If you’re an artist, you get impatient waiting for the end of the world and so ponder ways it might happen, ways people could burn it all down. Our world’s generating new disaster scenarios, real or imagined, so rapidly lately that something like the nukes-deploying A.I. inside a sunken Russian submarine in the eighth and final Mission Impossible movie this week sounds almost relaxingly old-fashioned, fit for a pleasant Memorial Day outing.
Also relatively traditional-sounding is the YouTube rumor, started by some couple with a Ouija board, that logorrheic occult forces predict the 27th, four days after the Mission Impossible movie’s release, will be when the world ends. And it can’t be long now before the tech bros who really control the world mix the A.I. and the Ouija, really taking the combined danger up a notch.
Smaller, personal “end times” likely do more to foster realism than do grand visions about the state of the world, though: Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who years ago described his philosophy as a “pro-death” stance—in favor of legal abortion, the death penalty, an active military, and euthanasia—apparently expects to be dead within months from cancer. So, this man who once raved that the genius Trump had “broken the wheel of time” and liberated humanity from historical cycles of oppression is now in a race to the finish line with the cancer-ravaged Trump foe Joe Biden. There’s some grim symmetry in that.
By contrast, the artists upon whom society is most likely to bestow the status of respected poets are the most likely to sound a bit detached from reality, except to the politically biased. In a spoken introduction to his song “My City of Ruins” at a recent concert, for instance, Bruce Springsteen made claims that were ostensibly timely but really unfocused—no doubt meant to skewer Trump but sounding like apocalyptic talking points Springsteen wrote on the back of a napkin as a plan for boosting the Mondale presidential campaign of 1984.
Per the Boss, “There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.”
Yet Springsteen’s faction was the one terrified of free speech last time I checked, for one thing, and the taxes, spending, and regulations liberals love cause more economic suffering than even Trump’s idiotic and destructive tariffs. I’m likely more opposed to Trump’s immigration restrictions than is Springsteen (friend to the uncompetitive blue-collar union worker that he is), but Springsteen himself may be the closest thing we have to a living argument for forbidding migration between New Jersey and other states.
When I went to see the New Wave/progressive U.K. band the Fixx for perhaps the sixth time last month, the most populist—and most New Jersey-sounding—note of the evening may have been the likely-drunk guy a couple rows ahead of me who prior to the show kept shouting lines from the Fixx song “Walkabout” (which describes aboriginal Australians in meditation around the big stone outcropping they call the Nipple of Mother Earth) and somehow making the dreamy lyrics sound like a threat: “Don’ lie about da rock!”
Even though Fixx lead singer Cy Curnin is likely more radical than Springsteen, I realize as a jaded middle-aged man now instead of a teenage fan that Curnin sounds as safely cryptic as a moderate politician at times, asking vaguely and without context (but knowing audience members will interpret such dire comments in self-affirming ways), “Why does it always seem that it’s us vs. them?”
Curnin has always seemed philosophically akin to those “green anarchists” I mentioned at the end of last week’s column, the political sub-faction that hates industry’s impact on nature so much they’d like to be rid of civilization altogether (somewhat as in the Fixx songs “Less Cities, More Moving People,” “Driven Out,” and “Calm Animals”), even though the Fixx probably want to keep their electric guitars and synthesizers. One of the best-performed songs at that Manhattan show may have been their lesser-known “Chase the Fire,” though I might’ve preferred hearing the spookier-sounding “Sign of Fire” from which this column gets its name.
But speaking of fires: the Fixx’s opening act that night, the funny and bisexual folk singer Jill Sobule, who did the original “I Kissed a Girl” (not the faux-astronaut who performed a more recent song by that title), died in a Minnesota housefire this month, mere weeks after I saw her onstage telling anecdotes about things like her days working in a cheap Manhattan shoe store. One of her final creative acts will have been a song full of juvenile rhymes about JD Vance being a cunt. Perhaps someone should write a retrospective of her career called “From Kiss to Cunt.” R.I.P.
A group of self-proclaimed “experts on fascism” who are likely as left-wing as Sobule but far less funny announced in a New York Times piece that they hope to escape what they see as America’s descent into fascism under Trump by fleeing to other countries, among them, as it happens, one of my fellow Fixx fans from college, Tim Snyder, now a history professor relocating from Yale to the University of Toronto and framing it as a bold protest rather than a career move. I wonder if other U.S. academics I know who now live in Canada will turn doing so into an opportunity to lecture those of us living in the U.S. about how doomed we all are. And doomed we may be, but at least most of us living here haven’t been called “retarded” by Elon Musk, as Snyder has, so we’re ahead on that front.
I’d imagine Musk is even more aghast at the terrorist who recently bombed a fertility clinic in Palm Beach. It’s not just the murder that shocks but the unusual rationale, the bomber claiming to be no mere pro-choice or pro-life activist but an “anti-natalist,” opposed to people being born without ever having consented to it (whereas Musk is nowadays an avowed “natalist,” thinking the more humanity spreads its progeny, very much including Musk’s own, across the stars, the better). It’s as if the bomber wants to save the world from suffering by forcing it to commit suicide. Is nothing in this world simply optional these days, not even “choice”? Must it all be Path A by force or Path B by force, imposed immortality or erasure at the zygote stage, right-wing autocracy or left-wing autocracy?
Assuming that everything might as well be a matter of decree rather than personal choice is how you end up with not just fascism but fascism with a cavalier attitude. Why not turn it all into Hunger Games, as it were? If you elect “reality” show stars like Trump, I suppose this is what you get: Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reportedly pitching a reality show of her own in which migrants compete for citizenship.
Just as no one should be dumb enough to think the mad scramble to evade border patrols is necessitated by immigration itself (rather, it’s necessitated by the government imposing and attempting to enforce its artificial restrictions on migration), no one should be sick or sadistic enough to think either Noem’s late-night raids or her hypothetical vicious late-night TV competitions are “necessary.” Like swordfights between prisoners, they can be avoided simply by giving the prisoners their freedom, assuming they’ve committed no thefts, assaults, or other crimes beyond crossing imaginary lines called borders. The real criminals are the wackos who want to pit them against each other.
If a turn toward the postmodern is itself a sort of apocalyptic bonfire, we’ve been burning for quite a while now. Indeed, back in 1901, in the quasi-sci-fi novel The Inheritors, Joseph Conrad and (using a pseudonym) Ford Maddox Ford depicted the rising 20th century as one in which old conservatives would find themselves attracted to yet befuddled by world-conquering young Fourth Dimensionists who seek to disrupt society through the use of cryptic trans-dimensional metaphors—or who might be actual menacing visitors from another dimension being too readily laughed off and who are, in any case, living representatives of the inexorable passage of time, their subculture affecting such momentous political machinations as the rise of a railroad mogul and a plot to annex Greenland. It’s not just a Greenland-annexation novel, in other words; it’s another novel like Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey and 1900: or, The Last President that almost makes one believe in prophecy or time travel.
Speaking of playing fast and loose with space and time, I only noticed upon a recent rewatch of both that the 1951 version of The Thing is set in the snowy north—and indeed mentions Thule Base over in Greenland—whereas the superior 1981 John Carpenter version is memorably set in Antarctica. The first film does have a great fire scene, the burning monster depicted through one of the first full-body-flames stunts ever captured on film. But Carpenter’s version is body horror worthy of David Cronenberg—whose current film The Shrouds turns his mid-1980s horror tropes into a fairly serious meditation, as he reaches his own mid-80s, on death, mourning, and funeral procedures. The ending is awkwardly abrupt, but then so is one’s own and it’s still worth the journey.
Scarier than all of those films, though, is Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe from 1964, convincingly depicting military control-room errors that could lead to a nuclear war. It was sued by the makers of the months-earlier film Dr. Strangelove but is excellent in its own right and ought to be more widely remembered. The hotline phones, command personnel desks, and big flight-tracking screens of the main war room become as ominous as any present-day installation artist’s attempt to depict warfare or the injustices of the economy or what have you, all of it in frequent contact with the contrasting tense quiet of the small room used by the President (Henry Fonda) and his terrified but steady translator (a very young Larry Hagman). It’ll make you more anti-war, assuming you don’t want it all to end in fire.
And if art resembling text and charts and big signs is your thing, without the imminent threat of nuclear destruction, you might be pleased that Lisa Levy shows off her recent book about text-centered visual artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, Thoughts in My Head, on Thursday, May 22 from 6-8:30 p.m. at Pine Box (at 12 Grattan St. near the Morgan St. L stop in Williamsburg). I’ll see you there because even if these are the End Times, I’ll spend them doing interesting things.
Meanwhile, in L.A., it’s interesting that Jillian Shriner, wife of the bassist from Weezer, has entered a plea of not guilty after shooting at cops who were rampaging through her back yard on the trail of a few criminals fleeing a hit and run accident, with the cops ending up shooting her in the shoulder (What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl?). Since Shriner has already written a book recounting living in a harem and another that’s the biography of a serial killer, surely she’s capable of getting some usable material out of this latest experience. How easily her world could’ve ended in this incident, leaving the police’s account of events, right or wrong, the only narrative of that day. Better if no one with a story to tell were ever snuffed out.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey