Am I Over Reacting?

(who tends to the future?)

Here’s my 5 things for this week/fortnight/whatever:

1. TV series recommendation (and how to make the future even worse)

2. Turning the election into a culture war (again)

3. Favourite gadget to keep you warm

4. Forgetting — (for Alzheimer and Brain Awareness month)

5. Vale to two wonderful artists

1. The Last Man on Earth

   

So this week I noticed SBS promoting the The Last Man on Earth, which you can stream here (all four seasons) and which I highly recommend.

A deeply dark dramedy, made in 2015 and set in 2022 (yes, only got the pandemic prediction wrong by two years), created by and starring Will Forte, it is hilarious, appalling and heartbreaking by turns.

You have to stick with it past the first few episodes in which Phil Miller — seemingly the sole survivor of a devastating plague — becomes increasingly obnoxious as he sinks into loneliness and despair. After travelling across the US looking for other survivors, he finally makes his way back to his home town, painting ‘Alive in Tuscon’ on billboards along the way. He holes up in an empty mansion on the other side of the tracks from where he grew up, surrounds himself with treasured paintings and artifacts he’s looted on his travels (Academy awards, a dinosaur skeleton head, Van Gogh’s Irises, the rug from the Oval Office, and so on). He drives abandoned cars to abandoned supermarkets, shoots the glass doors to gain entry, and fills his trolleys with every kind of packaged junk and gourmet food in an orgy of bored consumerism. He loses all personal dignity, invents games to play with all the excess that now has no other value, uses the mansion swimming pool as his toilet, the toilet as a dump for all his plastic waste, and fills a kiddie pool with margaritas. And then months later, just as he’s about to kill himself he sees smoke in the distance, smoke from someone else’s campfire.

Please do stick with Phil because the beauty of the series is in the relationships, the settings, and all the twists and turns and how even this utterly ghastly person becomes (at times) so breathtakingly, heartbreakingly loveable.

But the scene that I was most reminded of this week is towards the end of series three. The troop of survivors who have gathered together over the several years since the plague, each individually finding their way to Phil’s via his ‘Alive in Tuscon’ signs, end up on a bus, madly trying to find somewhere they can settle — using a map and an old book from a library: somewhere they can be more than 100 miles from a nuclear reactor. Because no-one has been attending to all the nuclear power plants dotted across the country. And every time they think they might have found a safe place, Phil’s geiger counter starts to go off again.

[And if you’re curious as to what would happen to the world’s nuclear reactors and power plants if humans stopped tending them, there’s a quora forum about it here - https://www.quora.com/If-all-humans-vanished-would-all-the-nuclear-plants-explode-or-just-stop-functioning ]

And of course that’s without even mentioning the radioactive waste (no, not the size of a coke can) that has to be guarded, or buried, and prevented from leaking…

Why is it that for some ‘Think of future generations’ seems to translate as ‘Great, let them foot the bill; by the time they realise how big it is we’ll be gone.’

2. Rolling out the Culture War again

When Dutton announced he was going to campaign at the next election on a nuclear future, something so easily damnable with facts and figures, I saw some saying, ‘Great, he is such a gift to the ALP.’

But underestimating people like Dutton (and Howard, Bjelke-Petersen, Morrison, Trump, etc) has always been dangerous.

I had a quick look into the world of ex-Twitter the other morning and it's scary to see how easily the pro-nukes people trot out their own 'facts and figures' in an authoritative, assured way to drown out the CSIRO’s report and the vast global evidence about blow out costs, time frames, safety problems, better and cheaper alternatives, etc etc.

The thing is they don't care about truth or evidence, so it's not going to be a debate on the evidence, it will be a shitfest of lies like all the others.

The subtext of it will be about ‘western civilisation’, belief in ‘progress’ (progress to what?), and ‘a way of life’ that so many feel is under attack by the Greenies and lefties.

And while 'if you don't know, vote no' worked for the right wing for the Voice referendum, I just don’t think that will be transferable here.

(ie ‘If you don’t know if it’s safe, then vote no’ - I mean it should logically work, but I think who says it matters. If this is the left speaking to potential Lib-Nat voters, it is likely to be interpreted as insulting and belittling. )

Apart from the 1972 ‘It’s Time’ campaign (thank you Gough and all who worked towards that momentus change) I don’t think slogans work as well for the left as they do for the right. 

‘It’s Time’ worked because there was already a huge groundswell and this just summed it up. ‘

And because it was positive.

Negative campaigns work better for the rightwing. 

So I think they'll use another variation of this kind of reductive negative slogan that spares their supporters having to think too hard and congratulates them for their salt of the earth progressive-conservatism with this issue.

They'll find a dishonest but catchy angle to damn renewables and hammer it, with all the media (and the utterly hobbled ABC) falling in line. (Remember the ‘$90 roasts’ and ‘Juliar’.)

They also have a lot of farmers and CFA/RFA volunteers etc on their side on this, as they hate the way corporations are buying up good farming land for wind and giant solar farms, and the negative effect this is having on those towns.

I think we need to become very sophisticated, and we need to listen to the complaints about this. Just saying how cool wind and solar farms are is not listening to these concerns about communities. And Dutton will play right into that gap.

It will be another wedge to divide us into the 'real honest folks' (like farmers) and the 'educated lefty inner city middle class'. As he did with the Voice referendum.

They are evil, not clueless. (Sadly.)

3. My favourite gadget this week

Whoa… even here on the Central Coast it is cooold….. So I am grateful for my new Hot Pod to keep my toes warm all night long. It plugs into electricity and takes about 10 mins to heat up (and then the light goes out to let you know so you can unplug it and pop it into your bed) and it keeps cosy warm under blankets for at least 8 hours. Much longer than a hot water bottle.

I got mine at Chemist Warehouse for $32.99. ($47 at Bunnings.)

4. It’s Alzheimers and Brain Awareness month

In case you know someone who loves someone with dementia and who might resonate with this — my piece from Radio National a few years ago, based on a long poem from Vagabondage. (And which became a prose piece in The Age of Fibs.)

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/earshot/forgetting/6781690

or here’s the link to it on Substack →

5. When so much happens in a single day
   
   Two amazing visual artists of my generation died earlier this month, on the same day, and way too young.
   

   Vale Destiny Deacon —
   ‘I like to think there is a laugh and a tear in each picture’

   What a loss.

   

   

   

And Vale Rosemary Laing —

Back in the 1980s when I was an only-slightly-published writer, Rosemary was living in a share house with a friend and she asked me to write about her exhibition of paintings for one of the Art magazines. (Back when she was working with paint, before she focussed on photography and video.) Such a privilege to engage so intensely with her work at the start of what became a rich career.

This last one seemed especially fitting for this Stack - it’s from a series called Swansongs : “in swansongs, the performance is an act of self-preservation as dozens of evacuees in the form of tiny rock and shell assemblages, or ‘shellworks’, flee disaster in search of a place of safety.”

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Thanks for reading!

Always love to get your comments, and shares, and restacks, and etc etc.

xxx Beth