The Revolution, Gil Scott-Heron prophesized, will not be televised, but at least the apocalypse will. It will be televised and googled, blogged, vlogged, facebooked and 24-7 entertainment. It will be a CNN special.
It will star fleeing celebrities and a cast of millions; it will be sponsored by that delightful cockney-accented gecko (and a multitude of oil companies).
Empowered by our media-rich environment, we can chronicle nonstop the minutiae and magnitude of mega environmental disasters.
How times have changed.
When Mount St. Helens blew its top, we had to scrounge a few photos in stop-action sequence to thrill to the Gotterdammerung.
Nowadays, Anderson Cooper would host the devastation. The fiery explosion would be a screen saver and an ironic t-shirt, and the thundering blast a ring tone.
Within hours, footage of boiling ash and lava would be mashed with Scandinavian death metal on YouTube.
It's a brave, new world. The ever-inflating media universe allows coverage of September 11, the Tsunami, Katrina and the Califlagration to expand endlessly. Happening at the speed of news, these disasters are picture-perfect television.
Not so for other calamities. The Southeast's drought may be threatening millions and melting polar ice might swamp coastal cities around the world, but shrinking lakes and rising seas do not titillate like howling firestorms and rampaging tidal waves.
At the other end of the disaster spectrum, earthquakes are too fast and nuclear war too totalizing to cozy up to as live-action spectacles.
For that we need Hollywood.
In "The Day After Tomorrow," decades of global cooling were compressed into a few days, even seconds, making the public's blood run cold with fears of a new ice age. Alas, global warming seems just that - warming.
It will not foment a freezing backlash but a burned and parched planet.
It's appropriate that California hosted the latest catastrophe: it's where Armageddon meets Eden.
Hollywood may one day burn as Public Enemy rapped, but not from social unrest, rather ecological distress.
Tinseltown was a bit player in this drama. The guvernator was powerless against Mother Nature; he was one of those pantywaist politicians who crowd the sidelines of disaster flicks, issuing motherly admonitions to stay indoors, listen to the authorities and stop making so many phone calls!
The heroic military of celluloid fantasies was even more impotent as thousands of Marines surrendered Camp Pendleton to the advancing flames.
Other movie royalty were mere extras in the exodus. Albeit escaping in luxury, they didn't have to worry about camping out in a sports stadium.
This was the bright side, beyond the glowing mountains. Despite a Katrina-sized tide of displaced, Qualcomm reaped a PR bonanza with its branded stadium cum refugee camp.
It was a corporate love-in, with free Starbucks coffee, telcoms providing free wireless, Ralphs Supermarkets trucking in food and Costco handing out pharmaceuticals.
There's a lesson here. If the Superdome had business sponsors, then the displaced residents might have received timely aid, and frivolous entertainment, because of its brand-building potential. More...
