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American spiritual connection to scientific progress

I have likely shared versions of this anecdote, and so beg indulgence. During the economic crises of 2007-2009, GM (the carmaker) experienced trials and tribulations of their and others’ making that rattled the china in every state and quite beyond: frozen credit markets and a collapse in sales plus heavy legacy costs (debt) led to its near collapse. GM filed for Chapter 11 re-organization after a bail-out from Uncle Sam.

During this time, I met my friend the poet at our appointed hour and he re-counted a visit earlier that day to a local auto dealership where the salesman finished off his pitch on a new poet truck with the immortal words, “You can’t do anything more patriotic than buy a truck from the General.”

Of course, the poet was nothing if not patriotic.

Parallels to the far-reaching economic and spiritual destruction of that moment are afoot. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (such a sense of humor) has decimated international aid in a slashing that is already killing hundreds of thousands and now has the American scientific research  ecosystem in its crosshairs.

Climate scientists are being fired and marooned in the dark at a critical juncture.  Government climate research has resurfaced as Climate.us:

Climate.us today launched the full version of its new independent, nonprofit climate information website, creating a public-backed home for trusted climate science at a time when access to federal climate resources has become increasingly vulnerable to disruption.

This is a critical public information effort but step back and do the math on the science. It is untenable to reduce support for climate research to a bake sale. Neither can NIH or NSF survive on charity. The comprehensive network that trains the next generations, tests, trials, safeguards, and incentivizes innovation across the globe is a giant sandbox. This is not a miscalculation, as no calculating occurred. Killing USAID was a crime; this is a mistake. The destruction is not about any single scientific project – this is about killing the American project. Bad for the economy, bad for soft power and national security, a salting of the global dominance for which we stand.

Stand Up For Science.

Like GM but much more so, there is something quintessentially American about scientific progress. We might not even be sure why, and as jingoistic as the words are in sequence, it is just simple, spiritual pride. Connection, not to owning breakthroughs but fostering them, sharing them, being the spring that feeds and from which they emerge.

This is not reform, this is destruction, plain and simple. Undermining expertise by aligning it with political considerations is the very essence of fraud which, if you haven’t noticed, are variations on an old theme.

 

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Things not to be believed, nor hidden

What do unimaginable riches permit?

History books will not be kind. We won’t believe we did this, we’ll try to hide it but we won’t be able to and we shouldn’t:

“DESTROY” stickers were affixed this week to hundreds of cases of U.S.-branded food aid — 15,000 pounds’ worth — that have languished for months in a Georgia warehouse and then expired before they could be sent overseas to famine-stricken areas like Sudan.

And Mana Nutrition’s warehouse holds plenty more of the peanut paste, a crucial element in treating malnutrition. A $50 million supply has been stacked for months in the nonprofit’s facility in Pooler, a short drive from Savannah, caught in the chaos as the Trump administration upended foreign aid and never shipped.

The food could still help 60 million people, Mana estimates.

“This is a giant glut,” chief operating officer David Todd Harmon said. “All contracted. All bought and paid for. It’s just not been picked up.”

A State Department memo in late May signaled that more than 60,000 metric tons of commodities were sitting in warehouses in the United States and around the world and that an “urgent” plan would begin to shift some of it. The logjam followed the Trump administration’s breakneck dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, slashing more than 80 percent of its programming and laying off all but a tiny fraction of its staffers. The agency’s doors officially closed July 1.

It feels a bit naive not to think some people will be pleased by this. Soi-disant ‘good christians’ everywhere will attempt to rationalize it with excuses that fold perfectly into the circular logic of the worldview that needlessly condemns millions to misery.

There is no reason for this beyond charlatans and cheap vengeance. Your vote has consequences.

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Miserable Places

One of the books I’m reading at present is Tracy Kidder’s 2003 Mountains Beyond Mountains, a gift from some friends this summer. The focus of the book is the work of Paul Farmer, physician and anthropologist, healing the sick, diseased and infirm in disaster-ravaged Haiti. Farmer is a remarkable man, Kidder’s book on him is great and you should pick it up. An excerpt from the author’s site:

It was two weeks before Christmas 1994, in a market town in the central plateau of Haiti, a patch of paved road called Mirebalais. Near the center of town there was a Haitian army outpost–a concrete wall enclosing a weedy parade field, a jail, and a mustard-colored barracks. I was sitting with an American Special Forces captain, named Jon Carroll, on the building’s second-story balcony. Evening was coming on, the town’s best hour, when the air changed from hot to balmy and the music from the radios in the rum shops and the horns of the tap-taps passing through town grew loud and bright and the general filth and poverty began to be obscured, the open sewers and the ragged clothing and the looks on the faces of malnourished children and the extended hands of elderly beggars plaintively saying, “Grangou,” which means “hungry” in Creole.

I was in Haiti to report on American soldiers. Twenty thousand of them had been sent to reinstate the country’s democratically elected government, and to strip away power from the military junta that had deposed it and ruled with great cruelty for three years. Captain Carroll had only eight men, and they were temporarily in charge of keeping the peace among 150,000 Haitians, spread across about one thousand square miles of rural Haiti. A seemingly impossible job, and yet, out here in the central plateau, political violence had all but ended. In the past month, there had been only one murder. Then again, it had been spectacularly grisly. A few weeks back, Captain Carroll’s men had fished the headless corpse of the assistant mayor of Mirebalais out of the Artibonite River. He was one of the elected officials being restored to power. Suspicion for his murder had fallen on one of the junta’s local functionaries, a rural sheriff named Nerva Juste, a frightening figure to most people in the region. Captain Carroll and his men had brought Juste in for questioning, but they hadn’t found any physical evidence or witnesses. So they had released him.

The captain was twenty-nine years old, a devout Baptist from Alabama. I liked him. From what I’d seen, he and his men had been trying earnestly to make improvements in this piece of Haiti, but Washington, which had decreed that this mission would not include “nation-building,” had given them virtually no tools for that job. On one occasion, the captain had ordered a U.S. Army medevac flight for a pregnant Haitian woman in distress, and his commanders had reprimanded him for his pains. Up on the balcony of the barracks now, Captain Carroll was fuming about his latest frustration when someone said there was an American out at the gate who wanted to see him.

There were five visitors actually, four of them Haitians. They stood in the gathering shadows in front of the barracks, while their American friend came forward. He told Captain Carroll that his name was Paul Farmer, that he was a doctor, and that he worked in a hospital here, some miles north of Mirebalais.

I remember thinking that Captain Carroll and Dr. Farmer made a mismatched pair, and that Farmer suffered in the comparison. The captain stood about six foot two, tanned and muscular. As usual, a wad of snuff enlarged his lower lip. Now and then he turned his head aside and spat. Farmer was about the same age but much more delicate-looking. He had short black hair and a high waist and long thin arms, and his nose came almost to a point. Next to the soldier, he looked skinny and pale, and for all of that he struck me as bold, indeed downright cocky.

He asked the captain if his team had any medical problems. The captain said they had some sick prisoners whom the local hospital had refused to treat. “I ended up buyin’ the medicine myself.”

Farmer flashed a smile. “You’ll spend less time in Purgatory.” Then he asked, “Who cut off the head of the assistant mayor?”

“I don’t know for sure,” said the captain.

“It’s very hard to live in Haiti and not know who cut off someone’s head,” said Farmer.

A circuitous argument followed. Farmer made it plain he didn’t like the American government’s plan for fixing Haiti’s economy, a plan that would aid business interests but do nothing, in his view, to relieve the suffering of the average Haitian. He clearly believed that the United States had helped to foster the coup–for one thing, by having trained a high official of the junta at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Two clear sides existed in Haiti, Farmer said–the forces of repression and the Haitian poor, the vast majority. Farmer was on the side of the poor. But, he told the captain, “it still seems fuzzy which side the American soldiers are on.” Locally, part of the fuzziness came from the fact that the captain had released the hated Nerva Juste.

I sensed that Farmer knew Haiti far better than the captain, and that he was trying to impart some important information. The people in this region were losing confidence in the captain, Farmer seemed to be saying, and this was a serious matter, obviously, for a team of nine soldiers trying to govern 150,000 people.

Thanks S and D.