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Not My Apocalypse!
Since we’re on the subject of Rolling Stone articles, I also just found this trimmed down online version of an article from the August 24, 2006 issue, entitled “Vonnegut’s Apocalypse.” The article relays some of Vonnegut’s apocalyptic pronouncements, such as:
“I’m talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What’s going to happen is, very soon, we’re going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.”
And asked to give advice for young environmentalists, he responds…
“There is nothing they can do,” he bleakly answered. “It’s over, my friend. The game is lost.”
And you know what I think about all this?
I say fuck him.
I say fuck everyone who says the world is ending, who says things are getting worse, who says we’re heading for a collision, a catastrophe, a crash and everything else. Fuck them because my world isn’t ending. It’s only getting started. And I don’t need any stodgy old fart sitting in a quaint summer house on Long Island telling me to give up hope because he’s grown too tired and jaded to give a shit anymore. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on. The world only ends when we all give up and stop caring and stop trying and start saying things are too hard and that we’ve gone too far to turn back. Fuck all that. And fuck all those people who are waiting around for the end with secret and smug glee, whether they’re expecting to float up into the sky, run off to the forest, hide out on remote islands, wait for South American gods to come pee on their heads, or are just too damned paralyzed with fear and paranoia to do anything but sit around with their thumbs up their butts crying about how evil is accelerating in the world. Fuck that. We don’t need any of that - not in my world. All you whiny bastards aren’t invited to my world. Get over it. Get over yourselves. Start living instead of anticipating. Life is what it is. And it’s beautiful and hard, terrifying and sublime, magnificent and absurd. And we don’t just get to give up and give in and walk off the playing field in a pre-pubescent temper tantrum.
No way. No how. Not anymore. Fuck all that.
September 2nd, 2006 at 2:18 pm
One of my favorite movie lines - from Jurassic Park, mind you - is “Life finds a way …” Hopefully, whether it’s the environment, culture, or your little veggie garden, life will find away to get out of it. … ‘course the other constant is that death always finds a way too.
A Chemical Engineer buddy of mine thinks the possible tragic legacy left to future generations, will be that we “burned up” all the oil. Plastics and other solid petroleum products still havent reached their amazing potential, and maybe never will, unless we can find alternatives those squandering “burning” it up uses.
September 2nd, 2006 at 2:21 pm
“a way out if it” - meaning reversing course and avoiding a no turning back scenario …
September 2nd, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Yeah! That’s the attitude. Anybody in Vermont? You should go on this walk http://vtwalc.org/
Chomsky http://www.chomsky.info/books/hegemony01.htm
I know some don’t care about politics- but it so fu*king important for absolute Republican control to come to an end. And to vote out every politician who doesn’t realize how serious global warming is.
And master genius Stephen Hawkings asks a good question “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?” http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0%2C%2C1836051%2C00.html
September 2nd, 2006 at 4:45 pm
I say fuck everyone who puts their email address up in magazines and Science Journals who never has any intention of ever answering those emails. Fuck those people. And also fuck idiots in the Media like George Noory who routinely put douchbags like Alex Jones on their show to talk about garbage how we’re all going to get wiped out by some Government produced virus or plague. I can think of about ten or twelve jackasses that I would love to just spit in their face right now. (Sorry this is my day to rant >:(). Btw, I never really read the Rolling Stone, but if they are jumping on this stupid Apocalypse bandwagon, then I’ll be sure to start discarding those magazines every chance and opportunity I get.
Thanks for allowing the voice!
September 2nd, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Oh I agree wholeheartedly..the planet stays..it’s not going anywhere. Only life as we know it will and should change…many of us will adapt to it..so no worries.
September 2nd, 2006 at 6:05 pm
The question is: what do we do in order to keep things from getting worse? I’m all for keeping on truckin’ and not giving up because I’m afraid to commit suicide, but what do we do instead? Guilter and guilter, indeed.
September 2nd, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Yeah, it really pisses me off too, when people just say “It’s over, in the next 30 years blah blah blah…” cause they always say it like theres nothing anyone can do about it. When a kid like me hears that, I’m just like “Yeah right, I got 70 years left, buddy.”
I don’t care if a spend it in an underground bunker, or a bubble under the sea, or a space colony, unless i get hit by a bus or get drafted and killed in a pointless war (both of which pretty unlikely) I’M GONNAH
THEM. There’s always something we can do.
What I always think when I hear that stuff is that we should make a pint to preserve what little humanity has, by collecting a whole bunch of digital music, art, literature and science stuff, put them inside a mountain whith some people to protect them, in the ground somewhere so that even if the rest of the human race is ripping itself apart, more so then usual, when they stop we won’t have to start from scratch!
But they won’t do that; they won’t do fucking anything. And when ALL the shit has hit the fan, it’s gonnah be my generation’s job to sort it all out, while the old bastards who got us here rot in nursing homes. And when we’ve sorted it all out; made some kind of New World Order, some Anarcho-Comunist Utopia or wtf, we’re gonnah be to old to enjoy it!
September 2nd, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Well said, Tim, well said.
September 2nd, 2006 at 10:12 pm
i remember as a little kid looking at grass growing through the concrete pavement and realising that nature (and we are part of that………..) finds a way. it doesn`t complain and editorialise and whine. it crashes it`s waves on the rocks for centuries and produces sand. and then goes and does something alse. like, um, sunsets and flocks of birds and oceans full of things we can only imagine.
we can`t destroy that.
those who are promoting that view are sad and desperate for attention……….or book sales.
September 3rd, 2006 at 1:20 am
As I wild optimist I would be the first to side with you countering Vonnegut’s Cassandra-ing. But I have to consider the source. Vonnegut is one of my favorite modern writers AND he is an old, worn down old man who has suffered much in his life. So while I will join in life affirming joy, wanton happiness, beating back the darkness and eschewing doom and gloom in general I won’t let attack Mr. V. Until I have made into my 70’s in this life I won’t judge someone else who falters at the end of a long road.
September 3rd, 2006 at 3:31 am
Oh sure, the planet is gonna survive, it has for billions of years without our presence. And I’m sure life for humanity will go on as well, just a lot less comfortably than it is now. But who’s to say that such a kick in the pants isn’t exactly what we need? Your recent gardening and physical labor has seemed to clear your head, and I can tell you’re seeing the benefit in a hard days work. (ie, reconnecting with mother earth, and you stop thinking incessantly). Well perhaps Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem MO is precisely how things SHOULD go down. We should go back to tilling the fields, raising our own crops, hunting for our food, being one with nature, etc. Who’s to say technological advancements have made us any happier as a species? They may have made things easier, but at what cost? Have we traded a piece of our soul for luxury and convenience?
September 3rd, 2006 at 4:01 am
Yes. Life will go on. After the riots, after the warlordism of hoarders leads to outright resource wars, after the millions of refugees flee the cities, bypass the suburbs which have become the battlefields, after they meet heavy resistence in the well-armed rural regions that are nearly self-sustaining, after all of that, the result of which would be probably something like 60 million dead or starving - - yes, in monastic, secluded, heavily-fortified agrarian communities, yes, life will go on.
Can you deal with that? Ask yourself who and whose horse is fucked in that scenario. Not me. This cityboy is gonna have to find a way to Vancouver. I’m gonna have to put together an escape plan, a stash of ammo, MREs, first-aid, and seeds.
Because reducing my own carbon impact no nearly zero has done shit to counterbalance the rest, now I’ve got to start thinking about a liferaft. Thanks. Love your blog.
September 3rd, 2006 at 7:28 am
Of course life finds a way! Sometimes that way is in eschewing cancerous life for the better over-all health of the planet. Strictly speaking, we all pretty much “deserve” to die, in the sense that we seem to be operating (albeit, mostly unconsciously) under a priveliged belief that we can alienate ourselves from the whole, and yet still mine, exploit, and rape that whole in favor of our immediate desires. Moderating this really doesn’t change anything.
The situation is truly hopeless, because, the way I see it, you get an apocalypse no matter what you do. We don’t get to merge into a mutually beneficial allignment with nature and still remain the focal point of our own lives, or even get to *think* like we usually do — neither can we continue being little ol’ me and expect nature to continue to support us, because as long as we entertain notions of seperateness from the whole, we’ll forever be on the path to self-destruction.
You say the world ends when we give up hope and stop caring, but almost everyone in America is full of hope and caring and all that hope and caring does is create guilt and tension over how we are and the way we’d like to be. Maybe there is just something fundamentally wrong with us, because it hasn’t done anything to motivate us to operate in our long-term favor (at least not on a mass scale, and the masses are our emissary and representative to the world.)
The truth is: we’re all going to die — you can’t con death and you can’t beat life — we don’t get the privelige of happy endings, because nothing ends with us. When Vonnegut says the world is ending, he’s talking about the human world, and rightly so — “Humans” don’t have a world, they’re a manifestation of nature, so they don’t get their little spot of territory seperate from the rest; that illusion of man being a seperate and independent entity, outside of nature, is what’s got us fucked up so bad.
What compromises would we be willing to make for our collective survival? I’m not talking about material ones, as those follow naturally; I’m talking about our selves.
But yeah… OF COURSE the game was lost, because we made the game “self” vs. “the other”, “man” vs. “nature”, and the other always wins — it’s infinite. There was never any hope for us. Hope is really just a totally untenable concept. I’m incredulous that we’ve had the audacity to even create something like that.
I mean, in a way, the situation is SOOO hopeless that there’s really no such thing as “giving up.” I assume what you mean by “giving up” is “giving up trying to make our current situation workable for the benefit of everyone”, which I think might be the most noble idea there is, because no matter how you interpret it, it seems like the most expedient path. But really, *whatever*, everyone follows their inclinations — the situation is so hopeless that we can’t even be wrong.
September 3rd, 2006 at 7:48 am
I also might point out that Vonnegut didn’t say anything in that article about things getting “worse”, he wasn’t exaclty projecting happiness in that interview, but I’m sure he, like George Carlin, views the little self-corrections and hic-ups of the environment (sometimes called, by us, “catastrophe”) as something necessary and essentially positive.
September 3rd, 2006 at 8:02 am
the way of thinking that seperates us from nature will enevitably allow us to conclude that we are destroyers and that things are going badly. when one realises that we are of nature and natural…………………….then the dichotomy disappears and we start to feel included and one with everything and not fatalistic about things. it is the ego and fear and anxiety about seperation that creates the bad feelings. a good hike or a dig in the dirt will cure that.
September 3rd, 2006 at 10:09 am
Well said alistair!
Jacob what a load of shit. What are you, the Machine incarnate?
Go ahead then. Seeya.
Amen brother.
Anticipation is equivalent to desire.
Vonnegut anticipates death and jokes (admits) in the RS article that he is trying to kill himself with cigarettes. He has indeed suffered in his life. It is what he wanted. Now he wants it for the rest of us. Kurt, I liked your books but just fucking die already.
I’d rather ask a child what the future holds. They know everything’s gonna be alright. Fuck anyone who thinks they know better. To them the kingdom of heaven is closed firmly.
Pinchbeck offers hope and Vonnegut offers none. Rolling Stone knows their demographic. The fucking hopeless.
September 3rd, 2006 at 1:48 pm
I don’t understand the violence of your reaction, Tim. Vonnegut was talking about gasolene. If your world depends on that, kaput your world. But one hundred years ago the dependence on oil had not yet been established. Mankind has done without it much longer than it has depended on it. I agree with Vonnegut that it’s too late to fix it. What we need to do now is embrace the fact and make drastic reductions in our dependence on oil. All populated regions of the earth should be returning to self-sufficiency in food production. If we are commuting long distances to work, we should recognise that this may not continue to be feasible. If air and road travel are progressively reduced to the levels of the 1950s and then to pre-automobile levels, so be it. We will still have the internet, even if we have to turn a handle to power our computers. This is no tragedy. It is blessed relief from much pollution and insanity and crime and dislocation of communities.
September 3rd, 2006 at 1:52 pm
I’m not talking about the planet surviving. I’m not talking about life going on after things fall apart. I’m talking about us surviving and about things not falling apart at all.
Well I’m just goddamned tired of hearing it all!
September 3rd, 2006 at 1:57 pm
No, there’s nothing goddamned wrong with us. I’m sick of hearing this too, of everyone loading each other up with a bunch of guilt over what amounts to human nature. There’s nothing wrong with us. There’s something wrong with our perception of ourselves though.
I’m not actually sure I agree that Pinchbeck offers hope. He’s always talking about it, but I don’t really see it underneath his work, personally.
September 3rd, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Yes I was oversimplifying (only to make a point about Rolling Stone’s rock n roll nihilism), but compared to the Vonnegut he’s a damn beacon. Personally I think they’re both kinda stupid, but I’ll take ayahuasca evangelism over doom-mongering any day.
Certainly nobody’s arguing that Vonnegut is offering anything of value. Cigarettes and despair? Ooh, how rock n roll.
Lisa Simpson at Hullabalooza: Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.
September 3rd, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Interesting that you aren’t allowed to react violently when told that we’re all about to die. We should acquiesce quietly?
Despair good. Anger bad. Stop thrashing and just drown already.
September 4th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Yeah, right. Is this the new insult now? We point at the opinions we don’t like and say “omg the machine!”
I don’t think the machine wants to destroy what it’s dependent on. It wants stasis, it wants to remain, it wants to find an equilibrium with the environment that will ensure its perpetual expansion and control of life (which it can’t, funnily enough.) By this point of view it’s a lot more machine-like to say: “the world will never end just keep on trucking!”
–
SHIT IS ALWAYS FALLING APART. It doesn’t generally fall apart all at the same time, but it falls apart for everyone individually — if you think can maintain yourself or your way of life through the ages then you’re full of shit, yet this is how most people feel.
Well, if we don’t mind percieving ourselves as some sort of wacky malignant growth — that’s just fine. I mean we don’t have to feel guilty about fucking shit up, that doesn’t change anything, though.
September 4th, 2006 at 1:54 am
The only reason you’re reacting violently is because the idea of the world ending is despairing TO YOU. There’s no value judgement attached to the apocalypse except your own.
September 4th, 2006 at 2:13 am
Bullshit! The whole thing is a psychological value judgement. That’s the purpose of it as a story & archetype
September 4th, 2006 at 5:00 am
So what, you’re trying to invalidate an archetype?
Whatever, my point is: the value attached to it is personal.
September 4th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Things fall apart quite a lot in this world. Every day it happens for individuals. Fairly often a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake or invasion or bombing raid makes it happen for a lot of people.
Running out of oil - which will mean oil getting more and more expensive, not a sudden complete drought of the stuff - need not be a catastrophe like the other things. We just plan for it.
Ironically, countries which have oil often suffer catastrophe by having oil, not by running out of it. Corruption increases, weapons are bought with the revenues, civil wars take place, self-sufficiency goes to hell, the poor get poorer or are victims of the fighting.
Of course, if individuals and states take their petroleum-fostered wealth and power as a god-given right, running out of the stuff will provoke anger and violence of apocalyptic proportions.
September 4th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Hell of a ride, huh? Jacob, I notice you’re still alive and kicking. There may be hope for you yet.
There is a way to cheat death. We’re all doing it right now. It’s called living.
Ha ha! Fuck you, death. Haven’t got me yet. Punkass.
September 4th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
What an absurd jab to make at somebody! I’m just saying that there’s a time and place for everything and I don’t believe this is the time or place.
Yes, and things are continually coming together as well. It is not a matter of one or the other being right or wrong. It is a matter of what you choose to focus on and emphasize within your own life and the people around you.
Why are people so wedded to the Apocalypse? Why can’t we move past it and enter a post-Apocalyptic scenario? Those always entertained me a lot more than the actual event itself. Let’s just go ahead and say it’s already behind us! What now?
September 4th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Sure, I can understand what you are saying if you are referring to journalism as entertainment.
But if you consider journalism as a necessary metier to present people with what is going on in the world so that they can participate as a team or family, whether on a local or global level, it doesn’t matter how much repetition there is or how gloomy the subject-matter. We can always avert our gaze.
Real news is made up of events or the reporting of what experts say. A lot of experts talk about some kind of apocalypse because they want to share their vision, because they see others acting without caring about consequences.
This is not entertainment any more than a pilot’s instrument console is intended to provide him with amusement during a long flight.
September 4th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
But an apocalyptic scenario, I might argue doesn’t make people *more* concerned with consequences of their actions. It could very well backfire and make people less concerned. You become so stressed out over something which is no more than a man-made story, model or hypothesis that you simply can’t take it anymore and stop caring, stop having an anchor for right action at all…
September 4th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
[…] My recent off-the-cuff denouncing of apocalyptic fantasies has yielded a bumper crop of people arguing against me. In effect, arguing for the Apocalypse. Why? What does this mean that this story has become so powerful that people simply don’t want to let it go? […]
September 5th, 2006 at 2:28 am
Well, that’s probably exactly what you meant, but it’s still a far-cry from what you wrote:
–
Well, if I wanted to get really zen, I might say I was dead already. If there’s really no preventing it, than it’s just another part of who I am.
September 5th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
I understand your rage, but Kurt Vonnegut has seen more bullshit in his lifetime than all of us who commented put together. You try surviving the bombing of Dresden and see if that doesn’t make you a pessimist.
However, the point you miss is that Vonnegut is a satirist, and when he says something like that, he’s trying to provoke a reaction. And he was successful, in relation to you.
But…
What are you going to actually do about it?
You say ‘fuck Vonnegut’ but now what? Another cyberspace post? Some actual hands-on activism?
What’s it going to be?
September 5th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
So, wait, I don’t understand. Tim, do you support trying to salvage technological civilization? That’s kinda where I am too, but I figured I was the only one on this site reactionary enough to think that way and at any rate, I’ll take primitivism if it’s necessary. Do you, Tim, equate giving up with preparing for a post-technological world?
About the only opinion I have on environmentalism is this: I agree that Earth will go on with or without human beings. I believe as a human being, I have a vested interest in seeing the human race continue until everyone I know dies a natural death — whether or not Mother Nature gives a shit about us either way.
Therefore, I support trying to help keep our environment clean for humanity’s sake, not because humanity is the only important thing on Earth, but because the Earth itself is not essentially what’s at risk — us humans living on it is. I don’t know whether technological civilization itself needs to be done away with, but I want to try to either 1) salvage technology or 2) grandfather us into the primitivist utopia, either way in order to avoid massive human deaths.
This is why I still say “yay” for labor unions in the industrial production complex. Whether the workers take over the factories and then gradually start decreasing production to save the earth before finally going back to hunting full-time is a matter of whether or not that industrial production makes human life on Earth untenable. I figure that if humans can survive with a polluted world, Mother Nature will, indeed, kill us — but this is not what we want, so we better clean up our act to whatever extent we need to (keeping the worker’s factories or not) in order to keep Momma from killing us.
Does this make sense? I haven’t proven myself again to be a hopeless reactionary, have I?
September 5th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Cool.
Speak for yourself.
Yes well he survived didn’t he? Seems like grounds for optimism to me.
Do about what? Dresden? Y2K? The passing of the Hale-Bopp comet? I for one am gonna ignore it all and go surfing.
Hands-on activism? As masturbatory as it sounds. Sheesh, cripple some infrastructure already and stop with the whining. Everything’s gonna be fine. You’ll never be able to beat the Machine if you think otherwise. (I think it’s telling that so-called activists use the same “motivation thru fear” tactics as the government. I’d hate either of them being my parents.)
This apocalypse will end up being no bigger than a chihuahua’s head.
September 5th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
I might and have said that elsewhere!
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/06/01/so-dark-the-con-of-man/
That’s part of my point: if the worst has already happened then there’s nothing to be afraid of.
September 5th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
Great! That’s awesome. I admire and respect that! It’s what I meant when I wrote this as well!
By that token, you could say the same thing about Vonnegut? What’s it gonna be Vonnegut, are you gonna give another smarmy interview or are you gonna actually DO something?
Writers write. It’s what they do. But I still agree with the substance of your post and criticism. Not that it matters if I *agree* so much as that I see what you’re getting at and agree there is a larger effect I can have on the world than necessarily writing. I think about it all the time!
September 5th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
I know this is an annoying response: but, I don’t know! I was hoping you guys knew! Somebody wrote me in an email today saying we can’t just unknow what we know. Knowledge doesn’t work like that. I think there is an important seed of truth in that statement but I don’t know how to apply it in a larger sense. I am actively working on the issue on a mental level, but that may not be enough as James pointed out above!
Definitely see what you’re saying. I think this is such a complex issue that there’s no way to be a reactionary. Everyone is and isn’t at the same time here.