In case you missed it, here's an op-ed of mine that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The piece with which my article was paired--about the Republican Party's habit of turning a blind eye to its own racism--is worth a look too.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing--as well as mud-slinging--following the election of the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in nearly 40 years and the Democrats' consequent loss of the supermajority they briefly enjoyed in the Senate. But personally, I'm not surprised by the Democrats' meteoric fall from grace. And maybe, instead of wringing our hands, we the people should be wringing their necks.
I'm an independent, but like many progressives I voted for the Democrats--including Barack Obama--in the 2008 election because I hoped they'd keep their promises concerning the issues that matter to me most: global warming, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the policies of torture and detention pursued by the previous administration, the lack of universal health care, the profligacy and criminality of the financial industry, the corruption of Washington politics, the devastating effects of the recession. But with a year in office, most of it spent with their vaunted supermajority in place, what have they done?
They've derailed international climate-change negotiations by failing to get climate legislation off the ground. They've escalated one war and extended the other. They've kept in place effectively the same wartime policies of their predecessors. They've watered down the health care bill to the point of meaninglessness and still failed to see it through. They've made feeble stabs at corralling the most egregious sins of Wall Street (CEO perks, credit card rate hikes) while utterly failing to address the system's fundamental inequities. They've done nothing about the lobbyists who swarm around them--indeed, it's their incestuous dependence on those money-peddlers that has squelched the other reform legislation I hoped to see. In order to achieve all of this nothing, they've thrown around so much cash (but none of it to you and me) you'd think they were on a year-long holiday shopping spree. And still the economy is reeling.
One might expect such monumental failures to produce not excuses and accusations but soul-searching. If, that is, the Democratic Party still had a soul left to search.
The Massachusetts election, in short, has only driven home what was already painfully evident from the past year: The Democrats are a failed party in every conceivable way. They no longer stand for anything coherent or meaningful, they no longer feel any responsibility to the people they serve, and they are no longer capable of achieving anything of consequence no matter how many votes or offices they hold. A party so ideologically, morally and politically bankrupt has no business existing.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama asserted that "it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength." I couldn't agree more. But I no longer believe the Democratic Party has a part to play in creating such a government.
Historically, political parties arise to meet a great but unfulfilled need: The Democrats emerged in the 18th century as the "party of the common man," the Republicans in the 19th to oppose the extension of slavery. I don't know what new party will rise from the ruins of the Democrats. All I know is it can't rise too soon.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
King's True Dream
In the week following Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I've made it a habit to introduce my students to a speech of his that practically no one knows about, a speech that's been almost entirely eclipsed by "I Have a Dream." Not that I have a problem with the latter speech, of course. But I feel that the obsessive focus on this speech does a disservice to King's legacy, a legacy that was far more radical than his words at the Lincoln Memorial suggest. "I Have a Dream" is a speech that, these days at least, it's hard to disagree with; who but hardcore racists could object to King's vision of interracial harmony? In that respect, the endless replaying of the "Dream" speech serves a stultifying rather than a galvanizing function in our current historical context; the speech allows us, especially with a black man in the White House, to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, rather than to ask ourselves how far we still have to go.
And of course, we still do have a ways to go. From New Orleans to Haiti, we still live in a world of radical inequality grounded to a great extent in skin color; we still have color-coded systems of education, justice, economics, employment, residence, health, environment, and all the rest. We have a black president, yes, but also a black record that has yet to be addressed.
And we also, as I've noted in many an earlier post, have a black president who is waging (indeed, escalating) two wars. To bring this up might seem irrelevant to a discussion of King--but that's only because we've forgotten his other speech, his more radical speech, the speech in which he made clear that dismantling racism is neither sufficient nor possible without dismantling the systems of economic injustice and military imperialism on which racism is founded.
I refer to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which he delivered on April 4, 1967, a year before his death. In this speech, King argued that domestic racism was only one symptom of a larger social malaise of international reach, a malaise reflected both by the criminal war in Vietnam and by economic inequality at home and abroad. This speech, not surprisingly, turned many of King's former supporters against him; he was upbraided for dabbling in matters about which he knew nothing, vilified as anti-American, decried as a Communist. He was treated, in short, the way antiwar protestors are always treated: as traitors to their nation.
But his words remain as resonant today as they were over 40 years ago. Just listen to them:
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
That's the message I take from King's dream: the radical message of revolution not only in the arena of race relations but in the way our entire global social, political, economic, military, and environmental system is structured. We are far from realizing that dream; indeed, we are arguably farther from it now than we were in King's day. But if we truly wish to honor King's legacy, we must see that legacy in its full and true dimensions and do as he says: "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world."
And of course, we still do have a ways to go. From New Orleans to Haiti, we still live in a world of radical inequality grounded to a great extent in skin color; we still have color-coded systems of education, justice, economics, employment, residence, health, environment, and all the rest. We have a black president, yes, but also a black record that has yet to be addressed.
And we also, as I've noted in many an earlier post, have a black president who is waging (indeed, escalating) two wars. To bring this up might seem irrelevant to a discussion of King--but that's only because we've forgotten his other speech, his more radical speech, the speech in which he made clear that dismantling racism is neither sufficient nor possible without dismantling the systems of economic injustice and military imperialism on which racism is founded.
I refer to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which he delivered on April 4, 1967, a year before his death. In this speech, King argued that domestic racism was only one symptom of a larger social malaise of international reach, a malaise reflected both by the criminal war in Vietnam and by economic inequality at home and abroad. This speech, not surprisingly, turned many of King's former supporters against him; he was upbraided for dabbling in matters about which he knew nothing, vilified as anti-American, decried as a Communist. He was treated, in short, the way antiwar protestors are always treated: as traitors to their nation.
But his words remain as resonant today as they were over 40 years ago. Just listen to them:
"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
That's the message I take from King's dream: the radical message of revolution not only in the arena of race relations but in the way our entire global social, political, economic, military, and environmental system is structured. We are far from realizing that dream; indeed, we are arguably farther from it now than we were in King's day. But if we truly wish to honor King's legacy, we must see that legacy in its full and true dimensions and do as he says: "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world."
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Tale of the Tales
Well, my fiction credits continue to accumulate--I had another short story accepted for publication, this one by Trillium Literary Journal. (The story is due out later this year.) And I'm still waiting to hear about three pieces I'm shopping around, two fantasy/horror stories and one memoir. I hope to have more to report in the near future.
Since none of my recently accepted pieces has appeared yet, however, I thought I'd link you to a story I published a while back, "Azav," which was published in the journal SNReview. This story is, I believe, the most realistic piece I've ever written--no discernible fantasy elements, or perhaps it would be better to say that the story concerns what happens when a young person's fantasies collide disastrously with reality. I'm working on another story that operates in a similar register, though the disjunction between fantasy and reality is played for greater comic effect in that one, I think. In "Azav," as you'll see, I play it straight.
You can order copies of this journal, by the way--always a nice thing to do. I don't get any royalties, so my motives are pure: keeping literary journals alive.
Oh, and in answer to the inevitable question--"Is this story autobiographical?"--I tell people, "In part." But I'll never tell which part!
Since none of my recently accepted pieces has appeared yet, however, I thought I'd link you to a story I published a while back, "Azav," which was published in the journal SNReview. This story is, I believe, the most realistic piece I've ever written--no discernible fantasy elements, or perhaps it would be better to say that the story concerns what happens when a young person's fantasies collide disastrously with reality. I'm working on another story that operates in a similar register, though the disjunction between fantasy and reality is played for greater comic effect in that one, I think. In "Azav," as you'll see, I play it straight.
You can order copies of this journal, by the way--always a nice thing to do. I don't get any royalties, so my motives are pure: keeping literary journals alive.
Oh, and in answer to the inevitable question--"Is this story autobiographical?"--I tell people, "In part." But I'll never tell which part!
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Thank You For Your Service
I was reading my former colleague Ed Palm’s excellent essay on the return of veterans to college, “The Veterans Are Coming! The Veterans Are Coming!” In the course of discussing the longstanding ambivalence and uncertainty with which vets are treated on college campuses, Palm offers several very sensible suggestions to ease their transition, including: “Treat veterans as you would any other student,” “Do not shy away from any political or social issues appropriate to your class,” and so on. An academic and a veteran of the Vietnam War himself, Palm builds a strong case for best practices in integrating former warriors into the college classroom.
Only one of Palm’s recommendations has stirred any controversy: “Do not thank veterans you don’t know for their service.” Palm’s reasoning is that anonymous thank-yous are not only apt to be taken the wrong way but assume an unmerited familiarity with the individual veteran’s circumstances and beliefs. Several veterans who left comments on the website, however, have argued that they personally appreciated strangers’ thank-yous, and they have recommended this practice as, in the words of one, “good form.”
But is it good form? I’m not talking about the individual veteran or well-wisher’s feelings; I’m talking about the reflex “thank you for your military service” as a social practice. Is this practice productive of social good or not?
To answer this question, we first have to understand the reasons for the practice. As I see it, there are three principal reasons one might wish to thank veterans for their service:
1. They perform work that is vital to our society’s functioning.
2. The work they perform is difficult, demanding, and dangerous.
3. This vital, difficult work embodies certain values—patriotism, selflessness, sacrifice—that most of us claim to approve but that few of us adequately practice in our own lives or acknowledge in the lives of others.
Of these three, the second seems least subject to dispute. Military service is difficult in every conceivable way: physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, ethically. Shouldn’t people be thanked for voluntarily undergoing such difficulties?
Perhaps they should. But if so, then shouldn’t we also thank all the other people who voluntarily perform difficult, demanding, even dangerous jobs? This would include, of course, police officers and firefighters—but it might also include anyone in the penal system (prison guards and so forth), pilots, ships’ captains, bus drivers, airport security agents, field agents in the FBI and CIA, anyone who works with hazardous materials, health care workers who expose themselves to illness, child care workers who do the same, garbage collectors who encounter syringes in plastic bags, high school teachers who break up gang fights in the hallways, college professors whose students walk into the classroom armed with semiautomatic weapons, and, for that matter, those thousands of poor souls who went to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It’s a dangerous world—that’s why we have a military in the first place—and though of course the risks differ by profession, there are millions of workers who put their health, their security, even their lives on the line every day, as a matter of course. Shouldn’t they be thanked for their service?
But perhaps these workers fail the first criterion: that of performing vital service to their country. I’m afraid this isn’t so either. Everyone in the list above—and lots of others I can think of, from orderlies to Peace Corps recruits to soup kitchen servers—perform indispensable social services; that’s how a complex society works. Again, one might dispute which job is more vital to society’s functioning; one might privilege serving in the military over, say, addressing the physical, mental, and emotional afflictions of those in hospice care. But I’d still argue that if we’re going to thank people routinely for their service, we should thank those hospice care workers along with our veterans.
So that leaves us with the final, and least tangible, criterion: the values embodied by military service. I don’t deny that those values exist, at least potentially, in such service; nor do I deny that they are essential social values. (I do, however, deny that one should indiscriminately and under every circumstance attribute those values to military service. As I’ve argued in an earlier post, we’re obligated as moral agents to judge the conflicts in which our military engages, and I would no more thank a veteran for serving in the criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than I would thank someone for breaking into my neighbor’s home.) Yet even if we grant the questionable assumption that patriotism, sacrifice, and selflessness are synonymous with military service, we will be forced to admit that there are many other people, including you and me, who act patriotically, who sacrifice, who give of themselves selflessly day in and day out. What else do taxpayers do? What do parents do? What do ministers do? What do artists, bloggers, environmentalists, antiwar activists do? In short, those who serve in the military—to say nothing of the military itself—have not cornered the market on social value or values. If we believe they have, our own values are dangerously impoverished.
In the end, I hope it is clear, this is neither an argument against veterans nor against thanking them for their service. Rather, it is an argument against the assumption that military service lies in a class by itself and merits a regard entirely out of proportion to the regard owed other members of our society. It is an argument for recognizing value where value lies, and for acknowledging the value one recognizes. So I’d like to conclude by saying, simply, whoever you are, thank you for your service.
Only one of Palm’s recommendations has stirred any controversy: “Do not thank veterans you don’t know for their service.” Palm’s reasoning is that anonymous thank-yous are not only apt to be taken the wrong way but assume an unmerited familiarity with the individual veteran’s circumstances and beliefs. Several veterans who left comments on the website, however, have argued that they personally appreciated strangers’ thank-yous, and they have recommended this practice as, in the words of one, “good form.”
But is it good form? I’m not talking about the individual veteran or well-wisher’s feelings; I’m talking about the reflex “thank you for your military service” as a social practice. Is this practice productive of social good or not?
To answer this question, we first have to understand the reasons for the practice. As I see it, there are three principal reasons one might wish to thank veterans for their service:
1. They perform work that is vital to our society’s functioning.
2. The work they perform is difficult, demanding, and dangerous.
3. This vital, difficult work embodies certain values—patriotism, selflessness, sacrifice—that most of us claim to approve but that few of us adequately practice in our own lives or acknowledge in the lives of others.
Of these three, the second seems least subject to dispute. Military service is difficult in every conceivable way: physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, ethically. Shouldn’t people be thanked for voluntarily undergoing such difficulties?
Perhaps they should. But if so, then shouldn’t we also thank all the other people who voluntarily perform difficult, demanding, even dangerous jobs? This would include, of course, police officers and firefighters—but it might also include anyone in the penal system (prison guards and so forth), pilots, ships’ captains, bus drivers, airport security agents, field agents in the FBI and CIA, anyone who works with hazardous materials, health care workers who expose themselves to illness, child care workers who do the same, garbage collectors who encounter syringes in plastic bags, high school teachers who break up gang fights in the hallways, college professors whose students walk into the classroom armed with semiautomatic weapons, and, for that matter, those thousands of poor souls who went to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It’s a dangerous world—that’s why we have a military in the first place—and though of course the risks differ by profession, there are millions of workers who put their health, their security, even their lives on the line every day, as a matter of course. Shouldn’t they be thanked for their service?
But perhaps these workers fail the first criterion: that of performing vital service to their country. I’m afraid this isn’t so either. Everyone in the list above—and lots of others I can think of, from orderlies to Peace Corps recruits to soup kitchen servers—perform indispensable social services; that’s how a complex society works. Again, one might dispute which job is more vital to society’s functioning; one might privilege serving in the military over, say, addressing the physical, mental, and emotional afflictions of those in hospice care. But I’d still argue that if we’re going to thank people routinely for their service, we should thank those hospice care workers along with our veterans.
So that leaves us with the final, and least tangible, criterion: the values embodied by military service. I don’t deny that those values exist, at least potentially, in such service; nor do I deny that they are essential social values. (I do, however, deny that one should indiscriminately and under every circumstance attribute those values to military service. As I’ve argued in an earlier post, we’re obligated as moral agents to judge the conflicts in which our military engages, and I would no more thank a veteran for serving in the criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than I would thank someone for breaking into my neighbor’s home.) Yet even if we grant the questionable assumption that patriotism, sacrifice, and selflessness are synonymous with military service, we will be forced to admit that there are many other people, including you and me, who act patriotically, who sacrifice, who give of themselves selflessly day in and day out. What else do taxpayers do? What do parents do? What do ministers do? What do artists, bloggers, environmentalists, antiwar activists do? In short, those who serve in the military—to say nothing of the military itself—have not cornered the market on social value or values. If we believe they have, our own values are dangerously impoverished.
In the end, I hope it is clear, this is neither an argument against veterans nor against thanking them for their service. Rather, it is an argument against the assumption that military service lies in a class by itself and merits a regard entirely out of proportion to the regard owed other members of our society. It is an argument for recognizing value where value lies, and for acknowledging the value one recognizes. So I’d like to conclude by saying, simply, whoever you are, thank you for your service.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Year-End Summery!
As 2009 winds down, things are looking very summery in the fiction and nonfiction-writing career of yours truly. To wit: I've had a political essay accepted for publication by the online journal The Fear of Monkeys, a memoir accepted by the online journal Quicksilver, a very short story (950 words, which I guess some would call flash fiction, but it's more a postmodern parody or pastiche) accepted by the online journal Writers' Bloc, and, last but far from least, a science fiction story accepted, pending further editorial review, by a print journal to be named later. I'll be posting these miscellaneous works to the blog as soon as they appear, but for now, I just wanted to announce their impending arrival.
Whew! It seems that in the publishing business, it never rains but it pours.
Also: this cracks me up, but the editor of Terrain.org forwarded a message from a teacher who found "Positioning" online and was interested in using it in her classes. I'm not sure whether she's intrigued by the subject, the style, the sentiments--or, frankly, whether she wants to use it as an example of how not to write an essay! But whatever the case, this fortuitous first reminds me of the virtues of online publishing: you never know when, where, or why something of yours might be read and put to use.
So in my current upbeat mood, I'd like to end 2009, my first year of blogging and only my second of creative publishing, with a link to one of my favorite stories, "An Interview with Mr. Gance," which appeared earlier this year in the journal Gander Press Review. It took a long time to find a publisher for this one--you'll see why when you read it--but I personally think it's one of the most memorable, meaningful, and in an odd way moving stories I've written. You can read it online or order a hard copy (which would be nice, since it supports the publisher). Either way, I hope you enjoy it.
Have a great new year, and see you in 2010!
JDB
Whew! It seems that in the publishing business, it never rains but it pours.
Also: this cracks me up, but the editor of Terrain.org forwarded a message from a teacher who found "Positioning" online and was interested in using it in her classes. I'm not sure whether she's intrigued by the subject, the style, the sentiments--or, frankly, whether she wants to use it as an example of how not to write an essay! But whatever the case, this fortuitous first reminds me of the virtues of online publishing: you never know when, where, or why something of yours might be read and put to use.
So in my current upbeat mood, I'd like to end 2009, my first year of blogging and only my second of creative publishing, with a link to one of my favorite stories, "An Interview with Mr. Gance," which appeared earlier this year in the journal Gander Press Review. It took a long time to find a publisher for this one--you'll see why when you read it--but I personally think it's one of the most memorable, meaningful, and in an odd way moving stories I've written. You can read it online or order a hard copy (which would be nice, since it supports the publisher). Either way, I hope you enjoy it.
Have a great new year, and see you in 2010!
JDB
Thursday, December 17, 2009
We Were Warmed
My parents, God love 'em, never throw anything away. Usually this is a source of consternation and physical inconvenience--as when one tries to maneuver around the tottering piles of years-old newspapers that litter their home--but occasionally it can be a source of revelation, a recovery from a buried personal archaeology. That's what happened yesterday.
I was searching for their old copy of The Night before Christmas, the book my dad used to read to us every Christmas Eve. I figured the original, if it was there at all, would be in too shabby a shape to risk reading, but I thought I might find the same edition on Amazon or Ebay to read to my own children. What I found instead, among the moldering, masking-taped series of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries that crowd their attic bookcase, was a book from 1974, when I was nine, a book titled Dar Tellum: Stranger from a Distant Planet. It's the kind of book my almost-eleven-year-old daughter still likes to read between mammoth chunks of her favorite fantasies, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson: a chapter book, yes, but with large print, pictures on every third or fourth page, and only sixty-four pages total. So I snatched it--one less piece of junk for my parents to deal with, one less for me to deal with once they're gone--and took it home.
That's when I discovered a certain eerie appropriateness in my choice. I'd remembered the book's basic plot as soon as I saw it: a lonely boy begins to receive telepathic communications from an intergalactic being, Dar Tellum, with whom he forms a friendship. What I hadn't remembered, though, was the plot's principal conflict. Here's how the protagonist/narrator tells it:
"It seems that the planet Earth was right in the middle of a big crisis. Dozens of cities were in danger of becoming flooded. . . . And the reason for this flooding was that the oceans were getting higher.
"From what I understood, and I'm sure there are gaps here and there, the smoke from cars and factories goes into the air. A part of this smoke called carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere of Earth. It lets the sun's heat in, but it won't let much heat out. This carbon dioxide makes a kind of one-way lid on Earth. Heat in, but not much out.
"And this extra heat was warming up the north and south poles. So the ice was melting and the oceans were getting higher."
How could I have forgotten my introduction (in 1974, mind you) to global warming? Was the idea so scary I wanted to forget? Or--and this is another way of asking the same question--did the concept seem so preposterous, even more unbelievable than telepathic communication with interstellar strangers, that I'd easily dismissed it? To put it succinctly: was I, at age nine, a climate skeptic?
I suppose I was. And I suppose, at age nine, I was entitled to be. But now here we are, with a third of a century behind us, a third of a century filled with warnings from aliens and earthlings alike, and collectively, we as a society are still nine years old. Still wishing it gone, stashing it in our parents' bookshelves, forgetting it, treating it as fantasy rather than fact. Still, to cite the final words of a grown-up book, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, waiting for someone else (Dar Tellum?) to magically make it go away:
"All of the studies and news stories were there for everyone to read. But the storm of the future lay in the future, while the costs of preparing for it would have had to be borne in the present. It was easier, both psychically and economically, to turn away from the facts. And so life went on as before, and everyone hoped for the best."
Kolbert is talking specifically about Hurricane Katrina, finding in our non-response to the warnings that loomed over that doomed city an apt analogy to our non-response to the larger issue of global warming. Had she read Dar Tellum, she might have seen the warnings there too: smoke from factories and cars, warming poles, rising oceans, drowned cities. The stories were there for everyone to read.
But we'd rather hear a different story.
The tagline to the blockbuster movie 2012 reads: "We Were Warned." That what we were warned about is at once quasi-mystical (the end of the Mayan calendar), completely unrelated to the excesses of industrial civilization, and, as it happens, a result of the modern-day climate skeptics' favorite hobby-horse (solar flares) suggests that this movie's outrageous popularity owes at least something to its ability to preserve us blameless, childlike, without sin. In denial. Still preferring to tell ourselves a different story. Still forgetting that one book in our parents' attics that, years ago, might have told us the truth.
I was searching for their old copy of The Night before Christmas, the book my dad used to read to us every Christmas Eve. I figured the original, if it was there at all, would be in too shabby a shape to risk reading, but I thought I might find the same edition on Amazon or Ebay to read to my own children. What I found instead, among the moldering, masking-taped series of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries that crowd their attic bookcase, was a book from 1974, when I was nine, a book titled Dar Tellum: Stranger from a Distant Planet. It's the kind of book my almost-eleven-year-old daughter still likes to read between mammoth chunks of her favorite fantasies, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson: a chapter book, yes, but with large print, pictures on every third or fourth page, and only sixty-four pages total. So I snatched it--one less piece of junk for my parents to deal with, one less for me to deal with once they're gone--and took it home.
That's when I discovered a certain eerie appropriateness in my choice. I'd remembered the book's basic plot as soon as I saw it: a lonely boy begins to receive telepathic communications from an intergalactic being, Dar Tellum, with whom he forms a friendship. What I hadn't remembered, though, was the plot's principal conflict. Here's how the protagonist/narrator tells it:
"It seems that the planet Earth was right in the middle of a big crisis. Dozens of cities were in danger of becoming flooded. . . . And the reason for this flooding was that the oceans were getting higher.
"From what I understood, and I'm sure there are gaps here and there, the smoke from cars and factories goes into the air. A part of this smoke called carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere of Earth. It lets the sun's heat in, but it won't let much heat out. This carbon dioxide makes a kind of one-way lid on Earth. Heat in, but not much out.
"And this extra heat was warming up the north and south poles. So the ice was melting and the oceans were getting higher."
How could I have forgotten my introduction (in 1974, mind you) to global warming? Was the idea so scary I wanted to forget? Or--and this is another way of asking the same question--did the concept seem so preposterous, even more unbelievable than telepathic communication with interstellar strangers, that I'd easily dismissed it? To put it succinctly: was I, at age nine, a climate skeptic?
I suppose I was. And I suppose, at age nine, I was entitled to be. But now here we are, with a third of a century behind us, a third of a century filled with warnings from aliens and earthlings alike, and collectively, we as a society are still nine years old. Still wishing it gone, stashing it in our parents' bookshelves, forgetting it, treating it as fantasy rather than fact. Still, to cite the final words of a grown-up book, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, waiting for someone else (Dar Tellum?) to magically make it go away:
"All of the studies and news stories were there for everyone to read. But the storm of the future lay in the future, while the costs of preparing for it would have had to be borne in the present. It was easier, both psychically and economically, to turn away from the facts. And so life went on as before, and everyone hoped for the best."
Kolbert is talking specifically about Hurricane Katrina, finding in our non-response to the warnings that loomed over that doomed city an apt analogy to our non-response to the larger issue of global warming. Had she read Dar Tellum, she might have seen the warnings there too: smoke from factories and cars, warming poles, rising oceans, drowned cities. The stories were there for everyone to read.
But we'd rather hear a different story.
The tagline to the blockbuster movie 2012 reads: "We Were Warned." That what we were warned about is at once quasi-mystical (the end of the Mayan calendar), completely unrelated to the excesses of industrial civilization, and, as it happens, a result of the modern-day climate skeptics' favorite hobby-horse (solar flares) suggests that this movie's outrageous popularity owes at least something to its ability to preserve us blameless, childlike, without sin. In denial. Still preferring to tell ourselves a different story. Still forgetting that one book in our parents' attics that, years ago, might have told us the truth.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Confessions of a Global Warming Warrior
I just realized it's been nearly three weeks since my last post--the delay attributable to paper-grading--but I thought I'd try to slip something in here before the final, end-of-term crush. I did a rough calculation on how many pages of student papers I read in a term, and it came out to something like 3,000 pages. Fortunately, I grade everything online, so at least I'm sparing the trees.
But speaking of environmental issues, I've been doing some soul-searching lately, and I thought I'd share it here. This seems like a good time. As the Copenhagen conference dawns, as the EPA rules that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are hazardous to human health, as the U.S. Congress lurches toward some kind of climate legislation, it seems like time to confess that I've been rethinking my position on global warming.
Relax. I still think it's real, I still think industrial civilization is driving it, and I still think it's likely to have catastrophic results. (Indeed, a number of recent studies, including this one, suggest that it's going to be a lot worse than anyone dreamed.) But my position on global warming, I've concluded, hasn't been entirely rational or realistic over the several years I've been trying to do my part to address the problem.
What I realized, in short, is that I'm not going to be the one to solve the problem. That may sound silly--what, did I think I was going to personally monkeywrench every coal-fired power plant in the developed world?--but what I mean is, I've come to the conclusion that my generation, people in the middle of their lives, are not ultimately going to be the ones to reverse the trend. At most, we'll be the ones who raised the alarm, who raised the public conscience or consciousness, but not the ones who will raise the new structure our world is going to need to get out of its self-inflicted mess.
The issue, as I see it, is this: people don't make big changes in preferred systems until things get REALLY bad. And for most of us in the industrial West, things aren't going to get really bad until mid-century, when people like me are either dead or in serious decline. What this means is that for my generation, the window for making the changes we need to make is both too short and too long: too short because these changes will need to be made quickly to stave off what will come if we don't make them, too long because we won't start to see the problems our changes could have averted until we're largely too decrepit to do anything about them. So we'll chip away at things here, screw in compact fluorescents there, pass a half-assed climate bill tomorrow (or the next day, or the next year, or the next decade), and pretty much keep on with business as usual until, one day, things get so bad that someone realizes they simply have to act.
Who that someone will be, I'm not totally sure. The key question will be: for whom has it gotten so bad that decisive action is no longer avoidable? For my children, maybe. For my children's children, almost certainly. I both hope and fear it will be for my children: hope, because the longer it goes on this way, the harder it will be to set right, and fear, because they are my children, and I don't want the things I (we) have done to harm them. But either way, my feeling at this point is that those of us who could do something to prevent such harm right now probably won't.
This may sound utterly pessimistic. Or it may sound like a cop-out, a way of absolving myself of any responsibility to act. Trust me, it's not. I will continue to act in every way I can (and I've been acting in plenty of ways), and I will contine to seek new ways. What this is, rather, is a realistic appraisal not only of the situation but of myself: a recognition that, deep down, I really wanted to be the one to fix things, not only because then they'd be fixed but because then I'd have been the one who did it. I wanted to be a member of the Greatest Generation; I wanted to save the world. I wanted to be remembered that way.
And maybe that's a dangerous desire. Maybe it's better to realize you can't save the world until it's ready to save itself, at which time it'll no longer need you to save it. It's funny: I got involved in this issue because I wanted to secure my children's future. But maybe, as with one's children, one has to resist the temptation to do it all for them--resist, that is, the temptation to do it before they've stepped into a future in which they're ready to do it themselves.
So you'll still see me at the rallies and on the boards of local organizations, you'll still read my letters (at least, if you're my representative), you'll still watch An Inconvenient Truth (if you're my student), you'll still know I'm around. But you won't have me to thank when the problem is finally solved.
But speaking of environmental issues, I've been doing some soul-searching lately, and I thought I'd share it here. This seems like a good time. As the Copenhagen conference dawns, as the EPA rules that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are hazardous to human health, as the U.S. Congress lurches toward some kind of climate legislation, it seems like time to confess that I've been rethinking my position on global warming.
Relax. I still think it's real, I still think industrial civilization is driving it, and I still think it's likely to have catastrophic results. (Indeed, a number of recent studies, including this one, suggest that it's going to be a lot worse than anyone dreamed.) But my position on global warming, I've concluded, hasn't been entirely rational or realistic over the several years I've been trying to do my part to address the problem.
What I realized, in short, is that I'm not going to be the one to solve the problem. That may sound silly--what, did I think I was going to personally monkeywrench every coal-fired power plant in the developed world?--but what I mean is, I've come to the conclusion that my generation, people in the middle of their lives, are not ultimately going to be the ones to reverse the trend. At most, we'll be the ones who raised the alarm, who raised the public conscience or consciousness, but not the ones who will raise the new structure our world is going to need to get out of its self-inflicted mess.
The issue, as I see it, is this: people don't make big changes in preferred systems until things get REALLY bad. And for most of us in the industrial West, things aren't going to get really bad until mid-century, when people like me are either dead or in serious decline. What this means is that for my generation, the window for making the changes we need to make is both too short and too long: too short because these changes will need to be made quickly to stave off what will come if we don't make them, too long because we won't start to see the problems our changes could have averted until we're largely too decrepit to do anything about them. So we'll chip away at things here, screw in compact fluorescents there, pass a half-assed climate bill tomorrow (or the next day, or the next year, or the next decade), and pretty much keep on with business as usual until, one day, things get so bad that someone realizes they simply have to act.
Who that someone will be, I'm not totally sure. The key question will be: for whom has it gotten so bad that decisive action is no longer avoidable? For my children, maybe. For my children's children, almost certainly. I both hope and fear it will be for my children: hope, because the longer it goes on this way, the harder it will be to set right, and fear, because they are my children, and I don't want the things I (we) have done to harm them. But either way, my feeling at this point is that those of us who could do something to prevent such harm right now probably won't.
This may sound utterly pessimistic. Or it may sound like a cop-out, a way of absolving myself of any responsibility to act. Trust me, it's not. I will continue to act in every way I can (and I've been acting in plenty of ways), and I will contine to seek new ways. What this is, rather, is a realistic appraisal not only of the situation but of myself: a recognition that, deep down, I really wanted to be the one to fix things, not only because then they'd be fixed but because then I'd have been the one who did it. I wanted to be a member of the Greatest Generation; I wanted to save the world. I wanted to be remembered that way.
And maybe that's a dangerous desire. Maybe it's better to realize you can't save the world until it's ready to save itself, at which time it'll no longer need you to save it. It's funny: I got involved in this issue because I wanted to secure my children's future. But maybe, as with one's children, one has to resist the temptation to do it all for them--resist, that is, the temptation to do it before they've stepped into a future in which they're ready to do it themselves.
So you'll still see me at the rallies and on the boards of local organizations, you'll still read my letters (at least, if you're my representative), you'll still watch An Inconvenient Truth (if you're my student), you'll still know I'm around. But you won't have me to thank when the problem is finally solved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)