Climate change deniers aren't rogue scientists who disagree with their peers, author Naomi Klein argues in her new book — but rather free-market capitalists who want to protect the economic status quo. (hereandnow)
By Naomi Klein“We didn’t just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things. We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane.”SOMETIMES A PROJECT TAPS INTO A FORCE THAT IS POWERFUL WELL BEYOND the expectations of its creators. So it was with A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a seven-minute video I executive-produced and conceived of with the artist Molly Crabapple.
Crabapple suggested doing a film on the Green New Deal with Ocasio-Cortez as the narrator and herself as illustrator. The question was: How do we tell the story of something that hasn’t happened yet? Not all art takes collapse for granted, however. There have long been creators on the margins, from Afrofuturists to feminist fantasists, who have attempted to explode the idea that the future has to be like the present, only worse and with sex robots. One such visionary was the great science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who delivered a searing speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, four years before her death.
And yet for all its many contradictions and exclusions, the New Deal’s popularity continued to soar, winning Democrats a bigger majority in Congress in the midterms and FDR a landslide reelection in 1936. Much of the art produced by New Deal programs was simply about bringing joy and beauty to Depression-ravaged people— while challenging the prevalent idea that art belonged exclusively to the wealthy. As FDR put it in a 1938 letter to author Hendrik Willem van Loon, “I, too, have a dream—to show people in the out of the way places, some of whom are not only in small villages but in corners of New York City . . . some real paintings and prints and etchings and some real music.
The piece struck a nerve, in large part because it imagined a future tense that wasn’t some version of Mad Max warriors battling prowling bands of cannibal warlords. Crabapple and I decided that our film could do something similar, but this time from OcasioCortez’s vantage point. It would tell the story of how society decided to go bold rather than give up, and paint a picture of the world after the Green New Deal the congresswoman had championed became reality.
The response was unlike any we were prepared for. The film went online on April 17. Within forty-eight hours, it had been viewed well over six million times. Within seventy-two hours it was being screened in rooms of more than a thousand people, as part of a national tour to build momentum for the Green New Deal organized by the Sunrise Movement. In the halls, people cheered for every other line. Within a week, we had heard from multiple teachers who told us they had already showed it in class.
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