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NPRoar

I’m all ready to put up something for your friday reading enjoyment, but (accidentally) listening to NPR this morning for a little too long had me pulling an Inspector Dreyfuss, and not in a good way.

Mara Liasson, you know you know me, national political correspondent or whatever, talking about the post-election shake-out, practically encapsulates the conventional wisdom flowing from every quarter that also just happens to be a ridiculous way of thinking about politics. It’s pulling for atrophy, as one friend is want to say. I’m not linking to it, but it goes something like this:

The final score of Tuesday’s election gives Republican’s evidence of a resurgence.

People want divided government, so it can do nothing.

So they vote for Republicans, even though they don’t like them (~20% consistently self-identify as republicans).

Republican can win, if they obscure their stances on social issues.

NY-23 was an example of Republicans dividing their support, and so handing a victory to the Democrat.

CA-10… oh, Mara didn’t mention CA-10.

Moderate democrats better hedge their bets on supporting the Obama agenda… or else voters will punish them for looking like they support something and running afoul of the way national political correspondents (aka The Village) and others have grown accustomed to thinking about what the legislative branch should [not] be doing.

So, NPR donors listeners good liberals… Is this the way the news about this or any election should be delivered?

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Time – the Revelator

We spend all manner of time and effort trying to de-couple these things which cannot be separated, no matter how much we want them to be.

I’m talking about economic growth and any of the things we don’t want to tackle because we’re afraid tackling them might harm our prospects for growth: health care reform, immigration policy, energy policy, especially regarding carbon emissions. Not only only will addressing these policy challenges head-on not jeopardize the future of the economy – the future of the economy is pretty-well destined to leave the toilet and head toward the sewer if we don’t address them. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

gdpannualized1_2

via.

So what do you see when you see this graph? Are the prospects for growth drying up? Are they tied to other coincidental developments( peak stupid oil, the internet, the economic rise of Yurp and China? The wild swings of yesteryear and the policies that conjured them should not be the goal now. But this is a difficult idea for our better minds to grasp. We want to go back back back. Time goes forward forward forward, and well have to do way more with way less or we’ll just be like those crowds of people in old movies that are all dead now.

The prospects for and directions of future growth are changing; not in-a-phone-booth kind of changing but cloaked in the heavy disguise of things we’ve [supposedly] never done and so appear foreign and frightening, even un-American. But that charge is scurrilous and ignorant, and done they must be if the growth we crave is to become the reality we so desperately seek to escape. The extent to which we do not get this can become depressing; the extent to which we do will liberate us in the direction that turns hopes into certainty. Warning: An opposite set of outcomes may apply to the more resourceful among you.

Can you hear me, Doctor?

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Eco-Sikhs

Our government bails out sprawl and congress picks up two one more progressives (but two Dems) in overnight voting, but the news here is the role of religion in the climate change debate. Leaders of the world’s major religions have gathered at Windsor Castle to discuss ways in which the faiths can impact (in a positive way, more on that distinction in a minute) efforts to combat global climate change.

Much of the discourse over climate has been focused on gigatons of gases, megawatt hours of electricity, miles per gallon or details of diplomatic accords or legislation. But  Olav Kjorven, an assistant secretary general at the United Nations involved with the meeting, spent the last year visiting religious orders around the world to see what faiths could bring to the climate table. The answer, Mr. Kjorven told me, is a lot, and not simply in prayer.

Religions, he explained, run more than half the world’s schools, so tweaking a curriculum to include more on the environment can have a big impact. Their vast financial holdings provide leverage and capital for investments with environmental or social benefits. At the conference, which ends on Wednesday, many faiths will be  announcing long-term plans to make more of an impact in an arena that has not tended to be a top priority.

What was it Mom always used to say? Yes… but. Granted, there are religious people around the world who are taking the threat seriously.

Of our very own countrymen especially, however, these are the folks who are greatly uninterested in the impact of man upon the Earth, even as they/we subscribe to a divinely-inspired caretaker role. I get this whole ‘dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air…’ thing as it extends to super-sized mega churches surrounded by oceans of pavement amid seas of sprawl and entitled consumption of limited resources, but it leads to super-sized mega churches… . Anyway, I used to think the funniest thing was how the mega-churches labeled themselves that way. Now, not so much.

Churches may end up being the last refuge of climate change denial, or at least indifference. So much despoiling of the earth and its inhabitants has been committed beneath its aegis that it may be impossible to turn that around and begin to use it as a force to un-despoil. Conceding any of that would seemingly undermine too much. And imagine a sermon whereupon the minister looks up in the suspended Bose speakers and recessed lighting 100 feet overhead and asks his fellow congregants if they need all of that to effectively commune with God and whether the energy they put into what they’re wearing or how they arrived there has anything to do with the planetary crisis that has the liberals all in a tizzy. Me neither.

But how do they/we broach that subject? How do we connect the very trappings of our holy communion [obviously, not limited to religion] to the waste we’re laying?

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On Buying Green

That sounds a lot like On Golden Pond. And, with a little change of emphasis, it could be… Buying Green, Putting Green… Village Green. I love the village green. Anyway.

Here’s a piece about consumers buying green products, how we’re doing, why we’re doing it, etc. I don’t know how you read it without it reading completely weird. I mean what are we talking about?

  • “Dark green” consumers tend to be older, more well educated, and more affluent than “light green” consumers
  • They also tend to care more about what is in “green” products (all natural, organic, non-toxic) and how they are made (such as by socially responsible companies)
  • “Dark green” consumers also tend to be more thoughtful about their purchases, often planning them ahead of time. “Light green” consumers tend to be more impulsive, often buying green products out of curiosity

See? Totally weird; important (for me) to remember that this is not what we’ve come to – it’s just where we are now. Companies? Yes we consider them. But what are we buying when we purchase things? Must our achats symbolize our moral purity? Wait, before you answer that – one possible scenario:

Are we buying convenience? Durability? There’s a difference between, let’s say, buying cleaning products and jeans. If you’re buying clothes, you’re rifling through a whole number of characteristics, none of which likely have to do with sustainability. Or do they? Better-made clothes last longer. We might buy less of them. It’s a way… wait a minute. We weren’t even trying to be green – we just, hey… there are different ways to accomplish similar goals. Are there other reasons? Ewww. Can we not drive, buy local, eat well or hang out clothes to dry just because we like to do these things?

Even or especially with clothing, we don’t have to call it green or anything. But we do. Because the choice will help the environment and that’s why we would buy it… well no, it isn’t. The environment isn’t the only reason we would buy things that last longer, or buy less of them. Or shop in our downtown instead of W*lmart, or from farmers at a market. We do these things because we like to do them. They are meaningful in their own right. It’s a corporate world and we need the slogans. But our needs here in the 1st world are actually quite simple and directly correlated to things we like: we like to do things that are enjoyable. And have gotten off the path to enjoyable things for exactly to demonstrate the power of advertising.

So these things of value, to us, these are the benchmarks. Now, consider all the other stuff that we buy, and whether you think ‘buying green’ is necessary to change any of them.

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High-level Complicity

Did something happen in the art world recently? Or more specifically, did everything that appeared to have been happening in the art world over the last thirty five years suddenly just give itself away? British Non Shark-killer Damien Hirst (at least he himself didn’t do the killing) had a show of oil paintings at the Wallace Collection. It turns out they were teh suck:

The fact that he appeared to be attempting to align himself with the other great artists in that gallery, by using Old Master imagery such as the skull, that he employed a dark blue-dominated palette reminiscent of the early works of his hero Francis Bacon, while making reference to Picasso’s Blue Period in the title of the exhibition, merely compounded the offence. Hirst’s presumption in comparison with the technical inadequacy of the work was simply unforgiveable. For once, chutzpah wasn’t enough.

Tom Lubbock, writing in the Independent, felt the need to preface his particularly acerbic remarks by reiterating – in an almost apologetic manner – one of the great mantras of contemporary art, that “skills needn’t matter”. Yet perhaps the great lesson of today’s responses to Hirst’s paintings is that skills most definitely do, should and always will matter.

Skills? What a concept? (sorry, low-hanging word choice). More like the above here, here and here.

To me, we have an easy political comparison. The Republican party has been trying to convince Americans for at least a generation that government just flat does not work. From 2001 to 2009, they attempted to demonstrate this and convince us via indisputable evidence and example.

For the last 35 years or so, the art world has been trying, desperately some might say, to convince us that art does not matter.

So I’d love to think the mask is off. Did Hirst manage to do it, with paintings?

Thanks, AC.

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Steady in One Desire

The Roman stoic Seneca (5 BC to 65 AD) was a philosopher and statesman whose writings have made to our own day in several forms, including a Penguin Great Ideas series. The slender volume On The Shortness of Life, Life is Long if You Know How to Use It is three sections full of gems. Is the life we get in fact not short – we just make it seem so? This from the first section, which is along letter to his friend Paulinus, On the Shortness of Life:

But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realize too late that for all time they have been preoccupied in doing nothing. And the fact that they sometimes invoke death is no proof that their lives seem long. Their own folly afflicts them with restless emotions which hurl themselves upon the very things they fear: they often long for death because they fear it. Nor is this a proof that they are living for a long time that the days seems long to them, or that they complain that the hours pass slowly until the time fixed for dinner arrives. For as soon as their preoccupations fail them, they are restless with nothing to do, not knowing how to dispose of their leisure or make the time pass. And so they are anxious for something else to do, and all the intervening time is wearisome: really it is just as when a gladiator show has been announced, or they are looking forward to the appointed time of some other exhibition or amusement – they want to leap over the days in between. Any deferment of the longed-for event is tedious to them. Yet the time of the actual enjoyment is short and swift, and made much shorter through their own fault. For they dash from one pleasure to another and cannot stay steady in one desire. Their days are not long but odious…

Even their pleasures are uneasy and made anxious by various fears, and at the very height of their rejoicing the worrying thought steals over them: ‘How long will this last?’ This feeling has caused kings to bewail their power, and they were not much delighted by the greatness of their fortune as terrified by the thought of its inevitable end. When that most arrogant king of Persia [Xerxes, ed.] was deploying his army over vast plains, and could not number it but had to measure it, he wept because in a hundred years out of that huge army not a soul would be alive. But he who was weeping was the very man who would bring their fate upon them, and would destroy some on the sea, some on land, some in battle, some in flight, and in a very short time would wipe out all of those for whose hundredth year he was afraid.

And what of the fact that even their joys are uneasy? The reason is that they are not based on firm causes, but they are agitated as groundlessly as they arise. But what kind of times can those be, do you think, which they themselves admit are wretched, since even the joys by which they are exalted and raised above humanity are pretty corrupt? All the greatest blessings create anxiety, and Fortune is never less to be trusted than when it is fairest. To preserve prosperity we need other prosperity, and to support the prayers which have turned out well we have to make other prayers. Whatever comes our way by chance is unsteady, and the higher it rises the more liable it is to fall. Furthermore, what is doomed to fall delights no one.

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Special Ops

green_att_tee

With these guys on patrol all over Afghanistan, and not a few of them coming back to Dover in the middle of the night, it’s good to remember that to many people, green has nothing to do with eco-anything or money and the parts it fools fools it parts from, except within the idea of protecting the liberty inherent to those conceits.

Their official motto, De Oppresso Liber, to liberate the oppressed, is truly something to contemplate. It gets complicated when you begin to unravel all of the absolutes necessary to project force with the tender skin and bones of actual men across the globe. Belief goes beyond believing, and into the land reserved for religion and reverence. And craven beings that we are, we can’t help but corrupt the selflessness of the display with all manner of politics and nationalism, righteousness and relativism that surely crushes most missions to liberate the oppressed. It’s almost impossible, but our war-making sanction, which we mistake for nature, animates so many elements of public policy that we put ourselves at the mercy of our warrior impulses. Oppressed by these very tendencies, how might we be liberated?

So while I can revel in the fact that our mighty militaristic capabilities may indeed build some bridges out of the energy morass, we shouldn’t forget those young guys, bearded against regulation but for their own protection, walking around villages and laying wait in poppy fields – scared, nervous, confident, well-armed, lost, found, known, unsure, fit, tired and certain in the face of but one of our every-present, shadowy enemies. Go ahead and try harder than them to do something impossible.

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Big Sky

A friend was telling me recently how, even as Montana enjoys a reputation as a sort of great outdoors Shangra la, in actuality it has been methodically raped for its resources without concern or recourse for the environmental damage that has followed. Significant portions of the state are highly polluted from coal and gold mining, which until ten years ago utilized cyanide in the process and of course resulted in incidents of cyanide-tainted ground water. Push back on environmental issues in Montana has traditionally come from land-owners, though often their interests are as tainted as the ground they seek to protect.

So there are all kinds of fictions about the Big Sky state floating around, plus they’ve given us the wit and wisdom of Max Baucus to add to the healthcare debate. Actually, his wisdom knows no bounds, as Baucus steps up to pontificate on how we should go about dithering on global warming, too. via Grist, it seems that the beetles eating Montana’s trees don’t care if Baucus believes the planet is warming or not. cue munching sound:

One part of the media focused on the real story that Montanans are increasingly concerned about:  Climate change is already hitting their state hard now and is poised to devastate it utterly.  American Public Media’s Marketplace has be done a terrific multipart series on climate change, which can be accessed here, along with a map of how different regions of the country are being affected now and how they are likely to be hit in the future.

The first piece “Climate change in our own backyards,” tells the amazing story of the warming-driven bark beetle infestation around Helena.  And yes, this is the same exact story that the NYT screwed up in July (see “Signs of global warming are everywhere, but if the New York Times can’t tell the story (twice!), how will the public hear it?“).

The article is complete with pretty pictures and ‘sustainability reporters’. But this is a good reminder to watch out for the dueling rationales that pop up for the millions of acres of dying trees across the mountain west. Climate change denial is one thing – some people just choose to rather not believe it. And skepticism has its privileges. But what happens when actual people begin experiencing things like this? Will it get more difficult to concoct gymnastic reasons that place the blame on immigrants, or does Occam get a seat on the city council?

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Taking Care of Business

So… banks are experiencing a priapism that just won’t shrink.

Sixty per cent of the people support a cap-and-trade bill.

Everybody loves the public option.

Much larger CRE defaults than expected are predicted.

Recession for all means depression for many.

So… what’s happening with all of this? Our green compass has definitely lost its magnetic north Franklin, or the device has been broken down and sold as parts. Now what? Do we know the way to San Jose?

Like an uncle’s hand on your knee, it’s funny that we assume and perhaps long for a return to normal – when that’s the last place we need to go. How many times will we lurch back toward something that holds nothing but FAIL before we realize the futility and set out in a frightening new direction? The truth is we’re already headed there; all the above plus anything you read in newspixels are signs of this. Remember the change-thingy?

The whole arrangement – not impure for any reason, political or other, besides it simply could not last – is shifting. We’re waking up slowly, trying to see things the same way, but they are already different. And that’s unsettling. An economy that makes money off of money is a fabulously faulty set-up; it entices innovation that is self-immolating of the whole. Then we stand back, gape and wonder who was to blame. These would be lessons in any other context; what we will call them now, it’s hard to tell because we are attempting to see them through eyes that want to make the best of what’s left rather than use the knowledge to change what we see. We only want to adjust our vision, but it’s semantic optometry at best.

An example, as private equity firms rush to cash in on green tech. They are attempting to extend exactly the same cycle that brought us such hits as health insurance companies, credit default swaps and off balance sheet transactions: shareholder value is given precedence over actual value, much less social value. The model must be tied to it’s own failings, then we won’t have to crush it. Remember triple bottom line? This stuff is not as hard as it is different. Different from the way we have been doing business up until now, which is taking care of business, not people or planet.

If you don’t do all three, taking care of the one doesn’t work.