Leave it to Rolling Stone to put a banner ad for the military in a Kurt Vonnegut interview where he concludes that the world is about to end and there’s nothing anyone can do.
Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. “I know what it’s all about,” he scoffed. “I don’t need any more persuasion.” Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. “There is nothing they can do,” he bleakly answered. “It’s over, my friend. The game is lost.”
I remember a lecture given by Marc Gaede when I was studying photography at Art Center. To represent how we had “destroyed” the Earth he used the analogy of a cross Atlantic plane flight. There is a point of no return where you do not have enough fuel to turn around to the continent you came from. You must go on to the other side, or crash into the sea. As I recall he believed that we have upset the balance of things so greatly that the Earth is going to undergo cataclysmic changes. Not necessarily the end of the world, but the end of how it was. So the challenge now is not how do we fix things, but how do we cope with the way things will be.
Disasterbation is fun. And profitable!
Yeah, a tad snarky this midmorning. Musta been a bad pancake or something…