The Doomsday Clock
and why this utterly surreal piece of performance art never fails to make me smile
and why this utterly surreal piece of performance art never fails to make me smile
Just two days ago within this befuddling Matrix within which we all reside, news broke, the yearly bulletin if you wish, that the earth, we as humanity and our entire species, was still perilously close to extinction and annihilation. Thankfully we hadn’t crossed the Rubicon into the final minute of our collective lives and the clock, the officially named Doomsday Clock, remained at 100 seconds to Midnight. For most of humanity, this news will have been pushed away with a shrug of indifferent shoulders and I’d like to think an occasional hearty titter at the utter absurdity of it all. I, on the other hand, reacted with a childlike glee, dusted down my Twitter jokes of “Why can’t it be 30 Seconds to Mars and why can’t Jared Leto save us?” and “Can’t somebody just disable the bloody thing and take out the batteries?” and was frankly just thankful to be alive in yet another earthbound year whereby our Masters and Overlords need to continually and obsessively inform us, over and over again, that we’re going to die. It’s not just 100 seconds from destruction or 30 seconds from Mars, it’s a pandemic virus, economic collapse, inflation, prospects of Nuclear War, disruptive and ever more dependent digital and electronic technologies and climate change. And if we listen to the chaps in the starched white shirts or the ladies in the formal suits there’s a lot more besides to be frightened of too. They may as well just stare into the camera and against a background of Regan from The Exorcist and the Doomsday Clock just coldly announce “You’re all going to die out there” and then walk silently off camera.
They won’t however, as they need (a collective “they” of any of those nefarious Elite figures, Captains of Industry, Media Barons and more and more psychologists and sociologists) us as a screaming, useless majority of humanity to fear our own mortality and our impending death. It’s always been so too and a firm reason why I adore The Doomsday Clock. As a young child I so vividly remember “News” bulletins about our titular and titillating clock, that we were hurling toward doomsday and the minutes and seconds of our lives were counting down to destruction and as an apathetic mass of humanity there was very little we could do about it. So the Lords and Masters of The Matrix gave us a clock to beguile us with, a calming salve to suck and a message that unless those dastardly and psychopathic titans of industry didn’t stop destroying the earth they’d end up destroying the earth, and rather than radically rethinking our ways of blending with Mother Earth and removing the inhumane and seemingly anti human rascals who are bringing us all nearer to a mutually assured destruction, they gave us all a clock.
A Doomsday Clock.
And I could not be more delighted!
The whole thing is a hideous parody and best left for 8 year old children who’d rather be running free in a field and climbing trees and making their own fun. Instead, and very consciously, this bunkum and balderdash is aimed at us, adults, and if you’re not scared enough, they’ll back next year to try again. I’m approaching my 50th year on this rock spinning through the unknowable infinity of the universe and that ugly glitch of The Matrix, the fear inducing Doomsday Clock, has been with me the entire time. Year after Year they wind up both a clock and the human family just to remind us that we’re all going to die and that we all need to feel in abject fear. Because fear sells and fear keeps the tills ticking and fear is very good for business.
I’m not highlighting just www.news.sky.com and the article linked below as feel free to delve into the many other articles on the Doomsday Clock and they will all reinforce, in lock step, these very same headlines and quotes:
The world remains as “closest to apocalypse” it’s ever been.
The world is “no safer” than it was a year ago.
“The clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilisation-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment”.
“Negative international security threats”.
We’re on the brink of War with Russia, there’s a “deepening crisis and alarm” due to climate change, the response to the pandemic was “entirely insufficient” and most puzzling and laughably of all, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Director General of the WHO) said “If we end inequity, we end the pandemic”. Pardon? We just become magically equal (after swallowing some magic beans presumably) and the pandemic is over? Pardon?
“The Doomsday Clock continues to hover dangerously, reminding us how much work is needed to ensure a safer and healthier planet”.
So said Dr Rachel Bronson, and whilst we can all appreciate the world’s ills and problems (and see incredibly clearly the reasons why and the reasons why our turgid and corrupt Mass Media won’t highlight the actions of the dark actors that pervade our world and their deflections onto us for our ultimate demise), what purpose does it serve to wheel out a bloody clock every year, and a clock entitled “Doomsday” too?
Fear sells and fear is the only reason for this absurd pantomime, this surreal performance art, this act of self importance, deep thinking and warnings of impending doom.
I LOVE the absurdity as I saw through this as a spotty kid 40 years ago and wondered then why on earth they were pointing at a clock as if that arbitrary piece of equipment means anything. It doesn’t. It’s a prop. In a game. A game of fear, anxiety, tension, division, change, uncertainty and of course the biggest fear of all, death.
“Hello, good evening, and here is the news. There’s war, death, a pandemic, economic collapse, job losses, the stock market is in trouble and here’s the Doomsday Clock to remind you we’re all on the brink of the apocalypse. Then there will be a story on a Hollywood Actress from your home country, a young girl flying a kite in a hurricane, and then we’ll cross to Tom for the weather.
But first, here’s the fear”.
Don’t listen to these performance artists folks and if you missed them this time around, fear not, they’ll be back next year because there’s always more fear to sell to the human family.
Sometimes, you’ve got to ask yourself why?
Doomsday Clock stays at 100 seconds to midnight and remains 'closest to apocalypse' ever
The Doomsday Clock has stayed at 100 seconds to midnight for the third year in a row - as the world remains the…news.sky.com