Talkin World War III Blues

I think the old Chinese proverb goes something like: “It’s a curse to live in interesting times” (I’ll look up the actual quote later and get back to you. I promise I fact-check everything), but as a student back in the mid-noughties, I felt cursed not to be living in interesting times. Those were the days when the worst people said about politicians was they all looked and sounded like clones of a management seminar coach on powerful antidepressants.  

It was a time when the German economy was the envy of the world for its mundane efficiency and metronomic engineering prowess; Coldplay’s Yellow (a tune, it seems to me, about someone with jaundice being rescued from a drowning incident, though I’m not a hundred percent sure) was inexplicably popular among the young; mobile phones were for calling work claiming symptoms of bird flu so you could skive off a mundane job, and not for organising violent uprisings outside immigrant shelters; the internet dial-up connection was so pathetic it couldn’t handle more than a one-megabyte image of a banana, let alone shred the fabric of Western civilisation. 

Just thinking back to those days now fills me with a kind of anodyne nostalgia, like recalling some shit family package holiday where we spent the whole time whingeing about there being nothing to do, but which actually turned out to be the last hurrah before our parents’ marriage fell apart in dreadful acrimony and custody battles. If only we’d made the most of it. Hindsight, eh?

The mood back then was exemplified by Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club. The bit when he’s on the plane and fantasises about it blowing up mid-air, just to escape a crushing feeling of existential malaise, of tedium, of ennui—a sense that you weren’t living, weren’t feeling, weren’t even awake in that bland, sterile, Toilet Duck-scented world filled with Nokia cellphones, the Volkswagen Passat, and Chris Martin. 

So, back to the crux: are interesting times a curse or not? Even if that isn’t a verbatim quote—it isn’t. I just asked ChatGPT. It’s not even a Chinese proverb apparently. Oh well. Still, in today’s mad world, the sentiment clangs with tinnitus-inducing truth. We have a deranged US president waging war in Iran without any coherent plan or end goals, seemingly on a whim hoping, what, that it might nudge a few blue-collar workers in Ohio to vote for some barely cognisant neo-Nazis during the midterms. 

Add to the mix an unhinged Russian Tsar and a megalomaniacal Chinese emperor with specious territorial claims in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea respectively, and we have the perfect alchemy for a third world war.

It’s as if geopolitics has become a massive Netflix pitching field to find a new dystopian sci-fi drama. Each production company is encouraged to come up with a concept so terrifyingly bleak it will erase Black Mirror from the public consciousness forever. 

And so, the best the survivors can hope for is to avoid the worst of the nuclear fallout and attempt repopulation on a meadow downwind from the mushroom cloud, living off a stash of tinned foods and a trickle of iodised water until the radiation sickness kicks in. At which point our gene pools will begin spawning mutant humanoids resembling the mountain people from Deliverance. 

And on it goes. And on.    

But here’s a thought—maybe World War III isn’t inevitable after all. I don’t want to be blindly optimistic, but hear me out on this. Maybe the green shoots of hope sprout from the very ennui I was lamenting in my twenties. 

An existential fight to the death requires too much focus, too much long-term commitment, the putting in of too many hard yards. We can’t even keep up a fitness regimen for the duration of a yearly gym membership. How are we equipped to handle the psychological fallout of a world war, let alone one of the nuclear variety? Plus, World War II lasted six sodding years in Europe. We’re so hooked on our Instagram reels now, how are our attention spans expected to last a drawn-out war? 

My grandparents spent half the Forties in bomb shelters while actual Nazis tried to obliterate Britain’s entire infrastructure. Can you seriously imagine us lot holding out underground for that long? Think of the number of trigger warnings needed before anyone is allowed into the bunkers, let alone all the snowflakes lecturing everyone about how ‘invalidating’ and ‘othering’ nuclear annihilation is. I fancy my sanity would be better preserved during the apocalyptic winter, in all honesty.      

And that leads us to our enemies. Don’t they have a massive advantage over us in that case? If we’re not up for the fight, won’t they seize the advantage and invade while we’re taking the week off work because of our dust-sensitivity disorder? 

Chief among those foes now seems to be China: a repressive, totalitarian dictatorship where dissidents are filleted by crazed, Sweeney Todd-like butchers before their innards are parcelled up for organ transplants. Its military proliferation in the South China Sea is the closest we’ve come to seeing the actual Death Star built on Earth. It’s basically a country of 1.4 billion Manchurian Candidates conditioned to follow the murderous orders of a Dr Evil/Angela Lansbury hybrid. 

Or so the Western narrative goes.

Well, take it from someone who’s lived in the Middle Kingdom for two decades: today’s Chinese masses are just as phone-obsessed as their Western peers, spending more time listening to K-pop and watching cooking videos on TikTok than having Xi Jinping Thought zapped into their brains or electrocuting the nipples of Jimmy Lai. The only conflict I can see anyone on either of this Great Power divide partaking in is an ice bucket challenge.  

So, would anyone actually get out of bed and piss for a long and bloody conflict given the sacrifices required? Maybe World War III will be avoided simply because the ennui is so energy-sapping, our attention spans so short, our capacity for sacrifice and suffering so critically low that no side will ever be arsed to do it.

A bit like the DIY job in the back bedroom you’ve been meaning to do for years but endlessly put off because basically there are better ways to spend a weekend than rubbing sawdust from your bloodshot eyes, inhaling cancerous levels of paint fumes, and then waking up with a sciatic back for the rest of the week. And so you end up saying to yourself: “Fuck World War III, I think I’ll just see what’s on Prime and then head down the pub.” 

So, perhaps I was too harsh on Chris Martin all those years ago. Maybe he isn’t the apotheosis of all that’s wrong with Western civilisation. The vasectomy of cultural procreation. The sterile womb of artistic stillbirths.  

Maybe he is, in fact, the very thing that prevents all-out war from happening. A social analgesic so anaesthetising nobody has the energy to care about anything anymore. Instead, we slouch off to the freezer for the last of the vodka, before crawling back on the sofa at three in the afternoon for another episode of the Kardashians.   

But ultimately, who knows? This time next week, we could be identifying our neighbours by the fillings in their teeth. Let’s hope not, because ultimately hope is all we have now. 

But as the man himself said (not about hope, obviously; about revising for his science GCSEs from what I can tell): “Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be so hard.” So, thanks, Chris. Couldn’t have put it more blandly myself. Let’s just hope everyone else is listening to this vapid shite. We might then have a fighting chance of avoiding an actual fight.