Thornton Wilder

Been thinking a lot about Wilder this morning. He wrote what I consider to be the greatest American play of the 20th century, The Skin of Our Teeth. Its theme of survival, despite all our stupid and irrational behavior, Wilder's faith in the final decency of the human animal, the human heart, gets challenged today by the environmental crisis that we Americans, whose lifestyle is the crisis' greatest contributor, refuse to embrace and deal with. Indeed with crisis-denying Republicans now in charge of essential environmental committees in Congress, the situation deteriorates daily. Nature will win, however, and it looks like our suffering will be great. I've started a book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, that should be required reading for every parent on the planet, if only to educate them about what their children can expect. It's not a pretty picture (and it's a least likely scenario of disaster at that!). It's not too late to make it better (it's now beyond fixing, alas) but the immediate action required seems highly unlikely in our current uneducated suicidal political climate.

Wilder had faith that we could muddle through in the end, despite everything. I used to agree with him. Indeed this was one of the miracles of our species. Creative survival. But this time we may have gone too far. And as much as our American lifestyle, it will be our American tradition of anti-intellectualism, our stubborn self-made bias against knowledge, our preference for religion over science, that will do us in. Who cares if the world comes to an end if Christ is going to drop from the clouds and reward you for keeping the faith?

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but in Rapture