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The take away to the give again

If As nations decide to abandon disaster planning in favor of necessary shodding for war and its maths, a kind inverse calculus comes readable. As previously stipulated, climate change will not stop and governments preparing for war will be even less inclined to worry about floods, droughts, rising seas and disappearing shellfish. It should also be noted that military planners have long-prioritized strategies to ameliorate the effects of climate change on their ability to fight wars – actually not that different from other, widely more useful abilities.

So as Europe spends more on defense, the work they have already accomplished on de-carbonizing their economies becomes even more important, perhaps prominent and easier to understand. Not intended as investment advice or a silver lining, just another way to look at a dreadful and unnecessary shift in priorities. What was already required becomes even more so, maybe even venturing into a dual-use sort of armament, in terms we can understand. Again not, ideal.

And on the subject of less-than-ideal dualities, is destroying a country’s economy ALSO a way to file down its worst tendencies toward planetary harm? You didn’t mean it that way, but the results could point the same way – plus you’re doing it anyway. Just trying to give you credit for being so great and all.

The great environment Preznit.

Now, what makes us reluctant about forced reckonings is people will suffer consequences for no fault of their own. And in this case that is a little of all of us, as clearly always has been. Which is why we are committed to certain values and believe they are worth fighting for rather than simply picking winners. If what is going on right now with all the greatness making works out perfectly, the result will be an authoritarian wasteland of Hobbesian misery – poor, starving, wretched.

There is no possible upside to playing nice.

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Commonwealth

This is not any of that “we are all Bostonians now” dreck. This is a reminder of what and who we really are, what and who a commonwealth really is, from none other than Mr. Pierce:

We will not be embarrassed that we share these things in common just because, elsewhere, governors let children starve, and the sick get sicker, and preach of self-reliance while cashing checks from faceless millionnaires. We will not be shamed by the yahoo creationism of the Louisiana public schools, or the cruel neglect of health-care in Texas, or the corporate chop-shop that is being created out of the state of Wisconsin these days. We will not feel slighted that there are more sweatshops elsewhere than there may be here. We will not join your race to the bottom. It has to stop somewhere. It might as well be here.

We realize there is corruption in our systems. (The last several previous Speakers of the Massacusetts House in a row have all been convicted of one felony or another. Top that, Louisiana!) We realize there is waste. We howl and rail against it as loudly as anyone does. We mock its beneficiaries, and mock ourselves for being foolish enough not to see it happening. Our uncles get us jobs on the country road crews. We still have a Governor’s Council, a vestigial Rivendell for political elves that last was truly relevant to anything shortly before they threw the tea into the harbor. But the essential point is that even the corruption and waste in our government belongs to us because the government belongs to us. We won’t give it away, or sell it off wholesale, or exchange it for a bag of magic beans proffered by the political hucksters fronting for oligarchical money power. There is corruption and waste in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, and in “Bobby” Jindal’s Louisiana. But you can’t see it. It’s the product of backroom deals and corporate brigandage beyond the reach of democratic accountability. That has been the great triumph of the conservative political revolution — it has managed to privatize political corruption.

MA is near and dear to me for many reasons, and this reminder that it remains one of the few places defined by the things we actually stand for is another new one.

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Closing of the (American) Deal

Not sure if you read Charles Pierce, but you should. He’s given Esquire a new lease on life, with excellent advice for Willard Romney, like this:

That said, I think it’s time to update the recommendations I made last month. To pull off as shameless and utterly unprincipled a “pivot” as the one that is being proposed by the various handicappers on the bus would tax even the formidable internal guidance system of the Romneybot 2.0, for which being shameless and unprincipled is the only one of its prime functions that has worked perfectly throughout the campaign. The only way I see of doing it is to be so honest about being shameless and unprincipled that the whole wide world is so impressed by the sheer magnitude of your big, clanging brass balls that it forgets that you’d sell Massachusetts to the Somali pirates for five more points in next month’s Gallup poll, or 250 votes in Alabama. (I researched this phenomenon closely over the weekend, watching John Calipari win a national championship.) So, now that it’s very nearly, perhaps, almost, sort of Opening Day, let me suggest a “Big Speech” the candidate can deliver some time over the next three weeks, when nothing is really going on, and all that’s left to the campaign is empty bloviating (Hi, Newt!) and bitter recrimination (or, as it is known around the Santorum household, Our Reason To Live.) Give it to ’em between the eyes, Willard:

“I’m Willard Romney, bitches, and how you like me now?

“See what I did there on Tuesday night? I hammered those punks like ten-penny nails into a wedge of fine cheddar. I am a strong, able Republican with more money than God and an even greater taste for mindless destruction and casual vengeance. I am not a jack Mormon. I am a gangsta Mormon, motherfkers, and the country is my bling. I am Moroni’s Omar. I am the Stringer Bell of the Great Alkali Plain and the world is mine, whenever I want it. Come at the king, you best not miss. I’ll bury your ass like I buried Santorum’s, under so much money that nobody will ever find it, even though I hear it glows red in the dark every time someone mentions The Pill. I bought me a Wisconsin and a Maryland and a D.C., although I am aware that even my wealth — and have you noticed that I have $250 million stashed away for a rainy fking century? — wouldn’t be enough to carry The District in the general. But all I really have to do is spend enough to carry 51 percent of the Green Rooms there and I’m home fking free. And I can do that. Chuck Todd’s already halfway down into my vest pocket, looking for loose doubloons. And you know why?

“Because I’m Willard Romney, bitches, and I can buy and sell your great-grandchildren and you won’t even know it happened.

If it should please, and it does, you should start at the top and read the whole thing.

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The National Holiday

I posted something about this on the new other place, but a far more elegant rumination was made available by Mr. Pierce. The last graph:

We are all children of the civil-rights movement, whether we want to be or not, whether we are its direct descendants or whether we were adopted into it through the profound changes that movement wrought in the definition of what an American is. We are all children of the civil-rights movement, and this weekend is our national holiday. There is nothing mysterious about that. We make ourselves mysteries to each other because the cost of knowing our solution may be too ugly to bear.

Read the whole thing, because this cannot be hammered enough – and we can be too nice about it. Good thing Johnson decided not to be. But you can see it did not get in the way of his eloquence, which arrives in tact even today.

Democrats and most other decent people (see Venn diagram) are just too damn passive about all the racist crap hardening the arteries of our culture. Enough. It’s killing us and needs to be called out – there is no benefit of the doubt to give to people who poke around with euphemism about ‘other’ people. And there’s barely any euphemism, it’s not even offered with any delicacy any longer – check any group of headlines from the Republican primaries. The nature of this bypass surgery needs the courage of King and the brutal honesty and arm-twisting of Johnson. Celebrate by looking the haters in the eye and not looking away. They already know that you know, and are merely counting on you to let it go. How about taking a break from that?

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The Conformity of Confusion

I can’t help but think the number will have dropped in 2009 but EL reports that self-preservation green advertising was up, way up, in 2008. It does seem to have lost a bit of the initial ubiquity as marketeers figure out how difficult and complicated sustainability is to portray in American society as it is presently configured. Not that difficulty or complexity has ever stopped us/them before; and everyone should read this for a better idea of at least half of the target audience for greenwashing. Threading the needle: directing a sustainable product campaign to appeal to/overlap a population segment, of which half does not believe there is a problem. Let’s make a chart of the kind of spectrum I’m imagining.

So, your campaign, in order to be effective, must sufficiently appeal to an amorphous grouping of potential users/buyers of your product, half which must feel comforted by the fact that your company ‘gets it’ about a changing world – and the other half of which must know that you know it’s mostly if not all BS. Does this explain why these consumer appeals must be, by definition, devilishly clever or childishly absurd, and/or an insulting combination of both?

Of course, in the race for reason among this madness, the seven sins of greenwashing, complete with perfectly sound benchmarks for product performance and little green cartoon aliens. The question for the marketeers is, which clever/absurd elements appeal to which halves of the target demographic?