Blogifying Tuesday: Don't Panic

Following up a bit from yesterday, via the Kosness himself, there's this post from Balloon Juice, which introduced me to the useful word: poutrage. And he uses it in a sentence. After pointing out that the right wing was just as upset with Ronald Reagan early in his presidency as some lefties are with Obama, he concludes:

"I find this amazing in no small measure because Barack Obama has already done far more in his first 18 months than Reagan did at this point in his first term. Conservatives took on Reagan over specific battles, but basically they always trusted him. When push came to shove they always had his back. Today they have made Reagan’s record into a myth of conservative victories and Reagan into a romanticized Wingnutopia Saint (despite what actually happened).

Progressives, OTOH, have worked over time to turn an amazing chain of victories over the last 18 months into a narrative of defeat. It is a bit mind boggling to watch as so many ‘progressives’ embrace the memes, frames and talking points of the Right as they level an endless stream of attacks at the most progressive President in my lifetime. And why? Mostly because President Obama does not follow this or that preferred strategy, timing and/or set of tactics to the imagined screenplay of these armchair generals with keyboards. It is stunning to see process trump results and spin trump reality. Watching so many on the left jump at a chance to downplay the victories and inflate the outrage is like tracking an epidemic of foolishness. Useful critiques about important things are lost in the nonsensical noise about every rumor, every post, every tweet and each twist of every news cycle.

It is odd that some on the left have chosen to embrace the same attack tactics, strategies and rhetoric used by the Right when they confronted a President who is basically the champion of their POV without also embracing the way the Right always got Reagan’s back whenever it really mattered.

Meanwhile, things move on. More and more things are getting done by this White House despite the tantrums. Of course, even more could be done if some of the progressive poutrage practitioners would place action and unity over their egos, but they can’t. So it goes. Good luck with that in November.

Time will tell how the story of the Obama Administration will be told and what will be his impact on our Nation. I think it will be a good story regardless of current levels of poutrage on all sides. We shall see, but I think Steve is spot on when he said: I guess the moral of the story is that perceptions can change in time."

Which brings us to the question, are Democrats really toast this November, as the panic media has it? Maybe, but at least in some races, independents are swinging towards the Dem they know rather than the GOPer idiot they fear, and despite the great press she's getting on her endorsements, away from a Sarah Palin-approved mama grizzly.

Why? When elections are perceived to be what they are, a choice between actual alternatives, generic anger might get ungenericated. And as polls often show, Obama policies in themselves are often approved--most recently, Obama's economic policies over Bush's, which remain GOPer priorities. Hammer that theme, as Obama has been doing, and it doesn't look so bad for Dems.

This doesn't mean that Congress isn't still a corporate lobbyist and campaign contribution snakepit involving both parties, but the GOPers are in much deeper, both personally and in terms of policy.

Sherrodgate: yeah, it didn't last long enough to get such a moniker, and that's what I find interesting, and even heartening. I agree with this post by Jed Lewison--FOX was its usual despicable self, the NAACP and Ag Dept. panicked, but the media dealt with the story surprisingly well, and kept driving home the central message of: don't panic. Verify.

And speaking of FOX, how surprising is it that this watchdog of racism has an viewership in prime time that's less than 2% African American.

Emerson for the Day

"Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven...What we are, that only can we see. Build, therefore, your own world."

Emerson

Blogifying Monday: Leaks and Bleaks

The Big Noise of the day seems to be the Wikileaks on Afghanistan. Some compare it to the Pentagon Papers (or not), and the Tet Offensive. The White House points out that it's all about the years before Obama took office. And while the White House must officially condemn the release, my general attitude would be closer to John Kerry's. We'll be out of Iraq in a month. We should get out of Afghanistan ASAP.

There's been more negative reaction to the failure to bring forward climate/cap & trade legislation before congressional recess, especially among NYTimes columnists and in a NYT editorial. As I've said, I hoped for and expected more. It's easy enough to see the opportunity--the congressional numbers which are real unlikely to get better after the November elections, the attention-getting Gulf oil gusher and maybe above all, record heat in DC--surely God's vote. What may not be so easy to see are the no votes, cast in stone this close to the elections, that doomed it.

So I've got no problem with enviros and progressives decrying this lack of action, pointing out its dangers and calling for renewed efforts. And I even understand initial expressions of anger against the Administration as well as Congressional leadership and--incidentially--the GOPer Senators who actually prevented this legislation. But there are continuing modes of attack that are counterproductive, if not destructive. I'm saddened that Joe Romm at Climate Progress is placing himself in that category, with his blanket smear of Obama as a failed President.

It's a delicate dance, passionately urging change from outside and from "the left" to use a barely accurate cliche, on an Administration that basically agrees with you. The danger is poisoning support and contributing to a political weakening that emboldens the opposition and increases the likelihood of them taking power. The GOPers have already announced that among their top priorities "when" they take over Congress is defeating anything with the faintest aroma of climate crisis legislation, or support of clean energy.

You should give this kind of aid and comfort to the enemy only when you are convinced that your president is politically and morally done. We made that calculation about LBJ with good reason, and even at that, we wound up with Nixon and 6 more years of war.

I don't believe that of Obama. And I believe that the book hasn't closed on his activity on this issue. Would it have been better not to have left this crucial climate and energy bill to the end? Sure. It would have been much better if the GOPers hadn't timed their Great Recession with such precision, and virtually bankrupt the federal government as well. So do you want to tell people who now will have health care or a job that their needs aren't as important? Maybe I would, but I'm not President of the United States.

I have no doubt that the Climate Crisis is the most important issue of our time, and that, figuring impact and likelihood of that impact, it poses the greatest threat to human civilization, dwarfing other political issues. But where this climate bill fits into that is what's questionable to me. Maybe if this were a year ago, I would feel worse, because I would have believed that it was very important to pass this legislation at this time. But after reading new books by David Orr and Bill McKibben, I've kept my eyes open, and realized that many if not most reputable scientists and observers agree with them.

That is, it may have been possible for me to believe that there was a chance that civilization could make a smooth and relatively safe transition to the future if the U.S. passed strong Climate Crisis laws, and led the world to do the same. But it's very likely too late for that. The future, whatever it's going to be, is already decided for the next forty years, and it's probably going to be catastrophic. The far future may or may not have been decided yet, so maybe there's time to head off the worst. But this legislation wasn't strong enough to do that anyway.

This legislation--or something like it--may yet pass before the end of the year. But the time to head off catastrophic change was probably in 1976, or maybe 1992, or no later really than the election of 2000, when it "didn't matter" who won, Bore or Gush. The vast weight of industrial capitalism, and in recent decades of a vicious oligarchy leading the U.S. down into decadence and denial, are the forces of history that we still must oppose. But when we don't defeat them on a given issue, is that a surprise? Is that the reason to self-destruct?

Joe Romm may want to add to the defeatism that has Glenn Beck and the congressional GOPers gloating. I think it's politically dumb, historically myopic, as well as self-indulgent. I prefer to listen to people like Van Jones (also here) and Bill McKibben. But I am upset that Climate Progress is not a haven of sanity anymore.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

A blogger called cfk does a Bookflurries: Bookchat thread over at Kos on Wednesdays. Part of the thread is discussing authors with names starting with a particular letter or letters. This past Wednesday it was R, and in suggesting a few authors that hadn't been included yet, I was reminded of poet Theodore Roethke. I wondered if anyone read him anymore. It turns out that cfk lives near where Roethke did, and took the above photo of his house.

Roethke was a 20th century American poet who died in 1963, though his last book was published in 1964. I recall sitting in my college library freshman year, reading some of the poems from that book in a poetry magazine. A couple of them impressed me, and one in particular grabbed me and moved me. Even if my poetry profs would scoff at it as sentimental.

And the first line of "Wish for a Young Wife" embarrassed me because it's so obviously sexual, and I was so very young and callow. But the rest of the poem spoke to me, mirrored my own feelings, and reading it again (its rhythms still alive in my memory), it still does. So here it is, and I dedicate it to all the loves of my life, including those lovely young women--known and unknown-- of college days, and a little beyond...

WISH FOR A YOUNG WIFE

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.

---Theodore Roethke

The Week That Wasn't

This [Thursday] hasn't been a good day for me, which is why I'm blogging instead of doing something useful, but it's nothing to the week that the Obama administration had. First there's the picture above that you probably haven't seen before--it's the signing of the historic Wall Street and financial reform legislation it took all year to achieve. And then shortly afterwards, the finally final passage of unemployment insurance extension. But who noticed? Amidst an otherwise bad week of attention-getting trivia culminating in the extraordinary Shirley Sherrod saga, about which I'll have more to say later. But the obvious distortions by the Rabid Right got saved by panic at the NAACP and in the Obama administration. Nobody came out of this looking good, except Shirley Sherrod and Rachel Maddow, who--agree or disagree--assembles coherent, well-sourced arguments every evening, as she has done brilliantly on this topic several times.

The week ends badly as well with the Senate Dem leadership announcing that climate legislation won't be introduced before August recess because it won't pass, and a more limited energy bill will be offered. Though the White House reluctantly agreed and held out some waning hope that the fight will continue, President Obama is taking a lot of fire from climate crisis environmentalists, like Joe Romm at Climate Progress. While I am disappointed in how things worked out, and do feel that climate is the most important issue for the future, some of this is just as hysterical as the Sherrod thing started out to be. (Fortunately, as I am not tuned into the noise around the clock, I missed most of it.) But there are some good comments in the overwrought Romm post, including one from Bill McKibben.

The other night we watched Michael Moore's Capitalism, A Love Story on DVD and that gave a different texture to the week's noise. For one thing, it prompts a somewhat different perspective on this "angry voter" thing--that anger in the sense of what the plutocracy has done to people is completely justified, if currently displaced onto the wrong targets. Another thought is that there is such insistent noise on politics as opposed to policy because political spending is the last rich source of revenue for the media. It's in their interests to keep attention focused on who's up, who's down, the endless campaign and gossip about political figures, as opposed to substantive matters.

But that DVD--and especially Moore's interview with writer Chris Hedges that is included as a Special Feature--provides the perspective that makes the announcement about the climate bill just a predictable little current in the vast and ever-faster motion towards self-destruction that recent decades have become.

Yeah, and I don't expect today to be any better.

Applicable to a Different Tea Party

“As most perceptive readers will agree, the distinctive characteristic of the human world is its insanity.”

Alberto Manguel
A Reader on Reading (more on this book here...)

Consequences: China

China is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. Not to mention chock full of people. Many many people in incomprehensible number. The world's largest economy, the world's largest polluter, it just became the world's top energy consumer, surpassing the U.S. Despite its reported plan to consider spending a hugely vast amount of money on clean energy, China's contribution to heat-trapping gases building up in the atmosphere and causing global heating will continue to grow.

But also as a consequence of its size and density--and particularly its geography--China may experience some brutal consequences from forced climate change above and beyond what other countries may suffer in common. Which has huge, vast implications not only for the billions of people there, but for the U.S. and its national security--even if dumbbell CA Senate candidate Carly Fiorina can't see it.

One reason can be found in a precisely written piece by Orville Schell in the New York Review of Books (May 27, 2010.) The reason is in the title: "The Message from the Glaciers." The result of shrinking glaciers, particularly in the Himalayas, is likely to curtail water flow in major rivers and cause all kinds of havoc in much of Asia, including China and India.

India is also really really big. (This is going to be a theme here, so adjust your thought processes.) It is also teeming with people, with a rapidly expanding economy and consequent growth in energy use--and demand for resources. Also (lest we forget ) like China it has nuclear weapons.

Melting glaciers in the polar regions may get the most media attention, but the nearly 50,000 glaciers in the Himalayas, writes Schell, feed Asia's ten major rivers and contribute hugely to water supplies as well as seasonally based agriculture. While an error in estimating the melt in the last IPCC report got a lot of attention, the fact that this melting is occurring rapidly--partly because these higher elevations are heating up faster and hotter--is conveniently ignored.

One consequence: "As Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Bureau, recently put it, “If the warming continues, millions of people in western China will face floods in the short term and drought in the long run.”"

As if the heating as a general consequence of fossil fuel-induced global heating wasn't enough, the very melting of the glaciers accelerates the process. Buried beneath top layers of snow and ice is the black carbon that accumulated underneath, as a result of fossil fuel burning (especially coal, the primary fuel in China .) That it is black negates the reflective ability of the white glaciers and leads to more melting. That it is carbon means that more global heating-causing gases are released into the atmosphere:

On the accumulation zone of one glacier in the Qilian Mountains in western China, Hansen and Yao found that “fresh snow melted within two days, exposing dirtier underlying snow with black carbon concentration seven times greater than the fresh snow.” They concluded that the soot burden, which had markedly increased since 1990, had now become “sufficient to affect the surface reflectivity of the glaciers,” by increasing their “effectiveness in absorbing sunlight.” With their natural reflective and self-protective ability, or “albedo,” impaired by soot, and with temperatures continuing to rise, scientists like Hansen and Yao now fear that “most glaciers, worldwide, will be lost this century, with severe consequences for fresh water supplies.”

And below all that is the permafrost, which releases even more of these gases when it melts:
But the most profound global impact of this thawing, which has already begun, will be the enormous amounts of methane gas—roughly twenty times more potent in heat-trapping capacity than CO2—that will be released by the decomposition of once-frozen carbon rich organic matter in the area’s soil. Indeed, continued thawing threatens to turn what has been a major carbon-sink—sequestering about 2.5 percent of the world’s soil carbon—into a huge new source of emissions."

These consequences of melting aren't unique to the Himalayas--the attention paid to the Arctic region (including Alaska and northern Canada) and the Antarctic is more than justified. And these aren't the only consequences. But they do suggest several things: How really big changes--particularly for human civilizations as well as other lifeforms--can come from what may seem like small temperature changes. How consequences on the other side of the world can affect everyone on this side (especially considering how China seems to be making nearly everything we use, and the country holds our national debt and financial future in its hands, as well as the geopolitical, military and therefore national security issues.) And how consequences "snowball" in an odd reversal of that metaphor's reference. The snowball becomes much larger simply by rolling down the mountain because of the snow and other material it can accumulate. In this case, the consequences "snowball" as glaciers melt.

Schell doesn't discuss appropriate actions since they are by now obvious. He notes that the temperature rise expected by mid-century (more than 2C) is more than enough to continue and accelerate glacier melting which is already affecting, for example, 95% of the glaciers in Tibet. So consequences are coming, and should be prepared for. But he also notes that unless heat-trapping gases emissions aren't severely cut, the rise could more than double, with faster and worse consequences.

But he does end his article with the conundrum--or by now familiar lament-- of why urgent action isn't being taken in view of these well-known realities. His final statement: "And many more studies should be undertaken to scientifically clarify all these links. But there is already enough information for the world to know that we confront a very dangerous prospect, with no adequate effort underway to find the missing link between the knowledge we already have and action".

It is the question of why this emergency is not being appropriately confronted which I, in my unbelievably small way, hope to address hereabouts in future posts. Please stay tuned.

This is Me Blogging

A trenchant piece at Wired on why Americans are slow to accept green technology. I don't buy all of it, but almost.

Some of the best analysis of climate crisis denying comes from a conservative writing in a conservative newspaper. Leading in this Climate Progress thread to some interesting discussion in the comments.

I'm reading a novel by Alan Sillitoe, The Widower's Son, and just read this sentence: "The mixture of purpose and bewilderment on Bavon's exhausted face went straight to his heart."

Purpose and bewilderment. I can dig it.

R.I.P. Stephen Schneider

Stephen Schneider was the first climate scientist in my experience to sound the alarm over global heating. I interviewed him years ago. Others became more prominent from time to time, but his voice was always there. He died this morning.

Here's a tribute from Real Climate. And another with video from Climate Progress. There are additional tributes and links in the comments at Climate Progress--including to this photo, taken at Stanford in 2007. Stephen Schneider was 65.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“What James Abbey saw were the tiger’s eyes. He had never seen such eyes in any photograph or film, ever. And he understood now that the tiger’s eyes are not susceptible to being recorded on film. Abbey thought this was just. In twenty or eighty years, however long it will take, when the last of them is dead, or inbred so much in zoos that they’re no longer what they were, people looking at the films and photographs will think they’ve seen the tiger’s eyes, but it will not be so. The people won’t know, and the tiger doesn’t need them to know, that the stare of the tiger will be gone from the world utterly.”

Michael Ventura
The Zoo Where You”re Fed to God
[top photo: Siberian tiger, bottom: Bengal tiger.]

Once More Unto the Breach

In the wake of the financial reform bill passing into law on Thursday (which you might have missed since it apparently wasn't news) a Business Day section news analysis in the NY Times says this:

"Mr. Obama has done what he promised when he ran for office in 2008: he has used government as an instrument to try to narrow the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. He has injected $787 billion in tax dollars into the economy, provided health coverage to 32 million uninsured and now, reordered the relationship among Washington, Wall Street, investors and consumers."

And a bit later in the piece: “They clearly made a decision that political capital was something that should be used, not saved,” said Steven Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who worked for years as a senior leadership aide on Capitol Hill. “The reality is, he talked before the election about what he wanted to do, and he’s done it. He didn’t trim his sails, he didn’t change his philosophy. He didn’t compromise. The test will come in the fall: can he and Democrats in Congress make the case to the American people that what he did was the right thing to do?”

At the moment, the politics seem to be against it, and the piece suggests that the Obama administration may have to scale back from now on. Apart from the assertion that Obama hasn't compromised--he has of course-- that's the current conventional wisdom, which of course could change in an Internet minute.

But though the political test should be the next elections, when perceptions can be measured against electoral results, in politics such perceptions can change things so they can't get that fair test. For example, it wasn't an electoral test that caused FDR to slow down and scale back New Deal programs, so that the bracing momentum of change slowed nearly to a stop early in his first term. It was the politics and the noise. Though the next congressional election actually bolstered FDR and brought on the "second" New Deal, some say the Depression lasted longer than it should have because that first boldness wasn't maintained--and given the opposition and public opinion, perhaps could not have been.

The immediate test is likely to be the energy and climate bill, which is the next big piece of legislation on the agenda--and it's likely to come up fast. It has a history already, being declared dead and undead several times, and here's the latest analysis.

Though President Obama has been talking about the need for this legislation at every opportunity, it's usually been in conjunction with something else. What I will be looking for is a big statement just about this topic, and most particularly a major speech on the moral issue of the Climate Crisis.

Though there are various good reasons why the Recovery Act, health care and Wall Street reform had to come first, the fact is that climate and energy policy are more important to the long term future than all three put together, and for the near future they are just as important as any of them, in terms of the U.S. economy, national security, you name it. Not to mention the planet. So despite the bruises of the battles just past, this one has to be fought and won.

(Meanwhile, here's blackwaterdog's comprehensive diary with lots of videos on the 18 months of Obama accomplishments, unmatched (says more than one observer) since FDR.)

The Dreaming Up Daily Outgoing Mail

Dear Suddenlink: My cable TV bill has doubled in the past few years, with no increase in service, not to mention no better quality of programming. Instead I received from you today not one, not two, but three pieces of mail: three glossy pieces of cardboard, each measuring 6 inches by 11 inches, all advertising services I have never shown the slightest inclination of being interested in. So now I know where my money is going--not only to pay for your advertising, but now that paper recycling is no longer done for free here, to pay the garbage company to haul away your obscenely wasteful "communication."

You should also know that far from enticing me to buy your obscenely expensive premium services, your advertising has provided even more impetus to my reevaluation of retaining any of your services. Why should I be paying you every month, not only to advertise new ways of getting more crap, but for the channelsful of horrifying imagery I now receive?

Sincerely yours,

It's Really Getting There

Another set of polls and more cries of Obama failure. On the one hand, Joe Klein writes that it's baseless panic--that the polls showing a drop in confidence in Obama show even less confidence in Congress, and even less than that in Republicans. What's driving poll numbers down is the economy.

On the other hand, John Dickerson writes that the White House, and President Obama specifically have been ineffective in communicating their successes.

Faithful readers of this site will likely not be surprised that I think they are both right. But that the White House itself believes that economic anxieties are responsible for less than stellar poll numbers is perhaps part of the problem. Because while that is true, it is only part of the truth. For various reasons (or unreasons), the very real and very large Obama accomplishments aren't getting through as they should be. While as Klein notes, Obama is still more popular and trusted than anybody else, he should be clearly seen as such. Why isn't he?

Evidence that accomplishments and what they are doing for ordinary Americans isn't getting through is clearest in poll numbers on the Recovery Act. The latest CBS poll says only 23% believe it has helped the economy. Another poll's result claimed that less than 10% believed it has created any jobs.

That's beyond disconcerting--it's frightening. But for the moment, let's stick with disconcerting. So the administration claims to have created or saved between 2.5 and 3.6 million jobs with the Recovery Act, and a Seattle Times report flat out says: "A growing body of independent economic analysis suggests the stimulus package has boosted jobs and kept people off the unemployment line." So why isn't that the headline--not just in the newspaper, but in voter perception? Why isn't America cheering the President on?

Apart from the likelihood that a lot of Americans are, there are two factors I see. One is that the White House really hasn't been very good at communicating their successes. Unfortunately I don't know why, or what they should be doing. The second applies in particular to the Recovery Act: although the spending has both saved jobs and created jobs as well as seeding new industries, especially in clean energy, and is otherwise benefiting the American economy and society long-term, it apparently isn'tt building stuff that makes a big impression.

The actual success in its time of FDR's Works Progress Administration and other such projects has been inflated in historical recollection--FDR backed off under fire after little more than a year--but that's a different topic. The immediate and enduring imagery of those FDR projects had to do with large numbers of men with shovels, with big solid granite buildings and cement bridges being built, and land being very obviously cleared and landscaped for parks.

These projects not only made for great photos, virtually immune to misinterpretation, but they made immediate local impacts where they happened. So in this sense the cablemouths bloviating about building roads and bridges to get people back to work have a point. Those projects are visible and obvious, and more of them--as well as visually bigger projects--should have been financed early by the Recovery Act, and communicated every step of the way.

Instead, a lot of money went to dire necessities--like keeping the states from running out of money to pay for Medicaid, and to keep police and fire fighters working. That was necessary, but it's hard to take a picture of somebody not losing their job.

Money also went to where GOPers hearts are: helping the private sector, rather than creating public jobs. So it's hard to even identify or quantify the jobs created there, let alone show them on TV. Or else the number of jobs or type of jobs created at a specific clean energy manufacturer, say, aren't as visually impressive as big assemly lines. As the Seattle Times story said:

"The Recovery Act appears to be stimulating private investment and job creation at a time when the economy needs it most," Christina Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, says in testimony prepared for a hearing of Congress's Joint Economic Committee later today.... "I suspect the true effects of the act will not be fully analyzed or fully appreciated for many years," she said, adding that most experts agreed that the stimulus had had a "significant, beneficial impact on employment and output over the past year."

It was important to put that money to work to keep the current economy from getting worse while laying the groundwork for the future, again particularly in seeding a clean energy economy which is crucial to U.S. competitiveness even in the near future, as well as helpful to civilization having any future. I've got no problem with all that being either less than visible or not "fully appreciated for many years." But somebody should have figured out that some of that money had to go to high profile projects, not even for political reasons but to bolster the morale and confidence of the American public. Either that wasn't done, or it hasn't been effectively communicated.

There is however another contributing factor that neither Klein or Dickerson notes. And it is that for any number of reasons and mostly unreasons, we're in a terrible, unfathomable downward spiral of the spirit, of the collective intelligence, that may not stop soon. It may not be dark yet, but it's really, really getting there.

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