The future may consider May 12 and May 13 as significant days in the present information struggle between the science of climate change and those who deny that science. On Sunday, Seattle native Bill Nye show-stole John Oliver's 19-minute segment on the importance of the Green New Deal. Nye, who had a popular children's science show on PBS in the 1990s, Bill Nye the Science Guy, cursed like a sailor and demanded Americans grow up and face the facts as adults. Climate denial is worse than childish. The scene of him setting a globe of earth on fire in a flurry of f-bombs and storming off the set went viral on Monday, the day that ended with HBO releasing "Please Remain Calm," the second episode of its exceptionally moody miniseries, Chernobyl.
What connects the HBO historical drama to Bill Nye's burning of the globe in un-repressed exasperation is that the former is about a catastrophe that was made worse by the refusal of policymakers (members of the ruling party) to accept the facts presented by scientists; the latter features a representative of the US's science community demanding that policymakers face the facts of global warming. Both had a huge cultural impact.
It is likely that the future will see that Chernobyl left a much deeper and longer impression on culture than Bill Nye's burning of the iconic schoolroom earth. In fact, it is not hard to believe at this point that the total cultural impact of Chernobyl will be associated with that made in the Cold War era (when the world continuously faced nuclear holocaust) by the three-hour 1983 television film The Day After. What both achieve is the translation of a catastrophe (and all of its complexities) into a language that the mainstream can directly understand. With Chernobyl, the translation is done by the narrative tropes of a horror film. The monsters or ghosts, however, are not supernatural, but our flesh-and-blood leaders.
Chernobyl's screenwriter Craig Mazin began working on the script in 2015. But when the first episode arrived on May 6 ("1:23:45"), it was clear that the director, Johan Renck, had the US's age of alternative facts in mind. The miniseries is about a bleak confrontation between party devotion and the hard facts of science. And it is here, the nature of the confrontation, that the party in the twilight of the Cold War meets the party dominating the post-truth present.
In the Russian case, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) is about maintaining the power of the party. In the present case, it is, for the GOP (with assistance from members of the center-left), about maintaining the power of the economy's fossil fuel sector. Sure the latter party was democratically elected, and the CPSU was not, but there's no essential difference between how they respond to information they do not want to hear or spread.
In episode two of Chernobyl, we have two scientists, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), and Ulyana Khomyuk (Emily Watson). The first is morose and sees no hope for humanity. Indeed, we open the series with his suicide, which in reality took place two years after the disaster. The second major scientist (who is a composite character) still believes action can be taken and change occur if the truth insists and insists and insists. It is the first scientist who is, however, more attuned to the way things actually are. His roiling gloom finds its vent in the anger expressed by Bill Nye. The Soviet scientist knows why the nuclear plant is burning and why nothing is being done. Those in power, however, would rather drive society into the ground than change direction.
In Chernobyl, action is always taken when it's too late. Only a large number of deaths can challenge party policies that are opposed at every point to scientific facts. This is exactly how we—under the GOP, with assistance from the center-left—are heading into the disaster of global warming. In one powerful scene at the end of "1:23:45," a bird falls from the poisoned sky and hits a sidewalk in the city of Pripyat. It struggles. It dies. And ahead of it are Soviet children heading to school like nothing is happening. This little bird is, in our times and country, the ignored brown deaths of Puerto Rico. And USA (and particularly white USA) is a Pripyat.
In another powerful scene, the citizens of the city watch the catastrophe from what they believe is a safe distance; they watch the fire like tourists as radioactive ash fall on their faces and hair. Many will be dead within in a few years.
