Captain Future Sez

Hey kids, tired of dodging screen-obscuring pop-up ads that are increasingly hard to kill just to read a few paragraphs on the Internet? Bothered by idiots jumping around in the side panel while you're trying to read? Weary of the same stupids ads about weight loss miracles disgused as news stories on the sites you depend on for actual news? Well, here at Dreaming Up Daily we don't go in for any of that. No pop-ups, no alarming messages from bogus virus killers, and most of the time, no ads at all! Sure, the content gets depressing at times--but we're up to the challenge, right? And we talk about dreams as well as nightmares. We have some fun, too. So count your blessings and come around often, for a superior Internet reading experience. And drink your Ovaltine!

Consequences: Heat

For the past several years, commentators have concentrated on various consequences of climate change, especially sea level rise. And there's been equally admirable attention to the chain of consequences and their interactions. All of this has been and will be necessary to scope the dimensions of crisis, especially those effects that aren't obviously connected. Last winter there also had to be discussion of counter-intuitive consequences, like more snow in certain places.

But oddly perhaps there's been little discussion of the most obvious consequence of global heating: heat. But with heat waves in the U.S. a new report from Stanford is very timely.

"Using a large suite of climate model experiments, we see a clear emergence of much more intense, hot conditions in the U.S. within the next three decades," said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study... Diffenbaugh concluded that hot temperature extremes could become frequent events in the U.S. by 2039, posing serious risks to agriculture and human health.

"In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," said Diffenbaugh...

The study used two dozen climate models to calculate the likely rise in temperatures of approximately 2 degrees C. Applying their findings to powerful computer simulations for the future, the study found a heat waves equal to the most intense heat wave experienced between 1951 and 1999 is likely to occur five times between 2020 and 2029 in the western and central U.S. The decade after 2030 is likely to have at least seven such intense heat waves. Heats waves equal to the longest and worst are likely to happen three times in the eastern U.S.

"By the decade of the 2030s, we see persistent, drier conditions over most of the U.S.," Diffenbaugh said. "Not only will the atmosphere heat up from more greenhouse gases, but we also expect changes in the precipitation and soil moisture that are very similar to what we see in hot, dry periods historically. In our results for the U.S., these conditions amplify the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations."

Besides harming human health and agriculture, these hot, dry conditions could lead to more droughts and wildfires in the near future, he said. And many of these climate change impacts could occur within the next two decades – years before the planet is likely tor each the 2 C threshold targeted by some governments and climate experts, he added."

"The results were surprising," the Stanford University News story said, though it's not clear who was surprised. These findings are consistent with others, including the UN climate panel reports. They suggest that at minimum the beginning of the transition from Climate Crisis to Climate Cataclysm at mid century.

But in the real felt context they also suggest the consequences, viscerally. There is a new book on air-conditioning that appears to be the beginning of a discussion that will become more and more pertinent. My own vivid recollections of severe heat waves in Pittsburgh suggest the range of difficulties. My life became a quest for air conditioning. I had one room air conditioner that I moved from bedroom to office and back. On the worst days, I spent as much time as I could in air conditioned public areas--restaurants, movie theatres. It was often too cold, but that was better than the literally suffocating heat.

Air conditioning requires electrical power, which currently contributes to the greenhouse gas pollution that creates future heat waves. It's a causal feedback loop, otherwise known as a vicious circle. This is one issue that is better faced when cooler heads can prevail, and not because they are the elite that can afford air conditioning.

There are consequences in where people live as well as how. All of this lies within the lifetimes of many alive today. Not to mention what's going on right now. (Make that right right now.) Fortunately some people have been thinking about these problems and devising solutions. But so far, there is not the public will or atmosphere to beginning dealing with these problems before everyone gets too hot under the collar to think straight. If on some other level we haven't already passed that tipping point already.

Word Cup

I heard a CNN reporter say that Spain had "clinched" the World Cup. This is a now common misuse of the word as applied to sports contests. When the Giants are in first place by five games over the second place team with four games to play in the season, they have "clinched" the division championship, even though they have not yet won it, because there are still games to play. "Clinched" means that mathematically you will win.

But Spain won the final game (or "match") in the World Cup. So they didn't clinch the Cup. They won the World Cup.

So who cares? When you misuse a word like this, you lose its meaning. If "clinch" is substituted for "win," how do you describe the situation previously described by "clinch?"

Another such fashion is in basketball reporting, in which announcers talk about "shot attempts." What is the difference between a shot attempt and a shot? The distinction used to be between a shot and a made shot. So what in the world is a shot attempt? Somebody tries to shoot but fails--the ball falls out of his or her hand? It's a different sort of word problem--an unnecessary addition that clots things up, and confuses meaning, in the guise of saying something meaningful.

It's useful to make these points in a sports context because, for all the ribbing that sportswriters and announcers take about their verbiage, they have a tradition of careful and precise use of language. For example, one of the last bastions of the correct distinction between "less" and "fewer" is ESPN's SportsCenter. In sports, the distinction between quantity and number is still important.

That distinction is important everywhere, but it is slipping away because we're losing words. Dip into a Jane Austen dialogue and within a sentence or two, it is clear how words name distinctions of feeling and perception that would go unrecognized without the precise words to describe them.

Headline: Mockingbird

On Sunday I posted a lot about To Kill A Mockingbird on the 50th anniversary of its publication, mostly re-purposing old posts at Stage Matters and Boomer Hall of Fame. But for the Monday give-it-to-me-in-a-Twitter post, here's the "takeaway" (apart from the Harper Lee quote):

The second theme, which follows from the first and is explicitly stated as a lesson to the children in the novel, is that of cultivating empathy and understanding by trying to see the world from the other’s perspective (as Scout does finally when she stands on Boo Radley’s porch at the end), by metaphorically living in someone else’s skin, walking in their shoes. This is a lesson about life and specifically about race. It remains the most crucial lesson in our public as well as private lives, and so this too accounts for this novel’s standing.

There are a lot of reasons, or sources of arguments against racism, which animate different people to different degrees. But the principle of empathy was very powerful in the late 50s and early 60s among whites who saw the Civil Rights movement mostly from a distance. As it came closer to home, if empathy was well established, then barriers to racial equality were easier to overcome.

Empathy is likely to be a key necessity, a community and civilizational survival skill, in the difficult future, as it is today in various political wranglings with real consequences for real people, who often aren't party to the "debate."

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

'....in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”

Harper Lee

(photo: Mary Badham and Harper Lee. More about the 50th anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird in posts below.)

Remembering "To Kill A Mockingbird"

Today—July 11—is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most beloved and enduring American novels of the 20th century, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Upon publication in 1960 it became immediately successful, and won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It remains among th top 10 best selling novels from then until now. It is one of the five most assigned novels in American schools, and American librarians recently voted it the best novel of the twentieth century.

It was of course inspiration for the 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Only Lawrence of Arabia could deny this movie the honor of Best Picture. It is still among the most popular and acclaimed movies of all time. A few years ago the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch—the character Peck played-- as the greatest film hero in the history of movies.

(That's Harper Lee with Gregory Peck in the photo, at the time of the filming. This appreciation continues after the next photo.)

To refresh your memory of the story: Atticus Finch is the widowed father of the tomboy Scout (Harper Lee’s self-portrait) and Jem (Scout’s older brother). Atticus is a lawyer appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a young black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. This event is based partly on a case of her father’s, and partly on the infamous Scottsboro Trials of young black men falsely convicted of raping a white woman, also in the 1930s, when Harper Lee was about the same age as her fictional stand-in, Jean-Louise, known as Scout.

Harper Lee transformed memories of her childhood: her father was the inspiration for Atticus Finch, Truman Capote became Dill, her brother Edwin and cousin Jennings became Jem, and Boo Radley was perhaps based on someone else in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama (as discovered by the director of a University of Alabama production of the stage version, who visited Monroeville.)

In Monroeville in the 1930s, a rich man’s son was caught joyriding in a stolen car. His father persuaded the sheriff not to arrest the boy, but to leave the punishment up to him. He imposed three years of house arrest, but it turned into a life sentence when even after that time the young man found he could no longer face leaving the confines of his house, except at night. He became an object of mystery and fear in the neighborhood. At least according to the local story.

Nelle Harper Lee left Monroeville for college, then law school in her father’s footsteps, though she stopped just shy of completing her degree. Instead she went to New York, where she worked as an airline reservations clerk and assisted her childhood friend, Truman Capote, in researching the book he took full credit for, In Cold Blood, also a classic, about two murderers in Kansas. Catherine Keener plays her in the 2005 film Capote (photo above), and looks very much like Lee’s 1960s photos.

She began writing in earnest in the mid 50s, returning frequently to Alabama to nurse her ailing father. One Christmas in Manhattan, a songwriter friend and his wife gave her a unique gift—a year’s income, to support her writing. (The songwriter was Michael Brown, who made his reputation and probably his fortune producing industrial musicals for clients like DuPont and Woolworth.) She used it to write the first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird.

The novel was innovative in several ways. Through the narrative voice Harper Lee developed, she solved a perennial problem for writers: how do you accurately portray events from childhood to reflect both the feelings and perceptions of the time, and the fact that you’re looking back with the knowledge and insight of an adult?

The wedding of a kind of fictionalized memoir describing the texture of childhood and a particular place and time, with a courtroom drama involving an important social and political issue, was itself a synthesis that violated the rules. But in Lee’s telling, both elements gave power to the other. The somewhat languid mood of much of the early parts of the book (it takes place over three years) gradually quickens into page-turning drama.

Lee’s first submitted version of the work was reportedly more of a series of linked stories. But her publisher insisted on a more unified novel. Lee was able to achieve this partly by following in linear time the education of the young girl, Scout and her brother, Jem, and partly by weaving a few important themes throughout the book.

The first was about innocence, both of children and of “the mockingbird”—the innocent who only sings and does no one any harm—which applies to both Tom Robinson, the accused black man Atticus defends, and to Boo Radley, the neighbor who lives in darkness, the stranger in their midst who receives their projections of violence, and is therefore a source of fear.

He is different (and a kind of artist, who creates sculptures and leaves them for the children to find, along with talismans of his own “normal” childhood). He is literally unseen, and so represents the aspects of people we are blind to, because of our preconceptions. This obviously applies to race, and there is also a strong theme of class in the novel—which cuts both ways. (It can be argued that Atticus has his own class prejudices.)

The second theme, which follows from the first and is explicitly stated as a lesson to the children in the novel, is that of cultivating empathy and understanding by trying to see the world from the other’s perspective (as Scout does finally when she stands on Boo Radley’s porch at the end), by metaphorically living in someone else’s skin, walking in their shoes. This is a lesson about life and specifically about race. It remains the most crucial lesson in our public as well as private lives, and so this too accounts for this novel’s standing.

This theme is reinforced in other ways throughout the novel, notably by the brief story of Mrs. Dubose, a surly neighbor who insults everyone, including Scout and Jem, and says harsh things about Atticus. When Jem loses his temper and destroys her garden flowers, Atticus sends him to Mrs. Dubose to apologize and make restitution. Mr. D. requires him to read aloud to her everyday. When she dies, they learn that she was always in pain and addicted to morphine, which accounted for her harsh behavior. She decided she would die free of her addiction, and Jem reading to her was a way for her to bear the pain. It’s another example of assumptions and projections contradicted by understanding, as well as a story of redemption and the power of simple acts to do good.

As the Civil Rights Movement came to fruition in the early 1960s, the book struck a chord. So did the equally classic 1962 movie version, which in addition to Gregory Peck at the height of his fame, had quite a pedigree behind the camera. Alan Pakula produced it (though only his second feature as a producer, he later produced Klute, Sophie's Choice and other hits, as well as directing All the President's Men, etc.) Robert Mulligan directed, Elmer Bernstein wrote the musical score, and the screenplay was written by Horton Foote, the Texan playwright, who had written extensively for television drama and later wrote many acclaimed movie scripts, including Tender Mercies for Robert Duvall. Duvall’s first movie role was Boo Radley.

Harper Lee was a consultant on the movie and present for the filming (mostly on a backlot in California.) She and other participants formed lifelong friendships on that set. She and Gregory Peck in particular remained close. As she watched the first scene being shot she was seen to shed a few tears: he reminded her so much of her father. For his part, Peck’s grandson Harper Peck Voll is named after Harper Lee.

Young Mary Badham, who played the six year old “Scout,” also kept in touch with Peck for the rest of his life. She felt close to him immediately on the set, and between takes would be seen hanging onto him in his lap. She called him “Atticus” ever after.

A wide search for children to play Scout and her brother Jem was conducted in various southern cities, but the actors selected, Badham and Philip Alford as Jem, lived within a couple of blocks of each other in Birmingham, though they’d never met.

Mary Badham was herself a “tomboy,” as was her character, and the girl that Scout was based on—Harper Lee. She acted for several more years, and was in one more notable movie (This Property is Condemned, based on a Tennessee Williams play, written by Francis Ford Copolla and starring Robert Redford and Natalie Wood.) She gave up acting by the late 60s but returned to it in recent years. While Harper Lee has long been reclusive, refusing most appearances, it was often Mary Badham who represents this movie when it is honored and shown at festivals.

The movie streamlines the story of the novel by collapsing the events into a single year. It very carefully tells the story from the children’s point of view, even in shot selection. Though the subplot of Mrs. Dubose (played by the accomplished actor, Ruth White) was shot, director Mulligan felt it sidetracked the momentum of the film and most of the scenes were cut. It’s said her performance was brilliant.

There are so many indelible images, performances and moments in this movie. Mary Badham was remarkable, especially in a scene of Peck as Attticus putting Scout to bed and talking of her mother (added to the film and not a scene in the book), and then of course in one of the most moving scenes in any film—when she sees Robert Duvall behind the door, and recognizes him, and with a luminous smile says, “Hey, Boo.” Her face in this film is absolutely unique.

And of course, Gregory Peck, who could express so much with presence, gesture and nuance—with a tilt of his head and a raised eyebrow. The makers of this film understood and complemented this power. They allowed him to react without speaking; in a key scene, in which he learns that his client is dead and he must tell others of this, we see him mostly from the back.

This style worked very well for Harper Lee’ story, which needed a delicate touch on screen. That her novel got such a near-perfect movie has helped keep the novel alive.

Ultimately, it is the book itself, which is Harper Lee’s achievement, justly celebrated today. Though she attempted a couple of other books, this is the only one she published. She lived a quiet but full life in New York and in a house full of books back in Monroeville, Alabama. Now in her 80s, she lives nearby. In 2006, Harper Lee reaffirmed her dedication to writing and the written word, in a letter to Oprah Winfrey. "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”

Emerson for the Day

"It is awful to look into the mind of man and see how free we are...Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances,--a hundred things you cannot do: but inside,--the terrible freedom."

Emerson

painting by Kandinsky

Emerson for the Day

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"

H.D. Thoreau

photo: Walden Pond

LeBronian Motion

2nd Update: Man, it's ugly. The NY Times, AP, Sports Illustrated and Washington Post --no doubt among others--join the negative reaction, turning LeBron from hero to villain instantly, and LeBron's ex-boss, dissed by hearing the decision on TV, unloaded on his erstwhile meal ticket, calling him a narcissistic traitor, and accused him of quitting during the playoffs. Here's a sample, from SI: "But James does not have the heart of a champion. He does not have the competitive fire of Jordan, the bull-headed determination of Kobe Bryant, the quiet self-confidence of Tim Duncan, the willful defiance of Isiah or the winning-is-everything hunger of Magic Johnson. He is an extremely gifted player who wants the easy way out."
Very ugly.

Update: It's Miami.

So tonight LeBron James is going to announce where he plays basketball next season. On a prime-time television special. About him. For an hour.

I may not be as exercised about it as this guy, but it is pretty weird. Nor have I paid that much attention to LeBron, except to note that he's a hell of a player, and his behavior in playoff games has been odd, to say the least.

But the stakes are beyond NBA basketball. James has apparently announced his ambition to become a billionaire, and if he chooses to leave his current city of employment (Cleveland), that city's economy could take a major hit.

So what will he do? Stay in Cleveland, where his team disgraced itself by quitting in their final playoff games, but where he will rake in the most salary, and be the undisputed King? Or go to Miami, where another star player (Chris Bosh) has joined the superstar Dwayne Wade, and figure to be clearly be the favorite to finally reach the NBA finals and get a ring--but where LeBron will no longer be the sole focus? Or will he go to New York, and become King of the supposed media capital of the world?

If he's serious about winning a championship and Miami can still afford him, he goes there. He is apparently less likely now to go to New York, and while there's a logic to him staying in Cleveland, I'd be surprised by that.

To suggest how really weird this is, apparently none of the teams he is considering knows whether he will choose them. He's not just announcing his choice to the world. He's announcing it to the team he will deign to play for.

For the past several decades, sports stars have made lots of money, comparable to Hollywood stars. What they do is singular, especially in the playoffs. So standards of what is obscene, especially when so many are unemployed and otherwise struggling, do change. But this is getting well into the territory of the disgusting.

So as an NBA fan, I'll want to know what he decides. But I can wait to check it online when I normally make the sports rounds. I hope whatever he decides that LeBron does make it into the finals next year, and that the Lakers kick his ass. Is that just because I'm a Lakers fan? Maybe. But I'll say this: even if he decides on the Chicago Bulls (a longshot now--it looks like either Miami or Cleveland), LeBron James is no Michael Jordan.

Consequences: Prepare Now

Catching up to President Obama's announcement on Saturday on a $2 billion federal investment in solar technologies: the significance of this is obvious economically and in the fight to save the farther future from runaway climate catastrophe.

Further, one of the technologies being financed includes ways to store sun-generated energy for use at another time--a key feature in an adapatable power generating and distribution system.

But investment in many solar and certain kinds of wind technologies have another important feature: these are decentralized, local power sources. The ability of communities and even households to be self-sustaining, especially in energy, are key to surviving the Climate Cataclysm period of the nearer future. Soon enough, the grid is going to be more expensive and less dependable. The entire nation will continue to be held hostage to oil supplying countries, or even to what other countries can do to our economy and currency. Wars over oil can continue to cripple our economy.

Anything that increases self-sufficiency, as part of the "resilience" that's become the buzzword in certain quarters, is important--like 82,000 homes to be weatherized this summer with funds from the Recovery Act.

And the homegrown answer can't be left up to coal, which is polluting in every possible way, damaging to the environment which more and more must sustain us, and leaves communities just as beholden to machinations from outside--maybe not in another nation, but in that other country of corporate rule.

So fortunately the ship of state is also turning away from coal, perhaps slowly and even quietly, but decisively. On Wednesday the Obama administration issued new rules governing coal plant pollution.

For the ever-moving target of now, jobs are a key to community and household stability. The writing is on the wall for fossil fuel related jobs. The Union of Concerned Scientists claim that wind power can generate two to three times the number of jobs as fossil fuels. I heard someone on TV assert than even now, there are more U.S. jobs in wind than in coal. Why is this a secret?

The answer for now, the near future, the far future, is all the same: clean local energy and conservation. Just think about what they both might mean for summers with more very hot days and nights, as well as winters with more snow and rain, when you really don't want blackouts and brownouts, or energy it is too expensive to use.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service."

Mark Vonnegut, introduction to Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect. Drawing is also by Kurt Vonnegut. Note the "should have been." By 2005 Vonnegut believed: "Well, it's too late! Look, the game is over! The game is over. We've killed the planet, the life support system."

Consequences: Feeling It

The consequences of climate change begin to be acknowledged and understood, but slowly. In a human sense that's understandable--denial as well as distraction and unfamiliarity slow it down, but eventually it will sink in.

It's one thing to read about possible future consequences of, say, sea levels rising. The breadth and depth of these changes can be noted and comprehended intellectually, and by some, imaginatively. In fact, intellect and especially imagination are crucial necessities.

But when temperatures rise above 100F, as they are in cities in the US Eastern and Middle Atlantic states, the consequences of prolonged bouts of heat become viscerally evident. The external ones can be observed--machinery, wiring, urban infrastructure frying along with vegetables in the garden and crops in the field, while bodies of water begin drying up. And the internal ones can be felt as well as observed in others. The growing difficulties of thinking clearly, keeping a "cool head," and of acting with energy, in periods of high heat. The obsession with keeping cool, the exasperation becoming fear and desperation.

In a postscript to his visionary book, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, David W. Orr confesses the personal source of his concentration on the subject, which began in a blistering hot summer. "After the summer of 1980, climate change was important to me, not because I'd thought a great deal about it in an air-conditioned office, but because I had first felt it viscerally and somatically. My interest did not begin with any abstract intellectual process or deep thinking but rather with the felt experience of the thing, or what the thing will be like. That summer is recorded both mentally and bodily in memories of extreme heat with no respite."

There was another extremely hot summer or two at the end of the 80s, especially 1988 in the Eastern US. That experience is what drove my insistent focus on climate change and the future, as well as the more personal and selfish preference for the North Coast of California, where the heat rarely rises above 70F. Those late 80s hot summers led to some of the first public alarm reflected in books and other media, and inspired some interest in what I regard as still the best film about climate change, James Burke's After the Warming.

Surely there is some correlation between the killer heat waves that western European countries have experienced and their own focus on the Climate Crisis. As Stephan Faris's reporting in Forecast shows, people living in the most affected areas of the world so far--particularly those whose lives and livelihoods are tied to the land--experience, recognize and acknowledge the signs and the consequences of the reality that others foolishly and tragically reject.

So once again this summer, TV airheads chirp about "another hot one out there" and ways to beat the heat, as if the prospect of more and longer heat waves can be cured by more ice cream. Meanwhile, the vulnerable among us, already ignored and even targeted by shameful political callousness, will sicken and die silently from the heat, unknown, probably uncounted and unheeded. Especially the old.

My sympathies to those who must endure the heat today. Keep as cool as you can. And when your head is cooler, remember today. This is something we must all prepare for, while we try to prevent even worse for generations ahead.

A Climate Progress update on the heat wave and its relationship to the Climate Crisis.

Mankind's Greatest Invention

"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." So begins John Banville's essay on Robert C. Richardson's books on Emerson, in what has to be my favorite quote of recent years, perhaps of all time.

When you're a writer, no matter how famous or obscure, whether you're one of the handful anointed by income or crowned by royalties to bear the title of writer, or you're a wretch like me, insultingly underpaid for squeezing into dubious forms, sooner or later, what gives you the buzz and the meaning, is a sentence you see and hear that you've written.

Oh sure, some get off on paragraphs, and there's the lucky few that get to play with chapters or scenes, and whole books, plays, sagas. But even they share the secret (and often secretive) gleam of a shining sentence, appearing under their fingers.

I wrote a review of a book about a writer who made very good sentences: Jane Austen. And in it I wrote a pretty nifty sentence, at least I like it. And for once I will violate the code and call your attention to it. It is mere cleverness maybe, but it is musical and funny, with a touch of cultural wit at the center. Or maybe it's just cute, I don't care. These days I must take my pleasure where I can. And pointing out a really elegant sentence is forbidden. That's up to readers to discover, and if they don't, well, everybody loses.

So in connection with Jane Austen's journey from obscurity in life to Jane-mania in the 21st century, I wrote this: She has the fame of the single name: absent Tarzan, she is our only Jane.

Good. Now I can put the clipping away with all the other forgotten sentences, and make some more.

Where Are They?

Hey, GOPer Gulf Coast governors: where are the National Guard troops President Obama authorized you to call up to help clean up and protect the Gulf? In this emergency that you blame everybody else for not addressing, especially the federal government?

According to the Christian Science Monitor:

While most of the criticism has been heaped on federal agencies and the Obama administration, questions are being raised about the extent to which the four Gulf state governors (all Republicans) are responding too – specifically, on deployment of National Guard troops under their command.

In a recent investigative report, CBS News found that Louisiana's Gov. Jindal had deployed just 1,053 of the 6,000 troops available to him. "Alabama has deployed 432 troops of 3,000 available," according to CBS. "Even fewer have been deployed in Florida - 97 troops out of 2,500 - and Mississippi - 58 troops out of 6,000."

And, by the way, why do you keep harping on what you know won't work--like those phantom berms, that are destroying more than they are saving, and will likely dissolve in the next big storm?

Or all the hoohaw you're spewing about how the Jones Act is preventing foreign vessels from helping, when it isn't? And lots of skimmers and other vessels from elsewhere are deployed?

Maybe you're too busy helping the BP police state of the Gulf scare reporters away, or you're just serving your oil company masters. But hoping to pin failure on President Obama is no excuse for GOPer governors to be derelict in their duties. Stop the political flimflam and showboating, and get to work saving what's left of the Gulf.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"He took out his union card from his wallet it and showed them, one by one. 'These words right here"--pointing to the slogan on the back of the card--"is what it all comes down to, you won't hear it in school, maybe the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence and so forth, but if you learn nothing else, learn this by heart, what it says here--Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof.--Straight talk. No double-talking you like the plutes do, 'cause with them what you always have is to be listening for the opposite of what they say. Freedom, there the time to watch your back in particular--start telling you how free you are, somethin's up, next thing you know the gates have slammed shut...Why you could write a foreign phrase book just on what Republicans have to say.'"

Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day

Hoedown of Shame

First they came for the undocumented, with vicious racism masked as self-preservation. Then for the homeless, including and especially homeless veterans. Then with state budget cuts targeting the old, the injured and the ill, but keeping corporate graft. Now GOPers and their well-fed leaders are coming for the working middle class, in trouble in an ugly and changing economy, or just doing the work of the people.

The now famous documentary about the plight of migrant workers was called "Harvest of Shame." But that was 1960. Now GOPers and their supporters have no shame. They have no conscience. And libertarians and their ilk have no sense of history, of what life was like for the less than rich and therefore powerless, before unions and federal and state law protected them, in the name of decency and community, as well as (it turns out) prosperity and democracy. Like all ideologues, they're willing to cause suffering for their theoretical purity, and like all right wing dupes, serve the interests of the rich and powerful. And this is the America they want to return to. This isn't just a harvest--it's a celebration of shame. If anybody remembers what the word means.

Declaration

All men--and all women--are created equal, that's pretty much how the Declaration of Independence (the July 4 we celebrate) begins. But when I google photos of Michelle Obama, I see just how racist this country remains. Such ugliness attacking this beautiful and good and profoundly patriotic woman, and you wonder about your fellow citizens. Which may also include the 26% who aren't real clear on which country the U.S. gained its independence from. Anyway, this photo and the photos below are some of Michelle that I've collected in the past few months, mostly from the White House. Today I celebrate that she is my First Lady.

P.S. And Happy Birthday, Malia!