From the top, I apologize for the extreme lateness of my posting. It seems, though, that every time I’ve sat down to write, I’ve done my usual procrastinating-web search to glance through the usual places in search of interesting diversions to read and, surprise surprise, everywhere I look is a story of the apocalypse. I wanted to only write about The Albertine Notes, but then I recalled a line from very early in the text, when the narrator first meets Cassandra: “I’d had enough with the Hasidim and the Baptists and their rants about end-times [emphasis original]. The problem was that Albertine, bitch goddess, kept giving conflicting reports about which end-times we were going to get,” (143). Albertine brings something expected—memory—with completely unknowable contours. Memories of the banal, or memories of the fatal Manhattan-leveling blast, can all be sourced here. And in our moment, I feel the apocalyptic finds expression in just as many ways—the narrative can be anticipated, but the dimensions are different each time. The Albertine Notes seems a good entry into reflecting on “which end-times” we are encountering, and whether they truly are apocalyptic.
Last week, I read an article in Harper’s about the tiny south Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. Tuvalu is entirely made up of coral atolls, and has a population of only a few thousand. It is also believed that it will be the first nation in the world to truly fall victim to global warming—it may be fully submerged by 2050, by some projections. The article took an angle slightly different from most that I’ve read about places like Tuvalu, or the Maldives, or Kiribati, all tiny atoll nations that, only a few feet above sea level in their entirety, which will be inundated by rising waters faster than anywhere else. Most of the time, the articles are recitations of doom, and warnings against polluting and carbon use, followed by lamentations from the people of these countries. This article, however, focused on what I saw as the business of the apocalypse. Tuvaluans have used their new-found fame—as the first victims of the coming global warming apocalypse—to reap in large monetary rewards. Tuvalu is accumulating vast amounts of foreign aid. In a country with about 70% unemployment, and nothing to trade aside from stamps and their ccTLD (which is .tv), the aid has meant new roads, new cars, new wealth in general—and as the wealth comes in, ministers are only too happy to take journalists on tours to show the waves, the washed-out areas, and so on, when perhaps the most disturbing thing on the main island, so narrow in points one can throw a rock from one side to the other, are abandoned cars left to rot by owners who do not want them, and rising obesity rates.
Salon recently featured two articles entirely apocalyptic in nature on the coming environmental apocalypse, in the US and the entire world. The first focused on impending dry years in the Southwest and the Southern California megalopolis. Lake Mead, source of much water for that region, will dry up by 2026 at today’s use levels. Water compacts drawn up in the 1920s relied on ambitious projections that do not account for the dryness of late. What makes the article apocalyptic, and worth a perusal for our sake, is its structure: the article is divided into three acts, as the author states, “like a Shakespearian tragedy”. Act I is today—it’s bad—act II tomorrow—only getting worse—and act III the future, and that will just be horrific. Act III is closed with images of the past Indian peoples who lived in the Southwest, and what happened when they entered a 30-year drought: smashed skulls, broken bones, and all-out war and killing. The second article focused primarily on greenhouse gases, and is of note if only for an Onion mocking headline within the text: “Report: Global Warming May Be Irreversible by 2006”.
Finally, the apocalypse came to the politics of this moment, as I read a commentator who used the Yeats poem The Second Coming to attempt to find an opening for an independent presidential candidate in 2012. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold… Surely, some revelation is at hand/ Surely, the Second Coming is at hand”. And though the Yeats poem, born of an apocalyptic time in Europe—the years immediately after the First World War—I do not see it as anything prophetic in terms of a third party. I wondered why the author would go so hard with the apocalyptic undertones—then came that happy note, where she disclosed she was an organizer behind one of the primary “independent” nominating organizations, and the grand reveal of the motive was achieved.
The power of the apocalypse as narrative has been something that has been of such great interest to me; this week, however, I began to think of an economic motive behind the narrative of apocalypse. Albertine sells for $25, and for that, one can buy the past, present, or future, in a trip. Just as the dealers of apocalyptic New York sell the power to remember, so we sell apocalypse. Creating these narratives can be quite useful for selling one’s cause, for gaining attention in a media market hungry for the unusual, the weird, and not necessarily the newsworthy, and apocalypse grabs attention. Apocalypse is a business, it is an economic motive, as much as is the black market Albertine.
