TS Eliot wrote that ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’ and this observation has never seemed more relevant than today.
For a longer time, I have been pondering the shift in people’s behavior towards immersion in screen-born fantasies. It became so prevalent that plot developments of fictional series took headline space in traditional media alongside real news. And binge-watching series in single sittings had become as commonplace as the consumption of comfort food, its companion.
Until recently, we were in danger of amusing ourselves to death. Yet nobody batted an eyelid. It was business as usual.
But no longer.
Where once people isolated themselves in escapist fantasies, we are all now opening our eyes each morning to a strange psycho social experiment which either invites you to go deeper into the dream or wake up to the new reality — a virus as brutal, arbitrary and deadly as its chosen host — us.
Personally, I find the cognitive dissonance of a world fixated by trivia and fantasy even more alarming knowing what time it is. Some things should be jettisoned immediately. Here’s a list — feel free to add your own:
· Cult of celebrity/personality/fame
Goes back to my original point — it’s just a big nothing burger soufflé fanned by people’s hot air on social media and armies of half-baked bots. Gwyneth Paltrow comes to mind here selling out Goopy candles that smell of her freshly steamed vagina. I much preferred her short, memorable and instructive performance in Contagion which ends in an autopsy.
Before I get off this particular hobby horse, I’d like to touch down like a fly on the turd of cult of personality. Now I can’t, for example contend that Donald Trump doesn’t have a personality but the fact that that he thinks 100 000 deaths would be a good outcome for America maybe says something about his attitude to the public.
And by spiking America’s National Security Council, slashing CDC budgets and decrying the danger of the novel Coronavirus as late as February so as not to scare the stock market, he is responsible for those hundreds of thousands of deaths — many of whom are MAGA hat-wearing devotees to the cult of his personality.
If he were hosting season Covid-19 of the Apprentice, he wouldn’t just be fired but also charged with mass murder aided and abetted by gross negligence.
I’d certainly watch that season finale.
· And now sport
Lovers and consumers of sport and other weapons of mass distraction are probably hurting bigly at the minute as all their favorite platforms are shutting down. Bewildered sports presenters on TV resign themselves to talking about nothing (no change there) and newsrooms are scratching their heads how to fill the other half of their time slot with real news — the unpalatable stuff like the war in Yemen, the climate crisis, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the refugee crisis etc.
Now when there was never a better time to sit in your underwear drinking Duff beer and watching the football, an inconvenient virus has shut down the sport sausage factory and everyone must stand by or watch re-runs.
But as Mr Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality — sport only becomes ‘real news’ to these people when a plane filled with football players erupts into an inferno or Kobe Bryant dies in a helicopter accident. Until that time, it’s just another soufflé of highly paid celebrities playing with their balls on prime time channels.
· Greed
Let’s face it, greed is ugly. Whether it is hoarders filling their shopping carts up to the brim or people bragging on social media about their bling, it’s just not a good look. The arrival of this virus is a curious mirroring of the last great pandemic that preceded the Roaring 20s which ended in a stock market crash and the Great Depression. Ironically, the only thing to end that regression was the Second World War. The timing is a bit off, but does this augur the chain of events for a third world war? I pray we aren’t that stupid.
In such an eventuality, the wealthy might be able to slip off to their well-appointed bunkers for a while with a retinue of servants and a concierge doctor but at some point, they will have to emerge to a world where their wealth has little value.
It’s times like these that ordinary people see wealth not as something aspirational, but what it is; ugly. The rich and privileged take note.
Obscene wealth is always off the backs of others, whether it’s international drug dealing (legal and illegal), exploitation of ordinary people trying to make a living or stripping the world of its resources.
Let’s stop glorifying industries which directly serve greed whether it’s the petrochemical industry, a lobster hauled from the bottom of a raging sea onto a gilded plate or an ingot of gold sifted from a gaping hole in the ground. Without the economic imperative, there’s nothing heroic or intelligent about risking your life or ruining the planet for the sake of somebody else’s wealth.
Today is the first day of April and morgues and ice rinks around the world are filling up with the bodies of the COVID-19 dead. For so many, this will be the cruelest month. We were given more than a century to make things right after the last great pandemic, but greed, idolatry and stupidity took the wheel instead.
Sure, things are better for a lot of people alive on the planet but the disparity of better for this one species of ours would even put Croesus to shame.
If it really isn’t too late (and hope is always the last thing to die) we have choices. Covid-19 will not kill us all but it will strip bare the lie of continuous growth, the status quo of gross inequality and restate the aching need in the world for a reset.
In December I posted a blog which came to the same conclusion I have today — we are all in this together — there is no ‘other’. The virus does not discriminate, and neither should we. We can either choose a better future for everyone or continue with a collapsing world covered in sores, fueled by greed, territorial ambitions and manufactured hate.
We can either go deeper into the dream or wake up. Nobody here gets out alive but with gratitude, love and a common sense of humanity we can still achieve great things.
