The Thanksgiving dinner I'm thinking of this particular year is the one in the 2021 movie Don't Look Up. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a midwestern university astronomer whose graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence) discovered a new comet. When he realizes the comet is on a collision course with Earth, and its impact would kill most life on the planet, he tries to warn everyone.
It's a serious subject, a kind of updated remake of the 1951 movie When World's Collide, but it's also a political satire very much akin to Dr. Strangelove. The President (played by Meryl Streep) is a female Trump, and in an suddenly more accurate addition, her right hand man is the tech billionaire (Mark Rylance) modelled mostly on Elon Musk.
The astronomers try to persuade the authorities to take the extinction threat of the comet seriously. At first they don't (nor does the news media) but when they need a political distraction, they pretend to address it--until the tech billionaire convinces the president that he has a way to divert the comet and still exploit its mineral riches. (Spoiler: he doesn't.) Eventually the President makes ignoring the comet into a political fetish. She whips up her adoring rally crowd, adorned in a baseball cap with her motto, "Don't Look Up." It's already visible but if you don't look up to see it, the comet won't be there. It won't be real. Instead, look down and check your Black Friday deals.
One analogue to the comet is the Covid pandemic, but mostly it's climate distortion. Climate distortion is the comet that will destroy civilization and life as we know it on Earth.
Eventually the comet crashes into Earth, but by that time the president and her billionaire have left the building, though their prospects on a distant planet appear dubious. Still, the point is made: the super rich and the ideologues who serve them, fuck things up and let everyone else suffer the consequences. As usual.
The dinner is at the astronomer's middle class home. It may not actually be Thanksgiving Day, but it seems like that kind of meal. Gathered around the table are his family, and the strays that became a family in trying to save the Earth. They've finished the meal, and are praising the quality of the coffee, when the DiCaprio character looks around and says, "We really did have everything, didn't we?" And the next moment the table shakes and the walls implode.
In comparison, our apocalypse is in slower motion, but it is underway. Due in part to the short time left, when squandering four years could be fatal, the chances of doing much about climate distortion as a society, as a global community, have just about disappeared. That's thanks to the results of a corrupted election, bent by illegal foreign interference by Putin and others, and Musk's money and power over a major information medium, and perhaps a lot more than that.
With a Harris presidency we had a chance of a useful approach to the inexorable effects of climate disruption, and prospects for humanity in the farther future. For one thing, Kamala Harris as v.p. is the only official I've ever heard speak of the crisis in terms of causes and effects. She knows her stuff. She had the potential of finally articulating the known dimensions and the tasks ahead.
We don't know for sure but it's likely that we are almost out of time to do much even about the far future. We still had a chance to get ahead of the effects in the nearer future--and the present we're ignoring by not looking up--instead of trying to only deal with each disaster as it occurs. Those effects are certainly coming. But on the federal level and in many states, addressing and anticipating those effects isn't likely to happen either.
It seemed that this slow- motion apocalypse presented opportunities to address its effects and its causes. But the fact that it was a slow-motion apocalypse also made it easier for some people to ignore what is really happening. Now the institutions that we would depend on to clarify what needs to be done, and to organize our resilience, are going to be bled dry if not completely destroyed. The stability and strength necessary to deal with the international problems that are already happening--such as the pressures of climate migration--may be willfully and needlessly destroyed. What would have been chaotic may now become chaos.
For the past 40 years or so, each Republican administration that screwed the economy and weakened government's ability to meet needs of the people was followed by a Democratic administration that spent 4 to 8 years undoing as much of the damage as it could. But that's going to be much harder this time, even if the growing electoral college disadvantage (and the Supreme Court) can be overcome.
Because--enter Chaos, formerly known around here as Homegrown Hitler, and more generally as the Orange One. The extent of the destruction his administration is already planning for the federal government would take a long time to restore, and might never be undone. The place of America in the world-- economically and politically (as a great power, but also a beacon to the world for its stability and the rule of law)--may be ended. We'll be lucky if in four years America is not a client state of Russia.
The last time Homegrown Hitler was elected, some had the excuse of not knowing what he would do. This time everybody who cared to listen knew what he planned to do. Severe damage to this country and to many other countries in the world will be self-inflicted, and hard to forgive or forget. America might never live down the humiliation of electing a wannabe dictator and what amounts to a criminal organization to run the country. A lot of other things this country has never experienced suddenly could be possible, like a dictatorship, and then even a military coup or a revolution.
Apparently there were enough voters in the swing states to elect a criminal, a sexual predator and de facto rapist and de facto traitor, who is appointing a government led by other criminals, sexual predators, de facto rapists and de facto traitors--a group notable for truly alarming ignorance as well as suicidal ideology. Those voters effectively voted against democracy, and as Margaret Atwood said, now we'll see how they like it.
So good luck to those voters in Georgia and North Carolina the next time there's a hurricane and they sit in the rubble of their homes for months before they see a FEMA representative throw them a roll of paper towels. Good luck to them in Arizona and Nevada when they can't get fresh fruit and vegetables from Mexico. Good luck to them in Wisconsin and Michigan if the inevitable next pandemic hits soon and the federal government does not permit a vaccine. Good luck to them in Pennsylvania and all the swing states when prices go up, and then unemployment, and the economy hits the danger zone again, with no one in power with the sense to do anything but make it worse. And therefore, good luck to us all.
And good luck to those voters in PA and Ohio when they feel the effects of losing seniority and savvy in the Senate, and in Montana they watch a senator who knows nothing about their state and cares less, or in Texas they endure another six years of a coward co-conspirator in insurrection, interested only in his own power and comfort.
Good luck to the small dying cities revived by immigrants who see their lifeblood drained, and to an America that thinks highly of itself as good and humane, as families are torn apart and more women die for lack of medical care that is standing there, too afraid to act. Good luck to an America that thinks itself peaceful and well-ordered by law and not racist at all when the high tech hobnail boots come to their towns and cities and drag people from their homes. Then we'll see how well this philosophy serves them: don't look up. Don't look at reality. Keep your eyes on your lying phones.
Taken all together, it's hard not to conclude that the apocalypse timetable has been sped up. It may turn out to be more like collision with a comet that it seemed it would just a month ago.
So this Thanksgiving we can savor what we have now, and what we've had. Probably no generations since the Pleistocene had it better, especially materially, than those who lived in America after World War II until now. Despite a rough ride through those decades, we really did have everything.
Happy Thanksgiving.
