Your Amazon Order – The Coronovirus Box Set Has Been Delivered.

“Back to life, back to reality. “

SOUL II SOUL, Back to Life, 1989.

I turned 18 in 1989, at the very start of that extraordinary year. Arrogantly, I felt that it was my generation that were going to turn this shit around. The Green Party had unprecedented success in the European elections, protests in China threatened briefly to bring that dictatorship to its knees, and then the insane events of the last ten weeks of the year saw the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain.

The unknown protestor with the shopping bag in Tiananmen Square, his faceless, distant almost pixelated form defying a tank to mow him down was an image that no one who saw it will ever forget. One can only presume he is now dead, the most surprising thing about the image was that the tank did not simply run him down.

I wonder if Communism (and this is in no way a defence of the atrocities perpetuated in its name – I’m a leftie but I’m not that kind of leftie) acted as some kind of unseen check and balance against the worst excesses of Capitalism. Once the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union with it, there was nothing left to stop the tides of consumer demand.

Now, as we well know, there are islands of plastic the size of France in the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of species are made extinct every year, having given names to every beast on land and in the air, we then hunted them out of the dictionary and into the history books.  The bee, the most valuable species in the world, the pollinator of plants and seeds is under threat.  The polar ice caps, melting slowly for decades in a fluorocarbon shimmer, are now becoming mighty rivers. The earth’s waters are rising, preparing to claim forever huge swathes of land. The Amazon rainforest is on fire, deliberate infernos started by loggers desperate for their own slice of the last fortune to be made.

We have entered the denaissance, a period of unenlightenment. Humanity has been overtaken by technology and, stunned by the potential of what it has unleashed upon the earth, it has retreated and begun to regress. The world’s largest corporations act as nation states, taking up land and resources and refusing to be taxed. Our streets are clogged with delivery drivers, bringing food and entertainment and clothes that we dare not ask the price of. And while the bee numbers dwindle and the Amazon forest smoulders, we ironically fill the skies with drones delivering Amazon-branded bundles of transient happiness.

There was a moment or two of hope for a better world in the last 30 years but there will not be another. Our lap of the track is almost run, we are on the curve and the crowd are on their feet.

Except they’re not, they’re on their arses, shrugging their shoulders and pretending it isn’t happening.  Each new human atrocity, each new depth plumbed shocks the world for a moment and then we return to our burgers, our selfies and our own problems.

The President of the United States is a paedophile, a racist and a crook. The police in America largely share his views on race, shooting as they do a disproportionate amount of black and Hispanic citizens on a daily basis. The President is backed by the NRA who, hiding behind an 18^th century scribble, sell semi-automatic rifles to mass murderers in order to prop up their share price. He is in power largely due to the efforts of the Russian President, a gangster and thug with an army of bots able to influence, it seems, the opinions and votes of millions of gullible Americans. This trick was also utilised in the EU Referendum in Britain, a Tory gamble that, like every other Tory gamble of the last 40 years, has backfired spectacularly for the ordinary people. Freed of the dogma of old style Communism, but fired by the grandeur of a proud Russian past, Putin has managed to instil a puppet President in the White House and now he sets about dismantling the power of the EU trading bloc.

Across the world, populist politicians claim they are challenging the elite and bringing the voice of the ordinary voter back into the spotlight. Populist is a new word for Openly Racist. The British media, owned almost exclusively by people ready to cash in on a 21^st century form of Popular Bigotry, fan the flames of hatred and then deny the rise in hate crimes is anything to do with them. Simply saying you believe the referendum result was rigged by outside forces and is therefore invalid is enough for you to be called a traitor. Death threats are common place. In the streets and on the internet, an uneasy peace sits. Name calling is the norm from both sides. No one is capable of backing down. Every day is a new Cuban Missile Crisis on the web. It is only a matter of time before the horror of civil war trickles into reality.

Last summer was the hottest summer on record. Again. The Earth’s lungs are on fire, like it has inhaled a particularly hot lump of hash. But the stoned, hazed Earth won’t be getting up for a glass of water. It has been rendered almost mute by the excesses of the human infection. The average length of the dominant species time at the top of the world is 100,000 years. We’re around that mark now. It’s us that are powerless. All empires fall. The queen bee cannot be protected forever. It dies and its spell of infertility in the other females is broken, the colony survives, finds a new queen and sanity is restored. But we will learn nothing from the bee whilst it is with us. Our stoned planet will hallucinate the last bee and try to swat it with an empty Amazon box. It will flail its arm a couple of times, unable to comprehend the ghost-bee’s refusal to yield. Eventually the planet will crash back to the sofa, the bee dream will fade and the last humans will fall unconscious, casting no shadow in the black smoke night.