Apocalypse travel plans YOUR FIRST ROADBLOCK WILL BE YOUR LAST 12th June 2010 Part 1 The ancient Kelts fought their wars naked, men and women, side by side, wielding bronze swords and very large axes, always shouting at the top of their lungs. They swooped down on Rome in 118 BC and, snarling and slashing, captured the whole city in a couple of days. Then they took a look around and collectively said, “This place is a phreaking dump!” and hauled back to their paradise abode in the Black Forest, now western Switzerland, then called Helvetia. Less than a century later, in his campaign through Gaul, Julius Caesar’s Roman juggernaut killed 360,000 Helvetians in one battle, effectively ending the Bronze Age Keltic civilization that had nurtured their world for almost a thousand years. It was the belief of these redhaired Nordic beauties that a true warrior always died with a snappy one-liner uttered at the moment of passing, indicating to the surviving companions that the dying Gaul truly believed he would be OK in the afterlife in which he had always believed. This communal love for living, hewn close to an intimate knowledge of the land, perhaps died with the Kelts. Mostly, it is the great endings that make us stop and think. Sometimes it’s all we can remember, the ending. In it is supposed to be the lesson. A Spanish novelist, C. F. Ramuz, wrote a novella in the late 1940s called “The End of All Men,” in which the Sun fried us up in a Twilight Zone kind of way. But a long ago short story by Arthur C. Clarke called “The Nine Billion Names of God” (I think) was the one that really did it for me. It was about some computer geeks who for some reason compiled the 9 billion names of God. Clarke finished it this way. “ . . . and one by one overhead, the stars were going out.” Even more jawdropping than that was a paragraph I was reminded of from one of my recent essays titled “The Babylonian Woe,” about Capt. David Astle’s book of the same name, which is the best history of money ever written and perfectly attuned to humanity’s final disaster, which is happening to us now. In a single thought of preternatural prescience, Astle closes the introduction to his book with this . . . “Through stealthy issue of precious metal commodity money into circulation amongst the peoples, replacing that money which represented the fiat, or will of the god of the city and which was merely an order on state warehouses through his scribes, this internationally minded group, from the secrecy of their chambers, were able to make a mockery of the faith and belief of simple people. The line of communication from god to man through priest-king and priest was cut, being replaced by their own twisted purposes such as they were; not however guiding mankind into the heaven that could have been and where all would be life, and light, and hope, but into such a hell as to escape from which men might gladly come to accept the idea of Mass Suicide . . .” How many will the poison air about to assail us drive to this point is a question we may all ask right now. Part 2 Once they reach the inevitable conclusion that the Gulf of Mexico oil volcano must not be allowed to continue — all life on the surface of this planet so thoroughly raped by humans will be dead in two years, as the atmosphere rapidly becomes poisoned with benzene, methane and sulfur dioxide, something like the toxic atmospheres of Jupiter or Saturn — the Russian experts they’ve just imported for advice will convince them to nuke the gulf. Imagine setting off a nuclear device at not only the foot of the New Madrid tectonic fault — quite likely to split the continental U.S. in half — but also in a small ocean of extremely flammable OIL, an entire small ocean extremely full of it, and mixed into a satanic cocktail of Corexit, an extremely poisonous substance. Can any of us really imagine what will happen? The best case scenario is this. The blast will be so humongous, it will throw the planet out of orbit. When this happens, the atmosphere which has nurtured us for so many millennia, will burst like a giant soap bubble, and every living thing that depends on air to breathe will be dead in less than 30 minutes. It will be a bad death, too — and endless sea of strangling, spasming, writhing blue faces. But it will be mercifully brief. It won’t take long. Faith will get you through it. This is the best case scenario. What happens if the blast is somehow less profound than that, or if they follow a strategy of lighting small fires from which the Corexit fumes will exterminate the populace in small segments, I can only say God help us. The oily nuclear winter that will follow in a matter of days and last for centuries will dwarf any atrocities fearful men have perpetrated upon one another since the dawn of time. The agony will be long and sublimely frightful. I can’t imagine anyone living through that, not even the Neocon Morlocks who think they’re safe beneath the surface. In an obvious way, every person on the planet is now frozen in time. The big clock in the sky is ticking down its final seconds. Everything humans have accomplished in the past has suddenly become irrelevant, and every now-frightening step into the future brings us one day closer to our exquisitely crafted, hypocritically conceived, self-inflicted doom. I explain this to the dapper executive in the BMW and he responds: “So we have to live our lives in super Hazmat suits. We’ll still have built in cell phones and computers. Life will go on even if the air is poisonous.” So now instead of computers and cellphones, we have to worry about the poisonous properties of a panoply of gasses — ethane, butane, methane, benzene, and sulfuric acid in the rain. Always know which way the wind is blowing. Always know when to run. For those of us who regard this description of life as insane, our minds wriggle with conceptual travel plans. One friend is jumping in his SUV and heading for Alaska tomorrow morning. But others are just sitting by the seashore, oblivious to the gathering storm, shrugging their shoulders, saying “Hey, there’s nothing we can do about it,” and sipping on their beer. And the fish on the end of the line is covered with oil. Edgar Cayce books are suddenly selling well these days. He’s that “Sleeping Prophet” dude who predicted the Great Lakes will run down the Mississippi and cut America in half, and wouldn’t you know that wellhead they’re thinking about nuking sits right at the foot of the very tectonic fracture that would exactly accomplish the trick. So where do you run? Which way do you go? Do you buy an ocean liner like Alan Greenspan and try to ride it out? Watch out for Somali pirates, true representatives of the people. Hide out in the mountains of Nicaragua, hoping the mudslides don’t get you? Tuck yourself away on a hillside in Maui? That might be worst of all, when our mother the ocean, the entity that gave this planet its life, finally decides to chastise us for what we have done to her. You have never seen awesome like the angry sea . . . If you choose to run, especially after the forced evacuation announcement (which I’ve heard will be June 16), your first roadblock will be your last. The men in the white trucks have orders to shoot to kill anyone who disobeys their orders. But if you follow their orders, chances are good you’ll wind up in a FEMA camp, where you will be herded into a barbed wire encampment (rented by the Feds in Georgia and Alabama for this particular event) and left to starve to death, just like Eisenhower did to those Germans all those years ago. In these bleeding days, beating the rush is the best way to stay alive at least a little longer. Part 3 If I’m wrong about any of the things I’ve said or written in the past few weeks — since I first felt the Earth begin to bleed in a serious and howling way — once the danger has passed and I see this has all been a paranoid panic attack, when the all-clear is sounded, I will only be too glad to queue up at my local VA psych ward and request admittance to medicate the error of my ways. I pray that my future will be that bright. A number of you reading this and a much larger percentage of those who aren’t will not make it to the end of the year, felled as you will be by the hazards of this unprecedented, rapidly unfolding disaster, and other disasters shortly due that will greatly reduce your chances of surviving. I will have a longer story later about useful procedures should you encounter that event. Tonight they were talking about oil burnoffs near Navarre Beach, in the Florida Panhandle, in water overloaded with the dispersant named Corexit, which exudes lethal fumes at temperatures above 90 degrees. And this is the brew that the hurricanes sure to come will rain down on Georgia and the Carolinas when they whirl through the Caribbean, as they do most every year. I know a couple of young mothers in the Smoky Mountains who should be moving further north. But everybody’s not going to get the message. Charles is going to sit there on Bourbon Street and play his horn until the sky turns red. Brigitte is saying ‘come on down, we’re going to rebuild N’Orleans bigger and better than ever.’ I turn my head away in pain. I wonder which of my friends will make it to the Canadian Rockies before British Petroleum’s deliberately errant shot turns the entire southeastern United States into a giant gas chamber. You’re not all going to make it. You don’t need to be a fortune teller to read these cards. There has been not one bit of good news since this nightmare began. Things run true to form. Get out while you can still breathe. But remember. The amount of poison in the Gulf will hiss for many years. Whether it will actually kill every living thing on the planet is a question only the future can answer. But what we know now — facts on the ground — that enough poison has been released already — with much, much more to come in the future . . . it’s enough poison to do the job. Useful links 6/12/2010: They keep using poison for no reason www.floridaoilspilllaw.com Oil vapor in the air we breathe www.blowoutblog.info One million gallons of Corexit www.worldvisionportal.org/wvpforum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t;=902&p;=2193#p2193 Two disasters, same formula www.oilprice.com/Finance/the-markets/The-Similarities-Between-Deepwater-Horizon-and-Global-Financial-Meltdown.html Imagine North America on fire www.snippits-and-slappits.blogspot.com/2010/06/great-abyss-entire-continent-burning.html John Kaminski is a writer who used to live on the Gulf Coast of Florida, but is now on the run from the rapidly growing shadow of human greed, which as we speak now creeps north toward Georgia. www.johnkaminski.info