This was really good, if you like this genre. [Im old enough to have seen Panic in the Year Zero when it was first released; and Them! with the giant ants, mutated from atomic testing--my grandmother took me to see that movie! and I was only 8 years old!... as a young teen I had her take me to the drive-in to see Marlon Brando in The Wild One]. pardon my digression... Considering the operation beginning at Fukushima (the fuel rods in the collapsing tower) this seems good mental preparation. Evacuate the West Coast my ass. If the cooling pool goes down it may well be that it isnt as bad as people had predicted, that the levels of radiation will dissipate or otherwise, trust us, wont be a threat. The one thing that all of us can be absolutely sure of, in the event Fukushima explodes, someone will be making, or trying to make, a LOT OF MONEY off of it. If that making of the BIG MONEY involves moving the entire fricking population of Washington, Oregon and California to the rain shadow, east of the Sierras, then so be it. Mission accomplished. My personal “in the event of” plans, in case Fukushima does go haywire (and now I cant keep out of my mind images of Dr. Strangelove and General Jack Ripper) involves... well, I dont think Id want to hang around to see the slow unraveling, the extinction. Thats what were facing. The extinction event is on us. A Fukushima explosion would make it quicker but the poisons are out. The seas are dying. The earth has been poisoned. It may be that it is too late. Acidic, warming oceans. The death of the small creatures, plankton, the first, bottom step on the food chain. The over-fishing, trawlers destroying the sea beds and the indiscriminate catch, just like the scars in California from hydrolic mining in the old days, entire mountain sides scoured by high pressure water to gain the gold. Just like the clear cutting in our forests and the burning of the Amazon jungle. This is not something that anyone wants to look at, like death itself. And to watch The Road makes me wonder which reality is the metaphor? The apocalypse as metaphor for our personal end of the world? But its no longer science fiction, fantasy treatment of a theme. “Its here,” to paraphrase Dr. Miles Bennell, at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Its here. And for all of us who are not part of “the breakaway civilization,” well, what will be left? “The Road” is truthful because it is stripped of all sentimentality, the false good, the false hope, the empty dream of the happy ending, of redemption by some form of the god of the machine. The boy is concerned that he and his dad remain the “good guys.” Not cannibals. The father falls short, finally, understandably maybe, to us, but not to his son, in a scene towards the end when the father catches up with the man who has stolen their cart and goods, their means of survival. One of many gut-wrenching scenes. What makes us different, finally, from the cannibals? What keeps us away from the trail of the Donners or from being only a mask of the human like Dick Cheney or the Georges Bush? A Pinochet, a Stalin? Weve known the answer all along. Its just gotten easier for the bad guys to trick so many of us into believing cannibal lies.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 06:21:27 +0000
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