This is not the apocalypse you were looking for
The essay “This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For: Pop culture has been inundated with catastrophe porn for decades. None of it has prepared us for our new reality” by Laurie Penny for Wired is probably the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve seen about the coronavirus pandemic. She begins by running through a list of games and other media that have served up catastrophe porn “somewhere between wish fulfillment and trauma rehearsal”: “I was expecting Half-Life. I was expecting World War Z. I’ve been dressing like I’m in The Matrix since 2003″ but this apocalypse is going differently than expected, “less Danny Boyle and more Douglas Adams.”
These two paragraphs really hit home for me:
The end of the world has never been quite so simple a mythos for women, likely because most of us know that when social structures crack and shatter, what happens isn’t an instant reversion to muscular state-of-naturism. What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.
[…]
My job will be the same as yours and everyone else’s: to be kind, to stay calm, and to take care of whoever happens to need taking care of in my immediate vicinity. We have been living for many, many years in what Gramsci called a time of monsters, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” The new is now being induced in a hurry, because after this, nothing is going back to normal. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and everything does feel fine—not fine like chill, but fine like china, like glass, like thread. Everything feels so fine, and so fragile, and so shockingly worth saving.
It makes me think of Gris and some of the other games we’ve been playing this semester. I hope you find her essay illuminating.
