What Isn't Happening

Though it might seem (as Al Gore promises) that just about any candidate for President in 2008 of either party is going to address the Climate Crisis in much more realistic and positive terms than the Bushite denialists, that may not be enough. There has to be a real change in the political dialogue, the political direction and perhaps in politics itself. And there is scant sign this is happening.

Yes, there are encouraging signs--in the states, the regions, in certain powerful Democrats in Congress, in the advocacy of Al Gore, John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Bill Clinton, as well as celebrities who've made this their cause. But is it enough to provide weight and momentum to leadership? I wonder. I worry.

Let's take this week's first debate among Democratic candidates for Prez as exhibit the first. There were no questions on the subject of the Climate Crisis or the environment, just as there seldom were in the past two elections. There were actually more answers than questions--a couple of candidates mentioned environment and at least one even mentioned global warming. But there was no indication it is anyone's priority. There was no sense of urgency.

More importantly than even this depressing lack of focus, was the general tenor of the campaign's beginning. That Iraq is sucking most of the oxygen (but not the CO2) out of the political atmosphere isn't surprising. But in the debate there was that question about what each candidate would do as President if there were two simultaneous terrorist attacks on U.S. cities. Hillary Clinton got a big bounce out of using the word "retaliate." It proves she's tough enough to be president, that she'll "keep us safe." The media conventional wisdom was fawning all over her for this.

Haven't we learned anything? We've been pathetic sheep following Bush over the cliff because he claimed he was tough. And apparently we're ready to do it again. Does anybody seriously believe any of those candidates would be "weak" (you know, reading a children's book while the Towers fall) or wouldn't respond? But of course that isn't the point. The point apparently is that all we care about is bombing terrorists.

How discouraging is that? Hillary said this would be a "change election", but I didn't see it. I saw this as yet another fear election. And this was not all manufactured by the media, for apparently Hillary's people are actually attacking Barak Obama for not being violent enough in his response.

Keep us safe? What are we--infants? Apparently, yes. We need Daddy or Mommy to save us from the mean mean terrorists, who killed three thousand of our people on one day six years ago. Not from the health insurance terrorists, the credit card terrorists, the forget Habeas Corpus terrorists, the forget your retirement terrorists, not the destroy an entire country terrorists, inprison people you're afraid of without trial terrorists, build concentration camps for Mexicans at the border terrorists, kill more than 3,000 of your own young and maim thousands more plus hundreds of thousands of foreign innocents for a preemptive quaqmire born of lies and greed terrorists, and meanwhile the blatant thieves embodied and empowered by this administration who've stolen the future from babies not yet born.

Our politics remains infantile. Our ignorance has been carefully cultivated and nurtured by those who profit from that ignorance. For a brief shining and apparently illusory moment--the late 50s and 60s--we in America looked like we might be growing up. But we've actually gone backwards. Martin Amis called the 80s the "moronic inferno," and we've been swimming in the ashes ever since. We've gone backwards in the direction of the Dark Ages (only this time with Blackberries) intellectually, culturally and morally. Our culture and much of our government and military are in the grip of totalitarian fundamentalists, for whom their particular brand of Christianity and their particular reading of the Bible is the only truth. They are the mirror image of the totalitarian fundamentalists wreaking havoc in other parts of the world.

Individually, in families and maybe communities (physical and virtual), we can be sophisticated in our judgments and tolerant, generous and compassionate. But as a polity, as a nation, we're hopeless. Our politics as well as our commercial culture evoke our worst traits: fear, greed, hate, anger, sentimentality, laziness and conformity. And the industrialized commercial culture we've unleashed globally vies with totalitarian fundamentalism for apocalyptic potential.

Because of its nature and extent, the Climate Crisis calls for a leap forward in realizing our potential as human beings together on this planet. It's within our grasp. But we seem to be mostly going in the direction of becoming more simplistic, self-righteously selfish and willfully stupid. This is certainly the impression one gets from the newspapers and particularly from cable TV. Maybe it's distorted. One can only hope so.

But of course debating "will we save the future" is nonsense unless it's still possible to save the future. Is it?

Continued tomorrow.