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Breaking Better
On chaos, climate change and the art of catastrophe
When Biden took office in 2021, one of his first major acts as president was to pass the first section of his Build Back Better plan: a major investment in American infrastructure and social welfare designed to revitalize our economy after the pandemic.
It’s a phrase we’ve heard thrown around a lot in the past three years, “Build Back Better.” There’s a ring to it that resonates, a call to arms and action: we have the chance to rebuild stronger than we were before, saner than we were before, better than we were before. It’s an American kind of sentiment: it is our right, it is our duty, to Build Back Better and provide new guards for our future security.
But contained within the phrase is another hidden idea: if we are rebuilding, then something here was broken.
Lately, I’ve been reading Andrew Boyd’s new book, I Want a Better Catastrophe. In its opening chapter, he observes that there’s every reason for our hopes for the future to be hanging by a thread, if they’re still hanging around at all. We push and we push and we push for the tiniest of improvements in our world, the most meager of concessions on climate policy. We fight for scraps from billionaire dinner parties were power flows like wine and everyone invited gets too drunk to do anything but…
