Living in the End Times, maybe.

As the midterm election approaches and Trumpian idiocracy sinks to its lowest levels of flailing incompetence and moribund integrity—shocking, and yet, hardly surprising—the Republic hangs in the balance next week. But the death of the Republic would not necessarily mean the end of the world. We can’t go on like this of course, we can’t go on, and yet, we would go on. (Beloved Spouse and I attended Waiting for Godot earlier this month at the Guthrie, which betokens among the bleaker of such futures.) We could be Russia, our very own sh*****e country.

The climate degrades unceasingly, and while some of its negatives are beginning to be felt particularly at the extremities and mostly by the poor, the species will not likely be extinguished in the immediate future, though civilization—such as we understand it—might succumb in our lifetimes. A permafrost bound plague unbound, the collapse of the Gulf Stream current, violently melting glaciers, dystopias abounding, but humans and colonies of humans would likely survive to start again.

The global economy, riven by crypto- and AI-inspired debt—threatens to unmake our post-COVID financial recovery and undo our generation’s 401Ks. And that correction might be the only way to save us from the greater threat of a Super-Intelligent Singularity which would eliminate the species without prejudice in, let’s say, ten years. If anyone builds it . . . .

And, of course, there’s always the risk of a World War III nuclear conflagration as a result of any of these factors working in combination with a disordered geopolitical world. The dark possibilities are myriad.

So that, if we might be living in the end times, we seniors represent the last generation of old people to walk the earth. Without belaboring that notion here, it is a sublime thought: that the world, human history, ends with us, on our watch. And that we are the last of history’s coots old enough to have seen some shit and wise enough to wonder what the fuck is going on. Under the circumstances, as Henry used to advise, “Silence and good temper.”

In the meanwhile, off to the polls on Tuesday. (And if you are Trumpist-Republican, maybe stay at home. You’ve done enough.)