Greta Thunberg: Teenage Messiah
A Quick Note Addressed to the Climate Activist — OPINION
Dear Greta,
I just read your piece The Show is Over. Bravo!
I see you’re named after Tintin, a fictional character. It seems so fitting.
When I was in high school, the movie star Robert Redford went before Congress and declared that the oceans would be dead in five years — that five year terminus being 1980. This was several years after David Bowie’s great song “Five Years,” in which the world was going to be dead in — five years.
“Born at 375ppm” — Numerology as sacred symbology…. Asperger’s…. The mark of stigmata…. (That Asperger’s isn’t a real condition hardly detracts from its utility as religious validation — it sets you apart as not one of the mass, as special, while explaining some of your…behavior.) … Numerology, stigmata, born not quite “human” as if sired from an entity from another world — These are trademarked bona fides of the religion marketing game.
“How dare you?!?”
Let ’em have it, Sister!
How the sinner likes to be rebuked! Religion as sado-masochistic ritual. The scouring cleanses as well as thrills — from the bottom of the brain stem to the genitals, our reptilians selves — and frees the sinner to go on and sin again.
Hallelujah!
The source of addiction is the need to feel good, and — How good we feel after atoning for being bad. Being excoriated exhilarates! It makes being bad all that sweeter.
Oh, Greta. You’re good. So good at the hustle. You know what every great conman knows: The marks have a memory of seconds, not years let alone days. We can recycle the old shills.
“Five years! What a surprise!
We’ve got five years! My brain hurts a lot.
We’ve got five years! That’s all we’ve got.”
All The World’s A Stage
Greta:
I like how you reveal your understanding that you are an actor in a role on stage. Letting the marks in on the “game” — the smarter ones, the ones able to read between lines…it lets them feel smarter, you allowing them the chance to read between your lines and like you the more for making themselves feel smarter, for validating them — is one technique of a master salesman.
You’re good.
You are not the first to play Teenage Messiah. And you won’t be the last.
Affectionately,
— Hoppy
P.S. Here in New Hampshire — breeding ground of American presidents (we gave the world Donald Trump), it’s 58 degrees (Fahrenheit* not Celsius — this isn’t Canada)… 58 in early July, after being 96 a few days ago…. I mention this as, when it comes to climate change, you’re right.
When you’re right, you’re right.
NOTES
*Why does America still use the Fahrenheit system, with its cabalistic numerology? 33 degrees is the quickening point? For shame!
