(The following article is a slightly edited excerpt from a well-received book: Notes from the Underground as fiction often foretells the future in many ways that objective reporting can't.)
If you happened to miss it, it happened last night: We reached another important milestone in Global Warming and in our other commensurate world crises. On the South Side of Chicago, we were having a luxurious dinner of soul food, of ham, sweet potatoes, fried up greens, Southern fried catfish, and shrimp gumbo with some ice tea and Hennessy to wash it all down, when this-can't-be-happening moment, err, actually happened.
Comfortably, we sat in the lap of the greatest storyteller of the times bar none except for the forgotten chroniclers of the human journey conveniently named William Shakespeare, John Milton, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. Essentially, we saw the nightly news and the news anchors, who always beheld the right amount of gravitas and script for every story, while they talked about our world, Mama Earth, spinning perilously out of control. Basically, you needed a medicine cabinet of good antidepressants, a finely rolled joint, or even electric shock therapy, if you watched every night.
Why?
The TV anchorman in a blue pinstripe suit, looking like some new reincarnation of Howard Beale, made an astonishing, ear-tugging statement: "It appears that in some of the deepest mines in the world, canaries are dropping dead. Namely, miners still use the canaries to warn them of imminent gas leaks. "They bring them down into the mines, sometimes thousands of feet below, and then begin to work. Keenly, they listen, and when the canaries stop singing, or chatting, the miners know to get out!
"However, for some unknown reason, hundreds of canaries have begun to drop dead, first, in the Mponeng Gold Mine in South Africa, and the Kidd Creek Copper Mine, and now all around the world.
"With the latest updates to this particular story, we go live to Michael Leadbeater at the San Jose Mine in Chile."
"That's weird."
"Yep," I replied. "Canaries dropping dead all over."
"Is it from some kind of poisonous gas?'
"Nah, that's just it. The air is supposedly normal."
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