Economy 2010 Part 2

If you thought I was downbeat in my new year assessments, here's how Bob Herbert began his first column of the year this week: "I’m starting the new year with the sinking feeling that important opportunities are slipping from the nation’s grasp. Our collective consciousness tends to obsess indiscriminately over one or two issues — the would-be bomber on the flight into Detroit, the Tiger Woods saga — while enormous problems that should be engaged get short shrift."

Herbert begins his uneasy litany with the problems of unemployment and housing. "Forget the false hope of modestly improving monthly job numbers. The real story right now is the entrenched suffering (with no end in sight) that has been inflicted on scores of millions of working Americans by the Great Recession and the misguided economic policies that preceded it."

Those "false hopes" turned out Friday to be false in more than one sense, as unemployment rose more than expected in the first December assessment, though far below the worst levels last year. This Times story checks with the usual economics suspects, and as usual they don't agree on what should be done. Some continue to call for another big dose of government spending, but the Screeching Right is focused on the "socialism" of that prescription, while of course also screaming that President Obama isn't doing anything to create jobs.

Meanwhile, Obama is getting little press or credit for the substantial accomplishments of the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act spending, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says has kept at least 6 million Americans out of poverty, and lessened the severity of poverty for at least 33 million more. The Congressional Budget Office affirmed that the stim has created or saved from 600,000 to 1.6 million jobs, a fact that got much less press than the purported "overestimate" earlier by the White House, of 650,000 jobs.

Such current or future spending takes time to create real jobs, especially when the stim is a "Reinvestment" package as well--targeted not just to infrastructure but the new energy economy. (See part 1 below.) But among other pressing problems (continuing housing mess, slow to nonexistent financial regulation reform) the one that's looming now--with the most impact on employment and the national economy--is the severe slump in state government income.

In his Friday column--"Invitation to Disaster--Bob Herbert zeroes in: "This is an arrow aimed straight at the heart of a robust national recovery....This is not a disaster waiting to happen. It’s under way. Without substantial new federal help, state cuts that are now merely drastic will become draconian, and hundreds of thousands of additional jobs will be lost. "

As usual, California leads the way, and Governor Terminator's budget message on Friday was full of cuts of unparalled dimensions and cruelty, as well as a churlish tone regarding federal responsibilities. This state is already reeling from last year's cuts, and their effects haven't even been fully implemented.

The dire state that states like California and New York are in (as well as Commonwealths like Pennsylvania) is due in part to political failures--some of them institutional, some of them due to past gutless expediency, and many of them, especially in California, due to the past "successes" of the Screeching Right in choking off tax money in favor of corporations and the rich.

But the banks were hardly paragons of virtue when the federal government had to bail them out. If there is anything too big to fail without catastrophic consequences, it's state governments. Way too many jobs are directly and indirectly affected, as well as services to the common good, obligations to those who worked and contributed in good faith and did their duty to their families, as well as those who can yet contribute to a better society.

Economy 2010 Part 1

There was an interesting economics debate at Salon this week. First up was their columnist Michael Lind, asserting that the Clinton boom of the 90s was essentially an illusion, and its premise--that a better educated workforce in knowledge jobs with high tech information infrastructure (the Internet, etc.) was creating a prosperous New Economy--was wrong. That's important, because in many respects, it's what the Obama administration is promoting to revive the economy now.

Lind writes that the productivity gains were overestimated by as much as 20%, with much of the rest accounted for by the tech and housing bubbles. Most gains were made by the top 1% of earners anyway--with the middle class losing ground. Lind's prescription for actual prosperity is: "The most effective way to raise wages at the bottom would be to increase the bargaining power of workers, by unionizing the service sector and by tightening the labor market through restricting unskilled immigration. That would probably spur genuine productivity growth over time as employers substituted technology for more expensive labor." He suggests that the corporate backers of the "middle way" Democrats discourages this, and so the Democratic party doesn't get behind such an effort.

A day or two later, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute disputed Lind's thesis and conclusion. He argued that productivity did increase in the Clinton years, and that economic gains were felt across all income levels. He also cites economic data showing "strong positive returns to educational attainment," so "it seems perverse to argue that Clinton and his allies, as well as President Obama, are mistaken in wanting to see more Americans attend college. "

As usual with these things, they often argue past each other. Marshall writes that steep drops in union membership is due to the fading industrial sector, but doesn't mention Lind's argument that unionizing service workers should be a priority. Lind seems to ignore the structural changes involving information tech that Marshall cites as transformative. Finally, there's no reason that the country--or the President--should have to choose between advocating better educational opportunities and more and stronger unions.

Still, it's an interesting debate. I don't know if Lind's economics is right, but it makes sense to me that stronger and more widespread unions are needed to get working Americans a just wage, and (along with more reasonable--that is, higher--corporate taxes) return this country to the economic and social balance as well as the prosperity of the 50s and 60s.

On the other hand, Marshall is right about changes: neither the economy nor society resembles or could resemble the 50s and 60s in important respects. Putting aside for a minute the new reliance on the service economy, the information technology aspect is only part of the relevant equation. The corresponding part, which neither Lind nor Marshall mention, is energy. U.S. prosperity was fueled by cheap fossil fuel energy, and an energy grid that is now deteroriating and obsolete, even without the need to replace fossil fuels.

President Obama has emphasized that jumpstarting a new economy and creating jobs requires emphasis on new clean energy technologies, and both the manufacturing and service companies and jobs to create a clean energy industry. He's advocating, he's envisioning, and he's devoting chunks of the Economy Recovery and Reinvestment Act money to such projects.

There are lots of pieces to this puzzle, though. There's the question of markets and market share, and whether the U.S. will innovate and lead in this area as it did to a debatable but substantial degree in information technology. So far, the evidence isn't entirely favorable, as countries in Europe and South America as well as Japan and China are in some ways ahead. Given our dependence on the global marketplace, this is probably a big deal--especially if the transformation of the U.S. itself relies on foreign-made systems. Can't happen? Ask General Motors about that.

A clean energy boom might help to restore some manufacturing to the U.S. economy mix, and some better wages. The idea that the service economy can remain so dominant requires such elements as robust government spending (politically unlikely, especially in the states) and foreign slave labor manufacturing (unlikely to continue, as the places where that's economically feasible are declining, even apart from the moral depravity of the practice.)

The debate has been raging for years now on just when fossil fuels are going to become so expensive that solar, wind etc. become competitive. As limitations on coal become part of the equation, and as oil is a finite resource, it seems inevitable. One aspect of this that fascinates me is that those on the left, right and center who are totally in love with the Internet and cellular networks and all the new devices using them, manage to not think about all the energy they use. (A few years ago, George Gilder projected that Internet computing would soon require as much power as the entire U.S. economy did in 2001). As well as all the toxic chemicals they use and electronic garbage they create and to make them (author Hunter Lovins estimates the manufacture of a laptop computer creates 4,000 times its weight in waste. Cell phones are being discarded in the billions.) These are going to be enormous problems. We can't go on forever, advocating an end to greenhouse gas pollution, while using fossil fueled electricity to say so.

What nobody wants to talk about is more of less, of the enormous waste built into this consumer economy that is unsustainable. Or the distinct possibility that there are no models for what's happening, and neither Lind nor Marshall, nor any oft-quoted economist, has anything like an accurate idea of what's ahead.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth."

--John Keats. Painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Not Always So

It's not easy to face what causes fear, rightly and wrongly. Some of what I write here constitutes a way for me to grapple with these subjects, and with those fears.

Though at times I find it overwhelming--prospects of my personal journey taking painful turns and ending, as well as the larger scale prospects I more often write about here--I don't dwell on all this as much as might be suggested by what appears here. Nor should anyone dwell on all of this too much.

Concentrating on the play of consciousness in time, which is all we clearly have, is a more pleasant way of living, though it doesn't dispel an essential sadness. Some philosophies that advocate such an approach--usually though not exclusively forms or derivations of Buddhism --acknowledge this sadness as an appropriate response, though elements of joy are also part of it.

Consciousness of being in the world is a tricky thing. It takes hints from the hyper-reality of some dreams, it's often inspired by nature, and the easily derided emotions easily evoked by children and animals, or by beauty in all its forms, warm and cool. Meditation is a tool specifically designed for such consciousness of the moment, but I also use forms of writing that don't appear here, at least by my authorship. And then there are conversations and other relations, and the more physical involvement, including music, the long vigorous walk, and Zen and the art of shooting hoops.

I mention this here and now because recent posts and quite probably future ones accent the gloomier prospects and aspects of life today. All of this is important, it's a responsibility as well as part of life--we do like to figure things out, as well as to do what we can to make possible a better future. But we're here such a short time. We ought to take it in, and enjoy what we can.

The Mechanics of Fear

Unwarranted and ultimately self-destructive fear is apparently a byproduct of a set of natural responses designed to help creatures like us avoid or escape from mortal danger. But the excesses of a glandular or pre-conscious response (disproportionate to the danger, or evoked mistakenly or falsely) become more consequential when culturally ossified or automated, and especially when linked to the power of machines, which multiply the human ability to damage and destroy to horrific proportions.

Historically this became apparent with the Great War of the early 20th century, when fear and hatred on societal levels supported warfare that otherwise made no sense, except for a few rulers, military leaders and those who made fortunes on armaments and other fuel for the fires of war. It was the nationalistic response to that war that inspired the coining of the term "brutalization" to describe a nation's psyche and behavior (in this case, France. Jay Winter wrote a very powerful and illuminating essay/review on civilian support for World War I and the subsequent disenchantment, in the Times Literary Supplement of June 16, 2006. ) Such fervor was not unprecedented--but the power of modern machinery to kill so many was new, and shocking.

That war was an enormous shock to European thought, and for awhile to political life. But the madness continued, resulting in another World War. And fear did not end with that armistice either--in fact, it got worse and even potentially more consequential. After the machinery of World War I killed a generation of young men, the even more destructive machinery of World War II was trained on civilians as well, and killed millions of them, climaxing with the death by blast, fire and radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by means of the atomic bomb.

But even that was not enough to inspire sanity's control over rampant, frenzied unreasonable and often artificially created fear. The atomic bomb that could kill a city was made larger, and multiplied. Then the hydrogen bomb multiplied that destructiveness geometrically, and a few nations made tens of thousands of them, aimed at each other, ready to launch at a moment's notice.

In a review of a new history of the cold war (in the New York Review of Books, 12/17/2009), Brian Urquhart writes:

“It is useless, though tempting, to speculate on who was the most responsible for the cold war and for the fantastic risk and expense it entailed. The paranoia of Stalin; the aggressive language of the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism; the wild exaggerations and panicky assumptions, sometimes for short-term political objectives, that created dangerous reactions; the tendency, on both sides, to confuse military capacity with military intentions; the mutual ignorance and hostility that led to the most hazardous and expensive arms race in history—to none of these factors, or to the people involved in them, can be confidently assigned the entire blame for a phenomenon that held the world in dread and suspense for more than forty years. The contestants in the cold war, it now seems, were all caught up in a monstrous nuclear nightmare of fear, anger, suspicion, and irrationality that no leader seemed able to dispel.”

Later in the review he adds: “Thus, until quite recently, we lived in a time when many of the most powerful and brilliant people in the world spent their energy and talent, and huge sums of public money, on developing weapons that, if used, would have almost certainly destroyed orderly life on this planet. That it was impossible, for forty years, for the two superpowers to discuss this most lethal of threats to all life in a rational manner must rank, in retrospect at least, as the greatest foolishness and the greatest shared irresponsibility in history.”

Though he guesses that leaders early on realized that these nuclear weapons should never be used, and that common sense often prevailed over panic, that the human race got through the cold war was, Uurqhart writes, miraculous.

Now we face a crisis that is a threat to "orderly life on this planet" that is different in many ways, but is just as grave. To fail to address it would easily replace the cold war as "the greatest shared irresponsibility in history." But to address it requires even more unfamiliar ways of thinking as well as common sense, and above all, it requires urgent attention. Fear only gets in the way.

Two things happened during the Cold War. The consequences of nuclear war were so severe that the citizenry at large, at least in America, simply shut down emotionally and refused to face it. The prospect of societal self-destruction was too much to deal with, and it was largely absent from public dialogue. It wasn't dealt with consciously, though subconscious fears were alive, and were expressed in the arts, especially movies--from the bug-eyed monster and alien invasion flicks of the 50s to the nuclear dramas and satires of the 60s.

It could be argued that's happening again. With relentless and passionate Climate Crisis denial buttressing the tendency to avoid the paralyzing fear of a horrific future, emotions are driven underground, expressed not only in end-of-the-world cinema but in fashionable tales of zombies and vampires: the walking dead.

At the same time, fears and suspicions of the other side--more familiar feelings, perhaps more tangible--distracted society from even considering what needed to be done. Now that Americans and other westerners travel easily to Russia, and there is more access to all the cultures involved, it may seem inconceivable how monstrous stereotypes could inspire fear for so long a time. But they did. Though there were ups and downs, some of the same stereotypes from the 1950s were repeated in TV commercials in the 1980s.

The analogy to today's irrational fear of terrorism is not exact: the threat of nuclear annihilation was real, whereas the chances of anyone in America dying from a terrorist act is minuscule--crossing a small town street is statistically much more hazardous. But the grip of fear on our political life and national dialogue is just as obvious and disheartening. One failed and pretty sorry terrorist attempt on one airliner has once again thrown this country into panic, as predictably as a literal knee-jerk reaction.

So, for example, this story, which appeared in the Eureka, CA Times-Standard:

Suspicious device found on trail in Sequoia Park

A suspicious device reported to authorities Monday afternoon was destroyed by the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office bomb squad.

According to a press release from the Eureka Police Department, at about 2:21 p.m., EPD received a report of a suspicious device on a trail in Sequoia Park. An officer responded and found that the device was an archery arrow with a duct-taped cylinder attached to the arrowhead end of the arrow.

EPD requested the assistance of the explosive ordinance disposal experts from the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office, who came to inspect the device. They responded with their EOD robot.
After inspecting the device, they subsequently destroyed it using the robot's water cannon.
”The device was obliterated but appeared to have been some type of foam rubber that had been wrapped in the duct tape, and not an explosive device,” said the release.

Several people in the immediate area of the device were evacuated from the area while the investigation was conducted. "

That foreign terrorists would train and dispatch an operative to blow up an unsuspecting hiker on a trail in this remote corner of the country, or that this financially strapped county would deploy a robot with a water cannon to douse an arrow with a bit of foam rubber stuck to it--all pretty laughable, though not quite on the Doctor Strangelove level. Except that it's indicative of what fear can do, and how it can absorb attention, short-circuit rational thought, and above all, distract from real threats.

Today there are still more than 20,000 nuclear devices in various stages of readiness in the world, including a thousand outside the direct control of the U.S. or Russia. And there is the ultimate time bomb churning away in our thin veil of atmosphere, a fire we are feeding every day, while we indulge in familiar fears and comforts. Our ability to destroy our world and ourselves thanks to our machines far outstrips our apparent ability to deal with those machines and the aspects of human nature--including the dynamics of groups and nations--that unleash our machines against us. If that remains so...the hand of evolution, having written, will move on--even if it will seem to us to move backward.

An artist rendering of a recent discovery: the Voyager spacecraft found that our solar system is surrounded by a kind of cloud, which is held together by a magnetic field. It's wispy but a pretty big cloud--30 light years across. This magnetic field, it's now felt, helps to shield us from cosmic radiation. The Earth has its own magnetic field shield as well.

Too Good A Story

"Fear and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."
Samuel Johnson

Here's a story you might have heard. Back in the 60s, NASA wanted a pen that astronauts could use in space, so they could write in zero gravity. They spent millions developing the technologically sophisticated and expensive "space pen." Meanwhile, the Soviet space program came up with their own solution. They used pencils.

It's a perfect story in its own way. It cheers those who are against government spending and feel that government always wastes money and screws things up. But it also cheers those who have experienced bureaucracy in any organization, and who are suspicious of high tech solutions for everything. And it cheers people who want to believe that scientists are buffoons, out to trick everybody for their own benefit.

So it gets repeated, in print and on the air, and in clever emails. It also happens to be untrue in almost every detail.

Both the Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts started out using pencils. Both space programs worried about the hazards of keeping the pencils sharp and the lead breaking off and floating around in the weightless space capsules. They used grease pencils for awhile. Meanwhile, an entrepreneur named Paul Fisher independently designed and produced what's known as the Fisher space pen. NASA didn't spend a cent on developing it. And eventually both the U.S. and Russian space programs adopted the Fisher space pen.

There are many other untrue stories that get prominently and endlessly repeated, many of them much more pernicious, told often enough by deliberate liars and retold by people predisposed to believe them. This alarming trend is growing. Sometimes it's because it's a good story--even if it's too good to be true. But more often these days, stories are accepted because they are sensational, or because they support a prejudice and a worldview, while they feed hatred and fear: everything from death panels to a conspiracy of scientists on the Climate Crisis. It leads to contempt, intimidation and violence, and terrible politics. If this is viral communication, we as a nation capable of dealing with the future and the real world are in danger of dying of it.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“Chaplin’s great virtue, aside from his comedic gifts, was his emotional readiness. Those who don’t respond to it will be quick to deny that emotion, or to call him saccharine—and indeed, Chaplin did have a tendency to pull out all the emotional stops and risk bathos. But it always felt real. His was not false sentiment but rather a naked display of raw sentiment. And that’s more than forgivable. It’s who he was. It’s what he had to risk to make his art, and the transcendent emotion of his best work shows that he was right to trust his heart.”

Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle

The Last Decades

It's an odd feeling, beginning this new decade. I start by realizing it could be my last, and almost certainly is my next to last decade. During the next ten years, I could well make the transition from late middle age to old age, that is to a certain frailty and disconnection. Not that I know really what to make of this, but it all gives a different sort of significance to this change of the calendar, compared to past decade markers.

The decade begins also as I'm beginning to read David Orr's new book, Down to the Wire. He starts by saying straight out what climate scientists seldom say very clearly (clotting it all with scientific caution and jargon) and politicians won't say: that we've already done so much damage to our atmosphere that the climate of the planet will be inevitably and seriously changed, and no matter what we do, the change will persist for thousands of years. Human civilization will have to adapt to "'a different planet,' one we won't like," or it will fall. Moreover, human civilization will have to change quickly and deeply to avoid causing an even hotter world, which would bring near certain doom, not only for humanity but for much of the planet as we know it.

Basically this is the same message I've been passing on here and elsewhere, except that Orr interprets it all in terms of time. It's that "thousands of years" that takes my breath away. He also quotes the UK's senior scientist Martin Rees as writing that human civilization has a 50% chance of surviving this century. James Lovelock is not even that generous. So I must consider the enormity of this: that this human civilization, which has sweated and bled its way to this point for several thousand years, could be gone in nine decades. Which likely means that it will be seriously unraveling, in blood and tears, in--what?--fifty years? Two decades? Some would say it has begun down that road already--in drought-stricken, war-torn parts of Africa, for instance. This is another head-spinner, and heart spinner, too.

Orr's book is about what needed for political and other kinds of change to avoid the worst: "I also write with the assumption that we will succeed in reducing atmospheric CO2 below the level that would create runaway climate change; otherwise there is no point in writing anything other than an elegy or funeral dirge."

But Orr also writes that preventing the worst--or even some of what is now inevitable--would have been easier and cheaper 30 years ago, or 20, or 10. But from now on, it gets harder and more expensive, and more uncertain. Very much harder, and very much more expensive.

I've also been saying this for awhile: that the climate crisis presents humanity with its greatest evolutionary challenge: can we as a civilization think and act in the more complex and sophisticated ways required by the nature of this crisis? If we can and do, we're fit for the future. If not, it looks as if civilization won't continue. So far, on balance, we're flunking the test.

Looking back on the past decade from the future, if there are historians to do so, the defining moment for humanity may well have been the theft of the presidency by the forces of G.W. Bush, and all that followed (apart from preventing the presidency of the man who has since won a Nobel Prize for his championing of climate crisis awareness.) In his latest column in the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne writes:

"Certain decades shape the country's political life for generations by leaving behind an era to embrace or, at least as often, to scorn...I'm afraid that the past 10 years will be seen as a time when the United States badly lost its way by using our military power carelessly, misunderstanding the real challenges to our long-term security and pursuing domestic policies that constrained our options for the future while needlessly threatening our prosperity."

But that isn't the half of it. The lost opportunity to build a consensus and begin addressing the Climate Crisis ten years ago may well be the fateful failure. Then again, it wasn't done in the 90s during the Clinton administration either.

And I look at what Orr and others are saying, and realize that I personally didn't do enough in the 90s and the past decade to make the stakes clear, to communicate clearly and well enough to cut through the denial and cognitive dissonance, the public relations smog engineered by fossil fuel profiteers, the sensationalistic distractions (if someone had an unbelievably profitable oil business and no conscience, might they not consider funding violent terrorists of any persuasion?) There's responsibility enough to go around.

The drumbeat of denial is comfortably part of our devolved politics (which even a right of center columnist like David Brooks notices, though he barely scratches the surface of it.) It plays into comfortable if tragically false analogies, like this op-ed piece which tries to compare the Y2K panic of 2000 to alarms over the Climate Crisis. The Y2K panic never smelled right to me--it is actually more like the panic over terrorism. We don't need panic. But we do need a crisis response. The evidence for the Climate Crisis has built up for more than 30 years, especially when contributing factors are considered (global population, loss of land and water, depletion of biological diversity, poisoning of the environment.) Even in the old story of crying wolf, the wolf finally came.

"It should not surprise us that the battle for the future will be shaped by struggles over the past," Dionne writes. But that's one of the traps we fall into--we fight the battles of the past, and lose the future. I for one am going to devote some time to trying to get my head around these timelines: the personal ones, within the context of the human prospect.

R.I.P. 2009

Among those we lost in 2009: guitar innovator Les Paul, actor Gene Barry, Soupy Sales, Senator Ted Kennedy, writer Larry Gelbart, Farah Fawcett, Ricardo Montaban, writer John Updike, Walter Cronkite, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary. Also: writer J.G. Ballard, director Budd Shulberg, producer Don Hewitt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, actor Patrick McGoohan, Michael Jackson, director John Hughes, actor Natasha Richardson, painter Andrew Wyeth, dancer Merce Cunningham, Robert MacNamara, deep ecologist Arne Naess. Many of them--and other actors, directors, writers, artists, entertainers who passed away in 2009--brought us joy, and depth to our souls. Others made a difference in our world, taught and informed us, guided us by good and bad example. We owe them. Farewell. Click collage to enlarge.

The Nameless Decade

Update 12/30: A version of this is on the Rescued List at Daily Kos.

Update 1/02: Think Progress notes exactly how much of nothing this decade was for American workers: zero net job growth and the first decline in median income since the 1960s.

Ten years ago, I speculated on what this first decade of the 21st century ought to be called. The choice wasn't obvious, and the alternatives weren't very appealing. I used this conundrum as a way to talk about purpose: would this be the decade of zeros--the postmodern, consumer society, corporate dominated nothingness-- or the decade of the Oughts--when we assumed responsibility for what we ought to do, our responsibility for the future?

The problem of what to call the decade was solved by ignoring it, which pretty much sums up how that responsibility idea went. As trend writers this week struggle to come up with something to say about the past ten years, a new title is bandied about--the "noughties." (As my piece linked above traces a bit of the history of "ought" for zero as slang for "nought" as nothing, zero or the "o" in x's and o's, this piece from this week explains more about "nought.")

Whatever you call it, writes Paul Krugman, it's been a big zero. "Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever."

In terms of economics, he writes, this was "the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing." He suggests we just call it the Big Zero.

My 1999 piece questions the whole enterprise of dividing experience into decades with their defining characteristics. At best, it's shorthand for an image, a mood. Mostly it's advertising.

But when it comes to time, I realize more and more I can only speak for myself, with some reference to my contemporaries. Maybe that's why I can locate a complex of feelings as well as images for "the 50s" or "the 60s." But when it comes to the decade we're leaving, I've got nothing.

I have images and memories, of course. But nothing defining. This decade for me is nameless because it is incoherent, without defining characteristics. Except perhaps for the cell phone. That's not much to hang a decade on.

It wasn't bland. It was extreme, but in every direction. How can you define a decade that began with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and ends with Barack Obama? It may be remembered as the decade of lost opportunity, of too late a start, of fatal delay and suicidal strangeness. And with a little hope near the end.

Of course people who grew up, got married, etc. in this decade will always remember its textures. But apart from what began in 2008, let's hope this decade is forgotten, that it remains nameless. And the next one is very different.

Snow Flyer

Lots of snow in lots of places this winter--this photo is from Washington, D.C. Before global heating changed the predictable winters of western PA, snow was the default condition from late November through much of March. In my 1950s childhood, a white Christmas was such a fixed event that the subject of my first play--in third grade--was the amazing Christmas when it didn't snow (or at least, not until the last minute.) So it was that riding down the hills on my Flexible Flyer was a regular adventure, and Frosty the Snowman was a myth made from the world around me.

Where I live now it never snows, and I miss it--especially the silence, the muffling white of it. In the promo for his winter album, Sting mentions the beauty and mystery the blanket of snow brought to the industrial town where he grew up, and though my town was something like that but more picturesque--the snow did have a transformative effect. I loved walking in the town during and just after a snowfall, also in the city of Pittsburgh. (I did arrange my life so I could survive without driving in the snow.) Even in New York, where snow quickly became blackened slush, walking in the snow was exhilarating. In fact, when I realized my brief residence in Manhattan would be coming to an end, I walked from midtown above 50th down to 13th Street in the swirling snow--my last Manhattan memory.

A Christmas Carol

By way of Charles Dickens and the Marx Brothers, Paul Krugman offers a near-future version of A Christmas Carol, set in the U.S. after current health care legislation takes effect--Tiny Tim's bleak 2009 fate with a pre-existing condition and expensive health insurance (not through Scrooge, of course) is changed by the Senate of Health Care Past: "But reform legislation enacted in 2010 banned insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history and also created a system of subsidies to help families pay for coverage. Even so, insurance doesn’t come cheap — but the Cratchits do have it, and they’re grateful. God bless us, everyone."

While Krugman sees merit in progressives who grieve for the bill's insufficiencies (but says this was the best that could get enacted), he scorns opposition from the "Bah, Humbug" fiscal conservatives who ignored the CBO's evidence that the bill is fiscally conservative, and especially "the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people — a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party. In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause."

The Invention of Holidays

“Holidays were invented in 1203 by Sir Ethelbert Holiday, a sadistic Englishman. It was Sir Ethelbert’s hope that by setting aside specific days on which to celebrate things...that the population at large would fall into a collective deep depression. Holidays would regulate joy so that anyone who didn’t feel joyful on those days would feel bad. Single people would be sad they were single. Married people would be sad they were married. Everyone would feel disappointment that their lives had fallen so far short of their expectations.”--Christopher Durang.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays anyway.

This One's For Ted

Dana Milbank of W Post, writing about Senator Ted Kennedy and the final Senate health care vote: " The president pro tempore of the Senate, 92-year-old Robert Byrd, shot his finger into the air to signal his "aye" vote. "This," the West Virginia Democrat called out strongly from his wheelchair, "is for my friend Ted Kennedy." That was very much the story of the massive health-care legislation that finally cleared the chamber early Thursday morning...

More than anything, it was his memory, and his final exhortation, that allowed the Senate Democrats to overcome considerable differences between moderates and liberals in drafting a compromise. President Obama, in his address to Congress in September, read from a letter Kennedy had written as he neared death, saying he was 'confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the president who at long last signs into law the health-care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society.'""One after the other, Senate colleagues invoked his name in a manner more often associated with his slain brothers."

The Eve of History

Today's New York Times:

President Obama said after the vote that the health care bill was “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s” and that together with the House bill, represented “the toughest measures ever taken to hold the insurance industry accountable.”

If the bill becomes law, it would be a milestone in social policy, comparable with the creation of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965.

Politics 2009

Now just hours away from the last Senate vote on the health care bill, which once again is expected to be 60-40, with all GOPers voting against, David Herszenhorn in the New York Times opines that " [t]he votes also marked something else: the culmination of more than a generation of partisan polarization of the American political system, and a precipitous decline in collegiality and collaboration in governing that seemed to move in inverse proportion to a rising influence of lobbying, money, the 24-hour news cycle and hostilities on talk shows and in the blogosphere."

Meanwhile the voices pointing out the dangers of current misuse of the Senate filibuster now include President Obama, in a PBS interview: " I mean, if you look historically back in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s - even when there was sharp political disagreements, when the Democrats were in control for example and Ronald Reagan was president - you didn't see even routine items subject to the 60-vote rule. So I think that if this pattern continues, you're going to see an inability on the part of America to deal with big problems in a very competitive world, and other countries are going to start running circles around us."

Update: The actual final vote was 60-39. One GOPer didn't bother to show, but the elderly and ailing Senator Robert Byrd, who earlier this week some of those Christian Republicans prayed would die before the vote was taken, made sure he was there. He voted in honor of "my friend," Senator Ted Kennedy.

Shortly after I took photos of the rainbow last Saturday I've already posted, I walked around to the back, and took some photos of the clouds above the setting sun. This is one of them.

This Fateful Moment: Follow-Ups

Copenhagen is over, the health care bill passed its first and probably decisive test in the Senate on a straight party-line 60-40 vote, the minimum necessary to avoid an unbreakable filibuster. So evaluations of the outcomes have begun.

Internationally there's a lot of skepticism about the Copenhagen agreement, expressed particularly in UK papers, like the Guardian. This BBC summary is a bit more balanced but still pretty brutal.

Update: Sam Hummel's useful and detailed account at Salon questions much of the reporting on Copenhagen. He asserts that no better accord was rejected, that while they were disappointed that the accord wasn't stronger, most developing nations supported it; the accord was put together by a representative group rather than a "backroom deal" of a few countries; and that the accord is meaningful: "The importance of getting an agreement under which the major developing nation emitters recognize they have a responsibility to act cannot be overstated!" He also says that Obama is not to blame for any perceived weakness in the accord, and that his contribution was positive. He concludes: "The things I saw, in every segment of the COP15 negotiations that I had the opportunity to watch, gave me hope."


On the health care bill, while some on the left are still angry, some oppose provisions or especially what's lacking so intensely that they remain opposed to the bill, others--like Kos--are calling for the left to continue to try to improve the bill until it is in absolute final form. At that point, if it doesn't become "worse," he and others will likely support it.

There's a growing sense that it's the best that could be expected, that all major "revolutionary" legislation began in a limited, inadequate form, and that what it does is better than things as they are. And there's the beginning of admission that it's an historic achievement for the Obama administration. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, "It was as grueling a victory as the one in the primaries, and took even longer. But it was a victory, a substantive, enduring legislative victory the like of which no president has achieved since Reagan."

In the context of the ongoing madness in the U.S. Senate on health care, several more voices have joined mine and Ezra Klein's in asserting that the current misuse of the filibuster as demanding a super-majority for any substantive bill is the prime suspect in a government that can't quite govern: The Nation's Chris Hayes said so on MSNBC, and Paul Krugman concludes that "the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional."

But what does all this mean for "this fateful moment" in the shape of things to come? It's more than a truism to say, only time will tell. It's a reminder that quite a lot is unpredictable. But from this perspective, it is ominous. The basic fact is that neither the need for a decent health care system in the U.S. and a concerted effort to address the Climate Crisis by the entire world could overcome the power of other political and economic interests.

While there is plenty of responsibility to go around, the usual suspects of the huge financial and economic interests--the multinationals and their banks, the big fossil fuel and insurance conglomerates--have been busy in the shadows, pulling silent strings.

Those interests mightily influence U.S. politics, and since I know this landscape better, this is where I see the most disgusting and disquieting evidence. It's true on the Climate Crisis as well as health care--for the lack of congressional action on carbon limited what President Obama could promise or persuade in Copenhagen.

This is despite what I believe is much stronger public support for universal health care and for action on the Climate Crisis. Polls suggest this as well, including a new one on the Climate Crisis, in which 65% favored regulating carbon emissions.

So at this moment, the conclusion on both issues suggest important beginnings, but containing flaws that may turn out to be fatal. The health care bill may not control costs or lower premiums enough, may impose an unpopular and perhaps unconstitutional "individual mandate" to buy products from private insurance, and may be phased in so gradually that it remains vulnerable to political destruction before it takes full effect. The Copenhagen agreement may not lead to real agreements to act, and may signal that national governments won't act quickly enough or sufficiently to either blunt the effects of the Climate Crisis in the near future, and especially stop the worst from happening later on.

I agree with those who say that even if he had done some things differently, President Obama could not have altered either outcome for the better. And I'm not going to waste my energy on political posturing. I have no editors to please or ideological banner to wave from my masthead. I have no producers to please by being outrageous.

As far as what we do to make a better future using the instruments of politics as well as of science, business and law: this is where we are. Both the health care bill (assuming that something like this becomes law) and the Copenhagen agreement do reverse the recent and seemingly unstoppable official refusal by the U.S. government to recognize and confront these fateful issues.

Most of these efforts will be conducted by people younger than me. To them I reiterate that hope is not what you feel but what you do.

Health Care Deal

Senate Democrats have apparently secured the necessary 60 votes to pass the current version of their health care bill by Christmas. Judging from what I've read about the contents of the bill, I believe it should be passed.

Here's some sense of the latest changes, and while I am troubled by what the bill lacks, I am most persuaded by descriptions like this--in a Washington Post oped Sunday by Victoria Kennedy--of what the bill does do:

" Thirty million Americans who do not have coverage would finally be able to afford it. Ninety-four percent of Americans would be insured. Americans would finally be able to live without fear that a single illness could send them into financial ruin.

Insurance companies would no longer be able to deny people the coverage they need because of a preexisting illness or condition. They would not be able to drop coverage when people get sick. And there would be a limit on how much they can force Americans to pay out of their own pockets when they do get sick."

It is even more important to pass this bill, and quickly get through conference committee and get the final bill signed into law. It is time for this to be over.

Once the bill is passed, the light can shine on the disgraceful conduct of congressional Republicans. As a candidate, Barack Obama made a persuasive case for an end to political divisiveness for its own sake, particularly on major issues of common concern. He tried to work with Republicans on this issue and others, and was rebuffed, insulted, lied to and lied about, and worse. For the next several days anyone paying attention will see even more clearly the Republican strategy of obstruction for its own sake. At at time when we need substantive attempts to find the best solutions for increasingly dangerous problems, we are mired in politics of the worst sort, and discourse that is as crude as any I remember, and even more shamelessly mendacious than any in my lifetime.

The end of the health care debate will free the White House from the pretense that congressional Republicans are acting as a legitimate partner in governing, or that the political hysteria Republicans are whipping up nationally is either normal or useful. It is all unpatriotic and undemocratic. I expect President Obama to unleash hell on the Republicans in the next year for their obstructionism, for their abdication of a constructive role in democracy. And they deserve it.

Don't Dis Beginnings

President Obama chose his words well in describing the final agreement made at Copenhagen. "Today we've made a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change."

This is undoubtedly true, if only because the United States was at last a party to the agreement. It means all the major developed nations now are on record committing themselves to not simply acknowledging the Climate Crisis but to addressing it, as individual countries and as international partners.

Further, the developed countries have acknowledged responsibility for both causing the problem and aiding the most vulnerable nations in dealing with the effects:

"We agreed to join an international effort to provide financing to help developing countries, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, adapt to climate change. And we reaffirmed the necessity of listing our national actions and commitments in a transparent way."

But he also recognized that the agreement is inadequate--that it is a first step, in direction and in the necessity of working together:

" Taken together these actions will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and our grandchildren a cleaner and safer planet. Now, this progress did not come easily, and we know that this progress alone is not enough. Going forward, we're going to have to build on the momentum that we've established here in Copenhagen to ensure that international action to significantly reduce emissions is sustained and sufficient over time. We've come a long way, but we have much further to go.

To continue moving forward we must draw on the effort that allowed us to succeed here today -- engagement among nations that represent a baseline of mutual interest and mutual respect. Climate change threatens us all; therefore, we must bridge old divides and build new partnerships to meet this great challenge of our time. That's what we've begun to do here today."

The greatest disappointment was in solid commitments to reduce carbon emissions. The agreement specifies a goal of doing what is necessary to keep the temperature from rising more than 2 degrees C. This is more than the goal some developing nations wanted (1.5C) or many scientists, but it is a lot better than what is likely to happen without efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.

President Obama often stresses the positive, which is alternative energy: not only the best way to limit greenhouse gases (by creating more of our energy with technologies that don't pollute with these gases) but as an economic boon, as what America needs to re-energize its economy and lead the world economically again. Once again, let's remember that this is a commitment by the American President that reverses eight years of resistance.

So in his statement, President Obama talked about his administration's efforts to jump-start alternative energy innovations and use, ending:

"And around the world, energy is an issue that demands our leadership. The time has come for us to get off the sidelines and to shape the future that we seek. That's why I came to Copenhagen today, and that's why I'm committed to working in common effort with countries from around the globe. That's also why I believe what we have achieved in Copenhagen will not be the end but rather the beginning, the beginning of a new era of international action."

The details of the agreement have yet to be analyzed. Some are speaking of it as a betrayal of the United Nations. Yet it is worth remembering how compromised and less-than-ideal the UN itself has been, from its inception. That's not to endorse more authority for--perish the thought-- the World Bank, but to remind us all of the international political context.

Will this be enough, soon enough? Such an effort should have begun twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. But it didn't. This much has begun now. This is where we are. We start from here. We have no other choice.

rainbow 3

Ungovernable?

Update: Another voice--Paul Krugman-- supporting the compromised health care bill. What the bill does, its supporter say, is insure the uninsured, while admittedly not doing much else. Krugman on the disillusion and the bill: "But don’t take it out on the tens of millions of Americans who will have health insurance if this bill passes, but will be out of luck — and, in some cases, dead — if it doesn’t."

Original post:
Sometimes I hear a commentator say something I hadn't thought of. Sometimes I hear something I had thought of, but days or weeks after it occurred to me. But it's particularly startling to hear a major if tentative conclusion come out of someone else's mouth on the same day it came to me.

As the Copenhagen meetings reach their climax, so does the health care reform legislation in the U.S. At the moment, everything is pretty much up in the air on both. The latest Senate health care proposal is creating new divisions, notably within the mostly Democratic "progressives." Howard Dean and Senator Bernie Sanders are among those against the bill. Kos makes his statement against it. John Podesta makes his for it, as does Ezra Klein.

It was Ezra Klein on Charlie Rose who read my thoughts. Not about health care specifically, but about Congress. Klein suggests that this debate demonstrates that under current conditions, Congress is unable to deal constructively with big issues, to make big changes no matter how necessary they are to the country, its economy, its identity, its future. He noted exactly the prior example I was thinking of: California. In combination with the kind of extreme politics prevalent now, a few rules in the legislature and in state government make this state ungovernable. The same is becoming true in Washington, where the misuse of the "filibuster" rule in the Senate now requires 60 votes out of 100 to pass anything of significance. It is that rule which has turned the health care reform effort into a shameful farce.

Klein also said something else I believe: that the media concentrates on the President, but the President's actual power is limited. Not everything that goes wrong is the President's fault. Congress is where the buck stops now. So it's too simplistic to assume that Hillary Clinton or anyone else could simply have kicked some ass and gotten this done. There's too much power accruing to too few very flawed Senators.

I'd go beyond Klein's naming of the media: it's also our focus on the President as our substitute king, our symbol, the president of projection. It's true however that the Bush presidency tended to mask the congressional black hole, partly because he had a rubber stamp Republican Congress doing his destructive bidding.

Now Democrat Obama has a large Democratic majority in the House and a tenuous 60 votes in the Senate, but there are two differences: the Democrats aren't a rubber stamp monolith, and the Republicans are shameless in opposing everything the Democrats propose or the President supports. That shamelessness extends to the criminal misuse of the filibuster, which has become just another way to vote no, and thwart the majority.

As Klein pointed out, even FDR didn't have to have 60 votes in the Senate to pass the New Deal. But President Obama must have 60 votes, and that has not only turned health care into a tragic farce, it is feeding an increasingly ugly mood and divisions within the country. At least one poll indicates that growing opposition to health care reform is coming principally from liberals who wanted the public option, but probably more broadly it is coming from people who are just disgusted with the process. It looks like Wiemar to too many.

What's the remedy? The Democrats are unlikely to be in a stronger position after the 2010 congressional elections. Their mythical 60 vote majority in the Senate is likely to be a memory. Only reform of the filibuster rule can save this country from sinking far and fast for the foreseeable future.

I don't know if this health care bill should be passed or not. I do know that it is far, far less than it should be, and it will do far, far less than it could have. Whether it would do more good than harm is debatable, and maybe even unknowable. It's just all pretty disgusting. And it suggests that both in terms of ugly, destructive politics and intractable structural deficiencies in the states as well as the federal government, this country is verging on the ungovernable.

rainbow 2

Copenhagen Context: Why the Horseshit

The second article I wanted to recall as context for the Copenhagen talks (the first is here) is in the New Yorker, where the formidable Elizabeth Kolbert takes on the currently hot (or is it cool?) Climate Crisis denying book, SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. It's not just that she dismantles their pernicious silliness, but she also isolates what I believe is the primary reason people want to hear that the Climate Crisis doesn't exist, probably, and even if it does, it's going to be all right.

She starts with the Parable of Horseshit, a story the book also tells, about how in the 1890s, big cities like New York were being smothered by piles of horseshit from the transport these cities depended on. "One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows. New York’s troubles were not New York’s alone; in 1894, the Times of London forecast that by the middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure."

Doom was predicted, stern and costly measures were planned, and then, suddenly it all went away. Because the horses did, ushered out by the automobile. The SuperFreaks tell it to make the point that simple solutions emerge, and they are usually technological.

Of course they deny there is a Climate Crisis. But if there is, they know how to fix it: with huge new technologies: “Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem,” Levitt and Dubner write. All we need to do is figure out a way to shoot huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere on our own. This could be done, they say, by sending up an eighteen-mile-long hose: “For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better.”

First of all, Kolbert suggests the extent of their ignorance about climate science. "Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong." In one case their conclusion is based on faulty arithmetic. Not sophisticated math: arithmetic.

Kolbert's disdain for the craziness of their main proposal is probably more muted than it deserves, because it is truly crazy. It looks attractive: a big tech fix, aping the action of volcanoes in cooling the earth, while CO2-spewing fuels can continue and even accelerate. But ir ignores just about every aspect of how climate, weather and life on the planet--let alone chemicals-- interact. In the guise of saving the planet we know, it would poison and otherwise fundamentally change life on earth (there goes the sun)--even if it were possible to do. And it is much more drastic than anything Al Gore and others in the mainstream propose. As Kolbert says, some legitimate scientists say such geoengineering should be studied, but only as a last resort.

It's not hard to understand what these guys are doing or why. They have found a marketing niche--by wearing suits and offering contrarian but simple-sounding solutions, they're making a fortune shoveling horseshit, the future be damned. But why are people listening? Actual solutions to the Climate Crisis involve change that will, Kolbert writes, "require a lot from us. It would mean changing the way we eat, shop, manufacture, and get around, and, ultimately, how we see ourselves. It is the difficulty of imagining such changes that makes schemes like Levitt and Dubner’s at once so alluring and so dangerous. Just about every time anyone with any sort of credentials offers a “simple and cheap” solution to global warming, the idea is hailed as bold or innovative, and taken far more seriously than it deserves to be."

It makes human sense that people would rather avoid wrenching change--it could be arduous, even dangerous, and you don't know if you'd be better off, or worse. Better the devil you know.

But the flaw in the argument is this: it's not a choice between change and no change. Things are going to change, big time. Perhaps gradually, perhaps more quickly, but probably in fits and starts over the next half century, the Climate Crisis is going to become a dominant fact of life, and engine of change. And most of it isn't going to be better.

The problem is that unless civilization anticipates and prepares for that change, and unless it works to prevent even greater (and much worse) change in the farther future, things are going to change for the worse, big time. At first for some people (that's happening already, in the far north, in drought-stricken Africa, in heat waves and storms, etc.), then for a lot of people, and then for everyone. Eventually, after generations of increasing hardship and permanent crisis, of accelerating misery, the survival of civilization, which means the survival of most of humanity, is at stake--along with life on this planet as we know it.

So among all the other difficulties, it's the horseshit shoveled by the likes of these guys that is smothering our chances at a future. People may think they're just sticking their head in the sand. But it's not sand.

rainbow 1

one of a series I shot here on Saturday.

Rainy Season

"Rain" by Yukie Adams. Though it feels late, the rainy season seems to be starting here on the North Coast. But we had unusually cold and clear days last week--while much of the U.S. was getting hammered by snow, ice and wind. El Nino perhaps? Anyway, if that was our rain, sorry... As for El Nino, it along with global heating has led the UK Met Office (Met is short for Meteorological) to conclude that 2010 is "very likely" to be a warmer year than 2009, and more likely than not will become the hottest year on record (exceeding 1998.)

The Future of Hope

Recently I've been trying to read Hope in the Age of Anxiety by Anthony Scioli and Henry B. Biller (Oxford), which was blurbed to suggest it surveys psychology, philosophy and theology for news on hope. Instead it seems more of a self-help book, with little tests and inspiring examples. But what's most troubling to me is that I can't locate an idea of what the authors define as hope that makes much sense to me. Some of it may be optimism, or faith. Some of it may be courage. But hope? What is hope?

The question was raised again in some of the responses to President Obama's Nobel Prize address [see the post below for more responses.] Here's one from Alex Steffan at WorldChanging (a site I like and find useful), which includes the last paragraphs of Obama's address:

President Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech is a truly remarkable piece of writing. He manages, in an incredibly conflicted moment, to neither dodge the conflicts nor let those conflicts define the possibilities of our time. It is a speech that is honest, humble and at the same time profoundly high-minded. The last few lines, in particular, reveal a sentiment that's critical for the era of instability we know we're headed into:

"So let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls. Somewhere today, in the here and now, a soldier sees he's outgunned but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protester awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, who believes that a cruel world still has a place for his dreams.

Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that — for that is the story of human progress; that is the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth."

"This is a set of ideas very much the moral core of the politics of optimism that I've written about before," Steffan concluded. And if you follow the link, he expresses a fairly nuanced view of the concept of optimism. But I don't quite buy it--that is, I don't quite buy that it is necessary, or more particularly, that this is what Obama is expressing.

Steffan opposes the negativism that says we are incapable of solving the major problems, of saving the future. I agree with most of what he says, but I stop with this definition of optimism: That we have the capacity to create and deploy solutions to the world's biggest problems."

I believe it's wrong to say solving great problems is impossible: that we can't. But I don't believe that we necessarily "have the capacity to create and deploy solutions to the world's biggest problems." I believe that it is possible we do. But it is impossible to know.

Optimism may help to motivate people, just as faith may. But neither is necessary. In terms in what will or won't happen, or even what can or can't happen, optimism and pessimism are irrelevant.

But admitting uncertainty doesn't mean not doing anything. Envisioning what success might look like, for instance--that's something else. That's useful. Yes we can is a clarion call, an assertion of possibility, although it can equally mean "yes, we can try." But even belief in the possibility isn't necessary for hope.

To clarify what I mean, here's another interpretation of Obama's speech, by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan and I apparently share a Catholic background, including some knowledge of what they were calling the New Theology in the early 60s. Otherwise, not so much. Plus he's stayed with the Church and I have not. But he writes this:

" Hope is not optimism. We have little reason for optimism given the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hope is a choice."

(He also adds: As much a choice as faith and love, which I don't entirely buy. Love is something of a choice, and something of not a choice, and faith is less of a choice than either love or hope. According to my definitions.)

But I do agree that Obama makes the case, especially in those last paragraphs, that hope is a choice ("we can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice," etc.) But I would take the concept further.

To me hope is embedded in a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is famous only for the first part: "…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." But the full statement concludes: "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

Fitzgerald may well have been thinking of the ending of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, in which the Time Traveller has seen a future when humanity is finishing its self-destruction. The novel's narrator is his friend, Hillyer, who acknowledges that the Traveller "thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end." Though this is not Hillyer's view he still concludes, "If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so."

My own sense of hope takes elements from all of these statements. In terms of fact or reality, hope is based on complexity, on the absurdity of our reflexive either/or: humanity is either evil or good, selfish or altruistic, destined for greatness or damned, etc. And also on fallibility and uncertainty: I am convinced that the Climate Crisis is real and is heading us towards the end of human civilization. But how it will all play out, and whether our efforts can really stop it, no one really knows.

So in that sense hope is a choice. It's not optimism--yes, we will solve it! Or pessimism--not with our selfish genes we won't! It isn't even about what will or won't happen in the future. It's about what we choose to do now. Hope is a condition of the present.

But in another sense, it's not even a choice, at least not as a discreet concept, any more than Samuel Beckett's famous"I can't go on. I'll go on"--is a statement of despair. It's just living. Hope is just another word for choosing to live, although it does imply an embodiment of values: a larger sense of life that includes doing for others, and for the future. Or put it this way, it's not so much a choice as a commitment.

When we do for others, we often can see the results (though not always.) But when we act for the future, we will never know if we were successful. Some people have faith. For me, faith is a trick of the heart, but it's possible that for others it is more, and they aren't deluded. But hope is more humble--it only hopes. Yet hope without works is empty. Envisioning and building a future worth hoping for is the work of hope. Idea by idea and brick by brick (or solar panel by solar panel.) "We can do that — for that is the story of human progress; that is the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth."

Nobel Speech Reaction

I admit to being a bit surprised at the response to President Barack Obama's speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. My own response was that it was a trenchant presentation but, as Andrew Sullivan wrote, "Nothing in it was very different from anything he has said before." I don't think it was Obama's best speech, and it was not as good (or as bold) as a speech he quoted from, President Kennedy's American University speech.

Nevertheless, this speech has been almost universally praised, even by GOPer and hardliners. "I am staggered that so many neoconservatives and conservatives seemed shocked and enthused by the address," Sullivan writes. "This does not, it seems to me, reflect on the address's novelty for Obama....Distilling it all in one 36 minute address may have clarified it for his opponents. But I have to say their welcome applause merely reveals that they have not been listening for so many months."

Joe Klein at TIME describes the speech's balancing act: "How does a rookie President, having been granted the Nobel Peace Prize, go about earning it? Well, he can start by giving the sort of Nobel lecture that Barack Obama just did, an intellectually rigorous and morally lucid speech that balanced the rationale for going to war against the need to build a more peaceful and equitable world."

But as Klein suggests, they're impressed with the justification for war, the statement that there is evil in the world, and Obama's assertion to the European audience in the room that their peace has been largely paid for by the U.S. military. But a lot of GOPers had to close their ears to other balances. Sullivan wrote: "The neocons are also trying to coopt Obama for Bush, while his speech, if you examine it closely, is, in fact, as brutal a debunking of Bush utopianism and incompetence imaginable. Just give the principled neocons time to save face and they'll understand (and appreciate) him in the end for how he is marshalling and rescuing American power from the Cheney wreckage."

Sullivan also quoted these two paragraphs by Peter Beinart :

"[Obama]...understands, in a way Cheney and Palin never will, that true moral universalism requires recognizing that Americans are just as capable of evil as anyone else. And that means recognizing that we are in just as much need of restraint. For Obama and Truman, the paradox of American exceptionalism is that only by recognizing that we are not inherently better than anyone else, and thus must bind our power within a framework of law, can we distinguish ourselves from the predatory powers of the past.

He didn’t just condemn human rights horrors in Congo, Burma, Zimbabwe and Iran; he acknowledged that an unfettered America is capable of moral horror itself—which is why we must ban torture and submit to the Geneva Conventions. He didn’t just praise US soldiers; he praised the peacekeepers of the United Nations, thus acknowledging that military force can occur within a framework of international institutions and international law."

Frankly I wish the public dialogue were mature enough for Obama to get beyond conclusions I came to in high school so he could envision and articulate practical steps towards creating peace--the skills of peace that are required. He could have given Europe more credit for creating institutions that have used the time and space American protection has provided to keep their continent--the focus of two devastating world wars--unthinkably peaceful.

But what he did say was worth saying. Especially having given the tragic justification for war he recognizes: "So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another - that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.

The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths - that war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human feelings. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions."

Except that when I heard the speech, I didn't hear "human feelings" but "human folly."

I suggest (or will suggest) more in the post above. This one is getting too long.

Far and Near

In a new image, Hubble shows us farther into the universe than we've ever seen before, including galaxies formed in the first 600 million years of the universe, some 13 billion years ago. And a recent photo from orbit of the blue Earth, the only place in that vastness known to have at least a little intelligent life.