Apocalypse June 2023
Emotional Ibrahimovic
Your powerful voice, your self-erasing impulses — jamais vu, presque vu. Something isn’t real until it’s shared. Acid pools at dead ends. Successful people surrendering to madness, by choice. Let yourself have the thoughts and feel the emotions. Have patience, gratitude. Have listened. You will be held in odium, in a world where rapid industrialisation constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today’s objects (1). Lovely. Brilliant. Amazing. All the oldest news in town. Fox News labels Biden a wannabe dictator during Trump speech. Woke military. Woke financial scams. Woke fascism. Everyone overestimated everything. A few days feels like a long time but it isn’t really. Trump indicted, Johnson resigned before he’s pushed. Both men sing from the Berlusconi songsheet. Oh, things are going to pot now. This could be the final nail in the coffin of our democracy, save yourselves by saving me!
Public life is by definition shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden. This splurging out of everything intimate into public view is new, true, but also, entirely predictable when we look with just a little bit of retrospect. Yet again, we have fallen clumsily into precisely what was forewarned. Young upstarts, habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic. It’s not all about earning a fortune. Cars. No they don’t, we’re mixing up need and want again. Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them. Dude, this editing gives me whiplash. I just felt like, if it was honest, people would get it. See what I’m into? That’s the good stuff. I’ve got it correct. That historical theorists were so accurate in their predictions — they would turn in their graves, or they wouldn’t believe their luck.
Do your job. Do it competently. Is that too much to ask? Issue free environment. Hip to gable with rear dormer. The first danger door is feudal. Prevent the birth of poor-quality descendants. In a world in which success was the only virtue, he had resigned himself to failure. Where is the duty of care? Just as well they can’t see behind his eyes. Purple hat, not the actual cause of underlying effectiveness. The Kremlin can’t create, so all that is left is to destroy. Sabre rattling, threat of nuclear war hasn’t gone away. The genius idea of mutually assured destruction, despite the statement that it can never be won and must never be fought. Explosions taking place. The cooling pond at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in danger of collapse as a result of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. The depleted reservoir will leave three critical regions in Ukraine’s bread basket without a key water supply — 40% of global trade in sunflower meal, 35% of sunflower oil, and 5% of wheat, barley and corn.
Watch! It is destabilised. It is an attempt to subvert us from inside. False pretences, factional standoff. Wagner march for freedom, armed mutiny, Putin calls it treason. Now, commercials. And then… commercials. Russians are fighting against Russians because they disagree on the way how to better kill us, says Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik. Let them kill people amongst themselves and hopefully get away from my country. No apparent resistance on the day. Lukashenko’s press office said that Putin has thanked him for negotiating with Wagner chief Prigozhin, who agreed to pull back his mercenaries. So… is it a theatrical piece to save face?
There are good people and bad people, and society has no obligation to look after the bad people because they already broke the social contract by transgressing, in your opinion. Here we get into murky waters. Good is hardworking, obedient. Bad is lazy, or different. It’s a brilliant sleight of hand to show Marxian theory as treason and blasphemy, and our society is by no means, absolutely not, a living, breathing communistic fiction already. Minus the regulation. Larger scale manufacturing conglomerates outdo, undercut smaller indies, a funnel to the top of mergers and acquisitions, maintaining the illusion of consumer choice and actual healthy market competition. All-seeing eyes and what you have access to. If you’re going for a different job, a better job, you’re embodying a particular set of circumstances in that moment. If you look around you and see things that you bought because you like them, think, how did you decide your taste? Entrust it to a deeper place, more automatic. Ye voters, ye consumers, we are all in this together!
If there was a chance lives could be saved, it was important to try everything possible. Titan elite, massively disproportionate blanket coverage. The most important thing happening in the world, for a day, versus the frequency of refugee tragedies in the Mediterranean. A frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea (2). Numbing, overwhelming stats and dehumanising terms. Blamed for their deaths, blamed for seeking out better lives. We’re not all saints, let it be said. In 2020, cigarette sales rose for the first time in 20 years. Wellness is out and sleaze is of the moment, even though we’re collectively more aware of how harmful the habit is, how influential it can be. Alas in the end I am too a hipster cliché. Arctic Monkeys headline Glasto — is this terminal decline culture? Trying to tell our hero what they need to do but can’t quite. They used to stick their tongues out at old rockers who looked and sounded like this, straight down the line.
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(1) Hannah Arendt
(2) Arwa Mahdawi
