A 2021 comic disaster movie called “Don’t Look Up” told about a planet-killing comet racing toward Earth.
As scientists led by Leonardo DiCaprio tried to get word out about the danger, the president, played by Meryl Streep, didn’t want the public alarmed until she and her tech billionaire sidekick could figure out how to profit from the disaster.
As the scientists made their case on news shows, the president exhorted her followers, “Don’t look up!” The country divided into a political war between those who saw the approaching disaster with their own eyes and those who wouldn’t look.
The trailer said the film was “based on real events … that haven’t happened … yet.”
The “yet” may be getting closer as the Trump administration senselessly destroys our country’s science and emergency response infrastructure and shuts down research, monitoring systems and aid programs that help us fight deadly threats from climate change to pandemics to natural disasters.
Last week The New York Times reported the administration will no longer track the numbers or costs of major disasters, leaving the U.S. flying blind on the patterns and economic consequences of increasingly frequent events like hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. Scientists compiling the nation’s biggest climate assessment were fired.
Don’t look up.
The National Institutes of Health has recently cut $1.81 billion in medical research, according to an analysis by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The cuts have been described by researchers as an “ideological purge,” with many grants ended as part of the president’s battle with universities that won’t agree to his political terms.
The administration’s proposed 2026 budget would cut NIH by $18 billion — a 38% drop — and slash overall health funding by 25%, leaving on the laboratory floor cutting-edge research and warning systems on lethal diseases and public-health threats.
New outbreaks of measles are raising fears the deadly childhood disease is becoming endemic again 25 years after it was declared eradicated, thanks to the administration’s vaccine resistance.
Don’t look up.
The interim Federal Emergency Management Agency chief was fired for telling Congress the agency was essential to helping communities “in their greatest times of need.”
The president has pressed to abolish FEMA; if you’re not bothering to count disasters or their costs as noted above, no need to respond to them.
Saying states can take care of themselves, he recently refused an emergency declaration enabling FEMA to help tornado-ravaged Arkansas, whose governor is his former press secretary. He ended a FEMA hurricane mitigation program popular among local Republicans in deep-red Louisiana.
Expect even less appetite to help blue Hawaii, prone to a wider range of natural disasters than most other states. Are our leaders planning what they’ll do without FEMA when the next hurricane, wildfire, tsunami or destructive lava flow comes along?
Or is it, Don’t look up.
(Movie spoiler alert)
The film ended with the president and her cabal of billionaires and political elites escaping by secret spaceship to an Earth-like planet, only to be eaten on arrival by Bronterocs that look like multicolored Big Birds.
Too bad nobody was left on the real Earth to look up and see that.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
