Author: Captain Future

If the 2006 elections were held in March or April instead of November, just about all any Democrat would have to do to win would be to buy 15 seconds of TV time and mutter three words–Iraq, Dubai, Katrina–then go home and plan the victory party.

Well, not really, but you get the idea. Unfortunately the election isn’t till November, and the issue with the greatest staying power and most potential isn’t either of the obvious ones: it’s Katrina.

Dubai may fade, Iraq may change, but Katrina is firmly fixed in the public mind, as two recent if largely overlooked polls indicate. Katrina is the Democrats’ political equivalent of 9-11.

—MORE—
Bushites have made shameless and effective political use of 9-11. But Democrats have not effectively focused on an equally powerful phenomenon, with its equally powerful associated images, that is ready-made to tell the tawdry story of Bush administration failure. The Democrats have Katrina. They don’t need to distort it or exploit it.  But it’s about time they used it.  Because people care about what it means.

The issue is ready-made because it remains powerful in the public mind, even with the extreme fall-off in coverage of the affected region, and the Democrats’ failure to concentrate on it. Just in the past week or so:

An Ipsos poll conducted for Associated Press shows Americans choose spending on Katrina over spending on Iraq as the country’s highest priority by a margin of 2 to 1:64% to 31%. Nearly 90% believe that the affected area is still devastated. More than half are not confident that the federal government can handle a similiar disaster in the future.

A WNBC poll conducted by Marist College says :

Among the many controversies surrounding the Bush Administration, its response to Hurricane Katrina is most troubling to voters. 66% of registered voters nationwide are bothered a great deal or a good amount by the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Although Democrats are most critical, 64% of independents and 42% of Republicans are bothered by how the administration handled the disaster.

(Hat tip to Political Wire which reported both polls.)

Katrina is the narrative that tells all the stories about Bushcorps that Democrats need to tell. Inattention and inaction when Americans were in trouble and needed their federal government. Disrespect for working people, the poor and people of color, which can be further illustrated through many other policies and failures. Failure of leadership, and failure of character. An aftermath studded with scapegoating and more evidence of the Culture of Corruption in the awarding of no-bid contracts to cronies. Wasting taxpayers’ money on these contracts with companies which demonstrably fail to do the job.

Even the Bush administration admits that its response was too little and too late. But what is their solution? Its Homeland Security office issued a report recommending the full militarization of disaster response. Such a response leads directly to a critique of the Bushite penchant for a police state, in the guise of national security.

There is also a clear opportunity to get the Climate Crisis on the table at last. Katrina is also a golden door to making the Climate Crisis a Democrat issue, especially with the recent statements by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, amending the view that the severity of Katrina and other hurricanes last year was not linked to global heating, to say that some researchers there think there is a causal link.

Katrina offers the emotional center and the opportunity to begin an incessant and relentless assault on Republican failures, while making the positive case for what Democrats stand for.

And it is not too late. Katrina is not going away. Cleanup still continues, and bodies of the dead continue to be found in New Orleans, at the rate of one or two a day. More than 1400 dead are recorded, with some 2300 still missing, three-quarters of that number are African-Americans. This tragedy is still unfolding, and it represents a threat to every American worried about how its government responds to emergencies.  

Levees are being rebuilt, amidst controversy. Hurricane season is fast approaching.Katrina should be on every Democrat’s lips going into the 2006 Congressional elections.

And there is occasion to begin very soon. According to Truthout, a march is planned for March 14, the day before the first scheduled evictions of Katrina victims. It will be in Washington, and the route goes past FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, to the White House. A rally will be held in Lafayette Square Park.

Apart from its specific purpose to bring attention to the plight of Katrina survivors, this event should be the unofficial but very real beginning of the 2006 campaign: the Katrina campaign.

While these other issues are powerful, Katrina can be the centerpiece.  At the very least, it cannot be forgotten: it must be prominent. It has the advantage of being visceral, relatively free of complications or mixed messages, and it provides the opportunities to make a positive as well as negative case–to say what Democrats stand for as well as what they are against.  If Democrats seize this opportunity, and use it well.

The New York Times has one of those insider gossip reports on tensions between the staffs of the president (The Big Smirk) and vice-president (Dead-Eye Dickhead.)

 Those tensions always exist between staffs, and a situation like this one–with Dead-Eye’s negligent shooting and serious wounding of a 78 year old man under still unknown circumstances at a little picnic at a “birds in a barrel” hunting emporium–always brings it out.

But this is the supposed vice-president, who has no constitutional duties other than presiding over the Senate (which he hardly ever performs) and staying in touch in case the president dies. His staff should be about as powerful as the First Lady’s.

Of course that’s not the case in this White House. Amidst all the grumbling and rumbing in the piece about how Smirk’s staff would have been more forthcoming sooner, there’s the money paragraph:

–MORE–

Several White House officials said no one among the White House staff, including the chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., felt empowered to dictate how news of the accident would be handled.

The Smirk’s Chief can’t impinge on the power of the v.p.’s staff. That pretty much says it all.

Not that Cheney being the real prez should be a surprising surmise—he’s the guy who worked for Nixon and Reagan with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and and all the architects of the current bloody policy to create booty for their corporate fellow trough feeders. And nobody much believes the Smirk can do much more than walk and clear brush at the same time.

But now the evidence is quite clear. Substitute the name Dan Quayle in this story (not Dan the Quail, who apparently got away from Cheney’s shotgun blast) and the dimensions of the difference become clearer.

So if it wasn’t before, now it’s pretty obvious to everyone who really runs the White House. And that must drive the Smirk’s staff nuts, as well as turning them even redder, this time with embarassment.

I am more than 3,000 miles away today, and I can feel it.

The western PA town where I was born is no longer called Greensburg. It’s Black and Goldsburg (at least until Monday.)

It could well be the name of the entire region. Black and gold is everywhere. Black and gold two- story balloons. Black and gold food. Michelle Pilecki (another Pittsburgher) at the Huffington Post has relevant links to this phenomenon.

It’s worth taking a shot at explaining it, not just to suggest what Super Bowl Sunday means to Pittsburgh and Steelers Nation, but to the possible fortunes of Lynn Swann, now the likely Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

I not only grew up 30-odd miles from downtown Pittsburgh, I lived in the city for about eight years, just before coming to far northern CA.  I still have family and friends in the state, some with political connections.

Pittsburgh on Super Sunday

On a normal Sunday in football season, business in the Pittsburgh area is slow, especially during the game. It’s a favorite time for non-fans to go to the mostly empty supermarket, though the game will be blaring from the p.a.

On this Super Bowl Sunday, come six pm eastern time, the city will just stop. The malls will actually close. It’s not just that fewer customers are likely. Too many employees want to be watching the game.

The Pittsburgh Public Theatre has cancelled its Sunday night performance of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The Importance of Being Steelers takes precedence. The city’s science and art museums, and even the zoo, are running programs and contests related to the Steelers. The game is the cultural event. The Super Bowl is the city’s theatre.

By the time the game ends, portions of downtown Pittsburgh will be closed to motorized traffic. A big safe space is being created for the hoped-for celebration. There hasn’t been one for a Super Bowl victory since 1980.

City of Champions

The Steelers grabbed the heart of Pittsburgh with its great teams of the 70s, at precisely the same time that the steel mills, the source of the city’s identity, were shutting down.

The mills were failing, the Steelers were succeeding, preaching the blue collar ethic.  Steel City became Steelers City.

From then until about 1990, the city of Pittsburgh lost half of its population. But people who left in this industrial diaspora retained close connections, if not also to family and the area itself, then certainly to the Steelers.  That’s why the Steelers can go to any NFL city in North America and play to Steelers fans in the stands.      

The Steelers were and are part of everything else that is and was Pittsburgh.  

Family: you see it in the photos in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online Steelers Nation collection: seven young cousins in Big Ben No. 7 jerseys, a father and his infant daughter in Steelers shirts, etc.  

Community: you see it in the joyful faces in other P-G photos of the rally downtown last week.  

Tradition: Like other middle-sized media markets, a lot of TV reporters pass through on their way up or down, but those that stay and earn a place in the heart of this city will be royalty there forever.  Every Pittsburgher from the 1950s will remember Rege Cordic, and Ed and Wendy King; Nick Perry, Paul Long in the 60s onward, and Bill Burns, joined at KDKA by his daughter, Patti in the 70s.

There are many more (one being one of the few liberal radio talk show hosts in the nation, the brilliant Lynn Cullen.)

One night in the 70s I was watching another Pittsburgh icon, Myron Cope, doing his “Speaking of Sports” segment before a key playoff game.  He suggested that the kind of scarves (called babuskas) that he saw women wearing at Steelers events could be modified into a terrible weapon against the opposing team.  When the Steeler defense came on the field, waving these golden Terrible Towels would have a magical effect and stun the opposition into submission.

Cope was always sort of nuts, and I admit that when I heard this I thought he’d really gone over.  It was such a dumb idea, it would never work.

Thirty years later just about everyone in America knows about the Terrible Towel.  There will be a sea of them in the stands at Detroit today.  Three generations and counting have been waving them.  A grandmother actually sewed a suit for her grandson made of worn out Terrible Towels.  And Myron Cope retired from broadcasting, on Pittsburgh first game on Monday Night Football this season.

Loyalty: It’s a Pittsburgh ideal not always honored, but there are conspicuous examples.  Many would point to the Steelers as an example of loyalty’s benefits, a team that has had two head coaches since 1969.

All of these, and more, come together in the Steelers, especially in the character of the team and its owners.  The original owner, Art Rooney is as revered as anyone ever will be there.  Around town he was known as unprententious and kind.  A sports writer I met who’d left the city told me for years afterwards he would get postcards from Art Rooney asking him when he was coming back, until finally he did come back.  There are stories of his son and current owner, Dan Rooney, and his kindness towards fans.  These are Pittsburgh people.

Governor Swann?

In 1980, I interviewed many people in Pittsburgh for a story on the relationship of its teams (the Steelers were NFL champs at the same time that the Pittsburgh Pirates were MLB champs) and its people. I talked to the mayor, who told me how important the positive attention the Steelers brought was to the future of the city. I talked to Steelers coach Chuck Noll, who said the Pittsburgh fans not only changed how fans relate to their teams all over the NFL, but were an important part of the Steelers success.

I talked to Pirate great Willie Stargell (who coined the “We Are Famalee” identity), and to Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene and Lynn Swann.

I talked to Swann on the training camp field at St. Vincent’s College.  He sure could talk.  It took another player’s intervention to get him to stop.

Years later, I was driving through one of the tonier city neighborhoods, stopping at a stop sign.  A car came up behind me fast and stopped almost on my bumper.  I looked in the rear-view mirror.  The expensive car behind me was driven by an attractive young lady, and sitting next to her, grinning and talking a mile a minute, was Lynn Swann.  

I thought of this when I saw people on this and other boards make fun of the idea of an old wide receiver as a candidate for governor. Swann is personable, charming and smart.

And so far, Swann could not have written himself a better script. He officially announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination the week that the underdog Steelers were playing the Wild Card game to begin the playoffs.  They were the last seeded team, and barely made it in.

They won.  Then they beat the team that was universally picked as this year’s Super Bowl champ, Indianapolis.  Then they beat Denver, convincingly.  No team has done what they’ve done so far.  And they’re no longer underdogs in the Super Bowl.

Attention is focused on the Steelers of today: Big Ben, the young quarterback on the verge of greatness, and who hangs out on the city’s South Side.  The Bus, Jerome Bettis, beloved as a person as well as a player, playing his last game, in his hometown of Detroit. His parents have been to every game in his professonal career, except two overseas.  Pittsburghers love that.

But after it’s all over, there will be Lynn Swann.  He was a Steelers hero of the mythic 4-time NFL champion team of the 70s.  He was himself a hero of at least one of the four Super Bowls, and one of the stars of the others.  

The Republicans nominate days after the Super Bowl.  Swann is expected to win it.

The latest polls I’ve seen reported have him neck and neck with the sitting governor, Democrat Ed Rendell, in the general election.  My friends in PA tell me the state is in a sour mood, itching to throw out every incumbent they see.  

It’s unlikely that many voters know Swann’s positions on the issues. His candidacy may fade. Still: Pittsburghers, as loyal as they are to the Steelers, identify with them for many reasons, but one of those reasons is they are winners.  And Pittsburgh, beset with problems, often enough the butt of jokes, and possessed of an inferiority complex that is a characteristic working class legacy, needs to identify with winners—that is, winners who win the Pittsburgh way, and stay true to it.

I’m told that this year Steelermania has spread from the west to the doorstep of Philadelphia in the east.  I’m used to the fanaticism of the city in the 70s, when schoolteachers went nuts trying to match each student to the right Steelers jacket in the cloakroom, and waitresses really would ask you if you wanted your coffee black or gold.  But the apparent range of this outside the city is something I can only imagine.

Can a Steelers victory mean victory for Swann?  Looked at one way, it won’t even take a victory—the Steelers as winners are already a matter of state identity.  And though this season is over today, the Steelers will be back on the field by election day.  

I’m not saying Swann is likely to win. I leave better calculations to Pennsylvanians still in the state. But my gut feeling based on all I know is that Democrats should not take this guy lightly.  Not this year.            

Promoted from the diaries by Steven D. Thanks Captain. I was going to write on this topic, but you more than cover why these stories are critically important — stories about a global warming tipping point and the Bush administration’s campaign to suppress “bad news” from NASA’s chief climate scientist — you nail them.

In the midst of Mideast uncertainty and violence, with Democrats feverishly involved in a possible Senate fillibuster attempt on a Supreme Court nominee, and on the weekend before a limping and defiant president’s State of the Union address, the lead story in the Sunday editions of two of the nation’s top newspapers–the New York Times and the Washington Post–is about the climate crisis.

In a sense, this fact is even more significant than the stories themselves. Could it be that the Climate Crisis is finally going to start getting the attention the possible end of the world as we know it deserves?

What these lead stories say after the fold.  
The New York Times leads with a story highlighting the charges by NASA scientist Dr. James E. Hansen, one of the most respected experts on climate change for more than a generation, that the Bush administration is taking exceptional measures to silence him on the subject.

Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide. In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA’s mission statement includes the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet.”

The Washinton Post leads with a warning from climate scientists that the earth is heading for a tipping point, beyond which lies global disaster and climate change beyond anything humankind has experienced before.

There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world’s fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.

Though there is little that is specifically new in the Post story (and it also contains Hansen’s charges), it is the more significant of the two, because it spells out what it is at stake, and what in general must be done. It gives voice to the two attitudes in play, that of the Bushites, in the words of their science mouthpiece who says:

“There’s no agreement on what it is that constitutes a dangerous climate change,” said Marburger, adding that the U.S. government spends $2 billion a year on researching this and other climate change questions. “We know things like this are possible, but we don’t have enough information to quantify the level of risk.”

And the common sense/enlightened government/scientific view, expressed by David Warrilow, who heads science policy on climate change for Britain’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

“… at the moment we’re accelerating toward the tipping point,” Warrilow said in an interview. “This is silly. We should be doing the opposite, slowing down whilst we build up our knowledge base.”

The Times story, on the other hand, is primarily a story about the continuing efforts of the Bushites to stifle science and control unfavorable information, which has been clear since this administration’s first year. It gets the anti-Bush dander up, but may obscure Hansen’s message.

Yet for that very reason, it may be the more effective story. By showing how Hansen is being muzzled, perhaps readers will want to know what he’s saying that is upsetting the Bushites. Apparently one thing is that it’s getting hot around here.

In mid-December Hansen announced data showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century. After that, “officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be ‘dire consequences’ if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.”

But what may have upset Bushites even more was Hansen’s lecture to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that:

significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth “a different planet.”

This is Hansen’s most potent message: coupling the dire consequences with the phrase that scares the Bushites and their selected corporate sponsors the most: “significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies…” and saving the planet cannot happen “without leadership by the United States.”

That two of America’s most influential newspapers choose to lead with a climate crisis story might mean that another “tipping point” has been reached: when news media begin to finally treat this story with the relentless serious coverage it deserves.

But at the State of the Union we expect The Big Smirk to stick to the terrorist under the mattress theme. As far as the climate crisis is concerned, he’s happy to whistle a different tune: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.”

This is in the nature of a frivilous holiday thread.

I don’t know how many here are baby boomers, but I got to thinking about gifts I got as a child and wondered if any were still around.  Some are, it turns out, though mostly as collectibles.

If you’re a boomer–especially an early boomer male–you may remember some of these.

I have a series of pictures at my blog, Dreaming Up Daily, at
http://dreamingup.blogspot.com.

So now that the gift-buying frenzy and gift-unwrapping orgy is over, and assuming you’re not out there bashing heads at the mall for leftover bargains–return with us now to yesteryear…

“Amid ruins, volunteers are emerging as heroes” is the headline of the story by Anne Rochell Konigsmark and Rick Hampson in USA TODAY. It begins:

In his 67 years, Howard Peterson had never seen a Mennonite. But 11 days before Christmas he stood in the ruins of his kitchen, watching a crew of them gut and clean his flood-ravaged house.

Peterson and his wife couldn’t afford to pay a contractor several thousand dollars to gut the one-story house, which sat in water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina inundated the working-class Gentilly district. So Peterson, who looks too frail to do spring cleaning, began trying to clear out the house himself. Then the Mennonites came by and offered a hand.

 In one sense, it is a perfect holiday story, about the willingness to help and can-do spirit of the people, rather than the impersonal government.

Clearly, charities and NGOs are heroes in New Orleans and government is a villian. The story cites a Harris poll that shows Habitat for Humanity has an 85% positive rating for its work in the Gulf, while FEMA has a 72% negative rating.

But that’s not the whole story.  –MORE–
The story highlights a number of NGO’s (non-governmental organizations, including those we know of as charities) that are doing vital work that the government is not:

Partly because politicians continue to dither, bicker and accuse, non-governmental organizations – “NGOs” ranging from large, non-profit agencies to church youth groups – are emerging as heroes of the recovery effort.

–snip–

In New Orleans’ devastated Lower 9th Ward, FEMA is so unpopular that its workers have been heckled and threatened. Some stopped wearing anything that identifies their agency.

The story quotes experts who enumerate reasons for the effectiveness of NGOs v. the government: NGOs are smaller and more nimble, they listen to what people need, government lost the people’s trust early in the Katrina debacle and never got it back, the NGOs are more experienced in dealing with the kind of needs they see in New Orleans, and the kind of people in need,such as the poor, the elderly; various levels of government are bickering, and there is no effective leadership.  

All of this is probably true. But the article and its analysis leave out other important points. Government agencies like FEMA have been effective in the past. Why aren’t they now? Apart from the cronyism that infects the Bush government, and the corporate philosophy that places image above real leadership, there is the toxicity of “privatization.”

A great deal of responsibility for that must be borne by the Bush administration, and earlier Republican administrations, that bled dry the funding for public services conducted by or organized by government—by directly cutting budgets of federal agencies and programs, and by indirectly bleeding state and local governments.

Why did they do this? The “philosophy” as stated was that government is inefficient, but private enterprise has the incentive of efficiency to keep costs down and get the job done, because their profits depend on it.

Certainly the bled dry government agencies have largely failed, especially FEMA and the monstrous money-eating disaster called Homeland Security, where the corporate model meant “branding” the agency was more important than actually addressing its mission and tasks, as a Washington Post series is revealing.

Government is failing because the people in charge expect it to fail.  The resources, including people in the agencies with talent and experience, have been stripped.  Leadership fails because the Bush administration isn’t interested in using government to meet people’s needs, because it might just show that government can be effective in doing so.

There is also the conspicuous failure of private contractors in New Orleans to do anything but pig out on fat no-bid government contracts, leaving the real work to non-profits.

It’s the same lesson as Iraq, where much of what the military used to do is being ineptly and expensively done by private contractors, who operate above the law (sound familiar?) and at least some of whom are stealing American taxpayers blind.

Anti-government stories play well. But Katrina’s lesson should be that only the federal government has the authority and resources, not necessarily to solve all the problems itself, but to ORGANIZE and coordinate an effective and timely response. When it fails to do so, the tragedy of New Orleans is the result.    

 Moreover, it has the responsibility to coordinate and effect preventive measures beyond the capacity of local resources.  When it fails to do so, the tragedy of New Orleans is the result.    

It isn’t government that has failed New Orleans. It’s the Bush government, and its policy of rewarding its corporate pals. It’s privatization and the corporate model to do the public’s business that has failed.

There is a war on Christmas, on the American Christmas: an unprovoked attack conducted after an offensive of deceptions by truth-twisting tyrants concealing with self-righteousness their true objectives of money and power.  Sound familiar?

And as all too usual these days, the opposition has been weak, muddled and slow, apparently in the belief that it’s too absurd to take seriously and will all die down on its own. Maybe theyre right.  Then again, that’s kind of how the Kerry campaign viewed the Swift Boaters.

It could be a mistake.  Because by being dismissed, the Swift Boaters Against the American Christmas make their point: they don’t get the proper respect.  Maybe they are due the respect of confronting their charges. Before we find ourselves in another weird war.

—more–

crossposted at kos,elsewhere…

The WMD

It started when certain politically minded people affiliated or allied with certain fundamentalist Christian groups and churches declared that terrorist WMD had been found in schools, town squares and retail stores.  

John Gibson, a Fox News producer, wrote the Bible, called The War on Christmas.  It was promoted and inflated by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Agape Press, with the slogan “Reliable News From a Christian Source,” and a logo above which modestly floats a halo.  (Link a few paragraphs to come.)

The basic charge is that the links of Christmas to Christianity are being destroyed by the WMD of law, regulation, profit-motive and political correctness.  They have lots of examples.

Too bad there don’t seem to be any Joseph Wilson’s willing to investigate their claims and debunk the ones that are exaggerated and untrue.  

Instead, many play into the hands of the promoters of this war by dismissing any concerns or emotions Christians might have about the disappearance of their religious symbols in this important time of the year for their religion.

So the promoters get away with such absurdities as claiming that people are afraid to say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” and this threatens Christianity.      

The result is that a lot of sincere people are successfully exploited to up O’Reilly’s ratings, sell books and most of all, to attract money and power to the POLITICAL organizations and activities of the far right.

 It’s no wonder that an essay on the subject by preacher Ralph Baker in Agape Press begins by musing that polls show George Bush won in 2004 because people were upset by homosexual marriage. That’s what this is really about.

 Because you can only flog that horse(gay marriage, baby killers, soft on crime) so much and so often.  The political preachers need something new and alarming to scare people with, so the gullible will send them brand new scads of hard-earned money reflexively, compulsively.  It’s the political religious right’s version of impulse shopping—with the impulse being to get the buzz of righteousness, and quell the fear and distaste for the power of the evil ones.

What’s This War Really About?

  In the aforementioned essay, preacher Ralph Baker announces: “Attention Christians!  Christmas is definitely ours.”  He attacks retailers and others who have joined “in efforts to steal the true meaning of the Christmas season and replace it with a secularized, paganized, non-religious holiday.”  The word “neutered” also appears in conjunction with “secularized.”    

Notice the conflation of the terms.  “Secular” these days means non-religious, though in the past or in certain religious settings it means believers within the religion who aren’t in the clergy–what Catholics more often call laypeople now.  For fundamentalist Christians “secular” often seems to mean “not fundamentalist Christians” and perhaps even “not my kind of fundamentalist Christian.”

“Paganized” as meaning “non-religious” is an even clearer tip-off.  It goes back to the early Catholic Church, that fought against “pagans,” meaning any religious belief not Christian.  As Europeans expanded into places like America, it became synonymous with “heathen,” meaning primitive peoples whose beliefs didn’t rise to the standards of religion, because they weren’t European and Christian.

“Neutered” is interesting.  It speaks more directly to the fear that this Swift Boating exploits: that the power of secular society, of not specifically “our kind of Christianity,” is overwhelming them, making them feel inferior.

Yet lurking in the term is the sense of being denied power.  Exclusive power.  The power to say, well, Jews and Buddhists can celebrate Christmas, because it’s Christian of us to let them.  Or maybe we won’t.  Because it’s ours.  Our identity is at stake, and specifically our power over Christmas.

The Sham

The only problem is that nobody is trying to take away their religious celebration.  Nobody is going into their churches and saying they can’t celebrate the birth of Christ.  Any more than Iraq was about to invade America.

The ambition of their war on the American Christmas is much more than that.  Christians and even non-Christians who are enchanted with Christ’s message of peace and love have complained for decades about frenzied commercialism overpowering “the true meaning of Christmas.”  But notice that Baker complains that its the “stealing” of the “true meaning of the Christmas season” that’s at stake.

The whole SEASON?   That’s very interesting.

The American Christmas

It’s time now to define—and yes, to celebrate—the American Christmas.  It is no longer unique to America, but it really got its spirit here.

Everyone who knows anything about all the various traditions and ritual associated with the Christmas season knows that they come from many countries and many religious beliefs, as well as more “secular” sources.

Christmas became powerful in America, partly because it was so commercialized, and like a lot of popular culture, it became a nexus for the exchange of cultural traditions.  I grew up in a working class area of mostly Catholics from Italy, eastern Europe and Ireland, but with a strong presence in our bigger towns and cities of German and Scottish Protestants and European Jews.  In my family, we had specifically Italian traditions and Christmas foods from my mother’s side, and eastern European from my father’s.

But there was tolerance in town and more–there was sharing.  That was the spirit of–the meaning of–Christmas, as America practiced it.  The songs we sang give it away—they came from many countries, many times, both religious and secular.

Out of this amalgamation came regional traditions.  In western Pennsylvania to this day, for instance, homes are more intensely decorated with more elaborate lights and displays than where I live now in rural far northern California.  

These of course were mostly Christians in a mostly (and very openly) Christian area.  That kind of Christmas influenced many Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah, with more emphasis on gift-giving than before.  

Now we have Kwanzaa, a new celebration for the African American community, with roots in Africa but also in this “spirit of Christmas” at its best.

And of course, there are holidays and holy days for virtually all religions that occur in mid-winter, rooted in one of the oldest human celebrations and religious occasions, the Solstice.

Not only was the birth of Christ transferred from the spring to the winter Solstice to take advantage of popular “pagan” celebrations (as the nuns in my school freely admitted), but many traditions came along with the Solstice from various ancient religions in Europe, like the tree, the holly and gift-exchange, and the Yule Log (Yule referring to the pagan holiday in Germanic and Scandinavian areas.)      

It’s true that even when I was a child, pagans were to be feared or perhaps pitied (“pagan babies.”)  But today there is a resurgence of so-called pagan religions, which are primarily earth-based.  And this is legitimate a much part of America’s religious practice today as environmentalism is of politics.

So the American Christmas has expanded to include all of these, in sharing and community.  The earth-based religions are particularly appropriate because there are no more powerful earth-based religions than those of the original Americans, the Native peoples.

These are appropriate in another way.  Most Native people will tell you that they don’t always get along.  They may even admit that they don’t often get along, or agree on very much.  But there is one element that I’ve found essentially universal among Native traditionals–and that’s respect for religion, anyone’s religion (as long as it isnt harmful or imposed.)  

The American Christmas follows the example of Native peoples who accepted Christianity along with their own religions.  They may have left some parts out that they learned from white Christians (like intolerance and hypocrisy) but they included what spoke to them.  They accept reverence and joy, and ways of understanding their relationship to life and the earth.

Without consciously realizing it perhaps, this approach became part of the Constitution, and has since become the most characteristic feature of the American Christmas.

Secular Terrorists?

Are Christians being denied the right to share in the American Christmas? Is Christmas Christianity’s 9/11?

 I have no trouble believing that some overzealous bureaucrats, especially in school systems, have made stupid decisions about what can and cannot be included in holiday celebrations.  And it wouldn’t surprise me if retail store managers with the imaginations of grocery carts go overboard in trying not to offend some customers.

And I know for a fact that some people are simultaneously atheist and asshole.  But that’s life.  And the law is the law, and the twin intent of tolerance and separation of church and state eventually protects everyone.  

It’s also true that this is no longer the America of the first half of the twentieth century.  There are many more cultures represented from many more parts of the world—from all of vast Asia, from Latin America and more.

And there are Muslims in America now, and thanks to a certain ignorance and intolerance fed by reaction and over-reaction to a terrorist attack, there is fear and a defensiveness, a feeling that to fight so-called Islamic fundamentalism, we need to circle the wagons of Christian fundamentalism. Yet Christ is a respected figure in Muslim belief, and some Muslims in America celebrate Christmas.  

Perhaps it was more comfortable for Christians to bring their religious beliefs into places where in a more diverse society it’s simply not appropriate.  And it never was all that Constitutional.  

But is this a war on Christmas?  Hardly.

 “Happy Holidays” is just an inclusive alternative, a greeting that is simply being polite, though usually unnecessarily so, since the American Christmas includes everyone.

No, the real war is the attempted war on the American Christmas by those who want to have it all to themselves, or to lord it over others, or simply to exploit believers for their own power and wealth.  

Some Christians want to assert that Christmas is only about Christ, and is only for Christians.  In their churches it can be true.  But it simply isn’t the case otherwise.  In America the season called Christmas belongs to everyone.

Using political and economic power to try to reestablish a hegemony from the past is just plain un-American.

All religions are entitled to their holy days and their sacred places. But it seems to me, admittedly only partially qualified to observe that hoarding the Christmas holidays, the public Christmas, for Christians only, is fundamentally un-Christian, as well as un-American.    

End the War Before It Begins (This Time)

Let’s not wait until war fever strikes and the missiles start flying, and the dogs of war are unleashed.  Let jackasses like O’Reilly make fools of themselves, but don’t underestimate the danger.

They’ve selected their weapons, and they’re not all hot air. They also include economic power, chiefly boycott and threats of them. Here’s Ralph Baker again:

There is an alliance building right now among major Christian ministries — such as the American Family Association (AFA) — to identify and target those companies who want our money but not our Christ. .. This is not just another economic boycott effort. It is a witness to the world that Christmas is important to the world because Christ is important to the world. This is exactly why the world has paused for 2,000 years and acknowledged the baby in a manger. That little baby has meant billions of dollars to retailers. It is time that they acknowledge Him.

That’s the weapon, the Swift-Boating combination of false premise, false reasoning and (very likely) false information. All for a political end, that in this case threatens religious freedom by turning the shopping mall into their church, by establishing one religion’s official ownership of a shared American holiday, and an official religion.  

Let’s name the danger: the legitimizing of intolerance, the destruction of the American Christmas: part celebration of Christ’s birth, part celebration of the silent growing within the earth of the new life of spring, part Hannukah, part Kwanzza, leading up to the various New Year’s–European, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Hindu, etc.

Most of these, you notice, are religious celebrations.  But even if Mr. Scrooge’s newly discovered spirit of Christmas is secular, or even if celebration of family and friends, memory and hope at year’s end is defined as agnostic, it’s all the American Christmas, the best intent of the holiday season. (The worst is of course that it can never fulfill the inflated expectations, and all the projections, tensions, loneliness and pain come rushing out.)  

Some of us will stick with one tradition and the expressions of one faith. But some of us will not only mix “secular” celebrations with religious, but we will attend high Mass and Hanukkah, sing a Native ceremonial song or a Buddhist chant at solstice.  I don’t know if whites are invited to Kwanzaa events, but I was invited to a black fundamentalist church one Christmas, and had a  great time.

In fact this is the one time of the year that America can feel like the America we’d like it to be: not just tolerant but open, compassionate, interested in learning about each other, and in sharing for our mutual joy, and our strength as a nation.

So happy holidays, happy Yuletide, merry Christmas, joyful Solstice, and may America be blessed by the Great Mystery. And bah, humbug, if that lights your Yule log.

I was in New York City the last day of John Lennon’s life. We breathed the same cold air. I was flying west when he was shot. I learned about it in Los Angeles. That made it even more surreal—in that sudden soft air and sunshine, after the dirty wind and gray chill of New York.

The radio played his songs, Beatles songs, constantly the next day when I was driving around in a rental car, and there was a period of silence that Yoko Ono asked for as a memorial, which I spent on Santa Monica Beach. When it was over and I was walking back to the car, I saw his name written in the sand. Imagine. Lennon Lives.

Paul’s first quoted reaction, widely criticized at the time, was “It’s a drag.”  Now I know all the inarticulate grief locked in those words.  It’s still a drag.

–more–  
I’ve resisted joining the chorus reevaluating him today. I guess 25 years since the day he died is a reasonable day to do that, but I don’t want to remember him for his sudden and sickening murder.

Plus the friend I spent the most time with that evening and the next day, sharing all those half-spoken feelings of awe and dread and the tentativeness of being alive, is also dead now. She also died young and suddenly, not many years later. And more beauty was lost from the world.

The Beatles are certainly still part of my life, even of a lot of days. I’ve felt closest to George the past few years, and I admire how Paul and even Ringo have conducted their lives as they age beyond what we could even imagine then. But John was the one I admired the most then, who opened the most doors to perception.

Oddly, the John song I like doing the most these days is a minor one, “Crippled Inside.” But it’s so John.

“You can shine your shoes and wear a suit

You can comb your hair and look quite cute

You can hide your face behind a smile

One thing you can’t hide/ is when you’re crippled inside”

These days the song I feel closest to is one of Paul’s, which I didn’t take note of much when it came out about two years after John’s death, called “Tug of War.” It’s only been in the last year or two that I’ve come to feel these lines:

“In another world, in another world
We could stand on top of the mountain with our flag unfurled;
In a time to come, we will be dancing to the beat
played on a different drum…”

And these:

“In years to come, they may discover
what the air we breathe and the life we lead
are all about.
But it won’t be soon enough,
soon enough for me.

No, it won’t be soon enough,
soon enough for me. “

[Front-paged by susanhu.]

International climate talks have begun in Montreal, while a disconnect, a  gap, grows ever larger and more tragic.

  On the one hand, this conference is the occasion for the latest research to be announced, which is telling us one story.

 On the other, there is the diplomatic dithering, posturing and above all, the distance between what action is proposed—not only in degree but in kind—and what science is telling us about the problem.

When political activists aren’t ignoring the phenomenon that is going to dominate political life for the foreseeable future, they are arguing about the wrong actions.  And Democrats who talk about nothing except Kyoto and fossil fuel emissions are setting themselves up to be co-opted.

Sooner or later the Republicans are going to do a 180 and admit that global heating is real—but there is nothing we can do to stop it.

And they will be right.

Then what are you going to do?

Part of the problem is that there isn’t one problem: there are two.

There is the Climate Crisis, which will affect everything for the next fifty years.   And then there is the possible end-game of the far future, which I call Earth=Mars.

Two sets of problems with different actions required. Getting this wrong is politically suicidal, not to mention self-destructive on a vastly larger scale.

—more—
It’s Here

This is what we must accept first.  It’s not “almost too late” to stop the Climate Crisis.  It is too late.  Moreover, it has been too late for decades.

It’s here.  It’s inevitably going to get worse for our lifetimes, and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren.  We have to deal with it.

Perhaps the time beyond that can be affected for the better by what we do today.  And that’s the reason we should cut emissions.  For the farther future, beyond 2055.  So the Earth does not become Mars.

Until then, the Climate Crisis will be our reality, and very likely our defining reality.  

But after that, things could get even worse.  And that’s something we probably can do something about.  And we should.

This is the framework we should be talking about.  

In this space I’m going to summarize a  basic framework that I believe is emerging from the science and from the reporting on it by analysts with far more specific experience and better credentials in the field than me.  

The effects of global heating have been difficult for people to understand, as well as to face.  Global heating involves factors like time lag, feedback and tipping points, that are unfamiliar in political discourse and approaches to societal crises.

The Climate Crisis 2005-2055

These are rough approximations, meant to suggest that we have two problems: the first is the Climate Crisis we are already in, though these are early stages.  It will unfold over the next several decades, regardless of what we do about CO2 emissions.  We can’t prevent it, but there are other actions we need to take to respond.

Earth=Mars 2055-2300

Earth=Mars is the possible second stage, the long-term future.  It is the outer limit of possibility, a planet with no life.  We don’t know if that’s what will happen, or if the climate will stabilize at some intermediate stage that nevertheless could mean the end of life as we know it on earth (killing many species of animals and plants, except those that can survive and evolve in the heat of the dinosaur age), which would include the end of civilization and probably our species on this planet.

 If such Armageddon were to happen, we don’t know if it will take two hundred or five hundred years.  But in fifty years, it’s likely we’ll know a lot more.  But the end of this century going forward is likely to be frighteningly bad.

The important thing to emphasize about the far future is, because of time lag and feedback effects and tipping points, what we do now will contribute to this future, one way or another.  It could even cause the Climate Crisis to worsen and become Earth=Mars.    

It may already be too late: Earth=Mars may already be in the cards.  But right now it’s most useful to look at this in two stages.  If we do, we’ll see   the actions necessary are different, and the actions that people are fighting about now aren’t the appropriate ones.  One thing is becoming pretty certain: even if Kyoto-style reductions in fossil fuel emissions were to actually be enacted, they will probably not reduce the Climate Crisis for the next several decades, and they certainly will not end it.  

 And when they don’t, and people have misunderstood why they are necessary (which is to possibly save Earth from becoming Mars in the farther future), they will feel lied to and cheated.  And if we don’t do what we really need to do for the Climate Crisis period, people and the environment will suffer because the kinds of actions that could ameliorate the effects of the Climate Crisis weren’t taken.

Lag-time

We’re used to dealing with crises when they become crises, not when someone predicts they will.  Most of the time, even though people have suffered and died needlessly, the problem is fixed before it gets out of hand, or the crisis ends (like an epidemic that runs out of victims without immunity) and eventually things get back to normal.

That’s not the nature of the Climate Crisis.  The Cause is cumulative over time.  What’s done to cause it occurs decades before the effect.

And ending the crisis, changing the effect, is not a matter of slowly subtracting the stuff that caused it.  Because once the effect is caused, it takes on a life of its own.  

So the first factor is lag-time: the time between the cause and effect.  When that time is measured in decades, while so much of our political life is measured in much smaller increments of time (from tomorrow’s news cycle to next week’s poll numbers to four years at most), it is difficult for politicians to take responsibility.  Especially when nearly everything else in our lives geared to small time frames: the quarterly report, the yearly income, the flavor of the week.

Lag-time is also a major concept in understanding the reality of today’s Climate Crisis (Katrina-to-2050.)    

Mark  Hertsgaard explained all this last February:

After studying the matter since 1988, the United Nations panel of some 2000 scientists issued its report in 2001:  

Several studies announced last week confirm both the reality of global heating now in comparison to the past, and also suggest that it began with the Industrial Age, some 150 years ago. Results of a Rutger’s University Study announced last week show the rate of sea level rise has doubled in the past 150 years over the rate of the previous 5,000 years.  

But time lag isn’t the only structural element involved. The climate is at its simplest a complex system, and systems have their own behaviors that “systems dynamics” and related disciplines are only beginning to understand.  

Much system behavior is counter-intuitive.  My own example is sitting in traffic twenty or so cars away from a red light.  If you notice, you tend to move up when the light is red and stop when it is green.  That’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the way that system works.  A lag effect is part of the reason.  Counter-intuitive is not very helpful when you need to convince large numbers of people, in a society that prizes simple if not simplistic issues and solutions.

Feedback

Feedback is another important factor in global heating.  Feedback is basically an effect becoming a cause of other effects, which affect the original cause.  Often it amplifies the original effect, like feedback from a noisy speaker into a microphone makes more noise, or distortion.

In the past year, climate scientists have studied several feedback effects.  
A study of the 2003 heat wave in Europe–extreme summer heat which itself led to deaths estimated in the tens of thousands, making it a severely underreported catastrophe–showed that plants expended more CO2 “breathing” in the heat than they took out of the atmosphere in photosynthesis.

 They were actually sending more carbon dioxide into the air than they were absorbing—a finding that shocked experts who believed that climate change would accelerate green plant growth in Europe, which normally would take carbon out of the atmosphere.  But extreme heat set up a feedback system, in which heat caused plants to behave in ways which would eventually increase the heating.

A related study showed that extreme heat waves also released CO2 stored in soil, which would add to the feedback effect of heat creating heat.

What feedback means for the Climate Crisis is substantially more trouble ahead than more linear analyzes suggested.  Because of lag time, experts expect that heat waves like the one in 2003 will occur every other year by the 2050s.  “By the end of the century,” one scientist warned, “2003 would be a cool year.”   Add to that not-yet quantified increases due to feedback effects.

Another example is the melting of Arctic ice, as one scientist explained in September:

Tipping Point

Over the period of the Climate Crisis half-century, feedback will worsen situations that seem to occur without cause, but are results of time-lag.
 What this might mean for this period of present to near future will be discussed a bit below.  But let’s follow the logic of the feedback effect to the ultimate danger of Earth=Mars.

The greatest threat scientists fear is reaching the point of no return, when a process takes on a life of its own and can no longer be stopped.  These days it’s often called the tipping point.

The tipping point might be described as the moment when positive feedback effects reacting to phenomena that can’t be controlled because their cause was in the past (time-lagged), creates catastrophic and self-reinforcing change.  

Where most of the world’s ice is now concentrated, once the melting ice passes its tipping point, it could mean complete melting, with huge rises in sea level that would inundate coastal cities. Consider this report:

The infusion of cold water into certain warmer ocean currents possibly could create another tipping point, which would result in the ultimate paradox of global heating causing a new Ice Age—the scenario in both a report to the Pentagon in 2004, and the movie “The Day After Tomorrow.”

 Though one of the authors of the report on the Greenland ice shelf admitted that assessing risks of tipping points is almost impossible, he polled ” 12 experts on the chances of a collapse of the Gulf Stream: four said risks were above 50 percent if world temperatures rose by 5C (9F) by 2100.”

“That was unexpected for me, I reckon the risks are lower,” he said. A rise of 5C is at the top of a range forecast for global warming by 2100 by the scientific panel that advises the United Nations.

Atmospheric temperature change is itself a candidate for causing a cascade of effects that could radically change the planet. That possibility was given a dramatic and shuddering boost last week with the finding that global CO2 levels are now higher by some 27 % than at any time in the past 650,000 years.  That’s a point in time at which our species still had nearly a half million years to evolve to the point we could be called almost human.

Back beyond 650,000 years is an earth that cannot support humans or much of any other familiar life forms. This is the ultimate end point: a planet too hot and dry to sustain much of life as we know it.

The 2 degrees of separation

The difference between the Climate Crisis and Earth=Mars is a matter of degree.  Maybe one degree.

According to Mark Lynas in his Open Letter to the Montreal conference, at two degrees above pre-industrial temperature or more, “we’ll likely lose the Greenland ice sheet – flooding coastal cities across the world – as well as coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, and many of the world’s major breadbaskets, as deserts sweep across continental interiors.”  He reckons the planet has ten years to prevent this by seriously reducing emissions.

We’re at about one degree F higher now, about a half degree C.  Some predictions, based on our current rate of increasing fossil fuel CO2 levels through 2050, show a large rise by the end of the century of from 2 to 11 degrees C. (I assume Lynas means 2 degrees C.)  

There are bound to be more surprises as information is gathered and calculations become more sophisticated.  No climate scientists, however, are looking for things to cool off anytime soon.

The lesson of 100 year predictions is this: we may be able to affect the future of our great-grandchildren’s children by moving aggressively to renewable and sustainable energy systems.  Some people alive right now will have to do something anyway when oil starts to run out, and renewable energy is likely to benefit people in their own lifetimes with better health, for instance.  

It may not save the far future, but if there’s any chance for us to save it, we should take it. That’s our responsibility, and I believe it will be the defining test of our civilization and of humanity itself.  If we don’t face this responsibility and Earth=Mars because we didn’t, we don’t deserve to survive anyway.  Unfortunately we’ll take down the only known ecosystem in the universe with us.

The Climate Crisis

Even though cutting emissions may benefit the far future no matter why we do it, I believe it’s wrong to continue insisting that cutting CO2 is going to prevent the Climate Crisis, and especially that it is the single way to deal with the Climate Crisis.
If we insist that cutting emissions will do it, and the climate continues to get worse, all credibility will be lost.  Let’s do it, but for the right reasons.

More to the point, we’re going to have our hands full long before the end of the century, and we’d better face up to what might be needed.  That’s what our science fiction gathering of scientists and world leaders would be talking about now.

What are those effects?  As Katrina was about to hit the Gulf Coast,Ross Gelbspan wrote an oped piece that catalogued the year’s weather effects the press wasn’t reporting, at least not coherently as a gathering Climate Crisis.

 They included: a two foot snowfall in Los Angeles, 124 mph winds that shut power in Scandavia, the Midwest drought that sent the Missouri River to its lowest recorded level, drought in Europe that caused wildfires in Spain and low water levels in France, 37 inches of rain in one day in Bombay that killed 1,000;, and a lethal heat wave in Arizona that killed 20 people in one week.

“The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying, ” he wrote. Yet the dots are not connected “because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.”    

 Just this past week, studies on a couple of large but specific problems were released.
Disease: A World Health Organization study estimated that the Climate Crisis contributes more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year, now.  By 2030, a conservative estimate is they could double.

Why? Hotter temperatures mean that disease-carrying insects flourish where it was too cold before, and they live longer and reproduce more in places where cold winters kept their numbers down.

For example:

Parasites that cause killing diarrhea flourish in the heat.  Though poor people and poor countries are the most vulnerable to disease as well as heat waves and hurricanes, being rich doesn’t guarantee immunity.  Rising temperatures also correlate with deaths from air pollution—from smog.

Water.  In a study also released last week:

Another study of 12 other models agrees generally with this conclusion. “I think this will be one of the first greenhouse gas-related problems that will fall on the civilized world,” Barnett said.

In particular, glacier and snow melt that furnishes fresh water to many places will fade in warmer climate.  This will also affect the ecosystems of rivers and their relationship to the ocean, and could lead to a lot of other effects, like a drain on protein from disappearing fish species.  

This is another way that the Climate Crisis interacts with systems dynamics: it fools with the existing webs of life.  Species crash is already a problem, as habitats disappear or change because of development and exploitation.  The wetlands around New Orleans that used to protect the city against the force of hurricanes have disappeared, and the lack of them is an acknowledged cause of that city’s flooding.

  Just because we ignore how the natural world supports our lives doesn’t mean we won’t suffer when those systems collapse, even before we’ve cared enough to figure out how they interrelate and are interdependent. Destroying keystone species and otherwise shredding the web of life can affect us even in the Climate Crisis period.

As it becomes worse, the Climate Crisis can unleash the ultimate human folly: warfare.

As Mark Hertsgaard pointed out, that Pentagon study “said that by 2020, climate change could unleash a series of interlocking catastrophes including mega-droughts, mass starvation and even nuclear war as countries like China and India battle over river valleys and other sources of scarce food and water.”  

What Should We Be Doing?

Mark Mark Hertsgaard:

Mark’s list still seems like a good start.  In addition, A2004 study suggested that global heating could mean the extinction of a million species by 2050. We need to put preventive measures on the Climate Crisis agenda.

 The major effort must be to begin a serious inventory of what may be needed.  That will only happen if citizens are aware of the realities of The Climate Crisis and Earth=Mars, and demand action based on this understanding.

As Gelbspan’s list suggests, the Climate Crisis is well underway.  But for Americans, the catastrophe of Katrina will probably be where we will date its beginning, and the start of our awareness of what it means.

Katrina also suggests that in the near term, we can simply avoid arguments over global heating’s current effects by concentrating on the Climate Crisis, whatever its contributing causes.

Some scientists say that the virulence of Katrina and other unusually violent storms are caused by the effects of global heating, specifically hotter ocean water.

  Other scientists disagree, and say that hurricanes typically come in cycles of a decade or two, and we are probably at the beginning of a new one.

Why are they arguing?  The reality is that for whatever reason, we are in for ten or twenty or more years of an increasing number of more violent hurricanes, capable of striking and devastating major parts of the U.S. and elsewhere, even in Europe.  So we’ve got a lot of serious thinking and planning, and a lot of work to do.

It may even help people paralyzed into denial by the spectre of Earth=Mars to concentrate on the Climate Crisis they can do something about now.  It’s no solution for Earth=Mars, and we must work to prevent that as well, but we need to get started somewhere.

  As Gelbspan wrote,”the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.” But part of the problem, along with the millions spent on disinformation and on p.r. positioning,  is that people just don’t want to hear about it much—not in the way it is presented.  Because it seems so hopeless.  Even on these blogs, a piece on global heating is almost guaranteed to be unread.

 But maybe by adding some clarity and a different context for action, we may begin to face up to it, and live up to our responsibilities to each other and this living planet we have abused and may yet destroy.    

This is not about conspiracy theories, assassinations or JFK’s death.  This is about his life—in particular, two days in his last year of life that I remember as the high points of his presidency, especially in terms of the future—our future, and beyond.

He is remembered by a single soundbite from his elegant Inaugural (that gets ever briefer each time—an entire generation may now believe that all he said was two words, “Ask not.”)Historians may rightly point to the Berlin crisis in 1961 and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

But on this anniversary of his death, I want to highlight two consecutive days in June 1963.  They stand out on this day in particular because it seems to me, if somehow JFK had learned he had one year to live, he would have done pretty much what he did throughout 1963, and these two summer days would be the summer of his life and legacy.

crossposted at dkos and maybe elsewhere.

The first was June 10.  After the world came to the brink of thermonuclear Apocalypse in October 1962, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev began discussing ways to prevent a repetition.  They agreed on the hot line linking their offices.  They discussed nuclear test bans, but the talks were stalled.  At that point, JFK decided to go public.

He did so not with a narrow policy speech focused only on the test ban, but a clarion call for peace that echoes through the ages.

He chose a commencement address at American University for this speech, where he would also receive an honorary doctor of law degree.  He began by acknowledging other dignitaries, including  “my old colleague, Senator Bob Byrd.”  That’s Senator Robert Byrd, who today is the elder statesman of the Senate.  He noted that Byrd “has earned his degree through many years of attending night law school, while I am earning mine in the next 30 minutes.”  He praised the university as a bulwark against ignorance, and continued, ” I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is to rarely perceived – – yet it is the most important topic on earth : world peace. “

He described the horrors and futility of nuclear war as few heads of state ever had.  This in itself was revolutionary.
But he continued:

“Our problems are manmade – – therefore, they can be solved by man” sums up the Kennedy faith.

I have posted more excerpts from the speech, along with photographs from his presidency, on my blog, Dreaming Up Daily at http://dreamingup.blogspot.com.  But I want to note just a few more isolated sentences, that should have immediate resonance for our particular moment.

The speech won immediate praise internationally.  Most importantly, it was published in full in the Russian press, and the Russian language broadcast of the speech by the Voice of America was the first western program in 15 years the Soviets did not attempt to jam.  Khrushchev said privately that it was the best speech by an American president since FDR.  Negotiations on the limited nuclear test ban treaty resumed, and the treaty was signed six weeks later.

There was strong opposition in the U.S. military and in the Senate that fall, but Kennedy spoke in favor of the treaty and repeated his calls for peace in speeches around the U.S., to great acclaim.  The treaty was confirmed.    

Ironically, however, Kennedy’s American University speech was overshadowed for awhile in the U.S.  by the events of the very next day that culminated in another groundbreaking  address, this time a televised statement to the nation.  

There had been violence and turmoil in the South all spring over Civil Rights, which climaxed on June 11 when George Wallace symbolically “stood in the schoolhouse door” to protest the first two black students to enter the University of Alabama.

Everyone knew that when Wallace did not really resist, a true crisis had been averted.  Yet Kennedy alone decided to address the nation that very night, while public attention was on the subject of Civil Rights.

In this impromptu address,  he proposed what would become after his death the Voting Rights Act.  It was in many ways the  culmination of the Civil Rights movement’s activities in the sphere of political rights.  Voting was sacred to the descendants of African slaves, denied their full rights and humanity even originally in the U.S. Constitution, and this would be a crucial key to their political power.

At the same time, JFK knew full well that supporting their voting rights would mean that the Democrats would likely lose the white South for generations.  This began to happen immediately, and Richard Nixon in 1968 would consciously begin the process of playing to white Southerners, especially by appealing to their prejudices, to bring them into Republican ranks.  

Yet JFK went ahead, and couched his proposal in terms of simple justice.  “In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated.”

But while this was the most striking proposal he made that night, he spoke as he had the day before, about changes necessary in the hearts and souls of Americans.  

He asked white Americans to imagine themselves in the place of black Americans.  “Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”   Having suggested empathy for Soviet citizens as part of a process of understanding the day before, he was asking it now for African Americans.

Some Civil Rights leaders praised this address as the second Emancipation Proclamation.  Opposition was just as swift, particularly from southern Democrats, and there was more violence: Medgar Evers was assassinated.  But Kennedy had set the wheels in motion on this major aspect of Civil Rights, as he had on what would become the limited test ban treaty which has held to this day.  Yet for the ages, the importance of these two days was that this President acknowledged that peace and equality  were moral issues, that they required new thinking and a change of heart.  

Much that Kennedy said, especially in his Civil Rights speech, had been said and thought before, but the fact that the President was saying it, and was backing it up with actions, made these words of special significance.  And of course, they were especially eloquent.

What is also striking about them today is the premium they place on using imagination as a crucial tool in political life.  The imagination to step back and see things whole.  The imagination to empathize on a personal level. The imagination to seize new ideas, and the imagination to know the right time for them to be heard.

Kennedy knew these speeches would alone not bring either peace or equality, and that he was inviting organized political opposition as well as conflict among voters.

At the same time,with his keen political instincts, Kennedy picked moments when his words would have the most effect.  They happened to be two days in June, 1963: two days that still speak to our time.  This sad anniversary provides a moment for  people in our time to hear these words again.