While the Minister of Culture was frantically searching for Passe-Partout’s costume last week (an army of agitated chicks could trigger a civil war) and the CEO of Télé-Québec was personally busy rescuing the precious clothes from a supernatural flood in the Faubourg à m’lasse, I was trying to find the title of this column: “Pass here, pass there, but not everywhere”, “Ababouinés* rare”, “Drop your Wii, stie, there’s water in the cellar”, “The blue sky over us can collapse”, “In the ass, sugar loaf” (an expression of my father, politely translated: ” fuck it “), “Between two joints you could do something because no one is going to do it for you.”
Finally, it’s the song of Starmania who won for his lucidity and his beauty; yes, the world is stoned. And then, I liked to see Starmania. French director Thomas Jolly has outdone himself, even more than with the Olympic opening ceremony, with which he dazzled the entire world. I especially liked the rain that day. It was poetic to see it strumming on Scott Price’s grand instrument. The show must go onsaid Celine. We don’t know why it is necessary, but we like to believe it.
We should ask Thomas Jolly, this large-scale conductor, to imagine a show nature in which he would direct fires, torrential rains, gusty winds and a derecho. And Jakarta would move at the same time. Yes, yes, I am not making this up. Jakarta, 10.5 million Indonesians, is moving because of rising waters. It is done on the sly, without triumph, “courage, let’s flee!” Soon, no one will have the crazy idea of going to live in a basement. It is a damp place where memories, old-fashioned sofas and dubious connections grow moldy.
The three V’s
I promised myself I wouldn’t tell you about what’s going wrong. Just the good, a show Olympics, Lady Gaga teetering on her too-high heels, rhinestones, Louis Vuitton, and lots of bling-bling to finance our headlong flight. They even flew horses (70) from all over the world for the Olympics and each mount weighs ten times my weight. When I read that, I wanted to eat horse tartare again. I’m kidding, no, I’m a vegetarian. To get back on a winged horse. There you go. Pegasus, symbol of poetic inspiration.
What struck me this summer was this: our phenomenal capacity to dissociate, to sublimate, to live in the land of unicorns and continue as before. You left YUL, stranded on a sailboat in the Adriatic, while it’s burning everywhere, in Athens, California, Jasper, Brazil and the price of tomatoes keeps rising. The heat must go on.
I would like to tell you today, dear “gamer”, that you are not withdrawing from society because it is doing badly. It is the opposite: society is doing badly because you are withdrawing from it.
I made a tomato pie last week; I had to apply for a line of credit. In the middle of August. To think that we used to get that kind of fling. Nowadays, insults are gratuitous.
Our species makes no connection between heat waves, floods of death and the three Vs: theft, meat, car, a way of simplifying the ecological message and targeting where it counts. I’ll tell you about the fourth V next week, my little chick. The three Vs are also: see, want and conquer. As the other one said: the game is toffe, do you have to wake up !
It is Christian, a reader who has become a minimalist, who writes to me that he feels like an extra in Don’t Look Upand he confirms what I know, that words have reached their limit: “The work of persuasion will henceforth pass through “our five senses”, as Jancovici says. When our cozy comfort will be compromised.”
I had promised myself not to talk about the zeitgeist while the summer has been a disaster movie commissioned by Qualinet. Hey, I could have republished this year-old column: https://bit.ly/3yZb3UK.
Finally, I decided to clean up my life, to choose “my team ” (said my Gaspé grandfather) at the end of breed : gentle warriors, upright women who look the horizon in the eye, sea legs, raisers of consciences. It doesn’t work everywhere, unfortunately. Change doesn’t inspire, no, it shakes things up.
The spectacular never ceases to blind, to make deaf and indifferent to the wonder of living.
All in detox
What makes me feel less alone in the world is rereading the poet Michel X Côté (A poet among pickup breeders), is to devour Nicolas Langelier in the last New Projecthis long, hard-hitting analysis “On the possibility of living in the ruins of capitalism” (see Joblog). It’s opening my eyes instead of opening my veins with the book How the World Really Works (How the world really works), by researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil, recommended by popular ecology expert Jean-Marc Jancovici and by Bill Gates.
Vaclav Smil presents himself neither as an optimist nor as a pessimist, but as a scientist. The observation is clear: rich countries are doped with energy, which Jancovici had demonstrated in his bestseller The world without end. We are stoned and China makes our coal-fired gadgets.
One example among hundreds: Vaclav calculates the energy cost of food and finds that halving food waste and changing our meat consumption would reduce carbon emissions without harming the supply, the planet. We don’t just power ourselves with fossil fuels, we eat them. And, by the way, Vaclav is not vegan, far from it.
He notes that the steps of the detox cure will not be magical, but rather gradual and costly. His first chapter, on energy, explains why we will not make the desired transition away from fossil fuels in a desirable time frame. We are far too stoned.
His conclusion is not based on personal impressions, but on realities that combine engineering and economics. Our dependence requires constant reduction, but denial is stronger than reason. GHGs have increased in Canada and Quebec between 2020 and 2022.
THE show must go on ? We still need spectators to applaud.
* Ababouiné (marine): relating to a sailboat stopped in the open sea due to lack of wind