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Look away, part II

Part one, here. Unrelated but really, is anything?

The ‘world’ souring on climate politics (choose your word to emphasize) has a true and correct ‘as if’ quality about it. As we find more ways to do more, we also (reminder: there is no they) find more ways to do less, pollute more, question everything, bury it in euphemism, and not recall what the worlds mean and then discover new ways to say this is Just. Too. Hard.

The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so. In many places — like in South America and in Europe — existing laws have already been weakened or are under pressure from shifting political coalitions now pushing to undermine them.
To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney — whose 2015 warnings about the financial risks from climate change helped set the stage for Paris by alarming the world’s banking elite — became prime minister of Canada in March and as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election. To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world. Almost everywhere you look, the spike of climate alarm that followed Paris has given way to something its supporters might describe as climate moderation but which critics would call complacency or indifference. “You can’t walk more than two feet at any global conference today without ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ being thrown around as the order of the day,” says Jason Bordoff, a former Obama energy adviser who now runs Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “But it’s not clear to me that anyone knows what those words mean other than this whole climate thing is just too hard.”
The world hasn’t actually abandoned green energy, with global renewable rollout still accelerating and investment doubling over the last five years. But climate politics is in undeniable withdrawal, and far from ushering in a new era of cooperative global solidarity, Paris has given way to something much more old-fashioned: an atavistic age of competition, renewed rivalry and the increasingly naked logic of national self-interest, on energy and warming as with everything else. In the wake of America’s presidential election, Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute declared that “the era of the climate hawk is over.” Perhaps, at least for now, the age of climate statesmen, too.
Lengthy quote because it’s pay-walled, but worth it if you can.
There is a great [human] tendency (unheard-of among rabbits and swordfish, one assumes) to struggles as one-off battles that are won or lost – rather than ongoing existential struggles for survival better-known among mammals and oceanic fish. Global warming is not a set-piece battle, though it has many sets and pieces. It’s successes need to built upon, it’s failures learned from. The article is also correct in that our language about it has stagnated, dominated as it is by capital interests. The role of the once ne plus ultra United States being self-negated has also proven to be of immense value to the rest of the world.
We yet need to face down the bullies – that is and always has been our existential struggle, presenting every single moment we’ve ever had to shine.
Coates is excellent on an adjacent, rhyming point.
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Answer the door

What are we trying to pretty up, by maintaining fictions that the current state of affairs is somehow normal, that it cannot be as grossly psychopathic for no benefit as it seems? And more importantly, why?

We’ve never had to make the case that maintaining a healthy ecosystem is good. The opposite case seemed self-refuting, until it making it became a badge of honor for disingenuous fraudsters to scare fraidsters, of whom we have plenty plenty and now more than is manageable because the original case that didn’t have to be made at all now seems questionable. Circular is the logic. Refuse to accept it but decline not to acknowledge its presence and malevolence.

Reason has been caught flat-footed in the face of the transparent willingness to lie and scare. Some call it boldness and question whether norms and even constitutional principles can hold. These are quaint notions, a reliance upon and retreat into status that were never anything more than rationalizations for themselves. And as long as they lasted, they bred contempt for any questioning of the status quo. The skullduggery has always been present but for decades channeled mostly yet viciously from pulpits and through direct mail campaigns, seldom wielded openly as the weapons they have become. Those who were getting fleeced should know better, so there was no need to defend them or point out the obvious problems with the arrangement. Or listen to the warnings of those tried.

Reason has not been ready to defend itself. Never felt the need.

Now the need is pounding at the door, and we are trying to act as though we do not hear, might not be home. Maybe the knocking will go away on its own. Consult any car repair manual for a detailed explanation regarding this strategy.

And along with the formerly self-evident case for a healthy ecosystem, add that for democracy, scientific research and discovery, postal delivery, voting rights, civil rights, marriage equality, human rights. Whatever the shape of the latest outrage or their accumulation, it is a symbol of an axiom long considered safe now under assault from all sides, with stunned onlookers staggering backward, wondering WTF and waiting for someone to do something.

And understand these strategies for exactly what they are – efforts to destroy the system.

Knock, knock.

Image: Author photo, Lefkes.

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Exceptionalism

With the AI on the fritz again, dear leader’s tenuous grip on a very limited supply of marbles, and the corporate media unable unwilling to call any of this what it is, the importance of checking the scores is our go-to.

Not those scores.

Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

Let’s start with Germany because everyone thinks they know this story. Franz von Papen, the conservative politician who convinced President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, said “We’ve hired him” in January 1933. He thought he was so clever. Within 18 months, the Nazis were machine-gunning von Papen’s allies in their homes during the Night of Long Knives. Von Papen himself barely escaped to Austria with his life. Every single conservative who thought they could “control” or “moderate” Hitler was either dead, in exile, or groveling for survival by 1934.

Italy was even dumber, if that’s possible. October 1922, Mussolini announces he’s marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts. Except here’s the thing: they were poorly armed, disorganized, and the Italian military could have crushed them in about three hours. The King had his generals ready. He had martial law papers drawn up. The military was waiting for the order. Instead, he invited Mussolini to form a government. Just handed him power. Twenty-three years later, partisans hung Mussolini’s corpse upside down at a gas station while crowds beat it with sticks. The king died in exile. Hundreds of thousands of Italians died for that moment of cowardice.

Spain might be the worst because everyone saw it coming. Three years of escalating fascist violence. Actual assassination attempts. Then in 1936, Franco and his generals launch a straight-up military coup. The Spanish Republic begged for help. France said “not our problem.” Britain said “both sides are bad.” America declared neutrality. The result? Franco ruled for 39 years. He died peacefully in his bed in 1975. They’re still finding mass graves in Spain. Still. In 2025.

Want something more recent? Look at Hungary. Orbán won democratically in 2010. By 2011 he’d rewritten the constitution. By 2012 he controlled the media. By 2013 he’d gutted the judiciary. It’s 2025 and he’s still in power. The EU has been “very concerned” for fourteen fucking years. They’ve written strongly worded letters. They’ve held meetings. Hungary is now a one-party state in the middle of Europe and everyone just… accepts it.

Okay, but surely someone, somewhere, stopped them?

The dreaded ‘someone.’ Not be outdone by Herr von Hindenburg

Want to know how many times people successfully “controlled” the fascists they allied with? Zero.

Are we feeling special?

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Seeing it as it happens

Figure out what you think, first. Where you stand, what you can support. Yes, you may be challenged in an argument (or be the challenger) so this includes being able to defend what you think. If you can be convinced to change or alter what you think by a superior moral rationale or appeal to reason, this is the path to knowing. Pardon the prologue.

The tendency not to see, much less believe, what is happening in the US at any particularly moment but especially this one is itself more widespread than many want to admit.

Climate change, née global warming, offers some analogue. The shift in the name presents a clue, that the reality had to be softened, broadened, recast in a more natural-seeming context to gather more support or even acknowledgement. This was and is childish. The ‘skeptics’ who tentatively step on board thought-temple and nod will only demand more incontrovertible evidence later, when the latter has piled up beyond any denial. And that’s assuming they were acting in good faith in the first place. My desire for more ice cream before I cleaned my room was genuine. When I was six. Sometimes. Depending on how many times my parents and I worked out these deals.

The point beyond any denial above is critical,  because that is when the negotiations begin. With individuals, with themselves. We don’t want to entertain the possibility that some things are happening, that we have some responsibility for their happening, that they are the results of our actions, actions that have benefitted us greatly, that question the wisdom and grace of those actions and perhaps even their divine sanction. No, it can’t be that. Must be treachery of any other sort. Certainly not ours.

So, there’s a great deal of possible agency, and it can be winsome temptation.

The successful contortions that have both pushed climate solutions so near the point of no return AND super-charged the development of the same solutions – wind and solar power displacing fossil fuels – have been the result of enormous time lags that allowed technology to catch up as well as the proliferation of lies and frauds on an industrial scale. Decades. We had at least a very solid handle on global warming in 1988.

Alas, the analogue has it limits. The transition to fascist authoritarianism offers no such kind of lazy time frame. You can argue, but you need to. It is in motion, speeding up as the summer burns out. And no, simply getting depressed about it is not one of your options. Just clean your fcking room.

 

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You knewESCO

UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations with the aim of promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.

A sort of civilization interlocutor,  UNESCO helps set global norms and standards, develop tools for international cooperation, generate knowledge for public policies and build global networks of sites and institutions that reflect the world’s cultural and natural diversity of ‘outstanding universal value.’

So, for obvious reasons, the US is of course now withdrawing from UNESCO:

“Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest of the United States,” says Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, in the statement. Bruce asserts that UNESCO’s vote to admit Palestine as a full member in 2011 was “highly problematic” and “contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.”

Audrey Azoulay, director general of UNESCO, denied the anti-Israel claims, arguing in a statement that they “contradict the reality of UNESCO’s efforts, particularly in the field of Holocaust education and the fight against antisemitism.”

“UNESCO has supported 85 countries in implementing tools and training teachers to educate students about the Holocaust and genocides, and to combat Holocaust denial and hate speech,” writes Azoulay, adding that the agency’s work has been “unanimously acclaimed” by leading Jewish organizations.

That’s according to the notoriously hot-headed Smithsonian Magazine.

Yes, all is political, everything. Must learn how to politics.

Instead, we choose to deal with highly complex political, scientific and cultural questions by magically making them simple and easy.  If only there was an international organization designed to serve as arbiter on such matters, rather than re-drawing them as cartoons stick figures.

Image: Credentials from my documentary film project a few years ago.

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Don’t Look Away, Dixieland

Stone Mountain is a geological wonder that carries a social significance as profound as its granite heart.

Untold numbers of American soldiers have trained at bases named for treasonous leaders. A legion of Nathan Bedford Forrests gaze across the South from squares, courthouses and public parks, perhaps puzzled by the recent stirrings and troubled by the rumble of heavy machinery. Discussions on re-naming buildings and removing commemorative statues that celebrate heroes of the Confederacy achieved new momentum as America re-inspected its past in light of its present, for a moment at least. The stirrings introduced great unease in many citizens, whatever their physical distance to the South. Still, a logical elegance about re-evaluating our symbols, their connection to identity, and the poison they present to our democracy should be able to guide us toward better role models and more equitable public allegory.

But the options for what to do about the massive carving into the eastern face of Stone Mountain celebrating that past sparks a different kind of negotiation. The question elicits a category error, a kind of nostalgia for a monument that would better serve us as the marker for a tomb, the final resting place for a reign of terror.

The vast crimes we perpetrated on our own people still loom large today – unequal schools, segregated neighborhoods, glass ceilings as far as the eye can see. While calls for diversity harkened the great benefits of inclusion, the remnants of Jim Crow and abandoned commitments to Reconstruction still haunt our communities. The many millions living under the duress of poverty somehow continue to threaten those struggling within their well-tended fear of others. We cling to prejudices – and violence – and succeed in continuing to avoid reckoning with the facts. Violence privileges as much as it destroys.

Impossible to relocate to a museum with other relics, we could blast Lee, Jackson, Davis and their mounts off their perch, replacing them with and/or even adding more worthy images to the composition. But we should not – and hardly only because of the anachronism it would create by adding a kitsch element to what has such a serious and devastating effects we also misunderstand.

The carving at Stone Mountain should remain permanently ensconced as exactly what it is: a dark guarantee of second-class citizenship for the vast majority of the descendants of Black slaves, 12 generations at Emancipation. That it could succeed only in anchoring the entire country to the fulfillment of false prophets from time immemorial is its own testament.

Irreverence might call this an opportunity, one instance where we might not politely look away, as the tune went, from who we are and how we arrived here. The monument represents a fraught reality in a difficult time that stretches across an open wound. A monument to a defiantly un-Reconstructed South, the three horsemen have ridden roughshod into our moment as a deliberate expression of what brought us exactly to here: a genteel façade that required decades of brutal viciousness to maintain. Overwhelming wealth mixed ever so precisely with extraordinary poverty presents as just one result of a systematic effort to elevate some and exclude others. But the power of the “Lost Cause” mythology that clouded the real outcome of the peace has kept the American Civil War alive in the imaginations of too many. Manifested through police violence, white supremacist ideology does a lot more than echo today.

When plans were initially finalized for a commemorative sculpture at Stone Mountain, there was no coincidence about the timing. In 1915, the KKK announced its modern rebirth by burning a cross on the mountaintop. Admittedly, it was not even an original gesture but one borrowed from the film, “Birth of a Nation.” Myth melting into reality was and remains one of the constant themes of celebrating the “Lost Cause.” And yet the implications of these social expressions remain as tangible as Stone Mountain itself.

After financial problems caused stops and starts on a Stone Mountain monument, an unfinished version sat untouched until the 1960’s. The project was reprised under state sanction when segregationist governor Marvin Griffin had Georgia purchase the mountain and fundraising began in earnest.

Why complete the monument then? Was the state government trying to make something clear? Is it possible to attend a laser light show at Stone Mountain Park and understand what it was? Deliberate and extensive efforts backed by unmistakable intentions on the part of the state and local governments sought to maintain segregation despite Supreme Court decisions about schools, despite federal laws and programs. It is folly to try and think of any other reason why the monument was completed then or why it should be destroyed now. The white majority decided and made itself clear with a statement visible for miles and in fact years, writ across inadequate housing projects and failing schools from the coast across the Piedmont.

White segregationists used the mountain to signal that they would turn the terror of white supremacist violence into a kitchen sink of socially acceptable but no less violent restrictions, from real estate redlining to voting barriers to gerrymandered districts, to assure the continued dominance of the white supremacist state.

The gargantuan efforts required to skirt the spirit of new laws, to soften your language but not your heart, merited a gargantuan symbol. And we can see the symbol and fruits of those efforts through today, from every vantage point. People mired in poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth; Georgia itself with the highest rates of felony convictions in the nation; voters still responding to dog whistles and scare tactics that hurt people, devastating families and local economies, attacking the very notion of a national commonwealth.

Let the carving stay and let it remind us that we still have work to do, that there will always be work to do while we have to convince ourselves that there is no they.

Stone Mountain should remain a permanent marker to who we are, to the deliberate cruelty and injustice that has so marred our society until the descendants of white supremacists rise up and plead for its removal. And then we should still say no. We need something to remind us: never again.

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Consequent antecedent

What if a climate report falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it read it write it?

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

No presto-magic-o, no problem-o. Luckily for us, those pesky climate issues are no match for a brain genius who just does not want to hear about them. Solved.

Fantasy Winning.

Video: frères d’armes

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The Mountebanks Congregate

In the early-mid 2000s there existed an essential and amazing weblog called The Poorman. Its disappearance in the early teens was completely understandable, as these things go. But what happened to The Poorman? Who is and where is Andrew? I’m sure there are people who know. Yours is not one of those people.

However, among their truly too-numerous-to-count hilariously poignant bits of writing about the complete and utter moral corruption of the Bush II administration and the media super-structure that served as its lifeline at each and every turn was a very insightful post about the founding of this great nation and especially the writing of its constitution. I wish I could find it for you dear people, but alas the wayback machine does not provide all. And so, I will attempt to re-create its fundamental point here.

So, back in ye olden revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, about July to September 1787, committees of the Constitutional Convention hashed out drafts of said document in grand strokes and fine detail, style and arrangements by Hamilton, Madison et al. Per the Poorman’s apt telling, near the end of this period, say around the middle of August, the entire crew of slave-owning inspired statesmen reached a point where they were sure the document was finished. What needed to be codified in order for the young country to function and treat itself justly had been put down in as clear a language as possible, easy and simple for all to parse. They had done it. In a humbling, electric moment, tired yet buzzed with destiny, they gathered up their finished draft and went out from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to get some fresh air and ponder the reach of their elegant treatise.

In the glare of late morning, the exhausted but exhilarated committee members poured out onto the streets of Philadelphia. But when they saw their fellow countrymen on the streets, began talking to a few and listening to more and realized the depths of a flimflammery and skallywaggery already afoot in the young country, the collection of mountebanks, the depraved and ignorant if eloquent tip of the hateful and begrudging masses for whom their toil was meant to soigner, they turned heel and headed back inside. There was yet more work needed on the document of their dreams and duty, to assure the perpetual longevity of the country of people it was designed to protect from themselves.

So as an update to the mysterious and direly missed Poorman, the descendants of those people that ran the writers back into the Hall to perfect their document are now in charge of everything.

And re: Harvard – pour encourager les autres works both ways, MFs.

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What does C L R James mean?

The West Indian Intellectual C L R James (born in 1901, Trinidad) provided an insightful assessment of democracy in the U.S., ‘Notes on American Civilization’ (1950). ‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in modern American life,’ he explained.

Carefully or not, the explanation has apparently been grossly, and repeatedly mischaracterized and misunderstood ever since, as unpacked in this essay:

At the climactic centre of this ominous analysis was the contemporary entertainment industry, which, James argued, set the stage for a totalitarian turn through its projections of fictional heroic gangsters as well as its production of celebrities as real-life heroes. A manufactured Hollywood heroism, he warned, had the potential to cross over from popular culture to political rule. ‘By carefully observing the trends in modern popular art, and the responses of the people, we can see the tendencies which explode into the monstrous caricatures of human existence which appear under totalitarianism.’ Completed in early 1950, James’s proposal remained underground for decades until it found publication under the abbreviated title American Civilization in 1993. Four years earlier, the author had passed on into history as one of the finest minds of the 20th century.

At the base of this ignorance is a 30-year-old tale of radical misreading. Beginning in the 1990s, commentaries on American Civilization have erased its concern with the dark cultural politics of totalitarianism, dismissing the manuscript as quixotic and optimistic, even embarrassingly romantic. James, according to reviewers, fell for the US with the naive zeal of what Trinidadians would call a never-see-come-see. This radical was so dazzled by the North American republic that his radicalism disappeared once he sat down to write about its history and culture. In American Civilization, James was ‘enthusing with the greatest passion about the democratic capacity of the civilization with which he had fallen in love,’ the UK-based historian Bill Schwarz wrote. In a review for The New Yorker, Paul Berman concurred, describing the work as proof that ‘James basically loved the United States’. Yet, far from love and happiness, the manuscript was inspired, we will see, by a concern with the despair and hopelessness of US citizens and by a worry about the political portent of these mass feelings.

James’s basic contention in American Civilization was that a critical mass of the population had become so desperately distressed by the failure of the promises of liberal democracy that they were prepared to give up on it and elect, instead, to live vicariously through violently amoral political heroes. ‘The great masses of the American people no longer fear power,’ wrote James near the end of the manuscript. ‘They are ready to allocate today power to anyone who seems ready to do their bidding.’ This popular disenchantment with liberalism and the accompanying vulnerability to totalitarian leadership manifested in the entertainment industry, according to James. In films, novels, magazines and comics, he identified a contemporary archive of the cultural politics of totalitarianism – not a source of special affection for the modern republic (James actually trashed much of US popular culture as ‘ephemeral vulgarity on a colossal scale’). For him, moreover, the dire US situation was not exceptional but simply a richer symptomatic case of a modern derangement. The conceit that James was seduced by the achievements of ‘American civilisation’ is one of those strange North Atlantic fictions; one that reveals more about those who study James than about James himself.

Read the entire essay, which is really terrific and uncomfortably on the nose concerning how ‘we’ might conveniently misunderstand polemical, and any, language:

Finally, and maybe most originally, James identified resources for totalitarianism not only in the industry’s projections of fictional protagonists but also in its production of ‘stars’ in reality. Since the Great Depression, he noted, a vital development in popular culture involved the professional packaging of celebrities (Hollywood actors, especially) into ‘synthetic characters’, produced by a ‘vast army of journalists, magazine writers, publicity men, etc’. The rise of these stars concerned James because he believed that through them the masses ‘live vicariously, see in them examples of that free individuality which is the dominant need of the vast mass today.’ Celebrities, he wrote, ‘fill a psychological need of the vast masses of people who live limited lives.’ In this regard, James saw an intrinsic connection between the industrial fabrication of these real-life heroes to be consumed by the admiring masses and the conditioning of the public for totalitarian rule: ‘We have seen how, deprived of individuality, millions of modern citizens live vicariously, through identification with brilliant notably effective, famous or glamorous individuals. The totalitarian state, having crushed all freedom, carries this substitution to its last ultimate.’ The entertainment industry’s heavy investment in the production of stars readied the republic for an antidemocratic regime.

Image: CLR James on New Year’s Eve in 1975 © Val Wilmer