The Plumb Pudding In Danger
Further to my last . . . Maybe there's always been no future in utopian revolution, before our day. Pol Pot didn't achieve much, beyond those fields of skulls. Mao was a monster. It didn't take long to get from the storming of the Bastille to the Terror (a nightmare in which (check it out if you like) the majority of those guillotined were not aristocrats, fat cats, or even the losers in the swift reverses of revolutionary power. They were far more likely to be hapless, lower middle class citizens, denounced by the citizen next door, for no particular reason except personal gain. But the odds are different now.
The plumb pudding in the cartoon above is clearly, as you can see, planet earth ----in danger of being carved-up by someone called "William Pitt the Younger", (you may remember him in Blackadder) Prime Minister of what was soon to be the greatest super power the world had ever known; representing wealth creation. Who is dining out with someone you should easily recognise as Napoleon Bonaparte, top war-monger of the period. (in our modest, domestic peril, I suppose that would be Theresa May across the table from that go-getting rabble-rouser Nigel Farage).
I've labelled them Economic Growth and War, and these are the existential bad guys in the Bold as Love story. Both of them are monsters; or have become monsters. Both of them have to go. I realise Economic Growth is our society's devoutly unquestioned religion, on every scale from the sublime to the ridiculous, and so do you (you can't have missed the sausage roll in the manger?*), so maybe this is the shocking part, rather than the savage attacks perpetrated on the sinews of war, by oil-field torchers and others, all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But shocking or not, denouncing them is not fiction, it's vital for our future. We don't need more money. Nobody could possibly need more money than "we" have concentrated in a very few hands: we need less. We don't need more War, on any scale. Nobody could possibly need more than we have right now . . . Remember that Third World War? The one fought with sticks and stones?
What we seriously need is more time. We need to scratch up another hundred years from somewhere, or fifty, or even twenty, and then we might just get through this part. But without some kind of rough magic, like a global economic crash and the rise of a Hard Green Countercultural revolution, the future of this living world, the only one we have, never mind the future of so-called global civilisation, does not look good.
Climate change was already a wolf at the door twenty years ago for science fiction writers, Counterculturals and others. The actual threat has been perceived by science for a lot longer (but scientists are so timid! Someone just waved a hockey-stick at them, and they vanished) It's coming on much faster now. It's real as real. But still nobody seems to care. What's wrong with us all?
The Plumb Pudding in danger: from HYPERALLERGIC
Castles Made Of Sand, the print edition with the Anne Sudworth cover, is still readily available.
The EU does not play a glorious role in Bold As Love btw. It's the government, everybody blames it for everything. That's what governments are for. But European identity is vital for the revolutionaries, Europe is where we all live. In times of trouble, the people cling together, I read that in the flood countries, long ago
*Okay, the outrage over equating Jesus, saviour of the world, & btw no fan of dietary restrictions (Matthew 15:11) with a non-kosher pork snack was funny: (now if only it had been a vegan sausage roll!) But what I see in that ad is the mass-market, populist form of "greed is good". Feeding your face is God.