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<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n Pete Townshend\u2019s prayer has gone unanswered.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US Dollar is \u201csurging\u201d even as I type, along with shares in Bitcoin and Tesla. Wall Street opened at an all-time high. The world\u2019s leaders, scared shitless, scramble over each other to fall in line and congratulate the new\/old boss on his resurrection. The world\u2019s tyrants and shitstains\u2014Orban, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro\u2014 were of course at the front of the line[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup>, but even vacuous ineffectual bobbleheads like Canada\u2019s own PM jump up and down like eager puppies, reminding Dear Leader of a friendship \u201cunited by a shared history, common values and steadfast ties between our peoples\u201d. (And, as the BUG astutely remarked, wouldn\u2019t it be interesting to see the alternate statements all these folks had doubtless prepared in the event that the merely mediocre candidate had triumphed over the apocalyptically bad one?) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump may not have spoken with the \u201cgreat clarity\u201d that Hitler commanded, but it\u2019s not as if he hid his agenda. He won anyway, handily. I guess you really do get the government you deserve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n And yet, for all Trump\u2019s hateful narcissistic idiocy, he\u2019s not really the problem. Trump is merely a symptom. The problem is a political system that rewards the world\u2019s Trumps with massive power and influence, instead of marginalizing them. A number of left-leaning \u2018Murricans\u2014most, I\u2019d wager\u2014seem to regard their homeland as a great nation, a shining experiment in liberty and democracy, that somehow lost its way. I tend to be less charitable. The US is a nation literally founded on invasion, slavery, and germ warfare\u2014which is to say, it was born in the universal reality of human beings fucking each other over for a percentage. It is a global case-in-point of Homo<\/em> so-called sapiens<\/em> belying its own self-aggrandizing myths and behaving exactly like the social mammals we are: short-sighted apes, prioritizing the approval of the tribe over long-term consequences our intellects grasp dimly at best, and our guts reject outright. Facts don\u2019t matter. Truth is not the survival trait. Conformity <\/em>is: defense of the tribe, hatred of The Other. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n U S A. U S A.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is there hope? Perhaps a little: ironically, in the crushing of hope. Because despite what the hopepunks have been wittering on about all these years\u2014despite the bromides about how we should stop writing dystopias <\/em>and never say 1.5\u00b0 is \u2018unachievable\u2019 <\/em>because to do so would give in to paralyzing narratives of hopelessness and despair<\/em>\u2014we have evidence that the exact opposite is true. Ballew et al<\/em> over at Nature report that \u201cClimate change psychological distress is associated with increased collective climate action<\/a>\u201d. People who are bummed out and distressed about the state of the environment are more likely to get off their asses and do something than are all those cozy optimists who tell us to put on a happy face because We Live In The Greatest Nation On Earth and Things Will Work Out Somehow. Ballew et al<\/em> show, at high levels of significance, that the Hope Police have their heads up their asses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This study, admittedly, did not explicitly deal with Gileads-in-the-making, with the unchecked power of demagogues or the stripping away of Human rights. It deals with our reaction to environmental havoc\u2014and even if that\u2019s all it applies to, I\u2019m cool with it. I personally am more concerned about ecocide than Human rights. Treating each other like shit at least keeps our sins in the family\u2014and frankly, given the contempt with which we treat the rest of the biosphere, I\u2019m skeptical that Humans even deserve \u201crights\u201d. Certainly, Trump\u2019s victory has pretty much incinerated whatever faint hope we might still have had of turning things around environmentally. The world was already circling the toilet bowl on that front (and would doubtless have continued in that grim decaying orbit even if Harris had prevailed); Trump\u2019s victory flushes it down for good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n I\u2019d be very surprised, though, if activism was catalyzed only by distress of the environmental kind. Almost certainly, it also maps onto the social distress currently being experienced even by all those Democrats who, according to polls and campaign priorities, really don\u2019t give a shit about climate change (at least, not relative to \u201cthe economy\u201d or \u201cthe border\u201d\u2014remember how Harris flip-flopped on the whole fracking thing to appeal to her tribe?) Hell, how may pundits have already attributed Trump\u2019s victory to the distress-induced activism of Magats who found themselves paying too much for groceries?\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n So maybe this will be the impetus for something. Maybe \u201cthe resistance\u201d will be more than an ineffectual Star Wars call-out this time around.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Maybe. But I\u2019m gonna start pitching in on building this Wall anyway.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n And on the plus side, all those environmental dystopias I wrote back in the day are looking increasingly prophetic. Should give my street cred a bit of a boost, until the book banners burn through all that gender smut and start looking further afield\u2026\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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