When I read Ruben Bolling’s Lucky Ducky take on last week’s United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change: Global Warming of 1.5° C (that’s 2.7° F) my memory flashed by to Last Gasp’s 2 December 1970 underground comic: Last Gasp No. 2. The third story in that issue—Routine, by Jim Osborne takes place in 2970 (1,000 years in Osborne’s future) and involves the exploration of a long-dead planet. The Twilight-Zone reveal, of course, is that the planet is Earth.
(You can get a feel for Slow Death’s art in A Look Inside Episode 2-Slow Death #5 1973)
My point here is that global warming/climate change is nothing new. (I first learned of the phenomenon in 1970 as a high school freshman in Mr. Smith’s Earth Science class.) Yet, like a similar slow rolling catastrophe—cigarettes—the relevant industries have managed to distract, obfuscate and ridicule the science that has been warning us for most of my life.
And, so far, their plan (to enjoy their ill-gotten gain and die long before the real crises hit) continues to work. The poll this week in the North Royalton Post asks a simple question: Do you think humans have anything to do with weather events like Hurricane Michael? The results, so far, are distributing: 50 percent of those responding said Not At All and a further 11.1 percent allowed that humans have Only A Bit to do with the storm’s ferocity. I joined the group that answered: Definitely (38.9 percent).
This is disturbing because here on the North Coast of The United States we live in an area where—euphemistically labeled—hydro-political issues are increasingly likely. We’re talking about Water Wars that will dwarf anything that has ever happened in our American West.
Back in 2015, I wrote:
In the extreme, communities like North Royalton battle to protect their access to the potable water of the Great Lakes from waves of refugees that will make the current flood of displaced peoples in Europe–or our own immigration “crisis”–look like beneficial tourism.
We are all frogs in the pot of rapidly heating water.
We need to hop.
Now!
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Guinea Pig by Charles Johnson, found in
Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:
I was a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, with a double major in philosophy and English, those two broken and declining (if not already dead) fields in higher education, and by the end of my third year I was going broke and couldn’t afford both tuition and food, but because I was physically healthy (mentally is a different matter), I started selling my vital fluids to the blood bank, and volunteering for every science experiment conducted on campus, and even off campus, by aspiring inventors, provided they paid the participants.
The final sentence in Johnson’s story is, in fact, a punch line:
But this is where my fabliau (I believe that’s the right form, I aced the class on the genre) ends, one I hope caused no offense, but if it did, try to keep in mind that sometimes every able-bodied American male enjoys being a dog.
Yes we do. Woof.
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You In The Red Shirt by Sarah Koenig.
In his recap of the episode, Sam Allard ledes:
Serial’s sixth episode is framed as the beginning of the third season’s second half, which will shift the spotlight from the Cuyahoga County Justice Center itself—its convolved mechanisms, protocols and persons of authority—to those who have “deep roots” in the system. Stories will now center on the victims; that is, those whom the system continues to chew up but never quite spits out.
Ep. 6 takes us away from downtown Cleveland and into the gnarly corruption and egregious incompetence of East Cleveland. Not like this will be surprising, but boy does the city look bad under a microscope.
“It felt like East Cleveland had given up on basic governance,” says reporter Emmanuel Dzotsi early on. “It felt like something out of I Am Legend.”
For the record, I actually prefer the 1971 adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 dystopic vampire novel Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, to the 2007 remake, I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, because the former’s ending is true to Matheson’s novel.
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War Of The Wolf by Bernard Cornwell. Chapter 3 begins:
The next day dawned bright and cold, the pale sky only discolored by smoke from the fires as Æhelstan’s men burned the remnants of Cynælf’s encampment.
This line, sort of, violates Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing: Never open a book with weather. I say sort of because this opens Chapter 3, not the the book, but I still found the weather jarring here.
