You know, that title could be taken another way
We visited friends in Alfriston Sunday, and they were like, “there’s a free screening of the Age of Stupid here today. You should go!” And we’re, like, “oh! Ummm…ha. Yeah. Ah. Mmmm. Heh heh heh.”
Have you heard of this turkey? It’s an indy film about an archivist from 2055 who looks back at footage of our time and wonders, “ZOMG, why didn’t they listen to the hippies about globular warmening????” It’s got all the important scientific issues: Iraq, Nigeria, wind farms, hurricane Katrina. McDonald’s and Wal*Mart (probably. Just guessing here).
It’s less charty and graphy than An Inconvenient Truth; it’s more an attempt to put a human face on pants-peeing alarmism. As one user on IMDB put it, “it’s possible that even Sarah Palin herself could not fail to be affected by the story of Fernand Pareau, an octogenarian French mountain guide, showing us the glacier he loves as it withers away before his eyes.”
Whoof. Excuse me. Just step around that for now and I’ll clean it up in a sec.
The film premiered in New York on September 21 and all the world’s most prominent scientists were there: Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson. Moby. That freaky-looking dude from Radiohead.
Anyhoo, in case this embarrassing invitation crops up again, I’ve pre-jiggered five reasons I can’t go see your stupid global warmening movie:
1 My mom was so terrified by The Population Bomb, she had an abortion rather than let me be one of the hundreds of millions who starved in the 1970s.
2 In 1983, I went out into the new Ice Age, licked a flagpole and I’ve been stuck to it ever since. Please come get me; I’m cold and lonely.
3 I ate a delicious t-bone steak in a restaurant London in 1998 and was one of the 100,000 to die horribly of Mad Cow disease.
4 Dude! Are you kidding? The grid hasn’t worked around here since the Y2K disaster. I’ve spent the last nine years living in a yurt eating treebark sammiches.
5 I gots de swine flu. Okay, strike that one. The flu pandemic still has time to be an actual catastrophe, for reals this time.
In case I’m being too fucking subtle here the professional catastrophe-mongers are always wrong. Bad scientists and conmen have been trying to sell the apocalypse to a weary public over and over again since…since science overtook Jesus as the main faith of the West.
Man-made global warmening is just the most recent. They’ve gotten clever with this con, though — the deadline is far, far in the future. We must act RIGHT NOW…but we’ll never know for sure how much they’ve played us for chumps. We won’t live that long.
October 5, 2009 — 3:33 pm
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