Laughing All The Way To The Brink

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The 48th annual Earth Day has come and gone without causing a ripple on America’s collective consciousness. Stormy Daniels, yes. Russians and the election, a little, The environment, who cares?

Don’t trust me. A Pew poll conducted about the time of the State of the Union in January asked people what the top priorities for Congress and the President should be for 2018. Terrorism topped the list, followed by Education, Health Care Costs, Social Security, and Medicare.

The Environment came in eighth, but that appeared to mean air and water pollution in a local sense — coal ash in the river, lead in Flint’s drinking water. It wasn’t until number eighteen on the priority list that Climate Change appeared — after Jobs, the Poor, Crime, Race, Transportation, Drug Addiction, Deficits, Immigration, Lobbyists and the Military.

Since politicians take their marching orders from polls like these, from lobbyists for special interests, and the donors behind those special interests, it’s no wonder legislation concerning the environment and climate change gets short shrift. Especially at a time when Republicans are in charge. Sixty-eight percent of Democrats call climate change a top priority, but only 18% of Republicans do.

Mass media news organizations also choose, in part, to cover stories that will attract eyeballs or clicks, which means climate change is well down the priority list for them. Such stories are complicated, technical, slow moving, all but invisible, and therefore unphotographable compared to a war, a mass murder, a tornado, a protest, a porn star, an insult comedian president.

Yet little by little the effects of climate change are becoming apparent and the shape of things to come can be discerned. Those required to think about long-range planning, including the military and global corporations, are beginning to get freaked.

Large fractions of the polar ice sheets and of glaciers are melting, changing ocean salinity, altering the habitat for billions of creatures and promising a rise in sea level. At first a few feet were forecast, then a half dozen, but if more of the ice vanishes the sea rise could be several times that with huge consequences for coastal cities, and food supplies.

My father was stationed during WWII on the Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. There, for a few months in 1945, the bombing of Japan made it the busiest airport in the world. A recent report reveals the Marshalls are about to vanish beneath the waves. Another announces that fifty percent of the Great Barrier Reef, the planet’s largest ecosystem, has died in just two years, due to rising ocean temperatures.

This isn’t just a blow to tourism — no need to go diving to see that underwater wonderland now that it’s a bleached wasteland. Besides, who cares about coral half a world away However, the same temperature changes are beginning to kill sea life that several billion people depend on for survival.

Another recent report also addresses the little issue of the AMOC — that’s the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a fancy way of describing the flow of warm water from the latitudes of the Caribbean north and east past Iceland, looping back past Greenland and down the eastern shore of North America.

The great conveyor belt of the AMOC has the effect of keeping everything from New York north on our side of the Atlantic and from Spain north on the European side much more temperate than their latitudes would otherwise predict. It’s also why a coastal city like Derry in Northern Ireland has an average January high of 43, while an interior city at the same latitude of 55 degrees N, like Moscow, has a January high of 23.

A few years ago, climate scientists suggested melting polar snow could reduce salinity and slow or stop altogether the AMOC, leading to warmer temperatures in parts of the North Atlantic that could kill or cause the extinctions of many sea species on which the ocean ecosystems depends. Simultaneously it would cause temperatures to plunge in continental Europe affecting crops and human habitation. Now, a study published in the journal “Nature” shows it has begun. The AMOC flow has weakened by 15% and might cease altogether.

While we worry about Trump and hookers, a Muslim ban, a trade war with China, crony capitalists heading cabinet departments, the Paris Climate Accord is abandoned and the issue of climate change is ignored.

But the climate is changing, perhaps faster than predicted, and in ways that will not permit business as usual. Diseases will spread or mutate under changed condition. Coastal cities will become too expense to save, and immense migrations and refugees crises will ensue. Agricultural, animal and ocean foods will be threatened. Drought, plague, famine and flooding will cause threats to life on the planet on a scale not seen since the Black Death, or the collision that produced the great Mesozoic die off.

And we are letting it happen as time runs out for meaningful action. We are treating an alarming, potentially apocalyptic, scientifically plausible threat as if it was a cartoon street corner prophet in sandals, robes and beard crying, “The End is Near. Repent!” By the time we realize the error of our ways, and of our votes, repentance will not keep our civilization’s head above water, no matter how fast it paddles.

Carolina Coup

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In ”How Democracies Die” a couple of political science professors outline the process that has repeatedly been followed as democratic government give way to autocracies, in the 1930s in Europe and in the postwar era in Peru, Venezuela, Chile and as we speak in Turkey and elsewhere.

The process always shares several features. Democratic guardrails are dismantled, norms overthrown, mutual forbearance and tolerance abandoned in favor of extreme partisanship. Opponents are branded illegitimate, civil liberties are curtailed, and propaganda replaces reality.

The book, unsurprisingly culminates with alarm bells about the Trump Administration, which is following the same playbook. It also accords my adopted home state of North Carolina a dubious honor. It is singled out for systematically and successfully employing all the tricks in the anti-democratic toolbox to deprive its citizens of representative government.

The authors warn that North Carolina may also offer a template for other states to follow if they too are anxious to abandon their birthright. They point out that, before the onslaught, North Carolina was a purplish state — relatively diverse, prosperous and well-educated compared to its Southern neighbors.

Beginning in 2011, thanks in part to an investment of money and effort from right wing oligarchs including the homegrown Art Pope, both Houses of the General Assembly turned Republican for the first time since 1870. In 2013, the trifecta was complete with the election of Pat McCrory, a Republican governor.

The agenda since has been to turn back the clock and consolidate the party’s hold on power. Republicans aggressively gerrymandered the state racially so that an evenly divided electorate went from electing 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans to the U.S. House to sending 9 Republicans and 4 Democrats to Washington.

Soon the Republicans also passed draconian laws to infringe voting rights for Democratic leaning voters including students, the poor, and minorities. Attempts were made to curtail early voting, require voter IDs, restrict voting hours and reduce the number of voting places in Democratic leaning counties. The overlords in Raleigh have also taken to minimizing the role of local government by overriding city legislation at the state level.

They also passed abortion restrictions, a ban of same sex marriage, and a bathroom bill that became a cause celebre nationwide. They turned down Medicaid money in order to avoid offering Obamacare, thus dooming the state’s less fortunate residents to poorer healthcare options and leading to the closing of many rural hospitals.

Several states with the lowest pay for High School teachers have made headlines lately when their teachers went on strike, notably worst paid Oklahoma and the fifth worst, West Virginia. But North Carolina, that once boasted one of the oldest and most admired university systems has seen its funding slashed and its High School teachers are now fourth from the bottom in pay. No statewide strike has been forthcoming, perhaps because resistance to the autocracy appears hopeless.

In the moves most reminiscent of a banana republic, when Gov. McCrory, a tool of the Art Pope machine, was denied reelection, he refused to concede for a month and instead called a special session of the legislature. It passed rules to make McCrory’s political appointees permanent, depriving incoming Democrat Roy Cooper of the ability to appoint his own people to as many as 1,000 positions.

At the same time the Senate gave itself the power to deny the governor his choice of cabinet appointees. And, instead of retaining executive control of election boards, the Republican legislature dictated equal representation by each party, but with the deciding vote in Republican hands in election years, thus tilting decision-making over local elections in their favor. The legislature also shrank the appeals court by three seats to limit the governor’s power to make judicial appointments.

Many of these actions have ended up in court, and several have been slapped down, including gerrymandering characterized as bringing “surgical precision” to discrimination, but that doesn’t do much to allay the fear that our democratic institutions are fragile and can be undermined by a sufficiently ruthless, well-funded and unscrupulous faction.

I’d tell everyone to go vote, but in my city, county, and congressional district my vote has been rendered meaningless in recent elections by partisan contrivances, as the presidential vote seems to have been in 2016 by enemy action, assisted by American quislings. In fact, it appears that while we weren’t paying attention, a silent coup has taken place and we are now living in occupied territory, ruled by a tyranny of the minority. What’s next? Mandatory performance of the party salute?

Comedy Can’t Get No Respect

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Last week in the “Washington Post,” Ron Charles took note of a rare feat pulled off by “Less,” the winner of the annual Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is a comic novel. He’s certainly right that honors are rarely heaped on such works. A glance back at the topics of the last few Pulitzer winners tells the doleful tale — slavery, Vietnam, WWII, a boy’s grief, totalitarian North Korea.

This bias in favor of works of art filed with seriousness, gloom, tragedy, sorrow, big ideas and news even more depressing than the daily front page is not confined to the Pulitzer. The Nobel Prize for Literature is even more committed to grim solemnity.

It’s also rare for a comedy to win a Tony or Oscar. Apparently if a work of art makes you smile or pokes fun at life as it is lived most of the time by most people, it is unworthy of honor or respect. And yet, it is conventional wisdom in the theater that writing comedy or playing it is harder than tragedy. On his death bed, the actor Edmund Kean said, “dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Is comedy really a secondary, inferior art form? Many of Shakespeare’s greatest works are comedy or romance. People may go dutifully to dark dramas and ponder man’s inhumanity to man, immerse themselves in war, death, divorce, madness, cruelty, dysfunction and what Aristotle defined as the tragic emotions — pity and terror. But Shakespeare, the canny entrepreneur, knew the shows with happy endings did pretty good business. They may have been “Much Ado about Nothing” or not but, as he promised his audience, they were also “As You Like It.” Joy, absurdity and topsy turvy can also provide a catharsis too.

Part of the reason downer dramas prevail at awards season is the nature of the prize givers. They are awarded, in effect, by trade organizations whose goal is to burnish the image of their business — motion pictures, theater, publishing— or in the case of the Nobel, philanthropic betterment. Therefore, no trivial entertainments need apply.

That doesn’t just rule out laughs, but love stories unless they end with Desdemona dead. Lowly genres like mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance and the thriller are also beyond the pale. Sobriety, not quality, is the yardstick.

No doubt this bias is imbibed in school where students are led to believe some of the dullest works, even if by masters, are the gold standard, so long as they are on important themes unlikely to rile up the school board. But does anyone return with joy to “Julius Caesar” or
“Great Expectations” in later life? Not when they’ve been fed them like bitter medicine. It’s little wonder that few bother to pick up a classic or venture inside a theater ever again.

Preferring tragedy or the higher melodrama is not just a silly bias but a historically questionable one. Tragedy is not, per se, better than comedy. The great critic Northrop Frye argued that writers and readers were temperamentally either “Iliad” people or “Odyssey” people. By this he meant they gravitated to stories of tragedy and agon, or to stories of romance, adventure, enchantment and times out of joint set right. One is not superior to the other. They are just different ways of understanding human life, or as some say, the human comedy.

I’d argue that the genius of literature in English has always been more comic than tragic, once you get beyond cold, bold Beowulf. As soon as you get to sunny Chaucer the fun begins, continues in the Arthurian legends and blossoms in Elizabethan and Restoration comedy with mistaken identities, pomposity punctured, and fun poked at characters who are human, all too human.

When you get to the novel, the roll call of satirists, farceurs, and romancers is long and distinguished — Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Wilde, Shaw, Chesterton, Waugh, Amis and many more. And which American would you rather read if push came to shove — Twain or Dreiser?

Even if you argue, with Hamlet, that art is supposed to hold “a mirror up to nature,” is human nature all serious and concerned with deep issues? We know life is real, life is earnest. However, if we take a take a step back from the headlines with their wars, famine, pestilence, death, hatred, bigotry and greed, do we see titanic figures contending — Macbeth, Henry Fleming, Frederic Henry, Tom Joad, Agamemnon?

No, we think of Washington, Moscow, Beijing, not to mention our little Podunk and see a cast worthy of comedy, satire and farce. Bumblers, bunglers, incompetents, pompous fools, weaselly connivers, and fallible strivers who can’t see the forest for the trees, who mistake personal interest for the public interest, and who are done in by vanity, cowardice, cupidity and the rest of the usual sins. As Sondheim said,

“Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns;
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!”

In fact, the mirrors of comedy and romance may actually offer the truer reflection of the tale told by an idiot signifying nothing in which we find ourselves at home, at the office, and in the larger world we inhabit. So let’s give a little respect to the mask with the smile for a change.

And tell the truth, which of these films would you rather see again, the Best Picture winner for its year or the also ran? “Argo” or “Silver Linings Playbook,” “The Departed” or “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Million Dollar Baby” or “Sideways,” “The English Patient” or “Jerry Maguire,” “Rebecca” or “The Philadelphia Story,” which is to say, Lawrence Olivier who won Best Actor for Hamlet or Cary Grant who never got a statuette for anything? If forced to choose, I’d be inclined to say:

“Nothing with gods, nothing with fate;
Weighty affairs will just have to wait!
Comedy Tonight!”