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What Keeps Climate Deniers in Their Fog?

Chicago storm clouds

It’s not easy to imagine the mental state of climate deniers these days. The magnitude of recent fires, floods, storms, ocean warming, melting ice, intolerable heat, collapsing ecosystems (what have I forgotten?) has affected almost everyone on this globe. The deniers can no longer address these events as natural or normal.

How people bear with and try to process climate change is the subject of a recent article by Jia Tolentino. I recommend it to you. As conditions have become so unmistakably and dramatically appalling, the deniers have not pulled their heads from the sand. Tolentino says, “And the worse things get, the less we seem to talk about it: in 2016, almost seventy per cent of one survey’s respondents told researchers that they rarely or never discuss climate change with friends or family, an increase from around sixty per cent in 2008.”

The media plays up our climate disasters without apparently changing many minds. Warnings, threats and the pressing timetable of climate change are all over the news, but there isn’t any easy answer to the question of “when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.” Simple reporting on climate disasters won’t change people’s minds. What will?

Wikipedia offers a lengthy, informative piece on climate denial here—it’s complicated, of course, and with a long history. There have been tremendous institutional efforts over time to deny climate change. You know how the tobacco industry covered up its poisons and worked its wiles for years to keep people smoking. Some of its same operatives are now doing the devil’s work for climate.

I think of it as a kind of conspiracy theory to keep fossil fuels alive. The vaccine deniers use similar nutty anti-science arguments to allay their followers’ fears. But if you believe Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., you do so at your own peril. One vast conspiracy after another makes up the world of the deniers. And there are lay deniers, scientific deniers, and political deniers.

There are also active deniers and passive deniers. Most Republicans, as you are no doubt aware, actively oppose climate remedies: “In the 2016 United States election cycle, every Republican presidential candidate questioned or denied climate change, and opposed U.S. government steps to address climate change as has the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate.”

Climate change must be addressed globally and politically. That’s obvious. Bill McKibben has pursued this subject for years. Recently he cited Canada’s continuing backwater on climate change, but he noted also Biden’s commitment to offshore drilling leases and his “giant oil and a giant L.N.G. project, in Alaska.” Obama also opened new sites to drilling, caving to the vast economic pressures of the oil industry. Even climate concerned presidents can’t resist creating that kind of cognitive dissonance.

Is climate denial another form of lying? Or is it just another way to ward off the pressure of reality, an uncomfortably obvious dodge? In the political arena, it seems like deliberate lying, just as Trump’s popularity owes itself to a mountain of lies. Time Magazine and Jeff VanderMeer, to their credit, recently castigated Ron DeSantis and the Republicans for their appalling record of environmental failures in Florida. An interesting note: “More than 90% of papers that are skeptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.”

Such articles are not just a warning for Florida, a state that’s been environmentally abused forever. They are a warning about the disease of denialism, with “environmental decisions based on pay-to-play, punishing perceived enemies, climate denialism, a reliance on fossil fuels, and a fundamental misunderstanding of core issues and their effect on the future.”

One more thought: I don’t read David Brooks in the New York Times very often. But he wrote a reflective piece on his growing fears about AI. He is on the fence about whether AI will violate “the essence of being human.” I thought, if humans can’t begin to deal with climate change, how are they going to deal with all the unknowns facing us with AI? Will we be entering a stage of total denial?

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Grim Humor Behind the Bleak Headlines

My premise here is that we’re entering a new age of gallows humor in our dreadful politics. When you start thinking about it, you find it everywhere. Does discovering this alleviate our political nausea? Probably not, but writing about it makes me feel better.

I mean, who could have scripted these people?

The media jumped all over the Cocaine-at-the-White-House story. They seem to have taken it either as an important security breach or an occasion for bad jokes. Naturally the Republicans were quick to finger Hunter Biden and his former drug problem. The administration responded with its usual earnest gravity, their typically humorless response to everything. Maybe Biden’s numbers would improve if he and his people would just lighten up.

In Iowa Pence said he said he was a supporter of Ronald Reagan’s doctrine that “if you’re willing to fight the enemies of the United States on your soil, we’ll give you the means to fight them there so our men and women in uniform don’t have to fight them.”

Nobody has pointed out that this was the same as endorsing what Prigozhin and his mercenaries do: getting paid by others to fight on their behalf. The irony here seems to have eluded everybody—and maybe that’s not so funny.

Outside the realm of politics is the story about the British tourist who carved his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum and later said he had no idea the site was so ancient. The only thing funny about this is why he thought anyone would believe him.

In a similar vein we read that New York mayor Eric Adams, in another act of pomposity, courted controversy after claiming a recently doctored photo was an original he kept always with him. The mayor keeps cementing his reputation as creepy and incompetent.

And then there’s Robert Kennedy, Jr., the new king of conspiracy theories who also courts controversy. Is it possible to laugh at a person who takes himself so seriously? The incongruity of his relationship to his famous family is pathetic rather than funny.

And now we’re hearing still more about the December 2020 meeting of the lunatics, when Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and others spent hours proposing mad theories of how to salvage the election Trump had just lost. Here we have truly entered the world of farce.

Yet farce is something you can laugh at and laugh with. The examples I’ve cited more likely involve laughing to keep from crying. Laughter, we know, is supposed to open one’s mind and heart. That’s what Jimmy Kimmel and the other late-night comedians hope to offer. But life’s getting too grim even for them.

Where are the great clowns I grew up with—like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin? Maybe our current politics and culture would be too much, even for them. Humor is ritual cleansing, and our politics is in great need of that.

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The Fantasy of Finding Different Worlds

I mean the persistent lure of travel—even in the face of all those airport horror stories, outrageous costs, cancellations, crowds and cattle-car accommodations. One ex-traveler put it this way: “Prices everywhere you go are absurd, and still, crowds are everywhere. Places are understaffed, expensive, the service is atrocious, and the quality of the food is all but gone.”

Why do people willingly endure these indignities, and what do they gain from the experience? They think that travel will somehow transform them, make them better, more cultured people, give them more notches in their conversational belts, and so on. Travel, they think, broadens the mind, a notion I had some fun with a couple of years ago. And how many of you have dozed off listening to a returned traveler’s stories?

Tourism (and who wants to be labeled a tourist?) has grown exponentially—and so have all its environmental impacts—as those with leisure, money and opportunity have proliferated.

In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals, in 1970 the number was 166 million, and by 1990 it had grown to 435 million. From 1990 to 2018 numbers more than tripled reaching 1.442 billion. By 2030, 1.8 billion tourist arrivals are projected.

A recent New Yorker story brought to mind some of the reasons why I no longer will undertake any long-distance travel. I guess money is one reason. But an older person would have to be some kind of masochist to go through the indignities I mentioned earlier.

Some of my best friends are travelers, and I excuse their behavior on the grounds that they are bored. All travelers feel the need to expose themselves to something different, to feel something different, to expand their stale lives. But in the end travel makes you a spectator, not a participant, in another culture.

Travel may in some sense be fun, but it also dehumanizes. It makes us into zoo-goers with cameras. It can produce a false sense of empathy or a pseudo-compassion. We can happily identify with, say, the lifestyle of the Danes and show pained sympathy for the poverty in Lesotho. Travel always, I think, gives one a false sense of empowerment.

Celebrity travel to the most dangerous environments is just such a search for new sensations permitted by money and access. At bottom this is not science but one-upmanship on the fools who fly coach. Yet, as recent events have shown, you can’t fly too near the sun without your wings melting.

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New Lessons in Hubris

The submersible Titan’s loss was no Greek tragedy. We had no hero with a tragic flaw; there was no grand discovery or revelation; we had, however, plenty of reversal of fortune (peripeteia). What we saw in the last week was a tragedy of spectacle, which humans always enjoy and which the media willingly provide.

At the same time, we and the media are guilty of giving short shrift to the thousands of desperate migrants now being lost at sea. A boat off Greece capsizes and hundreds die in the water. Viewers happily cut back to the more uncertain fortunes of the Titan. Its ending, predicted by some, was the anticlimax of a week-long deathwatch that drew millions of viewers. Few, I’m sure, wanted to think that the human drama was already over. Fewer still wanted to contemplate those hundreds dead in the Greek waters.

The four lost Titan passengers each paid $250,000 to die a quick, unsolicited death. An enormous air-sea search costing millions—as we will no doubt learn—was really a wasted effort since the sub imploded near the Titanic just an hour and 45 minutes after launch. Where was the effort to rescue the Greek immigrants?

Stockton Rush, the idiot savant who led OceanGate and piloted the dive, pitched the unimportance of safety and preferred innovation over proper testing and certification. The company will now be facing perhaps years of lawsuits. Rush already had a couple before his last and fatal dive.

I was immediately struck by the happy hubris of this guy in interviews. Well, how could sane people believe in someone who used off-the-shelf video controllers and RadioShack parts in vessels like this? An uncertified carbon fiber hull? Is the urge for perilous adventures so strong as to confound rational thinking? Two of the five passengers on board were experienced, smart, capable Titanic divers. They still bought in to this ride.

James Cameron, the seasoned ocean explorer (and “Titanic” filmmaker) was one of the few who spoke out about the disaster. He has made more than thirty successful dives to the Titanic. “OceanGate,” he said, “didn’t go through certification. It wasn’t peer-reviewed by other engineering entities, by any of these what they call classing bureaus that do certification for vessels and submersibles and things like that. That was a critical failure.”

I watched his interview on CNN. Toward the end he remarked on the supreme irony that both the Titanic and the Titan disaster were caused by hubris, that arrogant pursuit of power that goes against nature, the gods and human reason. So far, he’s the only commenter I’ve heard to use that word with regard to what happened in 1912 and what happened last week.

Titanic fascinates us because it seems like such a colossal failure of some kind of system back then, and 1,500 people paid the price for it. . . . The warnings were not heeded. They were warned about the ice, they had radio, Marconigrams, the Titanic captain was handed multiple warnings of ice ahead [yet] he steamed full ahead into a known ice field on a pitch dark night with no moon. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.

It took just over a hundred years to prove once again that when the fates align, humans are their mindless victims.

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Reflections on Father’s Day

“Honor thy father and mother,” says the Bible. Why do we need two commercial holidays to do that? I honor both my parents every day with memories, good and bad, of when they were alive and when we were together as a family long ago.

My father was often a pain in the ass, but so are many. And yet he was very attached to me, helped me out financially, gave me usually unwanted but needed advice. For all our arguments, he influenced my life and behavior in ways it took me years to recognize and ultimately appreciate. I have to honor him for that.

Married twice, I had three sons and now have three grandsons. I can’t evaluate what kind of father I’ve been, though I remember a lot of mistakes I made. Being a father is like holding public office: others will judge your competence.

Mother’s Day seems to be more popular, but still about 100 million Father’s Day cards are sent out each year. More than $22 billion is projected to be spent on celebrating dad this year. Incredible, isn’t it?

The industry is promoted by articles like: “All the Best Father’s Day Gift Ideas” in NYMag. Here are a few things they noted that your dad may be happy to regift.

People who buy this stuff know nothing about fathers. Give them a bottle of good rum and they’ll be happy.

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The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

After Hurricane Sandy, 2012

Let’s hear it for Chris Christie, who had the balls to do what none of the other Republican job-seekers would do. They should have learned by now that their emperor has no clothes, that renominating Trump will be the party’s kiss of death. The old adage above was never more applicable.

If you need to be refreshed about Christie, you could start here where, among many others—not all fans—former NJ governor Tom Kean said about him: “He’s the most able politician I know, with possibly the exception of Bill Clinton.”

Still, as many have expressed, he’s on a suicide mission because he’ll never get the nomination. That doesn’t matter as long as Trump is deposed. When the subject of Christie came up in my poker group the other day, there was rampant enthusiasm for him. Several of us said, “I’ll send him $5,” because he needs 40,000 unique contributions to get on the debate stage for the Republican primary.

Unlike most of his GOP compatriots, the former prosecutor will likely support the massive charges just brought against Trump and the DOJ which brought them. This will not go down well with the Quixotic idiots who have now made Trump’s defense an obsessive talking point. Their language seems paralyzed with its constant references to the “weaponizing” of the DOJ and its “witch hunt.” As with Pence’s confusion about easing off on Trump, any real defense of him is finally a denial of the rule of law.

The Intelligencer’s Jonathan Chait wrote today:

The sickness of the Republican Party as it is presently constituted is that there is no conceivable set of facts that would permit it to acknowledge Trump’s guilt. . . . It is the interplay of two forces, the paranoia of the right and the seamy criminality of the right’s current champion, that has brought the party to this point.

After enduring a series of slights and insults, Christie finally broke with Trump after the Jan. 6th insurrection. Did he stay too long? Probably, but the Democrats could hardly wish for a better supporter. Even if he’s a Republican.

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How One’s Reading Habits Decay

Trinity College Library, Dublin

We are all creatures of habit, and sometimes a habit can become the unconscious focus of our daily lives. In other words, we relinquish personal control to a formula of behavior. Brushing your teeth regularly is a good idea. Reading the news every morning is not.

More than ever, it’s become a dispiriting activity that, if you take it seriously, can poison your mind for the rest of the day. Smart people know this, yet we persist. This morning we read about the train wreck in India where nearly 300 people died; Biden crows about the debt ceiling agreement; the Supremes continue to defy ethical standards.

Politics now highlights every human frailty and failing. Worse still, for me, Trump and DeSantis have displaced Barthelme, Mallarmé and the literary life I once pursued. Martin Amis is dead. So is most poetry, and I don’t read much scholarly stuff anymore—or good fiction either.

I know I’m not alone. Many of you fix on your daily dose of the Washington Post and the New York Times. I do too while castigating them for all the junk stories they pursue. I also look regularly at Politico, the New Yorker, Vox, Bloomberg, the Guardian, New York Magazine, and sometimes Axios. Most of the liberal pubs like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, etc. I’ve given up on—too pro forma.

As world problems have become more convoluted and controversial, creative writing seems to have become less innovative and more conventional. A few sites still fight the good fight. But I don’t want to read about the gender trials that young people are undergoing or their kinky love affairs or food preferences. Digital content brings us everything we don’t need to know.

The recourse used to be bedtime. You absorbed a good read until sleep took over and dreams displaced the world of the book. That worked for me for a long time, but I read more slowly now and it’s hard to focus on Kindle after a while. Or the book falls to the floor, and the memories of what it contained don’t last until morning.

Among all the positive benefits of reading proposed by one site, we’re told that reading “helps prevent age-related cognitive decline.” Well, friends, I would suggest that this notion clearly depends on what you read. And, finally, nobody but you cares what you read.

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My Memorial Day

I’m going to rest up like my friend here. I’m going to eat well and play some music. And I’m going to remember our military dead—which is what the holiday used to be about. For many it’s become just another day off from work, an excuse to shop the many sales, a big weekend for travel, as a record 2.7 million will do by air this year.

Memorial Day shouldn’t be just about barbecues and beaches. It used to be called Decoration Day (which is what my mother called it), a day to adorn the graves of the now millions who served the USA and died for it. As the country has secularized, so have its holidays, Christmas being the notable example. Patriotism, for many, is long out of fashion.

People don’t much care now about the meaning of holidays—or even those current events which can dramatically affect their lives. How many have been truly involved in the outcome of the debt ceiling deal, for instance? Or understanding climate change, the world’s biggest challenge? I grew up in a different time and surely a different cultural milieu.

When I was 21, I was planning my first trip to Europe. This was 10 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. My aunt Edna had lost her son Bobby in the war. He had flown bombers for the Air Force and was downed over Germany, the land of his forebears. Edna asked me to visit his grave in Cambridge, England, which I did and which I can’t forget.

Why is it only those with personal ties who feel the impact of such a mountain of death? What does it mean to die for your country?

Part of my respect for commemorating the dead came from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy who taught for many years at Dartmouth College. I took several courses from this extraordinary man who spoke about religion, theology, language and philosophy in an inimitable way. He had fought in World War I as a German soldier.

He also had much to say about the importance of holidays, their celebration and meaning. One example: “To reconquer his holidays, to establish a new and better time schedule for life, has been the great endeavor of man ever since the days of Noah.” Some of us would occasionally meet at his house in Norwich, VT, for evening talk.

The celebration of holidays was one subject that brought together the disparate elements of Rosenstock’s thinking. With all the things now clamoring for our serious attention, maybe we can’t revise the meaning of a holiday like Memorial Day. Maybe we can’t recapture the past, but we can remember what it was about.

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Aging and Ego: Please, Martha, Enough

Martha Stewart at age 81 poses in scrupulous déshabillé for Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, and her legions of fans applaud.

“Crafting, gardening, cooking, modeling, restaurant owner.…What can’t Martha do? Unstoppable,” one fan wrote on Instagram. “An icon,” another said.”

Yes, her ego is unstoppable and really tiresome. For years now she has set herself to rule over American middle-class lifestyle choices—in fashion, furnishing, gardening, cookware, accessories, recipes and gourmet food. She sells not just items but her taste as an arbiter of style for the good life.

After a slight interruption to serve a short jail term (for securities fraud and insider trading), Martha took on business ventures (see below) and a social media presence. Now she takes off her clothes to prove, I guess, that you’re as young as you feel. She took posing as a challenge, she says, which she met and found it “kind of fun . . . a testament to good living.” It seems, rather, to be a testament to making more money.

Sure, she looks good for an 81-year-old. I look pretty good too for my age yet would never display myself as some kind of physical paragon triumphing over the trials of aging. And how many older women would do that? On aging she says, “I think all of us should think about good living, successfully living, and not aging. The whole aging thing is so boring. You know what I mean?”

For me, entering the world of aging was like entering a new life. For her, it must be an unwelcome continuation of the old, fighting off the degeneration of body and mind. She wants to show how she can beat the devil.

The best story on Martha happened in her new Paris-in-Las Vegas restaurant, as reported here. She is involved in a licensing partnership with Caesars Entertainment “where Ms. Stewart helms the restaurant’s concept from design and décor to food and beverage recipes.” In this Martha-themed restaurant called Bedford, a roast chicken served lukewarm costs $89.95 and lukewarm baked potatoes cost $15.95 each.

“If you order a baked potato, one will be presented by a server, raised high in the air and brought down with a resounding thud on the surface of a tableside potato cart.” So the food is presented with phony showmanship at an exorbitant price. The writer wonders whether Martha serves potatoes this way at her house.

The Bedford seems like another attempt to sell good taste to the yahoos, and yet it turns out to be a venture in kitsch. Her media company at one point was worth over $1 billion but the Bedford cooks “work, not for her, but for Caesars Entertainment.” That arrangement puts a rather big dent in Martha’s reputation for competence.

And she’s never going to compete with the sexy young women who used to populate the Swimsuit Edition.

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Ominous Prophecies and Shirley Horn

You didn’t have to be psychic to know what was coming from CNN’s Trump Town Hall event. Still, it was worse than I could have imagined. One forgets how vile and lunatic the former president is.

I found myself in a deep depression on Thursday, realizing what a chokehold he has on a large number of those living in what I used to call home. Trump shows nothing but anger, defiance, and the will to inflict his madness on everybody.

I wanted to write about all this and scoured the internet for some thoughts that might be a little different from what other struggling scribblers came up with. A futile search so I fell back on music to get rid of the blues, a process I’ve written about before.

A good friend had just broken up her CD collection and given me several discs, among which were three albums of Shirley Horn’s music. I’ve been a fan of hers for many years. Before she left us in 2005 she was a unique vocalist-cum-pianist who had a following of many jazz musicians and a growing public.

I got to know about Shirley through Rusty Hassan, a DJ and jazz fanatic whom I hung out with in Washington, DC. (Rusty wrote a fine essay on Shirley, his DC friend and neighbor, plus her involvement in the local music scene. It’s in a booklet that accompanies Shirley Horn: Live at the 4 Queens, a 1988 set that captures the way she sounded in a typical club date.)

She was a regular at One Step Down, that great small Washington club no longer there. One evening my wife Jane and I went to see her on a New Year’s Eve in the ’90s. We were given seats at the piano bar right in front of Shirley for two sets. Celebrated by many, including Miles Davis, this diminutive person in white gloves sang and played piano like no one else, accompanied as she was for many years by bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams. Here’s what she sounded like:

Her music gets under your skin because Shirley is such an impeccable performer. No one has ever sung these songs with such quiet authority and good taste. Most of her tunes also represent a perfect marriage of music and lyrics. Here she is with Buck Hill (tenor sax) performing one of the more upbeat standards that she liked:

Shirley was a singer with a perfect palate and execution, a master of space and silences. She was finally honored in 2004 with a Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her artistry got me out a bad funk on Thursday, and she’ll do that again, I trust.