Apocalypse Now

 

Pacific Palisades, January 7, 2025
Photo by David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images

Until four hours ago, today’s scheduled post poked fun at Hollywood and its endless awards season. I had some good stuff, which I might publish tomorrow or Saturday as an extra. However, it felt tone-deaf to criticize Hollywood before logging the pain and tragedy of the Southern California wildfires afflicting that community and many others. My heart goes out to them.

Although only ten days old, 2025 shows signs of the end of the world as we know it.

Once the locus of dream factories and California dreaming, SoCal is now the stuff of nightmares: an apocalyptic hellscape that makes Mad Max look quaint. Beyond Thunderdome, indeed.

We don’t need another hero, but having a president-elect whose judgment we could respect would be nice. Instead, the ultimate con man, as I like to call him, is threatening that “all hell will break loose” in the Middle East if the Hamas hostages are not freed by the time he takes office—tough, scary talk from a little man.

Imagining the world ahead, a New York Times opinion piece just argued that “Trump is at his absolute worst in a crisis.” We can see this in the orange clown's politicization of the California wildfires. What leadership. All this to take in on the day we bury the best of former presidents, Jimmy Carter.

And it already feels like half a year has passed since January 1, when an Isis-inspired terrorist unleashed a different sort of hell on unsuspecting New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street.

If all of this makes it sound like I am glued to the news, bumming out at every turn, I’m not. I made some home improvements this week. I prepared a new recipe for beef and Bok choy. I am going on a cruise next week. My coping mechanism since November 5th has been to hold myself aloof—from more bad news, from society’s ills, from the return of the "fiasco vortex" that is Donald Trump.

I even got good at regarding him and his clown posse with a certain ironic detachment, as if the stakes weren’t so high. As he foolishly enunciated his neo-colonialist ambitions to take over Greenland and Canada, I cackled. Except this idiot was serious.

Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, which inspired the 1979 war film Apocalypse Now starring Marlon Brando, explored the terrors of colonial rule. Conrad posited that there was little difference between civilized people and savages, and he would recognize that now in Trump and his vicious policies.

Tomorrow, I will return to the usual frivolity with which I occupy myself, but today, it is hard not to see what surrounds us. At 2025's onset, I can only exclaim, in the final words of Conrad’s seer, Mr. Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.”