Doom And Gloom, The Ethos Of A Liberal - And His Sorrowful End When He Sees The Light

Anderson Phillips was in a particularly bad mood because the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf was gaining ice at the rate of half a kilometer per year - an unexpected trend that suggested that global warming was reversing, and that the contention of climate change deniers that variations in temperature were par for the course since the beginning of geologic time might have some validity. 

Then what?  The past twenty years of Anderson's life had been based on the coming climate Armageddon - sea waters rising and inundating coastal cities from Miami to Boston, corn and wheat fields in Iowa and Nebraska burnt to a crisp, malaria and dengue returning to North America with a vengeance on the wings of billions of newly hatched mosquitos, energy costs through the roof because of increasing demand for air conditioning, and the final, last, disastrous drying up of rivers, the disappearance of mountain snow, and the intolerable furnace blasts of the sun's rays unmitigated by the ozone layer. 

Andy had been a tireless advocate for remedial action - a shutdown of coalfired power stations, punitive taxes on gasoline, subsidies for solar and wind power, a stop to all pipeline and oil refinery construction, a moratorium on carbon energy exploration, and a monitored program of home thermostat regulation. 

In a recent speech to a packed auditorium at Duke University, Andy said:

God created the world in seven days and we are destroying it year by year.  Our unthinking, unconscionable ignorance, our irresponsibility, and our moral dereliction are causing the rapid incineration of the planet.  Mother Earth needs you!

Andy was reminded of the WWII posters seen everywhere, I WANT YOU! a long accusative finger pointed at the American people by Uncle Sam.  

 

The wars against Hitler and Japan were nothing compared to the coming Armageddon.  At the very worst if we lost the wars we would be speaking German and drinking dunkles Bier; but this climate disaster was existential.  All living things would die in a conflagration only seen in Hell, leaving a charred, empty wasteland.  

The thought was chilling but real.  He had seen enough post-apocalyptic movies to imagine what the world would be like as it died - smoldering embers, smoking remains, burning tires, wildfires and vast, consuming blazes. - and then nothing.  Emptiness, desolation, the roaming of soulless gangs looking for food, water, and fuel.  He shuddered at the thought. 

So why was it that Americans were simply going about their business buying Suburbans, Escalades, Hummers, and Ford F-350s?  Jacking up their thermostats to 80F in the winter and down to 65F in the summer? Taking unnecessary trips, idling at stoplights, polluting their air in long lines of stalled traffic, buying plastic-wrapped food, buying aisles' worth of cheap plastic toys?

He smirked at the self-serving idea of  'adaptation', the ability of mankind to adapt to change and profit from it.  Venice-like canals in New York, Everglades wetlands extending through South Beach and Biscayne Bay, great stilted cities above the tides, agriculture moved north, a new geopolitical algorithms favoring northern Canada and Siberia, recombinant DNA enabling human beings to flourish in the heat, AI virtual environments obviating the necessity of environmental exposure. 

'Fat chance', Andy said to no one in particular in the clueless, ignorantly happy Christmas crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue.  He pictured each and every one of them shriveled up - desiccated,  mummy-like corpses lying on every street in America. 

His was a complete, finished vision of life on earth.  It was filled with images of smoking cornfields, inundated cities, drowning children in swamping seas, rampaging gangs, and inchoate violence until the final windblown, fiery incineration of all. 

'What if it isn't true?' was the fleeting thought that crossed his mind before he shook it loose and discarded it. What if the earth was not heating up as predicted, and that in fact a cooling cycle was already mustering in the Arctic ready to blow south?  What if man's contribution to climate variation was but a trifle, beggared by the overwhelming, inexplicably powerful forces of nature?  God forbid. 

The last twenty years of his life would have been wasted, amounted to nothing.  All the blood, sweat, and tears expended all for naught.  He would be a cipher, a nothing, a non-person, a bit of social detritus. 

As often happens when one bad thought jumps the firewall, others come fast behind. What if the gender spectrum were nothing but an idealistic confabulation?  A distortion of nature?  An apostasy, a God-damned aberration? A twisted vision of a universal bathhouse buggering?  An unhinged idea? A devilish construction?

What if the black man was not the sentient, original man of the forest, environmentally attuned, insightful, legatee of Natural Law, above all in moral principle, the New Man, the future?  What if the ghetto, not the primeval forest best described him - socially dysfunctional, drug addled, wantonly violent, and without any noticeable higher principles whatsoever? 

Andy sat at the bar of the Blarney Stone, drank another boilermaker - Wild Turkey and a triple IPA back - and tried to chase these horrific thoughts from his head.  Armageddon was coming to him not the planet. It was he on the brink of breakdown and incineration. 

 

'Oh, my God, what have I done?', he wailed at the bartender, nonplussed and indifferent, the stock and trade of his profession.  'Tell me, please!'

The bartender came over to Andy, poured him another IPA and Wild Turkey, and said, 'On the house', wiping the counter and resetting the salt and pepper shakers. 

'It can't be.  It simply can't be', Andy said.  

Negation and erasure are horrible things - life as a smudge removed.  The climate simply had to be warming, that was all there was to it.  The black man was not to be perennially mired in rancid ghettoes but would rise to his proper place atop the human pyramid.  Sexuality was to be forever a fluid option, not the confining, patriarchal obsession of white males it had been for millennia.  Capitalism was the tool of the devil, not the savior of the poor, the engine of civilization, the expression of opportunity and will. If not, then what?

But none of the cant and preposterous notions of social justice he had believed in for decades were as they seemed, and are nothing more than fantastic assumptions - febrile dreams, childish fairy tales, creepy In the Night Kitchen stories; so why had he not come to his senses before this?  Why had he dumped every bit of enthusiasm, happiness, good will and good fortune in the trash and ended up empty?

 

True belief is dangerous territory.  As the World Turns is a better option, for there is no let down in an afternoon soap opera.  We're expected to cry for an hour then go back to gardening.  Not so for the true believer for whom there is no respite from horror. 

God only knows what happened to Andy after his epiphany.  He was no longer seen along K Street, nor at climate meetings, or at colloquies on transgenderism.  Realizing you are a smudge is no laughing matter, and we call should have some compassion even for a man who should have known better long ago.