The Future Is Now and It Is Hideous

The real problem, according to The Author, is that we may be experiencing the beginning of the end and not the end of the beginning. We wander through these days with one of several attitudes, according to our political and psychological orientations. Either the virus is indeed “a liberal hoax” and the body counts are exaggerated and it’s only the dispensable elderly and pathologically infirm filling up the hospitals and graves (as if they were meaningless chattel who owed it to us all to die for capitalism) and impositions made on our rights to congregate at Nascar rallies and gun conventions are illegal government overreach, OR the virus is deadly and unprecedented and thus far impervious to our slapdash remedies, and we have to take continuing steps — painful as they may be — to mitigate its effects and safeguard our fellow human beings as best we can.

While this second approach seems (because it is) more enlightened, it will not save us if the virus does not confer immunity upon those who survive infection, and/or if no effective vaccine can be developed and administered, and/or if the virus mutates at a rate rendering vaccines only briefly effective, all of which seem to be real possibilities. We are told that we have “been through this before” and that we have always “emerged from global crises” to continue to inflict our planet-razing ingenuity on every iota of the once-green earth. But there will have to come a time when that is not true. Our species, like all species before us, will die out. The Author had always thought (like a Pollyanna) that one day his children would inherit the consequences of all of this human folly, the quality of their lives greatly lessened by the effects of climate change and the grisly endgame of free-market capitalism. Now The Author sees the folly and complacency of this perspective. The future is now, and it is very, very ugly. If you follow the more conservative line of thought, and “open the world for business,” dead-eyed crews in HazMat suits will be piling bodies into mass graves even as you sit with your beer at a sporting stadium that serves as an incubator for the next roiling wave of death. If you follow the more liberal line of thought, these waves of death will be smaller and slower but they will still exist, and all around you the homeless and jobless will amass in a different kind of mass grave — a grave of the living — as the government prints more money and tells us how close we are to emerging triumphant from our holes (homes) so as to again gleefully raze the earth with our toxic freedom.

What, then, is an Author to do? One supposes that, like Nero, The Author must simply hold the fiddle to his throat and play, providing his nonexistent readers with a glimpse into a future that ends in a black hole (as all futures do). Or, as an alternative, The Author could (one imagines) author up a different future, one that does indeed send our quarantined species back into the light of Starbucks and the cold company of other virus-dampened souls. Just tell The Author what to do, (non)reader. He is listening. He hears your hope and he feeds on it, like a lamprey… killing it even as it sustains him. Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.