Whaddya gonna do?

by David Benjamin

“… I looked and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by the gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place… ”

— Revelations 6:12

MADISON, Wis.— By my senior year in high school, I was grimly familiar with bleak and ghastly portents. There was a war awaiting me in Indochina! Worse, I was reading, in Esquire, The Saturday Review and even Newsweek, about various impending global cataclysms. A year later at college in Rockford, Illinois (a prime target for ICBMs from the USSR), I’d added—to my solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short future—regular Doomsday prophecies published in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The New Republic and Ramparts. None of these rags saw much hope for me to reach the age of thirty. 

I’d read about nuclear plumes sweeping the continent from Alamagordo, and about gaping holes in the stratosphere through which unfiltered infrared, ultraviolet and gamma ray-infested raw sunlight was turning my flesh into cankered parchment. The water I drank, according to the experts who wrote for these heralds of Armageddon, was tainted by detergents, riddled with asbestos, fouled with untreated fecal matter, crawling with carcinogens, infused invisibly with DDT, PCBs, IOTs, mercury, lead, radon, chromium, arsenic, thalidomide, chlorine, fluorine, nicotine, gasoline, benzene, naphthalene, Ovaltine, kryptonite and LSD. 

As I recall, The Atlantic was (well, it still is) especially granular in its exposition of the mounting horror of the month. Every thirty days, I trembled at the immense power and vile machinations of the monstrous forces responsible for launching the latest juggernaut from Hell. Each obituary bristled with depressing paragraphs about the hope-crushing impotence of a bare handful of brave, penniless, persecuted science nerds, professors, whistleblowers and moral crusaders who understood the crisis and knew what must be done but who were pooh-poohed as crackpots, alarmists and—finally, damningly—communists. 

I came to regard these slit-your-wrists exposés as “Whaddya gonna do?” (WGD) journalism. The genre has never died. Thanks to DARPA and the internet, there are more of these killjoy stories than ever. The good, professional reports—not fomented by conspiracists holed up in Key West, wreathed in tinfoil and posting hourly bulletins on the Dark Web—depict vividly and thoroughly the thorny challenge of navigating the 21st century.

But they’re still discouraging. You read through the whole thing, achieving a deep awareness of a terrible problem you didn’t fully grasp before—or didn’t know about! Then, as you turn the page, you realize either that nobody’s doing anything to fix this or, worse, nobody can fix it.

Whaddya gonna do?

One solution: Don’t read that shit. 

But if you insist on knowing how bad things really are, well, remember: It might not be quite so awful. After all, it’s the mission of a WGD article to grab readers by the throat and spell out, in blood-curdling detail, how totally helpless we all are to cope with, for example, white supremacist trolls hiding in plain sight in the U.S. Congress, Vladimir Putin’s insecurities, teenage psychos with AR-15s who live next-door to grade schools, nuclear proliferation, rain forest destruction, wildfires, invasive species (including humans) in the Everglades. ocean warming, elephant poaching, Merrick Garland as Hamlet, Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ron Johnson’s mouthwash and the gazpacho blonde from Georgia… 

Yeah, I know! Yada yada yada.

The first chilling fact you learn from a WGD philippic is that the crisis has been fomented, quietly, with millions of dollars of baksheesh and an intricate, impenetrable infrastructure, by a cabal of obscenely wealthy corporate interests who are allied with shadowy enablers embedded in governments all over the world. If you think you know the name of this organization—the Carlyle Group, say, or Black Rock, UNESCO or the Trilateral Commission—you’re wrong!

Second, the WGD author reveals that this looming catastrophe was been almost completely ignored, or dismissed as trivial, by well-meaning policymakers—in science, environmental regulation, occupational safety, etc.—who would be, presumably, just the right folks to reverse the infernal trend before it’s too late.

(Remember, it was already too late before anyone noticed.)

Third, if you’re still reading, you learn that experts in the field actually targeted the dilemma and alerted a number of receptive policymakers—who all said, “Uh oh.” The experts, as fast as they could, followed up with a solution. Working with the uh-oh leaders, they specified steps that must be taken—now! Then, miraculously, this collaboration achieved a measure of mitigation. Suddenly, there was hope. But salvation only lasted until an army of corporate lobbyists, possibly associated with the mysterious cabal but very likely just a bunch of Republicans, counterattacked. Slandered by propaganda and smothered beneath a fortune in dark money, the uh-oh-uttering policymakers were hounded from office. The experts were vilified, defunded and cast into exile. Almost overnight, the promise of a solution perished, its entire rationale condemned as blasphemy.

Regular people barely noticed any of this. 

Wait! The article is still going on. It’s, like, 6,000 words! As you read on, you discover that, for a while, a shred of hope lingers. The good guys file a last-ditch appeal that crawls its glacial course through the federal judiciary, evoking the Dickensian endlessness of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. 

Then finally, the unhappy “-30-”. Every serious WGD think-piece eventually reveals that you can go ahead and take the End of the World to court, but the end of the world’s gonna come along before a district judge rules on the admissibility of a lineup that identifies, as the prime suspects, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 

Which brings me around to my solution. 

After all that reading, I know too well the Whaddya Gonna Do? format, and I’m forewarned. Nowadays, when I come across a WGD lament, I usually fold the magazine and turn on an “NCIS” re-run before I’m tempted to fling myself off the balcony. But not always. I still suffer the lingering symptoms (“comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”) of an old newspaper editor,.

Sometimes, I succumb to the temptation to bone up on, say, the Islamist and Christianist misinterpretations of the Quran. I think about explaining the nuances to an infinitesimal audience of people who really don’t give a damn. I could—because I’ve done it before—try reaching out to the sort of earnest leaders who’ve been saying “Uh oh!” I could solicit trenchant insights from, say, anti-gun activist Sen. Chris Murphy, or environmentalist Bill McKibben, or voting-rights litigator Marc Elias. Bolstered by their testimony, I could sound an eloquent alarm against the vast injustices against which they struggle on behalf of All Humanity.

Yeah, I sigh, but what’s the point?

What am I gonna do, really?

What I can do is what I’m doing here. I can dig my Franz Kafka exoskeleton out of the closet. I can set my Sam Beckett fedora at a rakish angle, pull up my Hunter Thompson bullshit waders, fire up my autographed Ionesco panatella, and—with a bounce in my step and a what-the-hell twinkle in my eye—whistle my literary way past the werewolves in Gregory Corso’s graveyard.

What, me worry?