The Walking Dead may be the current teen sensation
but it’s also us. Listen carefully and you can hear the slow, slow, quick,
quick, slow of the global Danse Macabre...
As the boys get out their war toys again and the
dispossessed are on the march again and we poison the air we breathe, the water
we drink and the ground we need to survive, you can feel the rhythm. The 1% still squirreling away ill gotten
billions in tax havens and offshore accounts don’t hear it. But as those – for
example the British elite that sit on inherited (unearned) wealth - join forces
with those who have more recently become obscenely rich by ravaging the resources of
struggling nations that do not have the infrastructure to stop them, the music
gets louder the movements more exaggerated.
The Danse Macabre was an artistic vision of mediaeval
times. Long before Saint Saens’ music, DM was a depiction of the dead dancing
to their graves. The point was to show the elite with their crowns and sceptres
and gold alongside the poor and ragged of the earth all jigging towards their burial
places in a last desperate darkly joyful moment – levelled by Death.
Yes – you may say – those were times when war,
famine and disease could wipe out significant proportions of the earth’s populous
without warning and with frightening speed. That was then, you may say, this is
now. Then I will come back to you with this. Have you
already forgotten Ebola? I know we ignored it for years because it was just the
darkies who got it but we know it’s breaking out of its viral comfort zone.
Haven’t you heard, way before we’ve found cures for some of the deadliest
diseases on the planet, the medicines we’ve relied on this side of WWII are no
longer playing ball.
Each sect with a new End of Days prophecy is spot
lit and ridiculed by the mass media. The really bad joke is that we are at the
End of Days; it is an ongoing event that we are speeding up alarmingly. With
every thoughtless action, with every decision made for profit instead of
people, with ever pound or dollar we spend on war instead of security, with
every act of excess instead of restraint, we dance faster towards Earth Zero.
And if you are reading this behind the comfort of your scepticism remember – I
accurately predicted the 2015 election results. It’s past time to be
uncomfortable. The period when we could, in all reasonable hope, turn things
around passed early in my lifetime.
Unlike our 14th Century forebears we are
simply not facing up to reality; with humour or at all. Maybe that is why
you’ll hear on the ‘news’ a cursory account of how the corals around the planet
are crumbling as sea temperatures rise followed by lengthy detailed reports
about which bunch of blokes kicked or hit or ran with, various different shaped
and sized balls... I listened with incredulity this morning as Sainsbury, a
major supermarket chain here in the UK, encouraged people to get in their cars
for some extra journeys this month in their ad for discount fuel.
Since we succeeded in destabilising the Middle East
– again – the rupture, the crack in the thin veneer of civilisation has been
growing and no sticking plaster is now big enough to cover it. History tells us
that social breakdown, mass exodus and planetary pandemics follow.
Hospitals, if you are lucky enough to have them, are
over burdened and underfunded and we are short on compassion. In this country
our basic infrastructure has been sold off to the highest bidder and nothing
can now stand in the way of the profit juggernaut. Perhaps the most blatant recent
example of this is the Volkswagen debacle. In the face of even the flimsy laws
attempting to limit air pollution, human beings (who also need to breathe this air
I presume) have spent time, money, and ingenuity creating and fitting
technology to get round that legislation.
It’s like we’re all clinging to the outer branch of
a very old, tired tree and the people in charge are making big piles of sawdust
for themselves by sawing away at the part of the branch that connects us to the
trunk – and we are all just watching...
Time spent developing drugs to ensure a bloke can
shag when he wants equates to time that has not been spent keeping Malaria
drugs up to date or educating the population on the use of medicines that have
become essential to us such as antibiotics (see blog 97. Viagra – Yes. Effective Cure for Malaria – No!). There is no
excuse; the Chinese had medicines for Malaria 2000 years ago.
One of the elements the DM deals with is the human
desperation for a final fling, last dance, last hysterically elated act. On this
blog I’ve often decried silly, superficial, consumer mad triviality in the face
of human suffering and real anguish. But maybe those determinedly drinking / drugging
/ gambling / gorging themselves to death or spending themselves into oblivion
or flaying themselves for attention on social media are doing just that -
taking part in the Global Danse Macabre...