{"id":66753,"date":"2019-11-03T00:14:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-03T00:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=66753"},"modified":"2019-11-03T00:15:10","modified_gmt":"2019-11-03T00:15:10","slug":"three-stunners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=66753","title":{"rendered":"Three stunners"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron <\/strong>— can’t think why you’d need three stunners, or two six-shooters for that matter — stun once and done, sez I ]
\n.<\/p>\n

My first stunner is from an LRB <\/strong>piece about Margaret Atwood,<\/strong> it’s opening paragraph invoking PD James<\/strong> instead, and what a powerful description of what I think I’ll call a Falling Curtain Event<\/strong> — an event such as climate change which offers so great a threat that arguably we should drop all other activities to attend to it.<\/p>\n

For a quick dystopia, then — this:<\/p>\n

In P.D. James\u2019s strangest novel, The Children of Men (1992), humans stop being able to get pregnant, and no one can figure out why. Scientific research comes to nothing. Years pass without a newborn child. All the nurseries close, then all the schools. With no hope of posterity, landowners let their estates rot; scholars take up golf. Only the richest or best-connected are able to get a place in one of the increasingly rare care homes, run by increasingly senescent carers. Without children or grandchildren, people dote on their pets, and envy them for still being able to reproduce. When a small deer wanders into an Oxford chapel, the chaplain rushes at it, hurling prayerbooks: \u2018Christ, why can\u2019t they wait? Bloody animals. They\u2019ll have it all soon enough. Why can\u2019t they wait?\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

Second, a no less stunning foretaste of our current actual situation politically, from the dialog of episode 7 of the TV series, The People v. O.J. Simpson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I mean, we have hard evidence, and they razzle-dazzle a bunch of conspiracy nonsense into big moments. Now, we need to make our own big moments that land with the jury. That is how we beat the nonsense. Now, can we focus on that?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Do I hear a prophecy here, life about to imitate art? Beware the Jabberwock, my son..<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Let me close with another stunning Falling Curtain Event<\/strong>, this one from a Dylan <\/strong>live performance:<\/p>\n