"YOU CAN’T THINK ABOUT saving the whole world," Spiderman tells Spiderman in a very Spidermannish trailer for a Spiderman movie. "You have to think about saving one person."
The trailer is for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse which, somewhat predictably, features multiple iterations of Spidey. The product that the trailer is advertising will surely do well at the box office, if past franchise productions are any indication.
It's not the Spiderman brand, however, but a different, smaller club that makes this film interesting: The movie is in the growing family of stories about the multiverse.
The multiverse is a fun concept. In most of the popularized versions, it boils down to this: Every choice you make in life spawns another timeline, and every timeline constitutes its own universe. And each timeline has endless variations. Want a universe in which John Lennon lived to a ripe old age and Americans drive on the left side of the road? You got it. Want a universe where Al Gore was president and you kissed that cute boy and everyone is a two-dimensional cartoon drawn in Squigglevision? You got it.
There is at least some scientific basis for this idea. Some proponents of string theory suggest that there might be a large number of dimensions, charting out multiple universes. Films from the tepid Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness to the excellent Everything Everywhere All at Once have had a lot of fun with the topic, as do alternate-history shows like The Man in the High Castle and For All Mankind.
However, the notion is not without detractors in physics circles, and any time a concept becomes this viral after nudging from big movie studios, it's worth asking why the people who fund those studios might be interested in putting forward the idea that our existence is cheap, replicable and therefore disposable.
Could it be that some of the richest men on the planet might have an interest in peeling away the next wave of would-be climate agitators and equality crusaders with only 3 years left before global heating becomes a runaway process? Could it be that telling everyone that there are an infinite number of universes might play into their hands?
And most importantly, could it be that we could be having a lot more fun by engaging with our current challenges rather than seeking escape in another reality?
Some environmental activists in Germany seem to think so.
****
THE TWO PEOPLE IN HI-VIS VESTS on the stage are clearly enjoying the view.
It is late November, and they have mounted the podium before a Hamburg orchestral performance of Beethoven and Brahms, in order to stage a small talk.
"Just as there is only one violin concerto by Beethoven," Deutsche Welle quotes them as saying, "we have only this one planet whose boundaries we disregard so much that climate-related disasters are becoming more frequent and deadly."
They go on to mention that the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg's famous waterside music venue, will be one of the first buildings to become unusable, assuming sea levels continue to rise.
They have a point. And their message goes far beyond Hamburg. In recent years, 400,000 people are estimated to have died annually as a result of climate change, according to the group DARA, with most of those deaths coming in the Global South. And those deaths are likely to accelerate. According to Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything, "African delegates at U.N. climate summits have begun using words like 'genocide' to describe the collective failure to lower emissions."
And yet the German climate activists, while passionate and very serious about stemming this alleged genocide, do not appear to be gloomy. Far from it. They're having fun. They use humor. They feed mashed potatoes to a painting in a gallery. They glue themselves to picture frames and pedestrianized Berlin road surfaces that fusty state judges say must again carry auto traffic. They gleefully paint bank windows and a sculpture orange and red, respectively.
And they get arrested for it, as is their plan. The arrests gain their cause more attention.
Far from asking themselves whether state laws and policies are encouraging genocide, however, the leaders of the German Bundesländer are looking at whether they can jail the protesters for longer periods before releasing them -- and even, in some cases, preventatively detain them, lest they commit other dangerous, mashed potato-related crimes of an unspeakable nature.
"The introduction of preventive detention was [originally] justified by the danger of Islamist attacks," write Justus Leicht and Peter Schwarz in a November 15 essay for WSWS. "The reasoning is that “dangerous persons” should be able to be arrested before they commit an attack. Now, as many warned at the time, it is being used against climate activists whose only 'crime' is to block car traffic by peaceful means."
"It is obvious that a precedent is being set here to criminalise any kind of protest and resistance—workers occupying their factory to prevent its shutdown or removal of machinery, blocking arms shipments to war zones, resistance to neo-Nazi marches, etc."
This draconian crackdown is coming at us after it was alleged that activists' tactic of gluing themselves to a roadway was responsible for a death -- an allegation that, Leicht and Schwarz make clear, is completely false.
Watching supposedly liberal German pearl clutchers harrumph about this -- mashed potatoes and glue on artworks and roads! Interrupting a classical concert! You've crossed a line now, Mister! -- is tremendously, enjoyably silly. I love Beethoven and all, but the guy's ghost is more than 250 years old. He doesn't care. And even if he did, I heavily doubt that the composer who wrote a symphonic movement portraying the joys of a thunderstorm and said "There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven" would come down on the side of the hereditary oil barons running our planet into the ground.
The same goes for many of the 1800s artists whose antique works are being fed potatoes and oil. The phrase "starving artist" is a cliché for a reason: Many artists then and now are among the classes that scrape for food when droughts, floods and fires bring harvest yields down to famine levels. Climate change, which has amped up those catastrophes, is rightfully in the crosshairs of a lot of artists, many of whom are not above getting arrested over environmental matters.
****
ANYHOW, GETTING JAILED FOR A GOOD CAUSE is not always a bad thing. I was interviewing the National Magazine Award-winning writer and international gadfly Barrett Brown earlier this year, and he mentioned that he had done some of his best work in the solitary confinement area of the prison where he was incarcerated.
(They let him out of the prison system as a whole soon afterward when it was tacitly acknowledged by some in power that he was essentially being held for political dissent, and that he was more of a thorn in the establishment's side while in prison than while outside of it.)
Brown's prison essays -- published by D Magazine and The Intercept -- included a comically brutal takedown of revisionist Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, a tutorial on running role-playing games in the most confined of settings and the following description of the Native American sweat lodge ritual he attended on prison grounds:
Although undeniably majestic, the ceremony was also something of a disappointment. I had gone into the thing hoping that I might mysteriously know exactly what to do — how to pass the peace pipe and all that — and maybe even start singing old Cherokee songs that the eldest of those present would barely recall having heard from their own grandfathers. Stunned, the Indians would collectively intone, “He shall know your ways as if born to them,” this being the ancient prophecy I had thereby fulfilled, and then I would unite the tribes under my banner and lead the foremost of their warriors on a jihad against our shared enemies, as Paul Muad’Dib did. Instead, the Indians had to remind me several times not to just stand up and start walking around during the ceremony.
With the right blend of self awareness and -- here's that word again -- humor, a prison stay can be turned into a writing residency, or even a masterclass.
Here's a piece of another Brown essay, just because they're well crafted and fun:
In [the Jonathan Franzen novel] Purity, marriages fail one after another in excruciating 50-page flashbacks. No one is particularly likable or even unlikable, though a few do manage to be insufferable. Toward the end we’re treated to one great character, the cynical plutocrat dad of one of the dastardly feminists, but then he disappears from view and promptly dies. The megalomaniacal information activist is admirably complex, but as a megalomaniacal information activist myself, I found him unconvincing. The one murder that serves to kick off the plot is perpetuated against an otherwise minor off-screen character rather than one of the several main characters whom the reader might have much preferred to see murdered. Franzen is also rather hard on the ladies, whereas everyone would have been better served had he instead been harder on himself and maybe put out a better book.
Brown, for his part, has a book coming out in spring 2023. You should absolutely stop what you're doing and preorder it.
***
SO … LET'S WRAP THIS THING UP. We're starting a new year, and it's a good time to make a promise to yourself. If you aren't in a place in life right now when you can glue your body to something or feed starchy Irish foods to paintings, consider getting involved in a different way this year. One place to start: Agitate for decarbonization of your pension fund or university endowment. Or move to a city where you can ride the bus. Or, if you're in a suburb where a bus line is currently being blocked, get active in pushing for transit service. Heck, even just advocating for the substitution of bike parking minimums for car parking minimums could be a way to make a difference.
Do something big or small or serious or silly about climate change this year, if you like, but for Pete's sake, do something. Future generations -- and maybe glue manufacturers, to boot -- will sing your praises in a hundred languages that haven't even been created yet, and depending on how medicine advances, you may even be around to take it all in. Saving one person, as Spiderman is admonished to do, is important, but if you play your cards right, you'll find that you can help save a lot of other people as well, whether the old industrialist fat cats who fund Spiderman movies like it or not.
Happy new year.
==============
Links:
-- The site of the German climate action group that staged the Hamburg protest, with links to other groups organizing climate protests around the world
-- Essay: The campaign against “Last Generation” climate activists
-- The Barret Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison, edition 1: A Visit to the Sweat Lodge
-- My Glorious Defeats, Brown's forthcoming book
-- Untenured issue 1.3, which contains a recent poem I wrote that is mostly unrelated to climate change, though it touches on the topic of mass migrations, which are interlinked with environmental events
===
Image is in the public domain.
Full image information: https://www.flickr.com/photos/royaloperahouse/17071155296
===