Are we answerable? Angelina asks.
Who is Angelina*? She used those actual words in her question. We hadn’t heard of her before, and now it seems almost too late, but even if we had known her sooner, would it have made a difference? Would it have effected (be effecting now) our departure?
* age 13, and who had written a message asking the world for an answer, and came, she said, from a provincial city in Mexico about two hour’s drive from the capital. Apparently. Or was it another money-begging hoax from Russia, but then I thought how else does an Angelina, a little angel, send messages these days, and Mexico might explain the other Spanish phrases creeping into these texts, busca sangre (sudden blood), and all the rest.
And her question, are we answerable.
About the Extinction Plan –
Being the coincidence of her message, and that of the Sudanese chairman of the G-77 (group of 130 ‘Poorer Nations’) last weekend at the end of the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen…
‘The plan asks Africa to sign a suicide, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries,’ said Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-ping. ‘It is a solution based on values, the very same values in our opinion that funnelled six million people into furnaces.’
…And our departure into violence – busca sangre – and silence. Sudden blood, long regrets.
– And Answerability
Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-ping’s message was broadcast only once on the BBC, about 8.15am on Saturday December 19th. Since then it appears to have been airbrushed out of existence, unlike the words of the President of the United States of America.
It is not fiction, the President said at the start of his reported speech before leaving Copenhagen, It is science.
More value judgements concerning our departure: a disgusting comparison according to Ed Milliband, Britain’s climate minister. Different words might have been grotesque, abject, alternate monologism or perhaps carnivalesque ambivalence.
Is there a value to answerability? Is Angelina answerable? Are we?