What Happened To Climate Change? - The Disappearance Of Armageddon

Bob Muzelle had been one of the biggest fretters about climate change.  He had been on the front lines of the movement since the reported first thawing of the polar ice caps, the catastrophic loss of the Ross Ice Shelf, the disruption of the Humboldt current, the erratic Gulf Stream's patterns, the mass extinction of sea birds, the inundation of the Atlantic coast, sunspots, the choking new levels of carbon dioxide in the air and the continuing pollution of the environment. 

'The climate will so radically warm', Bob said to a group of Scientists for Social Action, his Washington lobby group, 'that in a decade crops will wither, insects will swarm, baking heat will kill thousands of the elderly, the demand for electricity will outstrip demand and the power generating systems of the Northeast and the West will collapse'. 

A polite round of applause rippled through the audience, far from the rousing cheers that Bob got a decade or more ago when he was one of the first to clamor for dramatic action against this existential threat. Half the seats were empty and many had rudely left before he had finished his speech. Those that remained were so old that they probably were not aware that he had finished talking, so zoned out they were, travelling in some godforsaken place sure to be Bob's next stop. 

'Nobody gives a shit anymore, Bobby' said a close friend as they both walked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, crowded with blonde young things making their way to and from the White House to which Bob shook his head, wrung his hands, sputtered and choked, but could manage nothing. 

 'That....that...that...' Words failed him when it came to describing the President.  Over the past decade of Trump's rise and fall and rise again, Bob had called him every name under the sun, and now when it really mattered, he felt the store shelves were empty, the armory bare, and the inventory down to zero. 

He looked around him and saw people simply going about their business as if there were no climate problem at all - ignoramuses who froze their feet in January and laughed at the idea of global warming; fools who were too stupid to look at the climatological charts to see discernable changes in Bering Sea temperatures or fluctuations in the South Pacific current; too credulous and intellectually sedentary to look at the barometer, the seismometer, the thermometer, and astronomical data. 

Bob had happily paid his heating bill this winter, higher than it had ever been; for melting polar ice had chilled ocean waters and caused a temporary, cautionary cooling, that was all.  The more global effects of a changing, warming climate were more dynamic, more profound, and although at times unnoticed, were taking their toll little by little. 

Now, it must be noted that Bob was a progressive's progressive.  There had not been one progressive cause that he had not espoused.  He was on the front lines to restore the black man to the top of the human pyramid as evolution's expression of high native intelligence, sentience, and emotional genius.  He marched for women's right to their bodies and the absolute right to eliminate the phlegm that was audaciously called 'life'.  

He cavorted with gay men in the Castro, waved to onlookers from a float in the Bay to Breakers gay parade.  He downed oyster shooters with the bull dykes of Bernal Heights, and was on the dais at the anti-capitalist rallies in Chicago.  

 

Progressivism was part of his identity, his persona, his soul.  There could be no other way to look at the world than through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity.  History had been deformed by racist colonialism, the perpetual enslavement of Africans, the occupation of land for no other reason than conquest. Israel was but the last of the exterminating, territorially obsessed nations of the world. 

There were deniers. The idea of a black pinnacle was total nonsense.  The reality was in the stinking, dysfunction slums of the inner city.  Gay pride was nothing more than a convenient, happy cover for buggery and perversion.  Women were not vessels of goodness, compassion, and righteousness but aggressive comers pricked by ambition, greed, and male envy.  And climate change was one big, outrageous, scam. 

Bob dismissed deniers and their ignorant notions out of hand.  'Pants first, shoes next' was the characterizing meme of these idiots who didn't know shit from Shinola and who had lawn parties and barbecues while the climate raged and the black man suffered. 

Progressivism was so ingrained, so deeply rooted, so immured within Bob's very soul that there was no way that he could wonder whether it was right.  That would have been tantamount to denying the sunrise or the phases of the moon.  There were such things as absolutes, said Bob, and it is our duty to recognize them. 

But all it took was a change of administrations, and all of a sudden climate change was off the front pages and there wasn't a black face in every commercial, every television series, and every Hollywood film. Gay men were back in the closet or at least in a back room.  The reformist programs set in place by President Biden - the distribution of wealth, the dismantling of free enterprise in favor of unencumbered public benefits, the rolling back of private sector initiatives in favor of government dirigisme - had disappeared overnight as though they had never existed. 

Yet, what if?  Bob could never consciously admitted that there might be some sense to the criticisms of race, gender, ethnicity, climate, and social equity; but every so often some niggling, irritating thought crept into his head, and no matter how hard he tried to shake it loose, it stayed damnably long. 

The Ross Ice Shelf was regaining ice, the climate had moderated, new forensic climatological evidence from the Paleolithic forward demonstrated almost predictable cycles of cooling and warming.  Black men were responsible for more than half the violent crimes in the country and represented barely ten percent of the population.  He himself would never set foot in the Anacostia inner city for fear of his life.  Transgender women, all big thighs, hairy chests, thick ankles, and gravelly voices reading fairy tales to kindergarteners was ridiculous, and the weather was certainly pleasant. 

What if it really all was bullshit? Bob wondered.  Then what? Would his life be erased? A kind of political Alzheimer's or a radical historical revisionism?  His whole life, save for an innocent childhood had been devoted to doing the right thing.  What if reality was really Poland - a country decidedly and defiantly white, Christian, capitalist, and European and not the trash-strewn, discordant, brutally antisocial Islamist suburbs of Paris?  Was the resurgent Right in Poland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK the future?

God forbid, he said, but was quickly ashamed of himself since he had become a confirmed atheist long ago. Religion was an obstacle to utopian, progressive, secular reform; but ideas of God were becoming just as insistent, irritating, and niggling as the possibility of no climate change.  What was happening to him?

Nobody cared, actually, since Bob without noticing it had become supernumerary, irrelevant, and a bother.  Let him do his windy preaching on some streetcorner and cadge a few nickels from the crowd.  Just not here in official Washington which was changing as fast as a chameleon's colors.  

As such, Bob was a metaphor for progressivism, a political movement which had finally had its day.  There will always be minor eruptions, burps from the radical underground, young idealists in need of a cause, but when all is said and done, the vapid, hollow, impossibly hopeful beliefs of the Left are finished.