The Week in the West: Does anything ever happen?

With 2024 about to enter its final quarter, things are continuing the way they’ve been going: politics, entertainment and online meme culture are becoming increasingly intertwined, everything is getting weirder all the time, and yet beneath the frothy surface, it all seems basically the same – the forces driving us towards climate collapse, war, and increasing economic inequality show little prospect of slowing down.

Just this week alone:

• New York Mayor Eric Adams pled not guilty to accepting bribes from Turkey in exchange for political favours.
• The New York Post suggested last year’s controversy over a racy Sabrina Carpenter music video filmed in a Brooklyn Catholic church may have led to one of many federal corruption probes connected to Adams.
• A seventh of nine planetary boundaries – ocean acidification – is either close to being crossed or already has been, according to a new report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Things are getting worse on all six boundaries already breached. In other words, the earth’s life support systems are failing. 
• The greatest musical artist of the 21st century, Lana del Rey, married alligator swamp tour guide Jeremy Dufrene at a Louisiana bayou. Some of her stans threw tantrums online because of his allegedly MAGA-coded social media history, but I say love is love and send my congratulations.
• Australia’s Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved three new coal mine expansions.
• Opposition leader Peter Dutton caught flak for creating an account on TikTok – the platform he apparently also wants banned. His first post from last week included a particularly lame attempt at a ‘demure’ gag.
• Israel has killed more than 700 people, including 50 children, and injured more than 1800, in attacks on Lebanon since 23 September.
• The West Australian newspaper cheered on the indiscriminate destruction: It editorialised on Friday that calling for Israeli “restraint”, as Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong had done at the UN, was “obscene”. It also praised Israel’s earlier use of exploding pager devices, which killed civilians including children, as “ingenious”.
• Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried are sharing a jail cell.
• Increased iron ore revenue has led to a $1.3 billion boost to the WA state budget, bringing the overall surplus for the 2024 financial year to $4.5 billion amid housing and health crises.
• Charli XCX, the British popstar who previously made US cable news headlines when she sort-of endorsed Kamala Harris as ‘brat’, spat onto the stage while performing at Madison Square Garden and then licked up her own spit.
• A former reality TV star and a former TV sitcom star made good TV out of their press conference on the Russia-Ukraine war.
• In the UK, Just Stop Oil climate activist Phoebe Plummer was sentenced to two years in prison for pouring tinned soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers 1888. Anna Holland was jailed for 20 months for the same offence. Immediately after the sentence was handed down, three more activists threw soup at Van Gogh paintings in London.
• The climate crisis continues to exacerbate extreme weather. At least 44 people were killed by Hurricane Helene across the southeastern US.

Even with all of this going on, and with history supposedly accelerating, from the narrow view of the here and now, it seems like we’re stuck. We’ve all got our roles – politicians, protesters, newspaper editors, businessmen, popstars – and we all know our lines, even as the scripts throw us into more outlandish scenarios and interactions, as if we’re nine seasons deep into a TV drama and the writers room is getting desperate to find a way to bring some of the old magic back.

‘Nothing ever happens’, they say on the internet. Is it true? Maybe there’s some significant social force bubbling away out of view that will become obvious with hindsight. Maybe what looks like business-as-usual will turn out to be some kind of disjuncture, and what looks like a disjuncture might just be business-as-usual on steroids. Who knows, but something’s got to give some time. The classic Ursula K. Le Guin quote comes to mind: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” Or as the Buddha put it: “Whatever has the nature of arising, all of it has the nature of ceasing.” 

Ok, I need a good lie down. Talk to you next week.