It's 6AM on Thursday morning a few days before New Years'. I am writing this in my head.
It's early and dark and my wife is still asleep. I'm too tired to get out of bed to get a pencil. So, while I'm think-writing, I'm also hoping I'll remember this when I finally get to a computer to scribble it down.
It's just before the end of yet another Amerikan annus horibilis, where facts are no more, gun violence and drug deaths are out of control, the world rages in wars and hatred, and the prospect of a dictator taking over the country is more feasible than laughable.
Oh, and it's raining like katz and schwartz outside. A rain that would have Noah pulling on those ugly LL Bean boots. A rain that inside-outs a trillion umbrellas and leaves the city streets strewn with the ribs of broken Chinese-made two-dollar rain-blocking contrivances that work about as well as a customer-service bot from a cable company.
It's late December, and we're having our third giant rainstorm in as many weeks without having had even a trace, even a downy flake of snow. My little horse must think it queer.
It will never snow again.
Though in my little seaside house we have three or four shovels, a bag of salt to help melt the ice that no longer collects on our stone walkway, and my 1966 Simca 1500 has two or three plastic ice-scrapers rattling about its tin-trunk, it will never snow again.
Humankind--we, you, me, all of us--broke the planet. And it will never snow again. It will be 70-degrees in winter, 120-degrees in the summer. Storms will come from nowhere. Tropical diseases will descend upon Canada. Seas will swell and rivers will dry. Food won't grow where it's always grown and the sixty-percent of the planet's population that lives near water will be displaced by that water, forced to drown or move and hated for having to move, and therefore starting more hate and more wars and more of the human-made gasses that started this all.
It will never snow again. We broke the planet.
Of course, it will snow again.
We'll have four inches or twenty-four and blizzards will sweep the streets and the idiots that wear their politics on a hat and proffer their philosophies on East-Asian made t-shirts will scoff and snort and laugh and say through their coke-laden noses, 'global warming,' as if one now-anomalous freak snowstorm proves they're right and science and a million points of data prove reality wrong.
It will never snow again. We broke the planet.
We broke it by being cheap.
We broke it for fun and profit and shareholder value.
We broke it by not paying for what we bought.
We broke it convincing ourselves it was ok when it wasn't and we gave ourselves trophies as reassurance.
We broke it by making a mess and refusing to clean it up.
We broke it by ignoring and ignorance.
We broke it because we denied it.
We broke it because because responsibility is hard and we prefer easy.
I think about all this as the rain cascades on my expensive solar-paneled roof and I think of what I know best, the ad industry.
We will never see a good commercial or print ad again.
Oh, maybe one will escape somehow from a giant holding company advertising gulag. One commercial for a real product, like a detergent, a computer or a car will get out. Or one will emerge from a couple of people who live in Greenpoint and still give a shit and somehow convinced a client to. Or we'll see something somehow in the wild that doesn't suck and we'll say:
OK, it's all right.
See, we over-reacted.
See, good-advertising can happen.
Except, those little blips on the radar screen of advertising are anomalous. They're somehow not some reality.
We'll never see a good ad again. We broke the industry.
We broke it by being cheap.
We broke it for fun and profit and shareholder value.
We broke it by not paying for what we bought.
We broke it convincing ourselves it was ok when it wasn't and we gave ourselves trophies as reassurance.
We broke it by making a mess and refusing to clean it up.
We broke it by ignoring and ignorance.
We broke it because we denied it.
We broke it because because responsibility is hard and we prefer easy.
That's all for today.
I'm putting on my galoshes.
It's raining like a son of a bitch.
No comments:
Post a Comment