I will start this series with the first look after World War I when humanity suffered its first ever effort at coping with a world driven by a massive conflagration that ripped asunder the end of the capitalist world as we knew it far sooner than we expected and threw humanity into the utter latest phase of what we are now beginning to better appreciate as the end of an epoch that could last eons.
Life on this planet may die off long before we are able to move beyond it except for a tiny remnant that may be sailed into space to watch us die from above and seek to survive as a tiny colony on Mars where we now know life began around 300 million years ago around the same time it started here.
Did an advanced civilization die on Mars then? Did an earlier one die on earth? These are feasible questions from a purely scientific standpoint based on what we now know. Will humanity figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light? There are hints at this in concepts like quantum entanglement but not yet any certifiable proof.
Just after the war, there was a brief period that allowed for the passage of the 20th amendment to extend the vote in the U.S. to women due to the monstrous consequences that men had caused launching a war for no reason other than possession. There was no other purpose.
But meanwhile, there had been a revolution in Russia that stunned the western world beyond belief. We moved into the post-capitalist world at that point. Still, urgent efforts were underway to counter this development. It involved the first ever sad efforts at stemming the rise of Bolshevism. Progressive anti-war efforts arose in the war’s wake but nothing seemed capable of stemming the Leninists on the one hand or rising Italian fascism on the other.
It was not for almost a decade following the elevation of the Algonquin circle centered around “The Great Gatsby” of just now a century ago of F Scott Fitzgerald fame that detailed the death of capitalism and the proto-feminist novelist Virginia Wolff of Mrs. Dalloway fame.
But for them there was very little that was not just horribly antiwar including Ernest Hemingway’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
In the 1930s as the Great Depression sank in, where Putin is taking us now, Roosevelt came into office as the man, along with Florence Perkins and wife Eleanor, who literally saved capitalism from its impending demise. He did it with a series of last ditch extreme measures.
Today we face the desperate need for a similar infusion but it may now be too late. Then Roosevelt sought to shape culture and its misery with a solid dose of humor. There’s no movie that was allowed to be produced in the 1930s that wasn’t a form of comedy. Don’t be fooled, nothing made it into the silver screen that was not OK’d ahead of time.
The camp of the 1930s was pure Hollywood at its best, even as the American intel community was slow to pick up on the importance of winning Latinos to the west in the Cinco de Mayo comedies of Lupe Velez and Zza Zza Gabor in at least the first two of that series and the discovery of the Pacific Rim after.
The decade of the 1930s was one of failed attempts at buying time for a dying system. Short of this last decade, we could not have figured out how to get off this lushest of planets. But now we’re looking at sheer hell. Donald Trump will be our last hurrah following a decade of folly and feeble efforts. It’s sad that as we sink into the darkness, this planet will best be remembered for its nobility of effort but little more. Oh well, we can try again in a few more million years.
