The Disappearance of Reality

 

Do you ever wonder why he gets away with it?  Or even why he thinks he can get away with it?

Boss Chaos lies with every breath, even when the evidence he is lying is right in front of everyone's eyes.  (Or is it?)

For instance, according to Chaos the US has won his war against Iran ("Mission Accomplished," he said this past week) and oil tankers are sailing happily through the Strait of Hormuz, which is completely open.  The evidence against these is on par with the evidence against his contention that his poll numbers are soaring.

He started his first term in office the same way--he claimed his Inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama's, while a baffled press (many of whom were at both) looked at the photographs and were embarrassed for his press secretary, recently one of their own, who nevertheless kept asserting what everyone could see was not true.

Chaos never stops.  Why does he get away with it?  There are a couple of procedural answers.  First, because the news media has gone numb on constantly correcting him.  But most importantly for him, he counts on his supporters being low information voters and/or so cynical about actual news media information that they believe only him.  If he says it is so, it must be so. That may be less true than it used to be, but it's still what he counts on.

Many others no longer concern themselves with whether his latest whopper is false, but take these statements as suggesting what he is going to do or not do, so they can act or react accordingly.  Because he's the Boss backed up by a corrupt Supreme Court, what matters most is what reality is according to him, not what reality is.

But there is also something more profound going on, that Boss Chaos is taking advantage of, whether he knows it or not.  It goes beyond the disappearance of the shared reality most of the country used to have, based on more or less trusted news media and institutions.  True, an unhealthy proportion of the news media that at least tried to maintain integrity and objectivity has been severely wounded or utterly transformed into ideological tools.  They also have fewer resources--so there are fewer reporters sending back images and accounts of for instance what's happening around Iran and the Strait, so the counter evidence is thin.  

And some institutions (like Congress) have lost what credibility they had, while others (and this is very important) have been destroyed by Boss Chaos and his minions, for instance those that applied information gathering and expertise to data in areas of science, health, intelligence, the law and the environment.  

But there's something larger still.  I'll make two assertions briefly (which I may develop more fully in future posts) and suggest broad implications.

Both of these are related to the obvious sea change in contemporary life: the dominance of the digital domain, and its ongoing replacing of reality with digital fantasies.

1. The Disappearance of People

Contributing to the disappearance of reality is the disappearance of people, even if it is a real person on the other end of the phone.  

Recently a truck belonging to AT&T backed into Margaret's car and caused some minor and mostly cosmetic damage. The driver apologized profusely, said it was his fault, and called it in to AT&T.  Margaret contacted her insurance agent who tried to contact AT&T and their insurance company. But she was confronted with what confronts us all: an impenetrable wall of "digital assistants," of robots programmed for easy answers and evasion.  Long waits--hours--to talk to a human, which direct the caller to another number that is an entrance to the same kind of endless loop.

Her insurance agent never did even get a phone number for anyone at AT&T that handled insurance on its vehicles. This is apparently not an isolated or unusual case, when big corporations and insurance are involved.  But we see the same evasions everywhere.  The hours of frustration necessary to cancel a digital service, the lack of customer service phone numbers or email addresses on web pages; in a word, the disappearance of people.

AT&T apparently has no face in our town.  Except for a store selling phones and services, there is no physical AT&T office, let alone somebody at a front desk that can tell you who you need to talk to.  I grew up in a small town--however frustrating the ultimate response, you always had someone you could talk to at the phone company, the electric or gas company, and everywhere else.  There was a limit to how unresponsive they could be because they lived in the same community.  You always knew somebody who worked there, or somebody whose cousin did. These days if you actually get to talk with a real person, they live in an unknown country remote from anything you know.  

 Even when we moved here in 1996 there were actual offices and real people.  Not anymore.

It's also worth recalling that back when there was but one Phone Company, you interacted with real people (operators, they were called) for many years when making phone calls, and even after touch-tone phones etc. you could still speak to "directory assistance," the heirs of "Information." Once the Bell System was broken up and the road to dominance by a few huge companies began, the business became selling the phones you used to get for free, and that's apparently where the money went to pay people who talk to people.    

(There are some compensatory changes, however.  Margaret's insurance agent got that company to pay for repairs at a local body shop, where real people were very pleasant and helpful and efficient, and they all signed a card thanking her for her business. This also seems like a change.)

People still have people in their lives.  But in necessary interactions with institutions, people have disappeared.  And even in daily life, people are starting to disappear.  Conversations are via texts and aps and social media.  Those people need not even be real, and many of them are not.  There's going to be more of that.  Some people interact more with Alexa than actual humans.  A.I. Alexas are here, as are persuasive AI agents, and soon enough they will be visible as well as heard (if they aren't already. I'll probably be the last to know.)  

Prominent people appear on YouTube videos that are complete fabrications, or slop. They never said any of those things, but when you do a search for that person, these videos appear right alongside legitimate ones.  Nothing on social media is trustworthy.  Because real people are disappearing in the murk.

2. The Disappearance of Things 

We live in a material society, that's the common wisdom--but do we?  In the era of fast (and quickly disposable) fashion, are the clothes actually real?  As garbage they certainly are--and they are a major problem. As clothes they are mostly plastic and quickly fall apart, they can't be repaired or altered even if there were tailor shops or sewing machines in every home, which there used to be.  

They aren't things really--they are symbols, status symbols, statements, badges of belonging.  But nobody cares about (or cares for) the fabric, the stitching, the durability.  Same with shoes.  Many wear running shoes or their equivalents, which are designed to be replaced every few months.  But you can't actually replace them--the version you had is obsolete, there are fifteen new styles (even if they are all more or less the same as each other.)

But perhaps most important in this context are the things that used to carry what we now clump together as information, or data, or more often, as content.  Physical books are replaced by digital content. Physical newspapers and magazines by online versions. Physical containers of recorded music (records, tapes, CDs)  are replaced by digital access to ITunes and Spotify; physical containers of movies (tapes, DVDs, Blueray) are replaced by access to streaming services.

 Granted that physical media that allowed people to take movies home are relatively recent, with recording music available longer, and books longest of all.  And that they replaced to some extent the group experiences of concerts or home music making, movies at the movie house and a night at the theatre.  

But physical media were things.  They had existence.  They were not off in some abstract cloud, controlled by corporate entities that change the rules of access or even deny it at their usually profit-driven whim.  You bought it, it was yours, you kept it, and played it when you wanted to.  (That was even true with the first digitalized music--which resided on your Ipod.)

You could see your records, touch your books, stack your movies.  They were real.  You could feel your newspaper or magazine, tear articles out of it, keep it or use it for something else.  You could see other people reading from the same newspaper you were, even at the same time.  You had that in common, even if you were not obsessing about it on social media.

Another great loss is letters.  Letters are a deep part of our culture, and the keepers of humanity in history.  Their loss will be profound.  But their disappearance is a loss already. Physical letters that you can read many times, and many years later.  That you see age.  Like anything you read, you can perceive or appreciate something new when you read it years or decades later.  But it is always a token, a physical thing with its own particularity--the paper, the writing itself; even the envelope with its postmark, addresses, stamp from that other time.  Not emails, texts and instant messaging that disappear into the digital ether from which they came, that barely physically existed.

A lot of reality is what you can see and touch, hear and smell and taste.  These are not only the sensations of reality, they are the ground of reality.  Things.  And their relationships to each other, and to us.

Now songs can be altered, movies reedited, scenes cut out, digital  or audio books withdrawn or censored, news stories distorted without physical evidence, and offered as the real things.  You have no say in this.  No one can change a book on your shelf, but digits in the computer or the "cloud" or cyberspace--can be altered without a trace, or just disappeared.

I would argue that physical life itself is becoming abstracted.  Consider the chaos of the so-called health industry.  And while I'm not going to argue the pros and cons of cremation, it is statistically significant that as the proportion of cremations has increased, the instances of burial or ceremony have decreased.  This is enormously significant, for even in the worst times, most human beings could count on one moment in their lives in which they were the center of ceremonial attention, and that would be their funeral.  There is something about acknowledging the physical remains of the transition from life to death and memory that has been part of every human culture as far back as anyone knows, as well as the community behavior of some other animal species.  It is among other things an acknowledgement of the physical continuity of a community.

Regarding the disappearance of physical media, it would seem that ceding great hunks of your intellectual, emotional and even personal--perhaps even moral--life to control by corporations run by billionaires is daunting enough.  But physical thingness cannot be argued with--things are real. When things disappear, and everything moves into the nothingness called cyberspace, what is there to hold onto?  How do you know what is real or true or what it says it is, and what is not?

When reality is so elusive, fantasy moves in.  And the people who control the fantasies can manipulate what remains of reality, including life itself.  That's what ultimately benefits people like Boss Chaos, and allows him to impose his fantasies on people who think they are reality and also those who know they are not. But these deadly fantasies thereby become major elements in shared reality with consequences for us all. 

Empathy Update

 

In a recent post, I cited a book by Frans De Waal that described research showing that behavior expressing empathy--or at least its building blocks--wasn't restricted to humans but was present in a range of primates and other mammals.  That far from either a strictly human accomplishment or evolutionary aberration (depending on your bias), empathy is a natural tendency across species.  

That book (The Age of Empathy) was published back in 2009.  But just this week the New York Times featured a story about more recent research, focusing on the phenomenon of animals other than humans who express and even cultivate caring relationships with members of other species.  Who, in their journalistic shorthand, treated them as pets.

As the caption to the above photo summarized: "Scientists examined 427 interspecies interactions across 88 primate species finding that every primate, regardless of species, held some behavior that could be linked to pet-keeping."

The story by Taylor Mitchell Brown was derived from an article published in the scientific journal Primates.  As with earlier research on empathy, this behavior flies in the face of gene-centric evolutionary theory, or even strict versions of the laws of natural selection.  But then, humans and their relationships with pets has always challenged the same simplistic laws.  Brown quotes a scientist not involved in this new research: "Lavishing resources on members of other species we have no evolutionary stake in seems to make no evolutionary sense."

Yet we do, and apparently so do some chimps, gorillas, monkeys, etc.  Every primate species studied showed some signs of caring for another animal, which included mice, marmoset, lizards, birds, a chicken, squirrels, even a small deer and yes--dogs.  It happens in the wild as well as in captivity. Often the behavior was fleeting--grooming, for instance--but sometimes it was "outright adoption."

Perhaps as unexpected as the behavior of the keeper is the acquiescence of the "pet." Both sides understand the relationship, and a bond is established.

Once again, as in the research on empathy, the evidence has been out there for a long time, but given the professional bias of that prevailing interpretation of evolution as all against all, nobody was brave enough to study it. One scientist explained that the behavior was often observed but always ignored, because it was deemed inappropriate for peer-reviewed journals.  "Someone might get a photograph and post it on social media," he said, "but you don't write a scientific paper about it."

That in this study, such kindness to other species was seen more often from females and juveniles but not so much among adult males--and adult male humans having dominated scientific paper writing as well as evolutionary theory--may have something to do with this learned ignorance.

Now somebody has written a scientific paper about it.  Some of the scientists speculated on reasons for the behavior (loneliness was one) but surely a major conclusion is that it is behavior natural to at least primates, and perhaps other animals not studied yet.  Further evidence that empathy doesn't decrease chances of survival, but may very well enhance it.  As well as just contributing to making life worth living.
 

To The Tongue

Whatever we say 

we know there is another

language under this one

 a word of it is always

 there on the tip of you

 unsayable and early

 O you for whom

 all the languages have been named

 who have none of your own

 naked sleeper in the cave

 where you were born

 dreamer without words

 who first tasted

 a verb of the world

 you who speak as though

 you could see

 you have not forgotten

 the serpent your ancestor

 its fluttering inarticulate flame

 of expectation

 on the way to you

--W.S. Merwin

This poem is from Merwin's 2005 volume titled Present Company, in which every poem is addressed to its subject--which may be a person, a place, a body part.  Some go far afield from there, but this one sticks with the tongue.  It plays with a cliche (it's on the tip of my tongue) and the second meaning of tongue as a language, before finding the actual tongue as "naked sleeper in the cave where you were born;" in other words, the mouth.  It plays with the tongue's resemblance to a snake, before bringing the various meanings together.  Each reading of this short poem ignites new insights and delights.  It's even a little impudent--like the Rolling Stones' logo above.

It's Not Over

 These days King Chaos is more chaos than king.  But that hasn't even slowed down his efforts to be the dictator of the entire world.  

He's turned federal Washington into piles of ruins. He threatens and interferes with states, cities and even small communities, while applying his will to the affairs of other countries, not to mention international sports organizations.  His tactic always comes down to intimidation.

Right now he's back trying to intimidate a Greenland community into allowing oil drilling in an environmentally protected remote area by a Texas company allied with him.  The company has gone so far as to land equipment without permission (as reported by the Guardian and Rachel Maddow, among others.)  So far the local community, Greenland's people and the government of Denmark are resisting.  King Chaos posted a photo of himself glowering over the Greenland landscape.  He seems to want to force the issue: is this something Greenland and Denmark want to go to war about?

The minions of Chaos as well as his opportunistic allies are also relentlessly bullying everyone to, among other things, rewrite history and erase science to establish the kind of lies they favor.  They started successfully with the military academies, where a student was advised not to write a paper on Japanese internment camps in World War II, and most recently bullied the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering into censoring a chapter on climate science from a publication meant to inform judges of scientific background on issues they might encounter.  

But the most serious efforts involve denying rights and, whenever possible, careers and employment, to black Americans, non-white immigrants, and women. The open cruelty is unparalleled in modern America, as black Americans are denied representation, innocent people are being unjustly imprisoned, killed and denied medical care in immigrant camps, children are being sent to American gulags without legal representation and are growing up there as if they were serial murderers, and immigrants on the economic edge are being driven into poverty.  

 These are the targets, and these efforts continue relentlessly. Dehumanizing everyone involved is an obvious strategy.  The natural environment is another target (shrinking protected areas, permitting oil extraction on sensitive land--including the Boundary Waters-- and coastal areas) along with bribing companies to withdraw clean energy projects, as they just did here at Humboldt Bay.  And the amount of taxpayer money being spent on these efforts is enormous. 

A dictator with cratering support in his own country however really needs his secret police, and here matters are also progressing, despite visible resistance and setbacks. The enormous budgets given to the ICE police are paying dividends, especially in supporting efforts to police not only the prime targets of non-white immigrants etc. but Americans of all descriptions who might support them, and oppose ICE and the dictatorship of King Chaos.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported:     “In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission. The government has paid millions to private contractors to surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE’s operations.”

“The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster’s name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history when possible.”

The next day, Wired reported that ICE collected the DNA of nearly one million people last year, which will remain in federal custody presumably forever.

Update: Now it is reported by Axios among others that trigger-happy boldly racist ICE "plans to begin using electric shock gloves designed to cause pain and disrupt a person's ability to react."

End the Hush

Every week it is the same story though the places may be different. This week it's extreme heat up to 120F in the US Southwest, tens of thousands dislocated by wildfires in Washington state, continuing devastation and heat in western Europe, and 90F at the edge of the Arctic.  Scientists announce that global warming has sped up.

The media shows the photos which look like all the others, though the suffering caused by heat is hard to make into readable visuals. Among the stories about celebrities, box office records, sports trades and the Chaos out of Washington, there are some "lifestyle" pieces about how to get a better night's sleep when its continuously hot and humid.

But maybe more than that is actually going on, and besides having their brains driven to mushy dullness by hot weather, at least some people are seeing the big picture.  And this picture could hardly be bigger.  

From The Guardian:

"Research makes clear that global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Yet the climate crisis has largely disappeared from the political agenda, with many Democrats who once described it as an existential threat now shying away from talking about it.

Now US activists are pushing back against this trend of “climate hushing”, arguing it is misguided. During the summer’s federal recess, during which lawmakers leave the nation’s capital to work directly within their home states or districts, demonstrators organized by the environmental advocacy coalition Climate Action Campaign are calling on representatives to put climate back on the political agenda."

The article continues:

"The activists’ campaign comes as new polling challenges the need for “climate hushing”, a trend that took off as some policy wonks argued that talking about global warming could alienate voters and distract from the message of affordability. July research from the University of California, Santa Barbara found that emphasizing climate change was neutral to beneficial for Democratic candidates, suggesting that talking more about the issue does not alienate voters and can even increase support in competitive races.

Though the Trump administration frequently derides climate policy as a “scam” and a “hoax”, polling indicates most Americans are not onboard with that view. Another July poll from Data for Progress found that 61% of likely voters believe extreme weather has become more frequent over the past five years, including nearly half of Republicans. And one month earlier, a Yale survey found that roughly two-thirds of Americans are worried about global warming."

The upcoming actions involve coalitions organized by the Climate Action Campaign and its director Margie Alt.  The coalition includes Sierra Club and NAACP chapters, as well as Bill McKibben's organization of elders called Third Act.  There are events both large and small slated for at least 20 states. The Guardian article concludes:

“Smart politicians will grab on this issue,” said McKibben. “There’s perhaps no other question where the gulf between Maga and the general public is higher.”

Alt said she saw climate-hushing as “the climate denial of 2026”. “I don’t think that ignoring the climate crisis is smart politics,” she said. “I think that it is dropping the ball on the biggest threat the US and the world faces.”

Dropping the ball is an almost insulting understatement.  Climate hushing must end.  Climate crisis leadership is the wave of the future, if there indeed is to be anything worthy of the name of future.

The Empathy Election?

 

For the first two-thirds of his book The Age of Empathy, the late primatologist Frans De Waal describes the observations and experiments that show that contrary to the conventional wisdom both within and outside science, empathy and its various building blocks exist in primate species and even in other mammals.  Empathy is not based wholly on human imaginative projection.  It is emotional and above all it is physical.

De Waal goes step by step through the research, and late in the book summarizes the findings and implications: "...empathy is part of a heritage as ancient as the mammalian line.  Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old.  The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry [imitation] and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need.

The full capacity seems put together like a Russian doll.  At its core is an automated process shared with a multitude of species, surrounded by outer layers that fine-tune its aim and reach.  Not all species possess all layers: Only a few take another's perspective, something we are masters at.  But even the most sophisticated layers of the doll normally remain firmly tied to its primal core."

The research De Waal cites (prominently including his own) is fairly new, because science has its own dogmas.  Animals were studied for what was assumed they were all about: hierarchy, competition, aggression.  All of that is real but incomplete.  As De Waal writes in an earlier publication, scientists did not observe cooperation, conciliation or empathy among primates or other species because they weren't looking for them.

Even empathy in humans is derided in dogma that's prevailed for a century or two, which maintain that "selfish genes" rule ruthlessly, that survival depends on selfishness and dominance, and wishy-washy concepts like empathy are dangerous outgrowths of unrealistic feelings, mostly feminine and definitely low-T.  Darwin's natural selection was immediately distorted into a personal survival of the fittest ethic.

It's no surprise how these dogmas became dogmas.  They were promoted and supported by the people that most benefit from them: the overlords, the wealthy and powerful, who legitimize their own dominance by convincing underlings that this is the nature of things: this is nature red in tooth and class.

 De Waal also goes into animal research that studies concepts of fairness and reciprocity.  Even in some hierarchical primate social groups, these must be honored or the ruling alpha and high ranking females could lose power.  There are behaviors that clearly aim to smooth out inequalities.  Sharing and the rules of sharing are also important. De Waal links these concepts of fairness to empathy, which makes intuitive sense.

In the last third of this book, De Waal looks at current society, especially America, in light of these findings.  In a section called "The Dark Side," he defines the psychopath as lacking in the feelings of empathy, who is interested only in defeating others.  Though he wrote this in 2009, he describes leaders we recognize: "A lot of trouble in the world can be traced to people whose Russian doll is an empty shell....[T]hey are intellectually capable of adopting another's viewpoint without any of the accompanying feelings.  They successfully fake empathy.  Whenever they achieve power...their disdain for truth and morality allows them to manipulate others into carrying out their evil plans."

How are they successful?  De Waal continues: "Their authority overrides the better judgment of underlings so that sometimes an entire nation, for example Germany in the previous century, falls for the cruel fantasies of a charismatic psychopath."  

I would add another phenomenon we've seen and are seeing more: people who serve them and essentially use them for their own selfish ends--they want power for their perverse ideologies, and especially a piece of the corruption.  But there is one more element that De Waal mentions, and it is important because it follows from his premise of natural empathy:

"What makes it so hard to wrap our heads around this mental disorder is that we can't imagine being immune to the suffering of others."

This could help account for the stunned response of so many Americans, and the denial indulged in by Chaos supporters, especially in the early months of this administration.  Is it really possible that an American President could cut off aid that would essentially kill thousands if not millions of vulnerable children?  Could that be true?  Isn't there another explanation for the cruelty and injustice visited upon human beings--men, women and children--in this country, now vilified instead of described as immigrants and asylum-seekers? For people living in fear of being snatched off the streets or worse by a brutal and incompetent but heavily armed army protected by the highest federal authority?  What about millions of people facing suddenly denied medical care, or the five million so far being cut from food stamps eligibility?  

Chaos and his minions have used the time-tested method of what is today commonly called "othering" to short-circuit any sort of empathy or sense of unfairness regarding these victims of official cruelty.  It is true that research shows that in primates as in humans, empathy and fairness are more easily extended to familiar members of one's own social group.  So Chaos evokes racial and class prejudices as well as fear of the unknown stranger, to create what used to be called--and can still usefully be called--dehumanization.

But now nearly everyone knows someone who can no longer afford medical care, just as they don't have to look far to see victims of high prices from tariffs and war.  Here and there the immigrant groups being targeted and vilified are well known in particular towns and cities.  People depend on their work, and see them as contributors to their communities.  That's why the Minneapolis response was so potent and had to be taken out of fickle public attention: because they said over and over that what they were doing was defending their neighbors.  They enacted empathy, every single day.

By now perhaps more Americans are able to face the fact that the ruling party and the ruling class, led by Chaos, is "immune to the suffering of others."  And if this November turns out to be a wave election, as it appears it well might, it may be because people vote, not just their particular self-interest, but to  bring fairness back to the social order, to fight back against callous inequality, to revive the ethic summarized in the phrase "you'd do the same for me."  This might be an empathy election. 

That would be a triumph for democracy in several senses.  For there is another implication of empathy as a natural state (not always dominant and not all the time, as De Waal describes) that he does not discuss directly. It has often been argued that without the authority of a religion or a king to transmit the moral laws given by a transcendent deity, there would be only cruelty, selfishness, chaos and immorality. 

 But if the sense of fairness, reciprocity and the constituents of empathy exist in nature, this cannot be so. There is no absolute need for artificial centers of authority in order for humans to behave ethically, fairly and with kindness and mercy. If ethics and what we call morality are rooted in nature, we don't absolutely require religious authority to impose them, let alone threaten us with eternal hellfire to force us to behave. We can always use models of behavior, guidance, inspiration and definition, and societies need some rules to fulfill the reciprocity and equity we recognize within.  But empathy is part of who we are.  We can assert that and express it in the sacred American ceremony of individuals voting.

Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 "In an age of conspiracism, some believe the truth is whatever gets the most views."

From a Politico article about MAGA's appetite for conspiracies being turned against itself.  In context, this paragraph follows that line:

“If you are looking for a way to gather an audience or to build clout on the internet, one way to do that is to post a lot of provocative or shocking content, and conspiracy theories can certainly fill that void,” said Matthew Hannah, an associate professor of digital studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lessons Without Plans

 

Many places in the world--and more particularly, in the United States--are in the midst of harsh object lessons about the chain of climate disruption effects.  At the moment, the combination of high heat and huge wildfires in Canada and northern Minnesota are causing dangerous air pollution in a number of northern US cities, which  currently have the worst air quality in the world.

The forecast is for this swath of heat and pollution to inundate the mid-Atlantic states, including the hot air capital of the world, Washington.  

The heat and deadly air usually affect the old and the young disproportionately, so the political impact is somewhat doubtful.  But this time it is going beyond that, as Bloomberg News reports that the pollution is "emptying the streets" of major northeastern and upper Midwest cities. None of this is going to improve the image of government, either cowed into ignoring all this or ideologically rigid in its denial.  Though often on the local and state level, officials are forced to deal with immediate crisis.

Bloomberg also reports that high heat has been straining the electrical grid, particularly in the Midwest.  This is an area where the combination of high heat and high humidity has in the past come close to lethal levels.  And I mean lethal--and without air conditioning due to grid failure, lethal to a lot of people, not just the poor.  

With its high heat, Europe is having its own air conditioning crisis this summer, but at least there (as well as India and other vulnerable areas) the so-called plug-in solar devices are becoming popular.  Yet in much of the United States they aren't even legal.  They would power at least some cooling in homes, even if the grid were down.

Meanwhile, a cyclosporiasis outbreak related to produce is making headlines.  An oped in USA Today by Dr. Tyler B. Evans notes that this outbreak is not due to a more virulent strain or anything particularly unusual.  It is easily detectable in produce by ordinary food inspection.  Unfortunately under the Chaos administration those inspections are fewer, due to lack of interest and personnel.  

All of this--climate and health related alike-- is completely predictable, but instead of planning and paying attention, we will go through a cycle of suffering and political controversy before cooler heads actually effectuate remedies and safeguards.  And in this climate (physical as well as cultural), cooler heads are at a premium.

Commentators wonder why the US electorate is so down on the political establishment, while political cynicism among officeholders has reached critical heights.  Witness the lavish funding of ICE and the cynical excuses, while an entire federal police agency is utterly cynical and irresponsible, turning a blind eye to its thugs continuing to murder people (in Maine, which may have doomed Susan Collins chances no matter who the Democrats select, as well as Houston and Memphis), and a labor crisis is only beginning due to the demonization of immigrants.  When will these lessons be learned?

Not Our Project

 

On the Fourth of July weekend, we watched the hit movie Project Hail Mary on streaming.  Like the novel by Andy Weir, it was engaging and entertaining.  My impression is that his stories proceed in a long line of science fiction, back perhaps to Jules Verne but certainly to the first generations of American science fiction writers, many of them scientists or engineers, who built their stories around plausible technologies and current scientific theories or speculations: the so-called hard science fiction.  Others like early Stanislaw Lem also appear in this lineage.  

Weir also absorbs influences from science fiction movies and television, with references in this movie specifically to Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman and E.T., for example.  That lineage includes 1950s films that set the basic familiar framework of this story: a threat to life on earth is detected, governments of the Earth (perhaps after initial skepticism) or (in some cases) wealthy patrons find scientists to discover a solution and, with the help of the military or other action-oriented entity, go on a dangerous adventure to solve the problem, eliminate the danger and save the planet.

There is an additional lineage in science fiction in which the story is a metaphor for some current or just-identified social problem or danger from a technology itself.  This goes back to H.G. Wells and certainly includes the aforementioned Star Trek.  These stories may offer the same kind of adventure, but with perhaps more relevance to a current concern. 

So part of my response to the Hail Mary movie was the same as my response to the book when I read it five years ago or so.  Instead of constructing a story around the very real threat to the planet of climate distortion, Weir invented a fictional danger that in a way was kind of opposite: some unknown cosmic force was causing the sun to dim, so the planet would die from the cold.  

The movie is an even better illustration of why he did it than the novel.  It is dramatic--there is a visible antagonist (which in this case doesn't appear to be conscious or at least intentional), and solution requires very dramatic tech: a completely new and fabulously equipped spacecraft fueled by a new source (ironically by the very force that threatens the planet), on a space journey of unprecedented and otherwise impossible distance to another star, and eventually the cooperation of a previously unknown alien species, vaguely on the level of humans.  

To achieve this--to identify the problem, marshal the resources and expertise, a powerful organization created and supported by the world's governments is apparently given vast power and a blank check. This does not seem to be an irrational response to an imminent threat to all life on Earth.  

When watching the movie, however, and especially the portrayal of Eva Stratt, the head of this organization, as played by Sandra Huller, I could not help thinking of the organization created by the United Nations to confront climate distortion which came to be known as the Ministry for the Future in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel of that same title, and its chief, Mary Murphy.  It is also a fictional response to a threat to life on Earth, which in this case happens to be very, very real.

Although there is dramatic action in KSR's novel which spreads over decades, there is no shiny spaceship or life and death drama in space confronting a phenomenon that can be seen in real time.  KSR's novel may yet make a fine movie, but it will likely not be anything like Weir's.  

Still, the idea that the world would unite and offer unlimited resources to keep the sun from dimming and freezing the Earth is rational and reasonable.  Whether it is realistic is another question.  Perhaps an easily identified "enemy" or cause, in the present, would make a difference.  But that's clearly not happening anywhere near that extent in addressing climate distortion, and even the few commitments previously made--resulting from the Paris Accords, for example-- seem to be slowly but effectively fading.

Is there a Project Hail Mary applied to climate distortion possible in the real future?  The reference is to the Hail Mary pass in football, a desperate heave at the end of the game, often covering 50 yards or more, into the end zone to possibly--but not likely--win the game.  It's named after the Catholic prayer, and was first used in the 1930s to describe a play by the Catholic university of Notre Dame, at the time the most famous football team in America.  The problem applying it to climate distortion is that there appears to be no single solution once it has taken hold, and addressing the causes of future distortion must begin years earlier. That and other complexities are dealt with admirably in KSR's novel.  It requires focused and consistent commitment over time. 

But in addressing the very real and growing threats to life on Earth posed by human-caused greenhouse gas pollution and related ecological attacks like ocean acidification and various threats that together could lead to mass extinction, which certainly threaten human civilization and life as we know it, if not-- in the worst situations--humanity itself...such focused and comprehensive commitment is not happening, let alone a powerful organization working on it.  Even though this threat has been known for decades, and right now is as plain as the sunburn on your face.

We continue every day, even as the climate distortion underway becomes more obvious and obviously dangerous, to look away.  We assign confronting them to our nightmares and as expressed in the major themes of futuristic stories in our time: dystopias and zombie apocalypse.  

Take this Fourth of July.  Held during an intense heat wave, the official Washington celebration of the 250th anniversary was centered in a faux state fair grounds, with tents surrounding a vast central area without shade or shelter on the mall.  There was no apparent protection from the heat of even a normally hot Washington summer; apparently not even water.  (One woman reported that the only water she could find was a concession selling a bottle of it for $5.  But they'd actually run out of it--and still they refused to even refund her money.)  As a result, hundreds were treated or evaluated for heat-related illness at area hospitals, even though the events were badly attended. 

Officials were able to evacuate the grounds when the heat became too intense, and again when lightning and thunderstorms threatened, but when they tried again to cancel evening events on the mall because of an approaching lightning storm, they were countermanded by the White House so King Chaos could speak and the fireworks go off. 

The fireworks themselves, billed as the largest display in history, created such a toxic environment that immediately afterwards, D.C. experienced "Code Red" air pollution--the worst of any major city in the world.   The New York Times reported that the smoke from the fireworks was so thick during the last 30 minutes that the fireworks themselves were not visible in the sky.  But the nearby lightning was.  

It wasn't only Washington.  Los Angeles also reported intense pollution expected from their fireworks.  Moreover, the fireworks everywhere sent tons of CO2 and other greenhouse and noxious gases into the atmosphere, to otherwise harm the sustaining water and air as well as other animals and plants, as they attack the health of vulnerable humans.  This at a time when other equally impressive kinds of displays by laser and drone are available.

A society that is serious about a long-term commitment to addressing the causes and effects of climate distortion would behave differently.  We apparently are not such a society.  This may be a small example, but it is a telling one.  We're in a different movie altogether.     

If You Can Keep It

 Of all the myths and legends and actual history surrounding the founding, one story comes most obviously to mind on this 250th anniversary.  It comes from a more than decade after the Declaration, after the War for Independence, and after the initial Articles of Confederation.  It comes from the Constitutional Convention.

Moments after the Convention came to final agreement and adjourned, the story goes that a woman stopped Benjamin Franklin as he was leaving the hall, and asked him what kind of government the nation would now have. Though the quotation is perhaps a more succinct version of his words, they are the ones that have come down to us:

"A Republic--if you can keep it."

It is the question of the moment, because the Republic currently is teetering.  Whether the question is preserving or reviving or both, can we keep it is the guiding and crucial question of the future, beginning this year with the upcoming November elections. 

No enemy, foreign or domestic, has done as much damage to the American Republic than elected and appointed officials of the federal government have done and continue to do this year, as well as last year.  It turns out that norms we assumed were inviolable are easily ignored and violated with impunity.  Our only constitutional protections it turns out are impeachments and elections.  

I was working in Washington during the 200th anniversary, the Bicentennial in 1976. (I wrote about it here.)  The integrity of the Republic had been tested just two years before, with the hearings in the House and Senate over the crimes of the Nixon administration known collectively as Watergate.  Those painstaking hearings, broadcast to a huge audience over months, saw agonized Republicans and reluctant Democrats move towards Impeachment and conviction of President Nixon.  In the end, no one tried to deny proven facts, or to repeatedly insist that Americans believe what politicians say and not what they could plainly see for themselves.  

At nearly the same time the Vietnam War stumbled to its ignominious end, after so many revelations of official lies and skullduggery used to justify and manipulate it.  Though the country immediately applied as much amnesia as possible to exploring the meanings of that war, some impressions led to change.  With a new administration to be elected later that year, many looked forward to what in fact happened:  professionalism and something akin to integrity became more of the norm in government and the military. 

The mood in 1976 was a little punch drunk, but there was relief that the Republic had in the end acquitted itself well, and hope that lessons had been learned that would strengthen the Republic.  

Recently the current vice-president commented that President Nixon's crimes in Watergate would be no more than a one day story today.  That may be true, if only because the current occupant of the presidency commits an impeachable offense nearly every day, with a great many High Crimes included among the Misdemeanors.  But there are few if any Republican statesmen in Congress, and by the end of this congress there will be none.  Impeachments are no longer considered on their merits, but seen only as partisan attacks--except perhaps by the American people.

This past week the radical right majority of the Supreme Court subverted the law and the Constitution to award even more power to our mad king--indeed providing him (as a dissenting Justice wrote) power beyond that of actual kings.

Last week his own financial disclosure form showed the extent of Boss Chaos corruption--some two billion dollars in one year, at least. Members of his cabinet, staff and even the First Lady, have also enriched themselves. Influence peddling, inside information and insider trading, market manipulation and forms of coercion are either on the public record or strongly suspected. Not only has America never seen corruption on this scale, the amounts dwarf the stealings of leaders anywhere in the world.

 They are robbing the economy and stealing from the nation and increasing the debt that future presidents must pay.  They have damaged the federal government extensively and deeply, at a critical time, endangering the country and all of its people--except perhaps the billionaires who are absorbing its funds.  Agencies of the federal government important to the safety of Americans and to stability and conscience in the world have been wrecked.  Professionalism in government and the military is being punished and erased, replaced by incompetence, cowardice and corruption. Foreign relations have been wrecked, and bribery is openly practiced.

Thanks to Chaos privileging his wealthy cronies, millions of Americans are losing health care this month, putting further pressure on a health care system that could collapse. This on top of high grocery prices, gasoline and the cost of living generally.  Except for the projects of favored billionaires, science and technology are being bled of federal support, which not only weakens the future but strands graduates in those fields looking to begin useful careers.  

In 1976 President Gerald Ford marked the Bicentennial by attending the annual swearing in of new US citizens at Monticello on July 5, praising the role of immigration and making it a central symbol of the uniquely American identity.

  In the summer of 2026, some 10,000 immigrants were arrested in five days, swelling the warehouse prisons where they may languish unseen indefinitely. This relentless attack on immigrants joins the systematic reversal of progress on racial justice of recent decades. The opening words of the Declaration being celebrated--all men are created equal--are no longer operational.  Even the rights and status of women--the largest category of voters--are under direct attack. 

On July 3, the New York Times headlined a story about the FBI sending more than 200 agents to "investigate" phantom fraud in 2020 elections in Georgia. (The photo at the top ran with that story.)  This is another pathetic but nonetheless dangerous effort to undermine the upcoming elections.  It also signals a dire threat to those elections: the substitution of repeated lies for easily demonstrable facts, well beyond the usual political mendacity.  

That is a daily feature of the Chaos administration, and in the upcoming campaigns it is likely to be greatly augmented by AI generated lies, such as videos of Democrats saying things they never said.  Perhaps financed by dark money, unattributed, with some likely the products of foreign operations that Chaos has welcomed into American elections.

There's more to be said about the celebrations themselves this year.  But for now, 250 years into what is even more accurately called the American experiment, the Republic is in peril.  Franklin's question is apropos to this moment.    

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die: and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

--William Stafford

An Island Full of Geese and Stars

The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man

One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,

One's tootings at the wedding of the soul

Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds

Occurred above the empty house and the leaves

Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,

As if someone lived there. Such floods of white

Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind

Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly

Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays

Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths. 

The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.

To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine

And pines that are comets, so it occurs,

And a little island full of geese and stars:

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, 

Has any chance to mate with life

That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life

That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

--Wallace Stevens

Resistance and Renewal

 A post in the New York Times by Julia Angwin and Ami-Fields Meye, authors of a forthcoming globally researched book on effective dissidence, champions the concept of "collective stubbornness." The most conspicuous American example lately has been Minneapolis, and its comprehensive and persistent resistance to the ICE invasion, which still goes on, despite the absent cameras (and another bogus indictment by the Chaos department of Injustice.) 

It's not the big rallies, they say, although these have their obvious uses.  It's the inventive and especially persistent activity locally that builds community as it organizes and expands its activities, finding new allies as it goes.  

Aside from the examples they provide, such efforts are often highlighted by Rachel Maddow, for example, but besides collective stubbornness there is also individual stubbornness. There are many examples of that historically, too--the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos being one, as featured here.  Simply bearing witness (and additionally articulating it) is a form of resistance, individual or collective, as proven by dictatorial efforts to prevent it and punish it. 

Resistance is a growing electoral battle cry among Democratic candidates in this year's upcoming elections--and in the pro-active organization to thwart Chaos in distorting or destroying those elections. It comes at a time that political observers mark the political weakness of Chaos and his administration, including chaos among Chaos supporters.

But that is not stopping or even greatly slowing down the destruction that Chaos continues to impose.  Apart from the obvious and costly outrages to federal spaces in Washington, a more damaging example recently is another Chaos federal bribe to get companies to abandon offshore wind power projects.  Like so much else that Chaos does, this may be illegal but by the time the courts get to it, the damage is done.  

The long term consequences are potentially enormous, and fateful.  We're already seeing the abandonment of public health resulting in measles epidemics in the US, a highly dangerous Ebola outbreak in Africa, and the incursion of other previously rare diseases into the US.  

Part of the public dialogue now is about the need to plan ahead to reverse the worst of Chaos, renew valuable institutions and move forward once Chaos is out of power, even partially.  There are calls for comprehensive plans on the order of the notorious fascist blueprint Project 2025, though some observers find this a dubious comparison.

A recent post by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo outlines the enormity, the difficulty and the possible resistance to such efforts at renewal.  It is a sobering commentary.

Kurtz regards the late but recent court-order to return the Kennedy Center to its statutory name, as a kind of debut to this.   "This was the first step in what will be a decades-long effort to strip Trump from American public life and repair the damage he has done. It will be slow, painstaking, halting, and thankless work — and perhaps most frustratingly it will have to overcome the inertia of faux reconciliation and indifference."

"The political dynamics of this renewal, America’s reconstruction history suggests, will be brutal," he warns:

"Each effort to undo what Trump has done will be met with howls of outrage, real or not, to maximize the political price exacted. Elected officials will have to decide whether to expend political capital to pay that price. If the 2008 financial crisis and Trump I are any indication, the stomach will not be there to engage in these fights even in the immediate aftermath of Trump II, let alone for the decades it will take to finish the work."

"The destruction of state capacity is the biggest and hardest thing to reverse. But the cosmetic and structural changes Trump has wrought without legal authority, in D.C., national parks, and the White House itself will carry symbolic weight that is likely to trigger the kind of backlash past Democratic administrations have avoided."

Obviously we don't know how it will all play out, but if it takes decades to restore what should never have been destroyed, that's a double whammy on the decades ahead of concentrated response to the growing dangers of climate distortion.  It doesn't help that some of these institutions are precisely the ones that are most needed in that comprehensive response.

But clearly this much is true.  As Kurtz writes, " If we don’t begin to confront now the scale and scope of the work ahead, we, too, will wilt when the times comes."  Though I hope we can at least change that "will" to "may."

Midnight

Light on her feet, dressed in black, her footsteps couldn't be

 heard at all.

She went through the arcade. The lantern was out. As she climbed

the stone stairs they called out "Halt." Her face

was steaming in the darkness, all white. Under her apron

she was hiding the violin. "Who goes there?" She didn't answer.

She stood there motionless, her hands high, holding the violin

tightly between her knees. She was smiling. 

 June 15, 1968

 by Yannis Ritsos 

tr. Edmund Keeley

painting by Magritte

Greek poet Yannis Ritsos wrote many poems such as this one in the years of a dictatorship in Greece from 1967 to 1974.  He wrote some of them from a detention center for political prisoners.

 I knew a Greek student at Knox College in the mid-1960s.  His name was Spyros.  I recall hearing that someone who'd known him at Knox had visited him in Greece during these later years.  Spyros showed him the secret room in his house where he hid his books. 

Climbing along the River

Willows never forget how it feels

 to be young. 

 Do you remember where you came from?

 Gravel remembers.

Even the upper end of the river

 believes in the ocean. 

 Exactly at midnight 

yesterday sighs away. 

 What I believe is,

 all animals have one soul. 

 Over the land they love

 they crisscross forever.

--William Stafford