I find the fixation on Swedish climate hysteric Greta Thunberg fascinating; she resembles one of the “child saints” who often appear in cults and relatively young religions, and are held by the True Believers of that faith to be especially pure in their prophetic pronouncements from the deity or other metaphysical source. Thunberg just parrots the same old apocalyptic “the world will end in 12 years” nonsense as other fanatics trying to hijack genuine concern for climate change to support their mad social engineering schemes, but her worshipers imagine that her complete lack of adult life experience and her scant knowledge of either meteorology or economics somehow makes the silly pronouncements more true when she repeats them (especially if she screams at adults while doing so). And when sensible people (or even foolish ones who pretend climate change isn’t real because they find it inconvenient) correctly point out the absurdity of venerating a troubled teenager who isn’t actually an expert in anything (except perhaps histrionics) as the font of all wisdom on a very complex scientific subject, the Gretists get as offended as any fundamentalist Muslim confronted with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.
The most interesting and disturbing part of the phenomenon is the proliferation of icons of Thunberg serving simultaneously as objects of veneration for the faithful and, presumably, as a sort of scarecrow to the infidels. I mean, what’s the intended message of this one from a cafeteria in Tel Aviv? “Holy Saint Greta, bless our utensils that we may endure these raw vegetables thou hast given us to sustain our sinful bodies…”? As one who attended Catholic schools for a dozen years, I find this very familiar. Then there’s the giant mural in San Francisco, whose unmistakeable “Big Brother” vibe reveals a hilariously-huge blind spot on the artist’s part, unless of course he’s intentionally trolling One Atmosphere, the patrons who paid for the ugly thing. Naturally, their spokespeople uttered all the usual fashionable nonsense about “raising awareness” and “sending a message”, but don’t want people thinking too hard about the fact that the project used over 700 cans of petrochemical-based aerosol spray paint (plus sealers, plus the detergents used to prepare the surface, plus transportation costs for the workers, plus…) As you can probably guess, this observation met with some pushback from her disciples on Twitter, who claim that the environmental impact from the project is negligible; actually, I agree with that, but I’m not the one who tries to shame people out of using plastic straws or spray deodorant, or who flies two crew members across the Atlantic so she can make a big show of crossing the ocean in a sailboat instead of flying only one person (herself). But in religion, facts are not important; only symbols and “messages” are. And apparently Thunberg’s devotees think her “message” is important enough to justify littering the Earth with creepy testaments to their adoration. 
Child Saint
November 18, 2019 by Maggie McNeill
14 Responses
Leave a Reply
Visit my bookstore
This Month
Old Posts
Call me
Become a Blog Patron
If you want to donate but don't want a recurring charge, you can send any amount you like via PayPal to my email address (see below). Be sure to include a note so I can thank you!Contact Maggie
Boring but necessary legal stuff
More than the environmental impact, my bigger peeve with the mural is that it’s not good? Looks like a puffy-faced cross-dressing Hitler more than Greta.
Totally agree with the comments…
And moreover she is sending wrong message to the young generation – get out of schools, protest, get the limelights and be marry, this is not how the world should be developed..
“Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions…The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.”
Jacques Ellul
Are those disposable plastic cups stacked above the little wall print of Saint Greta? Tsk, tsk.
Haha! That’s the best commentary I have seen on the teenage doomsayer Greta. Shame on us for not acting fast enough on her fears? No, shame on her for wasting our time!
[…] https://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2019/11/18/child-saint/ […]
Reblogged this on Kanti Burns, Poems, Book Reviews and more ….
I like this cartoon better.
Ben Garrison’s got a good point.
love this. As I have lunatic religious fundamentals in my family…who are as hysterically funny and stupid as Greta, I really enjoyed this. I hate all religions and false prophets. They are the source of evil and confusion and destruction. LOL! Finding climate change inconvenient. May these folk generally choke.
I regard the elevation of Greta Thunberg to two particularly unsavory elements of politics. The first is identifying a particular movement or idea with a particular person, even to the point of overlooking flaws in the person, or worse failing to heed any sensible advice that person might give. The second is how politics is being reduced to outrage and fear, hence burying constructive proposals beneath the clamor to blame and attack someone for the problems. Thunberg may be well-intentioned, but merely bad-mouthing politicians for not doing what you want is not constructive activism.
Well, the Greta-phenomenon is certainly over-the-top and has strong quasi-religious aspects. On the other hand we have known for several decades now that human-made climate change will be a serious problem.
The only answer still missing is how much of a problem it will be. Scientifically sound estimates go from possible extinction (at 4C and above) to “just” a few 100M dead in wars and migration attempts and overall conditions getting a lot less pleasant. What actually happens depends very much on a lot of factors, but the hopes on Geoengineering or some revolutionary technological developments are a fools hope. Projects at that scale take far too long and cannot really be accelerated much due to a number of factors.
Hence we will get basically all of the effects of what we put into the atmosphere. In a sense, the Human race is playing Russian roulette, hoping that it will be one of the less severe options in the end. That looks increasingly unlikely, which has been a consistent trend for the 35 years or so I have followed the respective scientific development (not the press reporting on it).
At the same time, human “leadership” has consistently failed to come up with and begin to implement any rational and effective solutions in the last 30 years and continues to do so. The “leaders” seem to think this is an entirely non-urgent problem and one where minimal and symbolic acts are quite enough. That is not what the respective Science says.
Hence, while “Greta” may be an irrational effect, rational approaches are not doing any better. The actual Science just gets ignored, ridiculed, discredited and misrepresented. With the wide-spread non-understanding of the issue, it may require such pseudo-religious approaches to get the problem actually under control, as far as that is still possible, and no matter how much I personally dislike this type of approach and no matter the huge risks it comes with.
My personal take is that the human race will either not make it or be mostly destroyed and take a really long time to recover. The root cause for that is that most people are completely unable to make and implement plans that span a very long time and hence the half-measures and ignoring of the scientific facts will continue. When the effects become blatantly obvious, it will be too late. This is one extremely slow moving system with extreme inertia. Of course, barring some extreme life-extension possibilities (that would then also have to actually appeal to me and be available to me in the first place), I will not be around to see whether my prediction is accurate.
Most, if not all, of the “climate change” hysteria strikes me as comically overblown at best. And claiming that “the science is settled” makes me instantly suspicious. Nothing in science is “settled!” The climate-change advocates depend heavily on computer models…models that have been proven repeatedly to be, at best, extremely fallible, and often exclude such things as variation in the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth (the sun is sometimes brighter and hotter than at other times. Who’d’a thunk it?)
And their solution is always the same. Get rid of technologies that are proven to work, that make life possible for millions of people, in favor of unproven or very doubtfully-effective substitutes. Down deep, they strike me as people who want millions of others (but never them or their precious friends) to die, just so they can live in a Green Ecotopia. Mention to them that nuclear power solves a lot of the problems with, e.g, carbon being dumped into the atmosphere, and they shriek like gutshot deer. Nukes are BAD in their worldview.