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Ozymandias Hyperobject

By: Timothy Morton

 What fun. Let's all have a jolly old flirt with fascism shall we? Italy, Israel, USA, UK, Russia. Anyone else want to join in? 

This is how we turn Earth into lone and level sands stretching far away. Literally. 

A thousand Ozymandias statues, proclaiming how "great" they made their nation. 

The only thing we can logically do is COOPERATE. We are facing a planet-scale problem. You think global warming gives a shit about your precvious national boundaries?

It used to be obvious with pollution. I remember Chernobyl. "Radiation doesn't care about national b boundaries" was how ecocriticism said it at the time. 

But ecocriticism wasn't loud enough. And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right." 

So ecocriticism was about as useful as a chocolate teapot for addressing the real issue at hand, which we all knew about since the mid-1950s (and before if we'd really been paying attention): global warming. 

Time to stop kicking this fascist ball around and do what you were always going to have to do anyway: COOPERATE. 

This is where Shelley, who stood up to the institutional bullying at Eton at age thirteen aka nailed it young and was ridiculously brave to the point of foolhardy, really really comes in handy: 

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”


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