Events | 2010.04.19
Smiling in the face of ash | Peter Preston
Frustrating, infuriating and costly. But still it is refreshing to see cool heads under empty skies
It ought to be an automatic Hollywood blockbuster. A mighty fire bursts through the ice and the modern world itself freezes . Politicians, scientists and millions of ordinary punters watch helplessly as their dreams are destroyed. There\'s a natural title. Airport 2010: The Empty Skies. But one thing seems to be missing. No sense of threat, no looming menace. What, no fear? For the moment, this script strays closer to comedy. Those Magnificent Men in their Earthbound Machines.
Whitney Houston has to travel to Ireland by ferry . Supermarket supplies of Kenyan dwarf beans, Guatemalan avocados and Californian walnuts are dwindling fast. Opera houses are in a spin because leading sopranos are parked, like 747s, in the wrong place right round the globe. John Cleese drives from Norway to Belgium for £3,300 by taxi.
Vox pop at airports arrives glumly good humoured, even as deadlines click back by a day at a time. Why can nobody give us firm information? Because nobody has any. Why did no one prepare for this "unprecedented event", asks a bumbling TV reporter. Because it\'s unprecedented. Even Gordon Brown escapes a kicking this time. Enter government medical experts talking dust, asthma and doom, though few timbers shiver.
It\'s frustrating, infuriating and damnably costly: but for the moment, a spectacular inconvenience is all we have, more brooding days to enjoy a gift that goes on giving: the wonder of commonsense context.
Waiting for Godot or an Airbus this week? Then why not fill in the hours by reading a newly revealed top secret CIA report which told the US president he faced an enemy "with no scruples about employing any weapon or tactic" – including a homemade dirty atomic bomb smuggled across the border that could be detonated in the heart of a city, killing tens of thousands.
"Officials regard the possibility of atomic sabotage as the gravest threat of subversion ... that this country has ever faced," said the New York Times . But that was the Times of nearly 60 years ago. The president in question was Truman, not Obama. And we know all this because the Times of today has trawled the archives crying "freedom of information" in search of dud threats that never came to anything. When a new Polish consul arrived in Detroit with four big boxes, the FBI searched them for hidden nukes. They found 24 bottles of cherry cordial, "but no article or part thereof that could be construed as a portion of a weapon of mass destruction".
The blight of the ash cloud is already worse than the air blight post 9/11, the BBC reports. See how terrorism still gets into every box of cherry brandy? But the mood of this particular crisis, thus far, tells us something that years of water-boarding, shoe-lighting and failing to find Osama bin Laden have missed.
No one doubts the horror of terrorism, of the twin towers, of Madrid, London. But, in context, its impact on ordinary lives is only as big as we care to make it (and as big as the whole burgeoning security industry deems appropriate). Here\'s something far more potent on the disruption front, a natural event that we can neither predict or do anything about, with nothing to do but smile, whistle and hope for the best. We\'re cheery cockneys in some old blitz movie. We\'re learning to make do and mend again.
Not masters of the earth any longer? Duly humbled, and all that stuff? Perhaps: but also muddling through with a grin, eating mashed turnip rather than pineapple, shrugging at a world we can\'t control. Will that mood, that matter-of-factness, last when the ash clouds roll away? Let\'s hope so, because it\'s rational, not hysterical. Indeed, it could be the end of Hollywood horrors as we know them. Yes, we have no disasters: we have no disasters today.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ing-ash-refreshing-empty-skies
