Category Archives: Americana

This rain is good news, but – really – not all that good

Americana, Current Affairs

Screenshot 2014-03-31 10.47.16

It is raining and NOAA tells me that it will pretty much rain all week. Even better, it is cold – for here – so it is snowing in the Sierras. We need the rain and we need the snow even more. Living on the edge of the continent, in a semi-desert, we have based our survival strategy on storing water, as snow, in the Sierras during the winter so that we can have water for the summer.

But we are getting less snow. Here in Northern California – and Southern California, for that matter – the snow is much more important than the rain. We live on an ecological edge of a cliff; we have built our supersized Civilization on that edge. If we don’t get a deep enough snowpack, it will become very hard to maintain that Civilization. We need the snowpack not just to drink and waste in showers, but to grow food.

For a long time, we mined water from the aquifer to make up for the decreasing snow-melt, but the aquifers are going down. While our situation is not as serious – or fanciful – as Las Vegas or Phoenix, we are running out of water. The rain is great and the land is thirsty and stressed and needs the rain, but this rain is not really going to change much.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond investigates several past Civilizations and their economic and social collapse. Civilizations as diverse as Easter Island, Classical Mayan, and the Greenland Norse – and I would add us – pushed their environments to the very edge of capacity and then they got slammed by ecological change that, in turn, pushed the Civilization into collapse.

It seems to me that we are still in a mindset that explains everything as if it were an exception rather than the new rule and that mindset – of everything is atypical – gives false comfort. It is easy to think that this has been the wettest start to the month of March ever for Seattle because they are getting our rain – that the same, temporary, high-pressure ridge, that is keeping California dry – but it is not our rain, it is our past weather pattern. True, it may not be our future weather pattern, but it is possible that it is. Near Seattle, the rain caused a mudflow that killed somewhere around forty people but the disaster was also caused by over-logging. It is possible that it was not over-logging based on past weather patterns – however, there is evidence that it was – but it is over-logging for what is happening this year.

DROUGHT ridge 011414

According to Diamond, that is typical; it is what happened to other Civilizations that collapsed. Those falls from grace were self created – over-farming, overgrazing, over-hunting, denuding forests, sucking aquifers dry – and, with Global Climate change and our refusal to correct for it, there is no reason to think that the result will be any different this time around.

World War I and Cold War II

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

Cold War-0289

Those that don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. Yet, those that do read history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everybody else repeats it. From a share by Vern Smith of a United Humanists facebook post.

When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.  Napoleon 

I am reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War by Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan was an advisory and speechwriter for President Nixon and is way to the right of me, so I am a little surprised that I am reading him. I am even more surprised that I agree with him much of the time. Buchanan’s main premise is that World War I was unnecessary and that the draconian demands – by the Allies in a righteous  fit – put on Germany after the War, led to World War II.

I half agree with him on World War I, after all, England’s king,  George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert), was related to Germany’s king, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and they were both related to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. In many ways, they stumbled into a war that almost nobody wanted. Of course, very few people had any idea how horrific WWI was going to be and, when the carnage was over and the allies had won, the Allies wanted Germany to pay. But Germany didn’t think that World War I was all their fault and they didn’t really feel that they had lost as much as they agreed to stop fighting. Compared to northern France, Germany was relatively untouched, after all, and – in many ways – life in Germany, right after the war, went on as if nothing had happened.

However, at the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was stripped of 13% of her territory and 12% of her population. The Germans had lost the peace and were humiliated. They were seething. That seething provided the energy to bring Hitler to power, it became the motivator for Germany’s rise from their indignation. Instead of being the war to end all wars, World War I became the setup for World War II.

I think that the same thing happened when we won the cold war. Like Germany, Russia didn’t really think the Cold war was all their fault and that they were punished for making peace. The Russians thought that they had lost the peace more than they had lost the war. We stripped Russian of its buffer zone, moving NATO all the way to the Russian border. There are Russians living outside of Russia all around Russia – in Georgia, in Ukraine, in Estonia where one-quarter of the population is Russian, and in Latvia with about one-third of its the total population being Russian – and they had been betrayed by the peace.

By all accounts, Russians are thrilled with the way the Russian bear is roaring, they love Vladimir Putin. They think he is bringing Mother Russia back its dignity. Various politicians and pundits are worrying about the Cold War coming back if we don’t ________________ (insert your own theory). I think that they are almost right, except that the Cold War is already here and has been since Russia’s Duma recognized Abkhazia and the Russian Army rolled into Georgia in 2008 (during the administration of George Bush the Younger, for those with short memories).

Russia is pushing back just like Germany did when its troops marched into the Rhineland, and we will not like it, but there is not much we can do except move troops around and install sanctions. I don’t think that Cold War II will turn into a shooting war but I do think it will involve a lot of pushing around the edges and posturing. It will make it much harder to solve our mutual problems.

A portrait of anger & hate

Americana

 

Fred PhelpsMichael S. Williamson / Washington Post/Getty Images file from The Daily Dish 

Fred Phelps, leader and father, really, of the Westboro Baptist Church, died several days ago. He was an angry, hateful, man who worked hard at being obnoxious. His despicable behavior – from my point of view – hurt a lot of people and, ironically, its collateral effect helped the gay community.

In 2003, 33% of Americans were pro-gay marriage, in 2013  49% were pro. For anybody that was at all up in the air about choosing sides – and the numbers say that there were many – Phelps made it very hard to choose his side. At some level, he must have known that. He must have known that his behavior was counter-productive and, yet, he kept it up. How much anger does it take to fuel that kind of action? And how much fear does it take to fuel that kind of anger?

Fred Phelps was a crusading Civil Rights lawyer in the 1950s and 60s and somehow, he became unhinged over gay rights. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes  of the fanaticism of the right and left as being closer together than they are to the reasonable – for lack of a better word – center. The fanaticism that enabled Phelps to champion Civil Rights in Kansas when it was anti-establishment somehow transmorgafied into hate. It probably wasn’t as big a transformation as it seems. As the social landscape of gay rights changed – in Alyssa Rosenberg words, That trend is part of a long cultural process of not just portraying gay people as normal and unthreatening, but of painting homophobia as distasteful and embarrassing. – Phelps stayed anti-establishment.

Ironically again, by staying anti-establishment as the establishment changed, Phelps went from the front of the Bell Curve as a crusading Civil Rights Lawyer, to the back as he became a reactionary trying to stop the incoming tide. To misquote Shakespeare, May the evil that men do be interred with their bones.

I want to pass this along

Americana

Street Art-

When I was a boy – about the 7th grade – some people dumped garbage on our front lawn. Several times. Because they were cowards, they did it at night. But they did leave a note telling us that they didn’t want us to move to their town because we were Jews. I was so embarrassed of my Daddy who just quietly got up – early – in the morning and cleaned up the garbage. Later I would tell people that If it had been me, I would have waited, in the dark for the fucker and shot him with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Of course I wouldn’t have, and not just because I didn’t have a shotgun; it was just a fantasy that I used to punish what I thought was my Daddy’s powerlessness.

Somehow though, we  – I – became white over the last 60 some-odd years and I never had to go through that with my daughter. But Black people, African-Americans, don’t get to white out like European-American Jews, even Eastern-European-American Jews.

Every once in a while, I read a blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates that cuts to my core, that makes me so sad that we aren’t as good – as a country – as we like to brag that we are. This is one of those somethings. If you get a chance, read his post,  The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males. It’s short.

 

True Detective and The Good Wife

Americana, Television

Sugar Cane Refinery

Sugar Cane Refinery by Richard Misrach

 Last Sunday was the finale of True Detective and the first Good Wife in several weeks. Good Wife showing times being so erratic, made watching True Detective on HBO much easier. Not that it wasn’t easy to start with, True Detective was on HBO – the adult channel – and that screams Serious television. It turned out, though, that the easy decision was the wrong decision. The last episode of True Detective has left me dissatisfied. The total was less than the sum of True Detective’s parts. I should probably say Spoiler Alert here although I don’t particularly want to talk about any plot points.

True Detective has lots to like: the photography was great, giving me a genuine sense of place; the music was superb and haunting; and the acting, by two actors I like alot, was outstanding. However, it was all to almost no avail. Michele said that True Detective was a story about telling stories, but the stories were like somebody who keeps telling us that this story is going to be great and then it turns out to be about a crushed ping pong ball à la Auntie Mame. I loved the way the scenes took place at three different, distinct times, mid nineties, early oughts, and now, but – in the end – the different times did not really add anything. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s mixing up of the times was a big factor. If the time were linear, one of the last scenes, would be when Vincent Vega got killed by Butch Coolidge. But True Detective seems to be, in the end, a buddy movie, and if the scenes were presented in a chronological order, I don’t think much would have changed.

I am not a big fan of conspiracy movies – you know, the kind where the little paperboy is killed because he saw the President kill his mistress – but I found myself hoping for it in True Detective. Nevertheless, in the end, True Detective was just about some crazy loon. Not that that couldn’t have made a good story, but everything about True Detective hinted at something bigger.

On the other hand, The Good Wife, is almost always about something bigger idea. As an aside, the producer of The Good Wife, is Ridley Scott who is one of Hollywood’d most ardent feminists – think Thelma and Louise, Ripley in Alien, or Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus – and the main character, Alicia Florrick, is the wife of the guy who is cheating (unlike True Detective in which the cheated-upon wife, played by the underused Michelle Monaghan, is just a plot device).  End aside. In Perry Mason style, every week is centered around a different court case and the cases are usually fascinating in their own right.

Often the case will turn on some cutting-edge legal or technological question. Last week, it was illegal wiretaps which turned out to be collateral damage from NSA wiretaps. There have been cases on  online currency  and the Treasury Department, a software manufacturer accused of helping the Syrian government spy on protesters, a test case to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, and an athletic doping case. All this against the backdrop of Alicia’s relationship with her husband and with her two kids and their relationship with their father. It is all fascinating stuff.

The next day, The Good Wife is still fascinating and True Detective has disappeared, like a phantasma.