Grains of Truth...

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Just watched 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire', a 1961 sci-fi film about a man-made climate Armageddon. A prescient document couched in fantasy fiction, the parallels with today's situation are significant. The differences between the fantasy and our current - and probable future - reality, are both substantive and stylistic. The basic premise of the film is that thermonuclear tests across the world have thrown the planet off its axis and shifted its orbit toward the sun.

That we have engineered a near-irreversible climate catastrophe by far more mundane means is, in itself, a tragic tribute to our species' inability to either appreciate on any fundamental level our symbiotic relationship with our home planet, or to have the political and economic will to address the problems we have created, and to implement the solutions to which, that are fast approaching being beyond our reach for good.

The differences between the fiction and the reality go further, however: in the fiction, the press - in this case represented by The Daily Express - and the government, are shown to be the bastions of stable society. By contrast, the 'youth' of the day are depicted as anarchically-disposed vandals, blithely partying their collective way into the abyss. How different reality is from the fiction. The principal voices of concern about climate are the young, betrayed by politicians who 'govern' through inaction and greed, and a press largely in the pockets of same: given all that is going down at the moment, just where are our 'leaders'? On bloody holiday is where. At least the gutter press are starting to wake from their slumbers at long last.

Pitchforks are readily available from all good farmers' suppliers, and probably on Amazon, too. Start stocking up, people; oh, and I think I might propagate plans for tumbrils and gibbets on social media while we're about it. Come the Revolution, Brothers & Sisters...


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