This is the title of a brilliant 1967 film made by Michael Cacoyannis. It is a wonderful satire. One that is perhaps more apt to what we are living through now. This was the age of the fear of a lethal weapon being leashed on the world. The fear of nuclear holocaust.
In brief the plot is that a container of some unspecified lethal substance has fallen into the sea near a pre tourist backward island in the Aegean. The military personnel sent to look for it under top secrecy conditions disguise themselves as a film crew. This stirs commotion and excitement and before too long the island has become a bustle of tourists, youngster dancing crazy dances and all that is associated with crazy carefree youth.
To cut a wonderfully funny long story short, the film ends with this ominous scene. As the hippie style youngsters are having a wild party dancing by the sea, this substance has been let loose and into the water. Into the water supply and into the sea. As carefree yacht jet setters looks into the sea they see the fish which have died in droves floating up to the surface, while everyone is drinking the water.
As the wild party goes on in a carefree abandoned manner, the world is being destroyed. But nobody has the slightest inkling that total catastrophe is imminent. And they just dance on crazily.
So what is the connection? Well, I have been getting the feeling more and more frequently that we are in fact living just such a situation. While the Eurocrats chortle that the worse is over, while that inane narcissist pretending to be the PM of Greece unashamedly spews on about some Greek Success Story he has concocted in his mine, while global stock markets are racing upwards for no apparent reason and hedge funds and banksters are having a real party, the world is being poisoned.
Maybe we won’t all actually die (though I dare say a great number of us will), as likely as not we are on the brink of total global collapse. Watch for it!
