[Zepps_News] # Special reports | Oh God (redux)

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" Zepp " <zepp

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:04:04 -0700

[Zepps_News] # Special reports | Oh God (redux)

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1837808,00.html

 

Oh God (redux)

 

Almost two years ago, Emma Brockes spoke to liberal Britons the morning

after George Bush's re-election and found a collective sense of

foreboding and depression. Now, she asks, have our worst fears come to

pass?

 

Saturday August 5, 2006

The Guardian

 

Everyone has their own tipping point. For some it was North Korea's

decision to fire missiles over the sea of Japan last month; for others

it was the transcript of Bush and Blair rap-speaking at the G8; the

relief into which the number of Iraqi dead has been thrown by the war in

Lebanon did for many more and for those really paying attention, it was

the collapse of the world trade talks last week. None of these crises

are in themselves unique, but they have built up over the weeks until

you are watching the news one night and suddenly there it is: the

out-of-body experience and sense that everything, everywhere, is out of

whack. It's like that scene in Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum, finding

himself being chased by a T-Rex, struggles momentarily to organise a

response. " I'm fairly alarmed here, " he says. I'm fairly alarmed here.

 

Article continues

The surprising thing is that any of this has come as a surprise. The day

after George Bush was elected for a second term, all those who had been

rooting for the other guy (who was it, again?) predicted that the world

as we knew it was shortly to end. It was comforting, in a gothic sort of

way, to throw oneself around like Sybil Thorndike and imagine just how

bad things were going to get. " The one consolation, " a friend of mine

emailed at the time, " is that he [bush] will screw things up so badly in

the next four years that the Democrats will move back into favour.

That's if we still have a world. "

 

It seems rather quaint, that attitude, now. The despondency was real and

the doom-mongering heartfelt, but they were still rooted in the

superstition that, by preparing for the worst, one reduced the chances

of it actually happening. On the November 4, 2004, when people moaned

" we're all going to die, " what they meant was, " we're all going to carry

on pretty much as before, " such being the limits to the human

imagination. And given Bush's approach to Iraq, Iran and the

environment, " just as before " seemed bad enough.

 

When things started to deteriorate, it took a while to register. We are

accustomed, as sophisticated consumers of the 24-hour news media, to

taking a rolling approach to disaster, which means never regarding a

story as finite, which means pretending that nothing has ultimate

consequences, which means, if you want to go the whole philosophical

hog, existing in a constant state of denial about death. Anyway. In news

as in life, the way we deal with disturbing events is to wrap them in

analytical packaging, an evasion that makes us feel more in control. If

you don't have a position on war in the Middle East, you at least have

an appreciation for the range of positions at your disposal and as long

as Sky News keeps booking the experts and loading the graphics, there is

no catastrophe too great or too strange to absorb.

 

September 11 was the exception to this. But without a single event to

focus on, it has been relatively easy, since then, to relegate the daily

drip of bad news to the top shelf of the brain. One night last week, the

main item on the 10'clock news was Israel sending troops into Lebanon.

It was accompanied by footage of tanks throwing up dust and people

crawling out of bomb damaged housing. The second item was news of three

British soldiers being killed in an ambush in southern Afghanistan and

nine hundred more British troops being committed to the region, bringing

the total to 4,500. The third item was that Corporal Matthew Cornish, a

29-year-old British soldier, husband and father of two young children,

had died in a mortar attack in Basra, bringing the total number of

deaths in Iraq that day to 60, which the reporter pointed out was

slightly below average, and the death toll over the past two months to

nearly 6,000.

 

At this stage, the shelf starts to buckle. Embedded in these stories was

speculation about Iran's nuclear threat, a reminder that Gaza is still

under siege, analysis of Tony Blair's fallout with his cabinet and

footage of his joint press conference with George Bush, which when it

was shown the first time round - Blair frowning powerfully, Bush

sinisterly jocular - was a tipping point into despair for lots of

people. The final item on the news that evening couldn't have been more

symbolic if it had shown the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Fidel

Castro, the one constant in all our lives, was on the blink. That's when

I reached for the phone and -

 

" We're fucked. "

 

There is a time when the time for analysis has passed.

 

" We are. "

 

" Shouldn't we being doing something? Panicking or something? "

 

There is nothing to do, of course, or at least there is nothing

constructive to do. But unease of this kind requires external

recognition, some small breach in your routine to show you're not just

passively consuming it all - like frogs in a pan of slowly heating

water, never quite making the decision to jump out. For the past five

years my newsagent has had Capital FM playing in his shop in the

morning, save for two occasions that I remember: the day after the July

7 bombings and the day after the death of the Queen Mother, when, to

mark the seriousness of the occasion, he switched channels to Radio 5.

He retuned it last week to Radio 5, on a morning when the news from

around the world was bad, but no worse than the day before. Everyone has

their own tipping point.

 

As any respectable doomsday cultist will tell you, once you start

looking for evil omens, you will see them everywhere; once you're in a

bad place, everything conspires to make the world seem more sinister.

Take Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, who seems in the current

climate to be the perfect messenger for the apocalypse: spooky-eyed,

expressionless, possibly powered by a portable generator off-screen.

Fergal Keane's dispatches from Lebanon, meanwhile, are getting so

lyrical I keep expecting him to break into Danny Boy.

 

Biblical prophesy sites have been quick to jump on the Israel/Lebanon

crisis as a realisation of Thessalonians 5:3 ( " While people are saying,

'Peace and safety,' destruction will come on them suddenly, as labour

pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape ... " ) and the Old

Testament Book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39. They must be the only

people actively enjoying the situation. " Got that dancing feeling on the

inside of me, " posts one contributor to the Rapture Ready website, an

outfit dedicated to scouring world events for signs of the second

coming. Its talkboards are in a state of high excitement at the moment.

" This is the busiest I've ever seen this website in a few years! " posts

one contributor. " I have been having rapture dreams and I can't believe

that this is really it! We are on the edge of eternity!!!!!!! "

 

" Whoa! I can sure feel the glory bumps after reading this thread! "

replies another contributor and another points out that there are

exactly 40 days between the date on which the first Israeli soldier was

kidnapped and that day's date, which, he writes, " I find to be a HUGE

coincidence. "

 

There is an argument to be made that the world is no more in crisis now

than it has been at any other point in history, give or take a world

war, and that the only reason we are freaking out is that the countries

involved are western. No one reported much existential angst during

Rwanda. When Israel bombed Beirut airport I was aware that part of the

reason I got end-of-the-world shivers was that, unlike the airports in

Baghdad or Mogadishu, I have been to Beirut's and it is just like Luton.

When two countries with well-decorated departure halls and branches of

Starbucks start fighting, you pay more attention than when Ethiopia

marches into Somalia, as it did in July without anyone paying much

attention. (The Ethiopian troops entered at the invitation of Somalia's

secular interim government, to help fight the Islamic militia, who

promptly threatened them with another jihad).

 

These are strange times and the fact that everyone claimed to see them

coming in 2004 hasn't made them any easier to deal with. It occasionally

feels as if magnetic flip is taking place, the process of polar reversal

that happens every 300 millennia or so when north becomes south and

south north, and birds fly into buildings and people with pacemakers

keel over in the street. What can you do? For the past 10 years I have

taken William L Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on holiday and

for the first time, last week, I actually thought about reading it. (I

didn't, obviously.) As multiple wars on multiple fronts drag on, you try

to initiate a cycle of response that reminds you there are things to be

grateful for; the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo going

off without violence, for example, and Mel Gibson self-detonating. You

reassure yourself that, as in all cycles of history, this one will come

to an end, too. Then you remember that the man in charge of writing the

ending is George Bush, and you have to start again.

 

--

" Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking

about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.

Nothing has

changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,

we're

talking about getting a court order before we do so "

-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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