Fiddling While Rome Drowns

Our priorities are all askew as we ignore planetary disaster in favor of culture wars

There is a memorable scene in The Amazing Mrs. Maisel‘s fifth and final season, in which  she is rebuffing the advances of her boss, a big TV star (think Johnny Carson—it’s the early Sixties). She says, “I can give you 10 reasons why I won’t go out with you,” and proceeds to list them, beginning with, “You’re not Jewish,” and “You’re my boss,” and concluding with “You’re married.” This causes him to raise an eyebrow, and say, “I find it interesting that the fact that I’m married comes in 10th.”

This is essentially how I feel about global warming. It’s an existential threat, but doesn’t seem to be very high on anyone’s list of crises.

Every time we see news about extreme weather like the unprecedented thunderstorms raging through the South this season, or hear about polar ice melts and rising temperatures, we are told that we simply have to stop burning fossil fuels. Somehow, this little bit of atmospheric physics does nothing to move the needle. In fact, mostly what we hear is political backlash.

Watching Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Mars) chair a Congressional Committee interrogation of some poor liberal woman (“woke” is now the popular term of disparagement) was instructive, and forced me to remember that she’s a performer, and all her leading questions, eye-rolling and histrionics were for the benefit of fundraising efforts, and her audience of one, the Former Guy. She knows the dirty little secret of fragmented media in 2023—you couldn’t scare up enough live viewers of her performance to mount a rugby scrum, but the official video will make its way into a jillion inboxes, and will be broadcast ad nauseam on Fox, Newsmax and talk radio. If they’re smart (not a given), it will also roll across Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, and more than a few right wing websites, some even safe for human consumption.

The most galling exchange was MTG’s “gotcha” attack on her witness for being a stepmother, as opposed to a “real” mother. It was a brand of hate and churlishness that was difficult to behold, and brought to mind the famous Abraham Lincoln quote, “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother,” who was, of course, his stepmother. Not good enough for the Queen of Mean. It was an ugly spectacle that I feared was going to burn up my retinas. I felt as though I should have made one of those shadow-boxes you use to view an eclipse.

The point is, from global climate change to AI to gun violence and domestic terrorism, we have much bigger fish to fry.

A writer I love, Bob Garfield, the former ad critic in Advertising Age, says we need to prioritize our dread. He says don’t sweat the lack of bike lanes or the prospect of super volcanoes. He is kind enough to provide us with a list things we should be freaking out about, and most of them are solvable, but not in our fragmented, siloed world. Here’s a sampling of his list:

Coming fourth, “American Fascism/ American Taliban. If you’re peering over the horizon, you’re looking in the wrong direction. It is already here, in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Idaho, Utah, Georgia, South Dakota and wherever books are banned, abortion is cut off, voting rights are curtailed, racism is legislated, Congressional districts are gerrymandered, Christian Nationalism reigns and conspiracy nuts rise to power.”

Third is Artificial Intelligence. “The genie is out of the bottle and moving at breakneck speed, possibly already out of reach of human intervention. Its almost incalculable utility is destined to be exponentially outweighed by the vast unintended consequences.”

He rates Nuclear War second. “Golden oldie, but Putin has his shaky finger on the button. And he is a psychopath. Not to mention Kim Jong Un. And Pakistan. And newly authoritarian Israel. I cowered under my first-grade desk in 1962, and I’m still quaking.”

And the number one thing to make him pull the covers up and tightly close his eyes? “Climate Change/Water Shortages. The most critical threat to humanity, because it is progressing unchecked by concerted governmental action. Why? Money and power. The world will end in deserts of reason and floods of greed. And the bike lanes will be empty.”

Garfield didn’t even get to Guns Everywhere. With mass shootings now feeling like daily occurrences, shouldn’t we be talking about gun violence instead of drag queen shows?

The top four on my doom-scroll list are climate change, gun violence, the looming financial default (welcome to Deadbeat Nation), and threats to democracy posed by pols who want to gain and keep power, regardless of what voters want.

All of this whistling past the graveyard is setting us up for a series of rude awakenings.

©2023 Jon Sinton