A Crisis and the Mad Max future! - Day #13 (6 April 2020) - 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #13 (6 April 2020)

A Crisis and the Mad Max future!

Who did not know that the Covid19 like pandemic was coming? Trump? Yea! He seem to be the only one who actually never saw it coming. Here are a few of his quotes, to prove my point and enliven up the blog!

(For a complete appreciation, imagine him saying this, when you read.)

“I would view it as something that just surprised the whole world.” “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.” “So there’s never been anything like this in history. There’s never been. And nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

(My comment - The Spanish Flu, for instance happened before he was born, and so probably, “nobody’s ever seen anything like this!”, and the H1N1 happened in 2009-10, but then he wasn’t President at that time, and so, “nobody’s ever seen anything like this!”)

“Nobody ever saw numbers like this even with regard to testing.”

(My comment - The Spanish flu.....blah, blah, blah...!)

“I just think this is something … that you can never really think is going to happen,” “It’s an unforeseen problem.” “What a problem. Came out of nowhere.”

(My comment – That was lie. Earlier, he called it a Chinese virus, then he says it “came out of nowhere”, that’s when he realised he needed Chinese masks and ventilators!)

These statements were like the usual, on various occasions, even as the virus was infecting and killing American people. His more recent sneers (the rest of us tweet!) are of another league!

How many of us watch English movies, especially Hollywood movies? I grew up watching some amazing, technically sound, but preposterously apocalyptic movies. I remember, it probably started with the 1979 Australian bloc-buster, the “Mad Max”. It is set in a distopian Australia, post-apocalyptic, where there is an oil crisis and violent gangs take control. And then comes Max to establish some semblance of law and order. The James Bond series, some of which came before the Mad Max, I presume, where mostly revolving around the Cold War, and there was always either nuclear bombs involved or sometimes oil pipelines or some very special invention that could either control the world, or destroy it. And it was James Bond 007, the British lover-spy and his love-interest scientist or a sensual co-spy, who would stop the attempt in an ever-improvised dare-devil operation. The movies always ended with M, the head of the secret service appreciating 007, and he leaves off to some lovely destination with his love-interest.

From then on, there has been hundreds of such movies, with scores of all sorts of threats- from such things as cyborgs, asteroids, comets, aliens, viruses, zombies, genetically modified creatures, biological weapons, bacteria, and then some very real stuff like earthquakes, volcanoes, gigantic storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, deadly winds and finally even climate change. And most of these films ended with the hero, usually an ex-corporal turned convict called back to service, and the heroine, a scientist who studies the subject of the threat, accomplishing their mission to save the American President, America and hence the World, in that order, from the threat! They get to salute the President, they get a full hand-shake (oops! Covid!) and then they kiss each other! The end.

Before I wrote this blog, I asked my son to pick me details of some films that deal with various kinds of disasters to the world. He googled for just 30 minutes or so, and gave me a sample list of 67 movies! There must be thousands. I will tell you, just this much should have been enough for Trump to have expected the crisis. The Hollywood expected this, why not the American President!

In this list are some mind-blowing ones. Children of men(2006), Day after tomorrow(2004), 12 Monkeys(1996), 2012(2009), War of the Worlds(2005), 28 days later(2002), 28 weeks later(2007), The Mist(2007), The Happening(2008), Reign of fire(2002), The Wave(2015), The Quake(2018), Volcano(1997), Geostorm(2017), Independence Day(1996) are some of them. And for current interests, those with viruses and zombies - Flu(2013), Quarantine(2008), Doomsday(2008), Slither(2006), The Last man on Earth, World war Z(2013), Warm Bodies(2013), Contagion and so on. But, I am immensely tempted with these two - Sunshine(2007) and the Wandering Earth(2019). Sunshine is a story where Sun is the main culprit! It’s drying up, and a group of scientists go on a space mission to try and re-ignite it with a bomb! The Wandering Earth(2019) is an end-of-the-world movie from China. It chronicles a group of scientists who seek to physically move the Earth to get it away from the ever-expanding sun, while avoiding collision with Jupiter! I prefer the Covid19 from China, seriously!

Welcome to the world of “Designed Reality”. This is where a lot of us live. This is where we bring up most of our children. This is where we are slowly manipulated, moment by moment, scene by scene, plot by plot, to a new reality of life. This is where, without as much of a realisation, our IQ’s go down point by point, with each scene, each screening, individually first and then collectively. This never happens when we read the written word. What has been read will either be washed out soon after it’s read, or would transform into our own visual construct. There is a creativity in it, and we would create it within our known reality! The Visual, the animated, the games, movies, especially the fictional ones, aren’t like that. They give you the past, present and future, visually, as they want you to see it!

And as visual technology improves, the difference between the real and the designed gets narrower, and hence more difficult to differentiate over time.

For instance, how much do we see the history of let’s say a million years or even as recent as a thousand years, which is very important to retain and process, for learning, future responses and eventually for survival; versus the designed virtual world, that we have unwittingly substituted for reality. How different would be the responses to, lets say catastrophes, in these two scenarios? How shallow would be our response, were we to simply be a generation that grew up on a designed reality, and not the historically retained and processed one? The digital world, internet and the social media, for instance is just a few years old, and is a technological construct, with a retention time of anything from a few seconds to a few hours. And it’s not a living entity. The Virus is, and it carries like us, a real life history of millions of years, and may be more. Our constructs of response cannot be separated from this history, and the farther we get back to such retained knowledge, and the evolved science, the better we will as a society charter the solutions of today and the needs of the future. Even a normal progress of life on earth needs this; a crisis like the Covid19 or the more complex crisis of climate change should certainly be based on this.

To build profoundness and sanity in leaderships, the stories that we tell our children will also need to change. If not, a crisis such as Covid19 will only have such limited options as to turn us into the violent gangs as in the Mad Max(1979), or turn us into depressed characters that rejoice the doom as in Melancholia(2011), or turn us into vampires that feed on other humans as in Daybreakers(2009), even as our leaders will look on as infected zombies.