery bags. We have met the enemy; we just don’t recognize ourselves. It’s enough to make a girl want to shut down her browser forever—if doom weren’t so addicting, so revealing of what we have become as a people. It’s all good fodder for art, at least as long as this empire lasts.
Tomorrow, something even scarier than ecological mass destruction and the end of civilization as we know it: marriage.