Bunch of tossers, really.

What is the lifecycle of a band? Bands lumber on like zombies long after inspiration has left the building; they stumble around after their singers die; deaf guitarists shelter behind Perspex sonic prophylactics; grumpy old men milk emaciated cash cows till they die on their feet; the stench of convictions for tax evasion, armed robbery, sexual impropriety and worse pollutes the arena. Rolling stones might not gather moss, but oh! how that brown stuff clings.

The fumes aren’t just fouling up the sunrise—they are totally fucking it up. We can no longer sit and watch wistfully. Unless you are lucky you are gonna get drowned on dry land in some kind of diluvian hell, or you are gonna be baked alive in the following heatwave. We need to stand and fight. We have to be prepared to die for what we think is right or we are all gonna be dispatched to that hell below in the midst of some really fucking nasty shit hitting the fans. We might have to do the twenty years straight for just walking down Main Street telling it how it is, so maybe you might as well learn to fight. Praying underneath the rain is futile desperation: that ship sailed long ago.

It is clearly all built on sand. Maybe it teetered a bit in the seventies when, under the influence of whatever psychotropics were available, the tuned-in and dropped-out citizens of powerful democracies thought they were thinking clearly. But the structures emerged strengthened and emboldened, and in the eighties, under the tutelage of governments run by Thatchers and Reagans, those structures grew. And now, as that evil superstructure of capitalism is finally being pulled down around us by an exhausted but still omnipotent and all-powerful Gaia we are resigned to a state of shock and awe. Shock at the state of things but worse, in awe of how we as a species could possibly have fucked things up so badly. Don’t be scared of dying. Be scared of being alive.

So the Forever War has moved on to Ukraine. It seems that the US cannot function without gritty footage of modern soldiery in action accompanied by scenes of wrecked humanity whose lives have been torn apart and whose kin have been murdered by sniper’s bullets or remote controlled game-tech ordnance. And its not just broadcast infotainment that feeds off this shit. You can hardly go out these days without the risk of some insect regurgitating it for you in the guise of entertainment. If, for whatever reason, you have chosen to attend one of DA’s outdoor support shows this July you would be wise to leave after the first act concludes. Or, be prepared to bury your head in your rented seat cushion for an hour while FFF prattles on about the US military before subjecting you to a slide show of snaps from his recent trip to the latest war zone. (Followed, I kid you not, by a comedy audience sing-along rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody. Get a fucking life John.)

Rational progressive change doesn’t happen without conflict in modern democracies. We can’t even sort out something as obvious and actionable as shifting from a fossil fuel economy by consensus. Instead we have the spectacle of the politically powerful edging into increasingly absurd contradictory positions as they bend over for the oil super-rich while at the same time trying to look like they might actually be doing something useful to ameliorate a citizen’s increasing risk of being extinguished in an extreme weather event (or even, if you live in the richest of those oil-rich states, the risk of beheading for opening your mouth).None of this looks likely to change until the Whitehouse spontaneously ignites in a 55°C heatwave or the Kremlin gets washed away by a surging Moskva. But by then, of course, it will be too late for us citizens and the dregs of the human race will have congealed into slug-like singularities and be travelling on privately built interplanetary craft looking for a new utopia to cover with their destructive slime (all funded by leveraging the oil driven economy before it collapsed).