Just heard the fires in Australia are so hot they're creating their own ghastly miniature climates, these diabolic weather-mobiles conjuring meteorological nightmares like flash-storms and fire-twisters. There's literally a fire-tornado sequence in Mad Max Fury Road. Fuck kids, this is really it isn't it.
Also just saw that the crowd-funded aid-relief is in the ballpark of fourteen billion. Holy Jesus Mary Mother and Joseph! Could this possibly be because the fire's are symptomatic of that long mythologised and yet for the average westerner yet to be intimately experienced slide into ecological catastrophe called Climate Change? Though disastrous, the manifest signs of what has been a stretch of gas-lighting to most middle-class citizens of developed countries can only be experienced as a (negative) relief; an evidentiary release from a half-truth which equally vague scientists (conducting various tests in the wings) kept telling us was an invisibly pending bookend to industrialisation. The fires in Ozzie have a certain 'told you so' ring to them don't they? Also if I see another meme about how they could have been averted if only Australia had privileged it's indigenous with sovereignty over their own lands then I think I'll fucking kill my self. I think the scale and immediacy of the crisis makes political recruitment as bad as hijacking it as an ad-space, which is practically the same when identity-based solidarities occur mostly across social-media platforms and exempt 'real-space' (as if the virtual had zero relationship with 'the Real'), until of course there's a disaster. No matter how networked we are we can't pretend real-space doesn't exist in the middle of an earthquake, for example.
Or a fire tornado.
Which actually isn't to say I don't agree with this retroactive consideration of indigenous ontologies as a salve to industrial processes. Because I totally do. But it's a bit late for that honey. Also this kind of blame-projection, no matter how accurate, tends to deny our consumer complicity in anything that happens here on out. I tend to think of this as an escapist manoeuvre where individual consumer practices can be carried on with guiltlessly (like air-travel lol) because we're so temporally removed from industry's genesis, namely the colonial expansion of Empire. Don't waste your breath! Literally, it's precious af rn.
Against this kind of backdrop I'm asking myself why I even bother writing! I mean, I'm aware of being drawn to a career in this shit, a drive which honestly is comprised of less noble aspirations, like those for wealth and status etcetera. But then I've always told myself those things are just means and that the ends justify those egotistic indulgences which are frequently packaged with a wide-reaching platform. I mean, look at M.I.A.! Problematic (I think?) but also holding space for celebrity to tackle not just platitudinous meme-worthy political stances, but to agitate for specific and vested causes into which she has a particular and therefore valuable insight. Political celebrity not as fashion but as righteously indignant mobilisation. Before her I'm guessing Right Aid or fucking Bono would've been the precedent, taking limp-dick stabs at remedying global poverty or playing stadium gigs for world peace, or whatever.
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