Everything is Fucked.

Everything is fucked.

We’re all so busy burning the land and boiling the sea that the new Mad Max movie looks less like an escapist fantasy and more like a preview of what the world’s going to look like in a generation or two. The huge populations of the developing world are pushing their way towards a standard of living defined by the industrialized nations of the west, following a path through massive deforestation and consumption of fossil fuels towards a consumer utopia that is absolutely unsustainable, but also irresistible. While the version of Chinese cuisine exported by its emigrants is a global favorite, in China itself gastronomes can’t seem to find satisfaction without boiling dogs alive or cutting the fins off sharks to allow them to slowly bleed to death as they circle like the Bismark, unable to swim, to the bottom of the dying oceans. The oceans, of course, are filled with plastic, swept up by ocean currents into massive constellations of plastic particles that, if this were a Neal Stephenson story, would be aggregated into a massive, floating, plastic city, but in the real world end up breaking down into toxic chemicals that poison the waters and enter the food chain. Tiny pieces are ingested by microorganisms and end up in your sashimi; larger pieces choke the guts of albatrosses, killing for example one-third of the albatross chicks born on Midway Atoll.

Cops keep killing people. Or raping them.  Or both.  (Courtrooms aren’t safe either.)  While there’s some heavily agenda-driven debate on the demographics of the victims of police violence, the basic facts seem to be that while the majority of Americans killed by the police are white, this is because 63% of Americans are non-Latino whites, and for a single individual having an interaction with law enforcement, the odds of being killed by the officers is much greater for a non-white civilian (four times worse, says one study). Racism certainly exists within police forces, but even without it, the combination of a frustrating and dangerous profession, deadly weapons, and a near-impunity created by a culture of corruption, coverups, and silence would be enough to guarantee the regular recurrence of unjustified killings of civilians by law enforcement. Nobody knows how many Americans are killed by the police each year. There are 18,000 or so law enforcement agencies in the US, and they aren’t required to compile their data on officer involved shootings. Of course, they don’t want to do so. They don’t want to be subject to the scrutiny that would challenge the power which they enjoy. And power corrupts. It is known.

Understandably sick of being killed by the police, some people have been taking to the streets in protest, others in riot. The peaceful protests are cheerfully ignored by those in power, while the violent riots are condemned, though the events in Baltimore showed that if you burn the heart of your city to the ground, you can at least provoke the cops into putting on a puppet show of justice, charging the officers responsible for the death of Freddie Gray with murder…and then releasing each of them on bail less than that set for a single rioter. (Although this fact is perhaps less damning than it seems on the face of it; the officers aren’t likely a flight risk, and have much to lose by running rather than fighting the charges in court.) And they even fucked that up.  I’m not sure whether to take it as a sign that things are getting slowly better, or that they don’t change at all, when I was reminded that 45 years ago as of yesterday, National Guard troops killed four students at Kent State in Ohio. Two were protesting the Vietnam War, the other two were walking to class when they were killed.

Of course, not all cops are bad cops, and we should be grateful to those who perform this vital service. It was a traffic cop who gunned down a pair of would-be jihadis, attempted mass murderers armed with potentially very lethal rifles. The previously seemingly-paranoid fears that Islamic extremism is coming to the United States have been replaced by a grim realization that it is already here. The Muslim fanatics were attempting to shoot up a convention putting on a “draw Muhammed contest,” which can be interpreted either as a militant defense of freedom of expression, or as an intentional provocation of exactly the kind of violent response that it got. The organization putting on the event is the American Freedom Defense Institute, which sounds like either a fictional group from Team America: World Police, or like a new euphemistic name for the School of the Americas. They have been described as a hate group (by the controversial and extreme Southern Poverty Law Center), and certainly aren’t shy about their criticism of Islam and their defense of Israel. Whether they are in fact anti-Muslim or are instead merely opposed to extremist violence, the group’s views are Constitutionally protected speech. Even if the contest was actually intended to provoke just this kind of attack, it’s perfectly legal to hunt over bait in Texas if you’re hunting feral pigs. Certainly when I was growing up, no matter what my kid brother did to provoke me, if I ever hit him, I was the one to get in trouble, not him. Ironically it’s the same strategy used by Palestinian protestors, getting kids to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers to provoke the soldiers to shoot at them so they can point out to the world how brutal the Israelis are. It’s a dick move, but it works.

Of course, if Islamic extremist terrorists are finally putting the tip into Lady Liberty, the Muslim-majority world has been getting it head, shaft, and balls for a while now. It’s regrettably understandable that some, seeing the horror of the Islamic extremists, come to treat Islam as synonymous with evil, but in fact most of the victims of Islam extremists are their fellow Muslims. Every day it seems, Da’ish comes up with some new horror even more fucked up than the last: throwing homosexuals in Iraq to their deaths from tall buildings, then burning a captured Joradian pilot alive by roasting him in a cage, and decapitating just about anybody they can get their hands on. Also, they fuck goats. And donkeys. But only when they aren’t being provided with enough sex slaves from among the local population.

There’s no happy ending here, no feel-good wrap-up to make the absolute horror of the world a little more tolerable. There’s nothing to do but look for some nepenthe to dull the sensation, to feel it a little less. Maybe you drink, because, as Bukowski put it, “When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” Or you go to the movies. And then, just trying to hide in the dark and forget it all of a couple of hours, you get all bent out of shape because Iron Man cracks a weirdly anachronistic rape joke. Because it’s impossible to have any sense of perspective in this world of fire and death, impossible to ignore the fact that when you stub your toe on the way to the gas chamber it still hurts.