Passe-moi le Valium

Earl Fowler

So where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?

Oh yes. I read in the paper this week that 2024 — punctuated by intense heatwaves, wildfires, deadly storms and mass flooding all over the world — is virtually certain to be the hottest year on record, topping 2023.

This was the year we finally ended up, on average, 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, meaning we’re well on the way to a three-degree increase by the end of the century and an ineluctable plague of global catastrophes compared to which today’s weather disasters will be viewed as minor tempests in a teapot.

As ocean temperatures rise precipitously, the ability of the seas to absorb carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels becomes less and less effective, thus accelerating the greenhouse effect.

In the meantime, we’re witlessly washing billions of pounds of micro- and nanoplastics, smaller than dust particles, into the oceans willy-nilly, poisoning aquatic species and the land animals that eat them — including us — in ways no one yet comprehends.

Let’s throw in, I dunno, widespread aquifer depletion, egregious overpopulation and a worldwide refugee crisis triggered by climate change and the legacy of colonialism, the reckless use of glyphosate and neonicotinoid herbicides and pesticides, the omnipresent dissemination of antibiotics in factory farms, the dumping of radioactive waste into the oceans, the deployment of artificial intelligence to produce ever more potent weapons, the rush to begin deep-sea mining that will involve scraping seamounts in rich habitats we haven’t begun to understand … oh dear, it’s all a bit of a pother!

And this just scratches the surface, literally, of what we’re up against. Now throw in the Drill-Baby-Drill Coming Attraction of a morally bankrupt Incelocracy in the Make America Straight republic-in-name-only to the south. Aside from racist, misogynistic revenge fantasies and the trashing of all the checks and balances on presidential power once enshrined in the Constitution, Trump 2.0 is already devoted to a no-holds-barred, grab-’em-by-the-pussy plunder, pillage and rapine of the natural world by puerile tech billionaires and smirking crypto-fascists addicted to violent porn.

Wallowing in a seemingly bottomless pit of despair in the face of all this would be an understandable and perhaps the only rational reaction. Since the Guy Fawkes Day Massacre, many of us have been lying like drowned sailors on the rim of the world, with the gulls screaming over us. (Can you tell I’m near a West Coast beach on a grey, blustery day as I write this?)

For it’s true. As we approach the end of our lives, as we prepare to be mounted on streamers and blown to nothingness under the trembling awning of elm and maple leaves like all the rest, we Baby Boomers (and the dwindling few from the generation that preceded us) have made a thorough hash of things, completely come a cropper. Our hopes and dreams for leaving the world a better place are whelmed, engulfed, submerged.

But not yet buried. Through those swaying leaves, latticed slashes of sunlight still fawn at our feet. Tugged and teased by the sun and the moon, long-period waves roll in the distance. And I always take solace in dark times like these (OK, there has never been a dark time like this in our lifetime) in a classic Terry Mosher (Aislin) cartoon that ran in the Montreal Gazette the day after René Lévesque’s sovereignist Parti Québécois won a crushing victory over Robert Bourassa’s federalist Liberals in 1976.

Standing next to a stupefied Bourassa and brandishing one of his ever-present cigarettes, five-packs-a-day-man Lévesque is looking straight at the reader as he advises: “O.K. EVERYBODY TAKE A VALIUM!”

Breathe. Relax. Simmer down. Chill out.

Calme-toi.

True, the Earth hasn’t been in such peril since the shadow of a six-mile-wide asteroid appeared over the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago. But in the long run, at least until we seem to have frittered it all away since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, things had worked out brilliantly.

And it’s not like America hasn’t been split down the middle and unravelling in every direction before. There was that little matter of the Civil War, of course. And anyone born before 1960 had seared into his or her brain live television images of burning buildings, decaying housing projects, bloodied antiwar protesters and elfin, wide-eyed hippies hurling rocks at police as that decade shuddered toward a corrupt Nixon presidency.

Then as now, the words of the prophets were written on the subway walls and tenement halls. Which brings us (as we hear the four dead in Ohio singing behind the rhododendron bushes) to the point of this simple desultory philippic.

It’s not a permanent refuge, of course, nor should it be. But the blue suburban skies of childhood look down lovingly onto the inverted daydream to which I retreat, recalibrate and recharge in the wake of a rum situation like a cancer diagnosis or the Second Coming of Doomsday Donald.

The skies of 1966, to be precise, my last year as a preteen, when the music on my transistor radio was flowing, amazing, and blowing my way.

The futuristic singles of that year are the soundtrack to which I regularly return when the excrement hits my internal punkahwallah: The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, The Yardbirds’ “Shape of Things”, The Who’s “I’m a Boy”, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In The City”, The Supremes’ “Love is Here and Now You’re Gone”, Cream’s “I Feel Free”, The Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind”, The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, The Rolling Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?”, and above all, The Beach Boys’ crowning masterpiece, “Good Vibrations.”

How we loved the colourful clothes she wore and the way the sunlight played upon her hair. That girl in the class we were all secretly in love with, I mean. She’s giving me excitations (oom, bop, bop)!

Mille-neuf-cent-soixante-six, the year The Beatles began Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was also the tipping point at which a handful of brilliant artists detonated the perceived limits of the pop album with the release of The Who’s A Quick One, The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out, The Byrds’ Fifth Dimension, The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, and mirabile dictu, Bob Dylan’s mind-blowing Blonde on Blonde.

My retreat to the black remembered grooves and sonorous contentment of childhood, that happy hi-fi where I went and cannot come again except in nostalgic reveries, is hardly unique. Plenty of people, I think, are in my tree.

There was, of course, a druggy, half-baked doors-of-perception message in the English psychedelia of the time. But songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Penny Lane" are really about childhood and how thrilling it was to be young in a world where a pretty nurse was selling poppies from a tray and there was nothing to get hung about.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And if the whole thing feels today as if we’re in a play, well, we are anyway.

So that’s my pitch. Mid-Sixties rock’n’roll might not be your happy place, the material paradise where you experience the utmost depths of comfort and fulfilment and, I dunno, let’s call it oneirism. Maybe it’s Glenn Gould and The Goldberg Variations. Maybe it’s deep Buddhist chants. Maybe it’s the frothing of hedges in the autumn wind. In our countless alveoli, I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together.

But once we’re done watching the wheels go round and round from the hermit’s hut, it’ll be time to do everything in our power to frustrate the little piggies and blue meanies. It’s clobberin’ time. Goo-goo g’joob.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but as John Steinbeck observed in The Grapes of Wrath:

There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

The only question is whether there’ll be anything left when the last shall be first and the meek shall inherit the Earth.