The Thin Red Line and all that it portends… End of Days Diary #13

Look at this graph. 

The red line is the North Atlantic surface sea temperatures for this year, All the other lines below it every other line that we have data for.

And you look at that line. And if you have any imagination at all, you know what it spells. 

And you keep thinking to yourself, “how is this happening?”  But you know

And you think to yourself, “what does it all mean?” But you know.

And you say to yourself, “it’s so unfair, that it’s not bending downwards into the norm.” But you know that ultimately, fairness has nothing to do with it. It’s not as if we haven’t had fair warning, after all.

And you know, also that if somehow you could arrange a vote of all the creatures on this planet, even though we have wiped out many who would vote against, it would still be an overwhelming majority raising their claws, their paws, their tails, their whatevers to say, “humans should get off the fucking planet. You don’t know how to behave.” 

And we don’t. We aren’t committing slow-motion suicide. We are committing – not just geological terms, but also human history terms – very, very rapid suicide. 

We’re holding petrol bowsers to other members of our species’ heads and threatening to pull the trigger. Like in that photo from the Tet Offensive of the Vietcong soldier being summarily executed. And what we don’t realize is the bullet will do full circuit. With a flame thrower, we’ll do a full circuit and cook ourselves. That’s the graph. That’s the red line.

We do realize, some of us, we  do understand we’ve made a Faustian pact and Mephistopheles is here to collect on that debt, the one we thought was so distant.

So to back up onto the “Faust thing” as you could call it, (there’s probably a book to be written called “The Faust Thing) as you’ll know from yesterday’s ramble, sorry, “detailed, coherent, logically sequenced, highly polished masterwork”  that I’m moving books in different piles around the house. And of course, I bought these books as a young man full of hope and expectation that I would read them more diligently. And that was not to be. (There’s a line to this effect in J MacIrney’s Bright Lights Big City.) 

Like Faust, I was greedy for more knowledge, more “facts”, because these would somehow protect me from myself, and from the world. It would help me puff myself up, and help me to (believe that I) understand and therefore feel safe. And I will not read all these books. And even if I did – so what? There’s factoids and cultural capital, and then there’s being a ‘useful’ member of society. But right now, it begins to collapse around our ears, what would ‘useful’ even mean?

At a species level, well, that’s Faust too – here’s Pandora’s box. We have all this. technology we have all this “power” in the sense of the ability to shape the world, but we do not have the wisdom. 

And all parents know that you don’t let children play with boxes of matches, if you want to have a house. But what if, like on that island in the book The Lord of the Flies, there are no adults. And it’s just all these different children striking lights, discarding them and finding a new one … iirc they burned half the island, and one of their own, of whom they never spoke again…

There’s a Tom Lehrer lyric about a young man in Our Hometown, 

I remember Sam

He was the village idiot

And though it seems a pity, it was so

He loved to burn down houses just to watch the glow

And nothing could be done

Because he was the mayor’s son

Sums it up really, for our planet. No actual adults in charge, the pyromaniacs are all too well-connected to political power to be punishable// All the other species being murdered. We’re not even looking after ourselves as a species in any sense. 

And I keep coming back to that red line. And I’ll try to follow that red line, to think about that red line. And what it means

One obvious analogy is the practice of not lending in certain neighborhoods because of perceived high economic risk that was called “redlining”. And this was suffered by particularly black communities who didn’t get access to the same finance as the white whether it was public or private money.

“Redlining can be defined as a discriminatory practice that consists of the systematic denial of services such as mortgages, insurance loans, and other financial services to residents of certain areas, based on their race or ethnicity.” (source)

The other analogy is when an engine is dangerously overheating and you have the temperature gauge deeply in the red and the engine is groaning and grinding and things that used to work are beginning not to. And unless you get some serious coolant into the system, you aren’t going to have a functioning system quite soon, just a very heavy and intricate paperweight (Ayn Rand, bless her totalitarian socks, used this image at the end of one of her doorstep ‘novels’).

And then that’s the beautiful but let’s face it over-long film by Terrence Malick too – “The Thin Red Line” about the war in the Pacific and the Marines on Guadalcanal (iirc). Defeat chaos death, death on industrial scale. awaits. 

So yeah, that thin red line,  that Thin Red Line. Fun times.