Mondays must be the day I catch up and dump materials and links here and there. This one's been out for a while, so it's here in it's full and unedited form.
It's often said, half way towards a joke, that the world went downhill after David Bowie died in January 2016. Over ten years ago now. There’s no evidence for that. His death did not tip the planet from it's axis. It marked a moment. It did not mark a measurable collapse. But it's an interesting thought. David Bowie's being is somehow responsible for the stability of the world and the progress of all the stupid humans left behind, including me and you. He passes away and right then a new era of decline is upon us. Slow to begin with but with the passage of time measurable. The power of popular culture, film and music is not to be underestimated. That’s something that most politicians fail to understand, but for the people the signs become visible, then clear.
Bowie shifted shape throughout his life. He refused the honours that others of his generation lapped up. He was a cracked and bad actor. A bee hive drone, an image junkie and an off the wall, cut up poet. The man who fell to earth and the Goblin King. There is a theory that he was super human or a god of some sort. He held onto an elevated status for fans and media types alike. Then he moved away to some other realm. Higher, cleaner perhaps. If he was a god at all, I'd say he was a modern, updated version of Pan. A 21st Century Pan, playing the saxophone rather than the pipes or a woodland harp. A Hornblower at the Gates of Dawn who made a few bad albums along the way.
We like anchors. When someone large in our lives goes, we fix the date in our minds. The years that follow feel harsher, so we tie the feeling to the loss. Nostalgia does the rest like a comfort blanket. We see changes differently. The past looks clean from a distance. It was easier when things were as they were. We forget the real muddle and constant noise of life and keep the low light of a better memory flickering. Those unaware of the Bowie magic can't see the obvious, so it goes. They have their other gods to deal with. Root causes are at the root. Sin came into the world via one man they say. Not David Bowie though. This time around.
The data, numbers and the feelings tell a blunt story. Some long trends kept improving after 2016. Extreme poverty, over decades, has fallen sharply and did not suddenly reverse that year. Other problems grew more visible. Climate change deepened but arguments remained polarised and amplified within an always quicker media machine. Politics hardened into schoolyard battles and bully-boy tactics. Even Bowie's conflicted take on politics may have looked attractive to the faithful.
A pandemic swept the globe in the early 2020s. Wars and invasions run on and still run to and fro to please the industrials. Epstein’s tacky, ragged ghost still haunts victims and his rat faced fellow criminals. Tragedy and suffering still are everyday things. Unreported and misunderstood. Crime and punishment, boom and dip, false dawns and unpleasant lottery winners. But none of these began or emerged from some new Frankenstein style swamp with Bowie’s unexpected death. They were already in motion and have been since the first stone was thrown in anger at some rival hunter gatherer.
So the claim doesn’t hold up as fact. It works as a metaphor. A great artist moved on. The years that followed felt unstable to many. It is human to draw a line between those things. Bowie was a touchstone, a life raft, an icon and also an incomplete and flawed genius. He was a fragile human and he became sick and died, sooner than we might have expected. It is not evidence of anything. It's a fantasy.
The logic of existence persists and pushes away against such a far fetched theory ... but it makes a kind of sense. If you want it to. Stepping back and looking at human activity there is a sense of absurdity and the ongoing repetition of futile behaviours that leave us static in some muddy rut, somewhere we don't belong.
It's a familiar rut. Almost comfortable. We've been here before and perhaps rather than settle for Occam's Razor and the obvious and simple truth, let's try another angle. A fresh explanation. Take a gamble on a piece of thinking. Clear blue skies overhead, not a cloud in sight. Our investments go up and down, according to some stiff market breeze or with the movement of a butterfly's wing far away in Africa, or so it seems. What difference does one more death in a billion make? Maybe more than you'd imagine.
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