Incredible
Francis Oliver
I am so INCREDIBLY – no, actually CREDIBLY – annoyed by the continued stupid and meaningless use of the INCRED adverb and adjective buzzwords that I feel compelled to write about it again.
As author Howard Jacobson has pointed out, incredibly most of the time just means ‘very’. If you do want to go over the top there are many adverbs to use instead. Exceptionally, remarkably, astonishingly, perfectly, wonderfully, outstandingly, are a few. And now that we do live in an INCREDIBLE time, what is left to describe it – except the synonym ‘unbelievable’?
But wait. Is it even totally apposite to the time we live in? Certainly my refugee antecedents, were they alive today, would have found it INCREDIBLE that America, that bastion of freedom and democracy (or so they liked to think) would in only a decade have turned, under a demented President and his powerful backers, into a budding quasi-Fascist dictatorship. Yet even here would the ‘INCREDIBLE’ be right? Look back at US history: the extermination of so many indigenous peoples, slavery, segregation, the Klu Klux Klan lynchings, the CIA making and unmaking governments abroad by bribery and brute force. Remember the Monroe doctrine, remember Allende ousted for Pinochet, remember Mossadegh? Then does not the advent of Trump and co become CREDIBLE after all?
However, as my sternest critic has pointed out, previous recent aggressions by the world’s greatest power were at least conducted in ostensible defence of freedom and the spread of democracy, hypocritical as it may often have been. The complete abandon of any such cover, the demolition of the rules based order after WWII is taking place with little world-wide protest or resistance. And that IS in fact INCREDIBLE.
As for our now INCREDIBLE hot weather in England (which actually no one does call INCREDIBLE any longer) most of the public suffer from the delusion that if we could only reduce emissions and keep below two degrees warming (we are already at 1.5, the danger point) we can carry on as before; we can keep our shibboleth of ‘growth’, and a disastrous rampant free-market consumerist society. The facts that our economic system is already eating up one and a half planets when we have only one, and that every hopeful new techno-innovation to reduce our emissions will only use up more of some precious resource, such as water or wood or land are ignored. No, alas, if you look at history this too is not INCREDIBLE. Read Barbara Tuchmann’s The March of Folly or Jared Diamond’s Collapse and the present Western civilisation’s gallop to self-destruction does not seem so INCREDIBLE after all. But – what if there were some new Messiah, some new revolutionary doctrine, or just some sudden realisation in the benighted minds of our politicians and pundits (maybe after a mysterious ghostly voice speaks from AI) that we must rethink everything and completely change our ways? And at zero hour. the change begins.
Now that would be truly INCREDIBLE.
