On the Patterns in the Apocalyptic Fire

Or what was that rabbit smoking?

(Reuters/Mike Blake)

As horrible as the spectacle of life gets, this past week has been a particularly bad stretch, but yet, there is something undeniably pleasing about seeing patterns in the maelstrom, and for a writer, there is no greater gift than a bird’s eye view of emerging truth.

Let me start with Jimmy Carter, RIP. His funeral this week brought back the memory of my teenage self, vulnerable and alone. At my vividly right wing prep school, I was most definitely on Team Peanut Farmer until he got attacked by a rabbit, when I realized he was not going to get the job done. He had the right message, but the wrong medium, or rather he was the wrong person for the culture and times he was operating in, and therefore became an easy target for the bully money interests that were threatened by utopian solutions, hippies, and wearing cardigans indoors, ie. anti-American bullshit, and plumped rather for generational war in the Middle East to guarantee access to the devil’s gold.

We all know the story of how the solar panels he put on the roof of the White House were ripped down on Reagan’s first day, an act that echoed into the future. I grieved for those solar panels as did millions of other Americans. Many of these people, boomers like myself, are grieving for the city of angels these days. It’s the same grief and the same sense of resilience that keeps us going. The beat goes on. To paraphrase the big JC, (no, not Carter, Christ), the ignorant and the corrupt will always be with you.

Do I betray my bitterness? Hell, yes. I ain’t no saint. Speaking of saints: butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths now about Carter in his construction belt, the octogenarian volunteer builder guy. Way to go, Jimmy! Just keep your hands off that petroleum pump, boy! But Carter had no regrets. He was like a bulldohg with his teeth into that rabbit of moral certainty. He knew, as did anybody with an ounce of sense, that solar panels were the way to go so we wouldn’t be dependent on OPEC oil.

Nobody was listening then. Voila! Gaza!

What about the oil giants? What did they know? It turns out a hell of a lot more than they let on about the effects of using their product on the planet, let alone the geopolitics. Their own scientists were raising the alarm as early as the 1950s about the impact of fossil fuel use that thickens the insulating layer of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, in the atmosphere.

We call it climate change, and we also know with the certainty of our technology, our science, and our common sense, that it is real and it is devastating. But all we wanted to do is have some fun. Too bad, Sheryl, that today you can’t see the sun coming up over the Santa Monica Boulevard.

Not that Sheryl is to blame. Neither are you, by the way.

Instead of leveling with us, the oil companies chose to use their profits to fund a massive disinformation and political influence campaign that continues to this day — where one entire political party of the two-party system of the wealthiest and most influential country on the planet has dedicated itself to spreading Big Oil’s false dogma. Many of us know that story also, and more of us will, thanks to the remnants of a still mostly free press and academia we continue to enjoy in this pseudo-democracy.

As I said, the beat goes on. We have the solutions, but we also have the same pattern of dystopian influence at play that guarantees a divided nation and an ineffectual body politic. As the Brits like to say, we are not fit to purpose. And so we burn, and so we drown, and so we flounder.