When I look at the world, I keep getting the feeling someone’s telling me, “If you can’t stand the heat – get outta the kitchen!”
Except, deep in my bunker, the kitchen is my living room, which in turn is my work station, which in turn is my bedroom. I couldn’t leave this hell hole if I tried. Too many wires, comforters and pretty pictures to remind me of yesteryear…
You see, the world is in a bad way right now and it ain’t gonna get any better. Climate change is the hot potato of politics and even if all the fat backs have resigned to eating it, the problem comes with what topping to choose. It doesn’t matter what kind of bizarre spin you put on it, the planet is fucked up with rising temperatures, flooding, radiation and El Nino heading back for round 2. Rocky Balboa stepped outta retirement doped to the hilt on steroids, but he hasn’t got shit on El Nino.
I remember back when the environment was mentioned on cardboard coloured science programs scheduled late at night when only the vampires fed on the cathode ray tube. The rest of us were force fed capitalist dogmas and consumer medicine through relentless advertisements, chat shows and films bursting at the seams with product placement. I had no idea what carbon emissions were, but James Bond sure looked suave in his latest automobile and chemical odour enhancer.
It’s like all of a sudden the wool has been lifted from our eyes as we witness half of Indonesia underwater, and old age pensioners boiling to death in the Mediterranean basin. The weather men can’t lie through their white teeth anymore. The cat’s out the bag and people demand answers. The fingers are pointing at the major corporations, oil refineries, car manufacturers and political whores. They smile and grip their knives behind their backs as the point right back at us.
That’s you, me and the next sorry sod in the street because when push comes to shove- we’re the one’s to blame. We’re the one’s driving petrol guzzling people carriers in congested inner cities, scratching deep scars in the ozone layer with our cheap air travel.
We’re the ones munching through the multiple waste wrappers of genetically modified food and demanding that our electronic devices do more than NASA space shuttles.
Argh! The capitalist dream has suddenly turned sour and it’s time to pay the bill. If America would just sign along the dotted line of the Kyoto agreement, maybe the Chef upstairs could work something out on the tax..? Hell, if car manufacturers put their money where their mouth is and actually started to build those lovely hybrid vehicles they keep prophesising about, maybe we’ll be able to breathe without portable respirators in 50 years? But no!
None of that is going to happen because it is not in their interest at all to suddenly quit the blood money program. What the hell??? Do you really think George W. Bush is gonna just step away from Iraq and all that black gold in favour of modern alternative that those dirty Southerners in Brazil can make? Hell no!
We live in a capitalist state and as long as we’re all consuming non-sensical rubbish that shit ain’t gonna change one bit. And you know what the greatest bit about all this terror and turmoil is: The lab-coats that we never listened to late at night not 10 years ago, have handed in an official report to the world that states that we’ve passed the point of no return a long way back.
50 years down the line, temperatures are still rising, animals are still dying and our kids will be crying because we left such a pitiful inheritance. We’re on a highway to hell baby, and I bet you’re wishing you’d bought that Duran Duran cassette tape and neon shades at the last rest stop, eh? You’ll need ’em- the future’s bright, the future’s radiated!
Maxwell Woodger Esq.
13.02.07
Pics from Sri Lanka from Zac Slack.