It's Getting There

It was one small step for political hacks, one giant leap backwards towards the new Dark Age.

The Republican Congress has passed a budget which slashes funding for NASA's earth sciences research.  There are many other preposterous cuts in their budget so when it comes time to compromise with the White House on a final budget, this funding may be sacrificed.

The cuts are obviously aimed at NASA's climate research, which includes weather forecasting.  Republicans and their fossil fuel masters are at war with reality, but everyone else is going to pay the price.

Jane Jacobs wrote a book, her last, called Dark Age Ahead, published in 2004.  Jacobs, along with Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Frances Perkins, Halle Flanagan, Eleanor Roosevelt and others, was one of the great women of the 20th century.  She was famous for The Death and Life of American Cities and other books on cities, and she changed what cities look like and what they are today.  But this last book was ignored.  It's time for it to be revived.

She writes that a Dark Age is not just some primitive state.  It is a time when what was once known is culturally forgotten.  It is when knowledge is at first denied and ignored, and then it disappears.  Once started, it can become very extreme.  In the last Dark Age, people lost the skills required to measure time, and so in a sense in daily life, time itself was forgotten.

"Cultural xenophobia", a "fortress or fundamentalist mentality" are the signs that the fall into an age of darkness has begun.

In the New Yorker article I linked above, Elizabeth Kolbert uses a term I've used here before: willed ignorance.  That's what is happening among our "leaders."  That's why, if it's not dark yet, it's getting there pretty fast, and this latest effort--especially if it succeeds--is a notable step towards that darkness.  With chaos ahead.

The cost of willed ignorance is increasingly steep, as is the lack of societal will to do the difficult things necessary to stop our self-destruction.

So the news is always the same, and yet significantly worse.  Species disappearing from the planet,including large herbivores like elephants and rhinos and species of primates, with consequences of the crash of natural systems we can't predict.  And of course, the continuing acceleration of pouring carbon pollution into the atmosphere, condemning our progeny to a hotter, more violent and in many ways, a poorer world.  This week it reached a long-feared record.

Meanwhile the rabid right grows ever more extreme and perverse, with the latest feverish delusion of an ordinary military training exercise really being an Obama-led military takeover, because (as columnist Gene Lyons wrote) "where else would you start a military takeover but the strategic hamlet of Bastrop, Texas, commanding the crucial highway junction between Elgin and LaGrange?"

 And when it doesn't happen, rabid rightists and their pandering politicians will brag that their vigilance stopped it.  It would be nothing but funny if it weren't another de-legitimizing tactic that has consequences for the planet and the future well beyond the petty careers in the tiny lifetimes of power-hungry hollow men.