Wallabies and Wallpaper

Sylvia Shawcross

Is anybody else as worried as I am? THEY are not saying it anymore. They drove us crazy for at least a year when Covid arrived. There are internet composites of leaders all over the world saying the same thing. Every. Single. Speech.

“Build back better.”

It was becoming utterly annoying and a bit strange to see them all using the same phrase as if they were little electronic toys with the same voice chips.

Most of us had no idea what the hades they were talking about anyway. We rarely do.

The thing is… now that we’re starting to understand it, and dare I say it even appreciate a small part of “some” of it, they’re not saying it anymore. And this, my friends, may not be a good thing.

They’ve certainly appeared to have arrived at the “let’s tear down the world” stage so they can in fact have something to build back. They now seem to have lost the plot and are surprised that the greater public is not exactly buying wholeheartedly into the Reset.

So what is next, I ask? They have yet to replace the phrase with anything that I can tell. May I be helpful and suggest some such as “WE will own everything and be happy” or “Build back eventually” or “Two weeks to unflatten the old Utopia” or “Eating Bugs is Beautiful” or “Global is Good for You” or “Cancel Cows and Natural Gas” or something?

But they’re giving us nothing…

Well, there is a rather hopeful phrase: “aimed at improving the state of the world” on the WEF website. But that’s a bit tame. And rather feeble compared to their original slogan if that’s meant to be the new slogan.

The question is: for whom are they improving the global world? Right now it appears failed diplomacy by ALL countries concerned means they’re walking us all into world famine if not a world war. So whom on this little green planet does THAT serve?

Why are we all paying these diplomats and politicians so much money anyway as they fly around the world on their private jets to confer with each other and ignore the voters?

Mind you, it was nice to see the Queen’s funeral involving a nod to the environment wherein all world leaders were asked to fly on public airlines and share buses travelling to the funeral. Not for the environment actually but for airport and traffic congestion.

Just the image of world leaders lined up for a bus makes me smile! (That reminds me of that song: “What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus trying to make His way home?” You now have this ear worm. You’re welcome.)

The truth is, I think these people, all these world leaders, need to be brought back to the shop and refurbished. They’re saying and doing outrageous things out of step with each other now and are apparently malfunctioning and are in serious need of a new unifying slogan.

And how are we supposed to know if any of this new utopian world is even starting to be built back better? Where’s our chart with the progress report? We need timelines! If we’re going to give up cars, farms, cash, meat, little local shops, or fry or freeze in our homes, die from unknown causes and support faraway wars we’ll need to know precisely that these are in fact covered under the global plan.

We need charts! (Well, one big chart—let’s not complicate things with a bewildering array of reports and papers and graphs and expert opinions and projections and interpretations. Just the facts please.)

How many cows have we killed for their carbon emissions? How many trees have we saved? How many truckers and farmers have “green energy” jobs now? How many solar-powered incontinental missiles have we built? How much do we all owe to the IMF?

That sort of thing. And we really want to know if there is a Plan B, or C… or D… Well, you get the picture.

But never mind all that.

I’m looking forward to the Greater Depression. Not the suffering part of course. That’s always a bit of a downer—but the wallpaper. The original stuff… the stuff that is put on physical walls to decorate your house. [Not that computer background stuff. You’d think that countries that can come up with 75 different gender names could invent another word for computer wallpaper! I mean, is there anything new that is original really? (Unless it involves technology for the military industrial complex. Maybe I shouldn’t ask that question. The answers might scare us all to death… Yeah… I don’t want to know.)]

For those of us who may still own a roof and four walls after this Great Regret, I mean Reset, the times will be joyous indeed. We will finally stop having to paint our walls grey to be trendy.

Quite frankly, I’ve been getting very tired of explaining to people that by painting their walls grey, they are in effect metaphorically bringing the pavement into the house and it is soul-destroying and depressing and bleakly urbanistic. This is only to be told that it’s not grey, it’s “Cornforth White No. 228” or “Icecube Silver” or “Grey Owl” or “November Rain.” Really. I mean Really!

For heaven’s sake people! There are rich lovely bright and happy colours out there. There’s greens and blues and purples and yellows. You know…. Other colours that make you want to sing opera in the morning or dance a jig when evening comes.

Is it because everything we decorate with is imported from China and is always black or white or grey because it is cost-effective to manufacture? Is that it? Matchy matchy? Really!

I mean why on earth do I have to go on about this anyway! We are not herds of colourblind lemmings rushing out of the paint store with grey paint chips in our hairy little paws because everyone else is doing it are we? Break free! Live a little!

(Sorry…. It’s a thing for me as an artist. We all have those things right? I mean these days you could give someone a Faberge egg and they’d paint it Icecube Silver I’m sure. And cars! They’re all black, white or grey and very occasionally look-at-me-red. WHY? Why are they bleak-ing us? Isn’t the world grey enough for heaven’s sake!)

Sigh.

Maybe I’m wrong about all this of course. Who am I to judge? Perhaps in truth all this grey on walls was really predictive—many of us are going to be living in cars, parents’ basements or micro-housing that we don’t own, surrounded by grey pavement, grey skies and grey-haired baby boomers by the looks of it anyway.

Those of us living in cars will visit or otherwise 3D tele-transport each other and explain how the red fire hydrant is actually painted a Plumrose Claret colour and the graffiti is actually the new Picasso and how all those used needles are simply urban kitsch banal decorative. Perhaps that was what it was all about—culture preceding reality or something. I dunno. I only know it is all very dark right now.

And I know that at least during the last Depression they used happy little colours and wild flowered wallpaper and lacy napkins. Like a colour revolution of a different sort than what’s been happening in the world. We can have a Reset of OUR own making. It could be OUR colour rebellion.

Just for the record, I for one, will not be putting out the lacy napkins on the hood of the car for dinner just to serve grasshopper granola and roasted contraband wallaby. Nope. Not a chance.

Well, that’s all I really wanted to say about the grasshopper and wallaby.

Start picking out your wallpaper. Don’t you believe it when “they” say there’s a paper shortage. We can always make wallpaper out of the fourteen million trees they’re cutting down in Scotland to put in solar panel fields.***

It’ll all work out. Things always have a way of working out in the end, don’t you find? Of course they do.

Sylvia Shawcross fails to understand the world but writes anyway. Does anyone really understand the world? If they say they do, they’re lying. Or delusional. One or the other.