Greetings, fellow dunderheads. And grim tidings.
We’ve been slack, and the repercussions are no longer hiding.
Most of us love us some Road Warrior, or Mad Max, or Beyond the Thunderdome, or Fury Road, or maybe even Furiosa. (Streaming now!) And what’s not to like? The setting and context transport us to a desolate afterworld that postdates us, our absolution baked in.
There’s never a lot of talk about how we get there. The world of the films simply becomes a hardly inhabitable postapocalyptic wasteland brought on by a systemic regimen of ecocide and a nuclear war over the dwindling resources, leaving us in a place where, curiously, persons of color — in this case, Australian aborigines — have no serious presence, even though the entire Mad Max run is filmed in Australia!
You and I aren’t in the credits, but let’s not kid ourselves. The plotline for every iteration of the Mad Max movies has already begun. You and I. We. Us. We have pivotal, supporting roles.
We’re creating the before with every increasingly labored breath and every continued false step. We’re way past the prologue. We inhabit the early, little-explained backstory. We are the living precedent. The characters in the Mad Max flicks are simply navigating the after.
The cold-blooded, pit-faced rush on petrol has already begun. And fresh water.
We’re becoming more clannish and mistrusting. Chronically xenophobic. Definitely tribal.
We’re already more savage. We hiss at the growing homeless population. We pity the profit-mongers more than the poor or the myriad victims of the precursors of Immortan Joe, Dementus, or the earlier Lord Humungus. Capitalism requires a bad guy, an enemy, and, ultimately, a denigrated “other” that can be openly and clandestinely exploited. And we can’t have the enemy being the entity behind the lucrative enterprises in which we are privileged to serve as dutiful cogs. We do what we’re told. We don’t ask questions. Doubt might demand soul searching or have us reconsider our soullessness. It might even require us to be brave.
We’re not.
We already have some sense of this. It’s clichéd, really.
We care more about our own self-preservation and personal comforts than our collective survival. We are a smirky gaggle of shortsighted miscreants more worried about retirement than reality and especially the future reality that our descendants will inherit. Which is great news for gaming outfits and online streaming services.
The virtual world is an ingenious, uber-addictive escape. It’s about the only place where we still have any real control. And we know more about our favorite characters on Netflix than we do our neighbors or our own children — who are weaned on the same streaming services that we now rely on to decompress or vegetate.
We exist in a meticulously constructed and carefully monitored dunderdome, oblivious to the consequences of our apathy and willful ignorance.
A terrifying, unavoidable reckoning is already bearing down on us. And bypassing the signs of the calamities to come are the occupation of the odious and reprehensible, but few of us know what either word means. We’re 21st-century troglodytes, a disgrace to our species.
We don’t care.
Disregarding our culpability obviously demands the abandonment of all conscience and decency, but even our binary political system is a sycophantic accomplice in plain sight. Our pep-rally politics have utterly failed us. Pointing a finger in either direction is a half-measure because both roads lead to Rome. Both parties are well-polished sides of the same coin. As long as the coin spends, we, again, don’t care. In fact, we prefer pandering spin that promotes and glorifies our spending rather than forthrightness or honesty.
The “pox-eclipse” has already started, and there will be no “Tomorrow-Morrow Land.” In this coming November’s dunderdome, we will chant, “Two people enter, one person leaves” — but we know they will both leave.
It’s all theater.
The spectacle masks the corporatocracy that pays for the stage. Our ambivalence and ambition doom the age.
Dr. Dealgood said it best: “Dyin’ time’s here.”
Welcome to the Dunderdome.
Fort Worth native E.R. Bills is the award-winning author of Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations in Infamous History and The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas.
This column reflects the opinions and fact-gathering of the author(s) and only the author(s) and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
