An early work-in-progress dedicated to helping,
circuitously, precipitate the Great Mobilisation
Dare to be wise!
Kant
Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20250601
Ox and lamb kept time,
pā-rum pum-pum pum …
I played my best …
Me and my drum.
Katherine Kennicott Davis
Readpainting actually titled Steady the Drums and Fifes, but repurposed here in the unrivalled cause of the Great Mobilisationy the Drums and Fifes: No Planet Earthly reason Great Mobilisation marches couldn’t be corps-of-drums led, with the beat relayed to a million or more, and to the world, via a corps-of-drums app. Mind, such an app would require to be immensely sophisticated and immensely secure, lest it aid the accidental or nefarious Jericosafely setting aside any literal credence to the Fall of Jerico, avoiding generation of structurally “significant excitation frequencies” is a real need, not least of all for the marchers’ own protectioning of buildings and bridges, through failing to break-step the million. artist Lady Elizabeth Butler
Wouldn’t in-step marching—Cimino found himself wondering—better, in fact magnificently , demonstrate the demand for, or participation in, the Great Mobilisation, or its precipition? Musing over his near-future-novel concept while focussed on fashioning a half-plausible Day of Hope-protest chant, unbidden, he began to hear the…
H’thhrrrætor H’thhrrrat, lest the æ—the a as in apple—mislead!
H’thhrrræt!
H’thhrrræt, h’thhrrræt, h’thhrrræt!
…of the marching snare-drum, and suddenly appreciated its exact correlation with…
Left!
Left!
Left, right, left!
Given the two-millennium antiquity of military marching, Cimino marvelled that marching, actual in-step marching, for the Great Mobilisation might prove to be a decisive factor in enabling the beyond-urgent sea change needed. At $1000 or more, actual marching snare-drums might be a stretch, but assuming smart phones remain ubiquitous—Alexander Bell’s telephone, with its original crank, rotary-dial and push-button successors, was essentially unrivalled for 103 years—Cimino figured that a corps-of-drums app could readily keep a millionnot necessarily hyperbolic in that nearly twice that number of pilgrims visit Hajj annually—better than 0.1% of global Muslim population; one million marchers would represent little more than a tenth performing that profoundly revered ritual marchers magnificently in step. Not that actual marching snare-drums should be discouraged, bona fide fife-and-drum corps could become iconic of the Great Mobilisation itself.
Resorting to drums and fifes might sound chronically melodramatic in this context, not to mention in that of Light the Fuse generally. Cimino chides: the stupefying cacophony generated by the do-nothing/leave-it-to-the-market legions is deafening an already hearing-impaired audience, alternatively immersed in consumerism or consumed by poverty…
To be continued…
For millions to march for the Great Mobilisation, Cimino is sharply reminded, will demand a historically unprecedented global groundswell, systematically generated, preceded by meticulous planning. The chapter’s premise presupposes there is imminently flammable tinder for said fuse to ignite. Young, or incurably curious older, New Zealanders—the target audience—need to be excited by a vision of what life leadingleading the mobilisation, simply by living in a mobilised country or by actively participating the Great Mobilisation could be like. Travel—that privilege that is most justifiably deserved by the young—Cimino judges, deserves to be fiercely focussed on, not least on account of the fierce push-back it would provoke from the annual 1.4 billion-international-tourist-arrivals global travel industry. So-where-the-bloody-hell-are-you Australians visiting Aotearoa carbon-free for all the right reasons has enormous potential demonstrate about every key attribute required for the Great Mobilisation to indeed be great. The 1.4 million-Australian-visitors-per-year sector is more than five times larger than that which is Chinese. Were the combined 37 000-kilometre railway networks of both continentsAustralia and the mostly submerged Zealandia largely electrified, and connected by a pair of small-modular-reactor-powered small-waterplane-area-monohull, passenger-only trans-Tasman ferries, the bulk of reasonable Australasian travel needscertainly, the trans-Tasman needs of, for example, family members, to visit could be met, fossil-fuel free.
Reimagining and invoking a new anzac-spirit, built on mutual respect and guided by the better angels of the lucky continent and the largely submerged one, would be a powerful and unexpected story to tell the world. Patently, Aotearoa and Australia, in partnership, could far more convincingly mobilisation at work, at scale… To be continued…
Neo-alarmism and legitimate alarm Far from surprisingly, the outright rejection of alarming information is commonplace, and instinctive. Bureaucrats famously default to favouring the don’t-scare-the-horses, nothing-to-see-here bluster. So too defenders of the status quo generally, whether their motivation be preference for the quiet life or the depraved accrual of power and wealth at all costs, or something in between those extremes. Weaponised by politicians, the characterisation of legitimate alarm as alarmism is more ancient than Aristotle. In the context of anthropogenic global heating, it is particularly effective in discouraging any action that might be seen to encroach on the rights of the rich and well off, or, by the Left, to load further injustice on the vulnerable and/or impoverished.
Ironically, of course, bought-and-paid-for sanctity-of-the-market defenders are typically the first to deploy alarmist rhetoric to malign the work of people whose responsibility it is to ensure that potentially irreversible biospheric-damaging trends are clearly communicated, that they be timely addressed.
To be continued…
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Disclosure The author of this novel modello is no longer the secretary of Mahurangi Action Incorporated or the Mahurangi Coastal Path Trust. The content published here, however, is that of the editorially independent, independently funded Mahurangi Magazine.
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