Takes your breath right away, doesn’t it? There are certainly few better ways to underscore the full scope of the regressive nightmare haunting a country that likes to think of itself as the last, best hope of humanity. Fat chance of that. Indeed, we – or at least some of us – half-deserve this fate for choosing the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, DeLay, Scalia and the rest these last decades. It’s the rest of the world I feel especially sorry for. Last, best hope? Jeez, the mercury had already burst out squirting from the top of my irony thermometer seven years ago. Somehow I don’t think so. Well, maybe the ‘last’ part...
And what’s especially killer about this particular issue is the degree to which the multiple maladies and solutions all line up so neatly. Sometimes the cosmos sends you a message in very subtle ways. Other times it beats you over the head with a two-by-four. Occasionally, it detonates a small nuclear device in your backyard swimming pool to get your attention.
We’re very much in the latter category right now. You don’t exactly have to do a full and complete inventory to figure this one out. Here, just take this pop quiz. Quick, now: What factor do all of the following items have in common: massive environmental devastation, skyrocketing transportation and food prices, a declining middle-class with disappearing jobs, and a war-prone and constant calamity-threatening Middle East continually sucking in American military involvement and nightmarishly distorting our foreign policy? (If you’re somehow still struggling with this, you may want to consider spending a little more time catching up with current events. Meanwhile, though, here’s a bonus hint for you: Alan Greenspan described this as the real reason America went to war in Iraq.)
Did you get it?!?! Okay! A+ for you! Now flip it on it’s head. What would be a way in which our society could address the massive threats of global warming, a sinking middle class with lousy jobs, poverty-inducing energy costs and military nightmares in the Middle East, all at once? How about if we made it a giant national priority to wean ourselves off carbon-based energy sources through a variety of policies mixing incentives and regulations, and a huge national effort to develop alternative fuel sources, with all the industrial development and good-paying jobs associated with launching such industries? You know. What did Jimmy Carter call it, thirty freakin’ years ago? "The moral equivalent of war", wasn’t it? Too bad he was a failed president, though. Hardly invaded any other countries. What could he possibly have known?
Seriously, though, here’s a chance to go from the all-wrong scenario of environmental destruction / energy dependence / Middle East war / horrific gas prices / recession / middle class decline, over to the all-right scenario of sustainability / energy independence / peace / reasonable energy costs / economic development / prosperity – all in one fell swoop. I mean, I know that regressives have a problem with any policies that actually make sense, and I know that Americans are just about the dumbest branch of the homo politicus family tree, but isn’t this a no-brainer so obvious that even people who actually have no brains could figure it out?
So, last week James Hansen reminded us that we are headed for such joyous ‘lifestyle changes’ as mass extinction and ecosystem collapse. Of course, most regressives continued to pooh-pooh such warnings as some sort of liberal conspiracy to undermine capitalism. I must say, these people blow me away with their unflinching and robotic dogmatism. I mean, I get why they insist on the Earth being only 6,000 years old and anything having to do with sex being a major sin. They’re incredibly frightened, and these beliefs bring the existential comfort of order to an otherwise messy and capricious universe. But what’s up with middle class fools ardently supporting tax cuts for the wealthy? Or any human being in the whole world denying the near unanimous testimony of scientific experts regarding a planetary threat, because oil companies told them to do so? Do climatologists seriously strike anybody as crypto-anarchists masquerading as scientists in order to destroy capitalism? (Listen to some regressive kooks talk about global warming and you could easily think so.) And, if that was really their goal, wouldn’t there be a lot easier ways to crash the system than to go spend years getting a PhD, do a bunch of boring research for low pay, and grade a million mind-numbing term papers written by a million grammatically-challenged college sophomores?
Then there’s that pesky little problem of evidence. Every week there’s more, though hardly any quite as egregious as what you could have seen on CNN.com just a few days ago: "North Pole Could Be Ice-Free This Summer, Scientists Say". Woo-hoo. No worries there, eh? Now if Adam and Steve get married in California or Massachusetts, that’s something to get worked up about. But the destruction of the Arctic ice cap? We’ve already got polar bears in zoos, so what’s the big damn deal? Prolly it’ll be easier to get to the oil up there without all that ice in the way, anyhow.
What will they say – assuming there are any they left to be saying – in five centuries about us nice folks who managed to bequeath the solar system a second Mercury where a green and fertile planet once stood, just so we could party a little longer? I’m not sure, but I don’t think it will be pretty. And I don’t think it will be, "Well, sure, they weren’t perfect. And, true, they wrecked the whole planet. But at least they kept boys from marrying other boys."
These regressive fools and their pre-/anti-scientific religious superstitions just kill me.
And that’s just the problem. They’re killing all of us.
Praise the lord.
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