Saturday Morning Essay: Too Tired to Write A Saturday Morning Essay

Brought to you by Peet's store-bought dark roast...

Contrary to the conjurer's illusion, I don't actually write these things on Saturday morning. I think of snippets during the week, usually just before falling asleep, and I write them down the following morning.  I believe this has some neuroscientific name, like "incubation" of the creative process. Whatever, it keeps the blogging process from being a chore and more of an enjoyable compulsion.

But it's actually Saturday morning right now and I'm caught out.  I didn't write anything during the week.  I read the news, about Ukraine, about the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, other trivia, but I never got around to writing anything. So it's stream of consciousness time at the Pond...

Speaking of which, it is now inevitable, probably within a few decades, that the world's large coastal settlements will be underwater (a lot of water).  While the forecasts are usually couched in terms of a century or two, everything in climate change happens much faster than the preliminary hopeful estimates.  If you will recall, the melting of the Arctic ice sheet was not supposed to be complete till much later this century.  In reality, the Arctic is likely to be ice-free at the end of the summer melt not later than about 2020, or 6 years from now.  A confounding of estimates perhaps is understandable when you consider that (a) climate science is a developing field (b) dealing with the complex interplay of numerous positive feedback loops (c) with impacts on society at large in crucial ways (d) that nobody really wants to hear about (e) because it upsets our cushy life.

However, the news is now out.  How do you sell a seaside condo in Jupiter, Florida at this point, or a house along the Seadrift strand of West Marin County?  Jupiter would be easier, I think.  You could make your sales pitch to Evangelicals and emphasize the Denialist viewpoint.  "Do you really believe God would allow this magnificent white sand to be submerged beneath ten meters of ocean?" This approach is unlikely to work in the pagan world of Marin County, however, although a New Age angle is probably feasible.  A New Age angle is always feasible out here, since it requires nothing more than a statement that it is so.  "Buy in Seadrift.  Become the ocean of your dreaming self."  Yeah, that will fly.

The Ukraine (I was trained, from playing Risk as a kid, to use the definite article) remains an amazing triumph of American propaganda.  Even by Council of Morons standards, Tom Friedman's column in a recent New York Times was a triumph of Imperial Stenography.  Here's how Tom handled the knotty question of just how it happened that Ukraine's democratically-elected President, Yanukovych, was forced from office by a coup d'etat:

Yanukovych opted instead for a closer economic relationship with Russia, so The Square People in Kiev toppled him, challenging every aspect of Putin’s K.G.B.-shaped worldview. Putin does not believe any political protest can ever be spontaneous. If a large body of Ukrainians gathered in the square of Kiev to demand an end to corruption and closer ties with the E.U., it could only be because the C.I.A., NATO or the E.U. inspired or paid them to do so. Putin’s whole mind-set is top-down, and the notion that the combination of globalization and the I.T. revolution might have given the “people” both the ability to see things they could never see before — and the tools to collaborate and act on them from the bottom up — is totally alien to him.

 So first one must apologize for exposing the reader to another of Tom's absolutely awful coinages:  The Square People.  When Friedman gets going with one of these clever turns of phrase, you just have to stand back and let the terrible writing run its course.  However, where might Putin get the idea that The Square People of Kiev were not just a "spontaneous" demonstration of freedom-loving, pro-European Union, plug-and-play iPhone app code-crunching Tweeting Instagramming Americanesque Slavs, but paid operatives of the American government, and Neo-Nazis at that?

I dunno.  You'd have to ask Friedman, because Tom has already affirmed that he knows how Putin thinks, and Tom, wunderkind that he is, knows that Putin doesn't know anything about computers or social media or globalization (surprising, in a way, given Putin's advanced degrees from top-flight Russian universities in scientific disciplines, not to mention his chess-playing, which is at the Master level).  Putin, however, runs a top-down government, unlike the American democracy which only caters to the preferences of its lowliest citizens.  

However, Box-of-Hammers Tom might want to ask a preliminary question: wasn't this guy Yanukovych, whatever his failings of "corruption," democratically elected by the people of Ukraine with full knowledge of his pro-Russian leanings?  Did it actually come as a surprise to the general citizenry of Ukraine that the fellow they just elected favored Moscow over the bureaucratic elites of Brussels?

Try turning this around, Tombo.  Washington, D.C. must have a Square somewhere or other.  Suppose that the Tea Party, fed up with the idea of Minority Rule in the U.S. (and by Minority Rule, you know what I'm driving at here), "spontaneously" organize a coup d'etat in the United States to overthrow the "corrupt" rule of Barack Obama and force him to flee to, I guess, Kenya.  Certainly the charge of corruption could be sustained.  Didn't professors Gilens & Page just conclusively demonstrate, through rigorous regression analysis, that the U.S. adopts policies that favor a tiny sliver of the American populace (if you count multinational corporations as part of the "populace") to the exclusion of the interests of the American commoners?  Yes, they did.  Even the Chairperson of the Federal Reserve (the pinko Janet Yellen) could not gainsay the suggestion from Bernie Sanders at a Senate hearing recently that the United States is an oligarchy, not a democracy.  So couldn't the people of the world, or Russia's version of Tom Friedman (there's a strange concept), quote our own academics and the Chairperson of our own Federal Reserve to the effect that Barack Obama is the head of a corrupt, undemocratic government, and thus his overthrow was appropriate, indeed, the highest realization of the lofty ideals of Square People everywhere?

So what then, Mr. Friedman, does your criticism of Vladimir Putin consist of?  That he objects to rule by mob?  Sometimes it's better not to get carried away with vacuous propaganda just because you come up with a crummy phrase like "Square People" and want to explain the whole world with it.  You start sounding like an idiot.

But as I say, I have nothing to say this morning anyway.

Saturday Morning Essay: The Eternal Now & Other Pointless Experiences

Brought to you by Peet's Colombia Supremo

Events in life arranged themselves in such a way a couple of days ago that I took a round-trip voyage to San Francisco from Larkspur Landing aboard a Golden Gate Ferry.  The trip over was mid-day; the return was during commute hours.  The ferries now are high speed catamarans which can traverse the waters behind the Tiburon Peninsula, cross the Raccoon Straits between Tiburon and Angel Island, and sail to the lee of Alcatraz to the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street in about 30 minutes.

More than twenty-five years ago I used the Larkspur ferry as my usual commute to work.  I had an office at One Market Plaza (the taller of the two sand-colored buildings pictured above in my own photo).  I once calculated that I made about 2,500 crossings during those commuting years. A ticket cost about two bucks, versus the $9.50 fare charged the usual working-age commuter now.  Parking was free and easily available.  It now costs a couple of bucks to park, and the lot is jammed.  Parking is arranged through a smart phone app.  It can be reliably assumed that the two bucks is a teaser rate designed to get people used to paying to park where they used to leave their cars for free.  In a year or two, I'm sure it will  cost five bucks, then seven, then ten.

What I can remember about commuting is that after the initial adventure of the experience wore off, I settled into finding a comfortable seat where I could read the San Francisco Chronicle in the morning and work the crossword puzzle, then read the Examiner in the evening and solve its.  I didn't look at the view; I had seen the view after a few crossings, and it was more trouble than it was worth.  In retrospect, that was a silly way of looking at things.

I came to recognize a few regulars on my usual schedule.  There was one woman I regularly saw who wore stylish business attire, low heels, her flouncy auburn hair blowing in the Marin breeze as she walked briskly to the boat.  I think she was a lawyer in a big firm somewhere in the Embarcadero.  I surmised from the regularity of her habits, her trim body, the big chunk of ice on her left ring finger, that she was a well-married and highly competent professional who had probably gone to Stanford Law School and had found life a series of confident triumphs.  She was pretty without being glamorous, and it was always reassuring to see such an attractive person using the same public amenity as myself.  I still see her from time to time at the market near my home where I drop in occasionally to spend more for food than is at all reasonable.  She's aged, like me, and I don't think she works anymore.  She has a couple of grown daughters I see her with.  I never learned her name, and I've never uttered a word to her.  I simply remember her.

I don't remember much else besides, as far as the ferry-riding years are concerned.  All told, with the waiting, the boarding, the voyages themselves, I imagine I spent about 3,000 hours in Golden Gate Ferry commuting.  In those days the boats were lumbering single-hulled craft which took at least 45 minutes to cross the Bay.  I can remember the woman I have described walking ahead of me one day, briefcase in hand, her auburn hair bouncing.  But the memory is only of a few seconds.  I cannot remember a single word, or a single clue, of the thousand or more crosswords I worked.  I don't remember any conversations aboard the boat.  There were no shipboard romances.  Nothing really happened, as far as I can remember.

I once wrote a short story about this elusive quality of memory, about how the mind works when it "recalls" something.  Things done repetitively, like commuting, like making coffee, like getting ready for work, like work itself, do not really register.  When we remember them, all that we do is to conjure a few representative flashes of memory that we allow to stand in for the generality of the experience we are recalling.

It's fairly obvious that the brain evolved to be exquisitely attuned to the present moment.  The purpose of memory is to retain survival skills and to remember danger signals, not to act as some sort of DVR of what happened long ago.  So a wiser course in riding the Golden Gate Ferry would have been to stand out on the fantail on every crossing and take the brisk bay wind full in the face, feeling the salt spray churned up by the plunging bow.  It made no sense to deal with the time that was passing by engaging in distractions.  Any way of dealing with life's passing moments that elevates a given moment over another is based on an illusion.  Once lived and forgotten, all moments are equally pointless.  As they happen, all are equally valuable.

Saturday Morning Essay: Door Number One, or Door Number Two? Better to find a Door Number Three, I suppose.

Brought to you by Peet's Colombian blend...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axdrh9F3Kqo

(Video doesn't seem to want to embed; worth watching - 8 minutes of Noam Chomsky's deadpan description of "Challenges of the Anthropocene.)

Climate Denialists point to the natural variability of weather, the waxing and waning of solar maxima and minima, the wobbling of the Earth around its axis of rotation, and other factors which have, given very long periods of time in which to subtly influence the climate, led to ice ages and eras of significantly higher average temperatures than prevail today.  These things did not happen in the ancient past, however, when the Earth was inhabited by 7 billion people combusting fossil fuels at the current rate. While the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been higher in the ancient past, even without the influence of fossil fuel burning, the rate at which we are increasing CO2 concentrations is unprecedented, as far as we can tell.

Also, it should probably go without saying that there have been no ice ages of any consequence (just a couple of Little Ice Ages of abnormally cold weather, of centuries duration, such as was occurring in Valley Forge the night before George Washington led his troops across the Delaware) since the era of agriculture began about 12,000 years ago.  The explosion in human population over these twelve millenia has depended on a moderate, predictable climate, as Craig Dilworth explained at great length in the indispensable Too Smart For Our Own Good.  These moderate, ideal conditions are what we have now trashed for good.  This is a stunning achievement, when you think about it.

It is perhaps true that modern humans spend an entirely unnatural amount of time in virtual realities or in artificial environments generally, and this is particularly true in advanced human civilizations of the First World.  Still, we were once arboreal foragers and hunters, and we remain exquisitely attuned to perturbations in the climate around us.  Lately, people have begun to notice that the weather is getting somewhat whacked.  This accounts for the very recent explosion in the sheer volume of airtime that the issue of climate change has begun to command.  As little as a year ago, it seems the subject never came up on the evening news or in the halls of Congress.

Led by breakthrough research and thinking by Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University and Paul Beckwith at the University of Ottawa, the effect of "Arctic amplification" has moved to center stage as an explanation for what the hell is going on.  Such as: granted, the song told us it never rains in California, but I thought this was poetic hyperbole.  I didn't think we were going to arrive at the point where it actually never rains in California.  Or: the "polar vortex" attacks on the Northeast and Southeast during a very rough winter, while the Arctic itself (and Alaska) remained unseasonably mild through the dark, sunless months.

With the Arctic warming and the Equatorial Earth remaining fairly constant in its temperature, the thermal gradient between the 0 latitude and the Arctic Circle has broken down.  It was this gradient  and the resultant flow of warm air northward toward the Pole, which was in turn bent laterally into the west-to-east jet stream by Coriolis force, which controlled our predictable weather in days of yore.  We took care of that.  Now anything goes, as Cole Porter would sing it.

Admittedly, I've gotten a little obsessed with the subject, because that's sort of the way I roll. Like my cats, I'm a little too curious for my own good. I find myself reading books, or watching movies, that were written or filmed ten years ago and taking solace in the idea these characters were living in a world where you didn't have to worry about which bizarre meteorological thing was going to happen next.  Now we don't have that grace, ease and comfort.

I think we've run up against things, hard, implacable things, all of a sudden, and that is why we're so disoriented.  Why those three a.m. disquietudes are so unsettling.  Even the climate scientists seem shocked into silence.  On the most recent open thread at Realclimate.org, a persistent question from the posters took this form:

Speaking of the weather, I actually have a climate science question.
How long before Arctic amplification causes the Jet Stream to completely collapse, and what will happen then?

Others seconded the question, but I didn't see any of the climate science moderators take the question on.  What is there to say?  The predictive models did not really forecast this particular manifestation of global warming, but if we wanted to point to just one effect of AGW, wouldn't we talk about this weather weirding attributable to the disappearance of Arctic sea ice and disruption of the northern jet stream?   So this thing that has us totally freaked out - we didn't even see it coming.  What does that suggest to you?

Noam points out that Homo sapiens has figured out another reliable way to bring on the End Game, which is thermonuclear war.  This post is running a little long, but since I only write once a week, I will venture this observation which I have not seen voiced in any of our official organs of public opinion, even the chief propaganda rag of D.C., the New York Times.

To wit, beginning in late November of next year, 2015, the great nations of the Earth will gather in Paris for what is widely considered a make-or-break climate conference.  It is slowly dawning on the Big Thinkers that given the 40-year lag time between a given CO2 level in the atmosphere and its effect on climate (meaning, this weird weather and the crazification of the jet stream reflect emissions up to 1974), and that it was well after 1974 that China and India came on board with their coal-burning jamboree, that maybe, just maybe, we better get this thing the fuck in gear. So, my question: given the manifest need for international kumbaya, is it absolutely the best time for the Obama Administration, egged on by the Council of Morons at the NYT, to bring back That 70's Show called the Cold War with the Soviet Union Russia?  To conjure up images of the "Domino Effect" by pretending that Russia is in imminent danger of invading Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, or pouring through the Fulda Gap to overrun East Germany?

Personally, I doubt it.  Dmitry Orlov referred to our President in his latest blog as a "claymation figure with a teleprompter," which I admit is damn good, and reflects my own take on the extent to which Mr. Obama actually controls American foreign policy.  The State and Defense Department apparatchiks are more likely running the show, and they seem intent on playing this "Great Game" bullshit over the world's remaining oil and gas pipelines and reserves, and of maintaining American strategic primacy in regions far distant from our (acidified) shores.

There comes a time when Utopian idealism is actually more realistic than what we used to think of as realism, and I suspect that time has arrived.  Realism of the old kind leads to extinction, through either Door Number One or Door Number Two.  It is, as Baudelaire said, time to get drunk, on wine, poetry or virtue as we choose, that we may not be the martyred slaves of Time.

Saturday Morning Essay: Simple Stringed Pleasures, Episode 2

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Italian Dark Roast blend...

A longtime buddy of mine and I once kicked around the idea of writing the "definitive history" of the housing tract where we grew up. This Peninsula subdivision was built about 18 miles south of San Francisco as the seagull flies, in an area that had once been part of San Francisco Bay but then filled in and covered with modest family homes in a rectilinear grid. Trees were planted, a school was built, a park in the center of the tract was laid out, and a shopping mall was erected at the far north end of the main street running north-south through the grid. Houses were built on quarter-acre lots, two or three bedrooms, one bath, a dining room, a living room and a kitchen. Yards front and back, a single-car garage. In the second California Gold Rush, beginning with the Dust Bowl and continuing through and after World War II, such subdivision housing sold out quickly, acquired by people like my parents, in search of a better, or at least different, life than that experienced elsewhere. Which makes me think that life elsewhere might have been pretty rough.

Later I discovered that it was unnecessary to write such a history, bestseller though it might have been, because a fellow named D. J. Waldie had written a book with the unlikely title Holy Land, about the town of Lakewood, a suburb of Los Angeles. D. J. described housing tracts which were a lot like the ranch-style ghetto of my youth. In his meticulous re-creation of the town's planning and development (enabled by voluminous research into newspaper archives, land records, court files and minutes of the planning commission), and through his own detailed account of the experience of growing up in Lakewood, Waldie captured the sense of alienation from the natural world induced by such a place, how the abstract nature of a layout where the houses, the street lamps, the scrawny trees (tapping their roots into saline soil), the mall, the school, the amenities and even the designed relief from the monotony (the park) were so utterly predictable. You might even say: abstract.

An assignment in a first-year English class at Berkeley, taught by the marvelously self-important Oscar Pemantle, was Notes From the Underground by our man Fyodor, often referred to on this very blog as perhaps the most definitive of the existential writers, although I realize he is not ordinarily grouped with them. In Notes, Dostoevsky wrote about the only subject which serious literature can seriously address, which is the meaninglessness of life. At one point St. Petersburg is described as the most "abstract" city in the world, and Professor Pemantle, trolling for suckers, asked the class what Fyodor had in mind. Thinking about my own humble origins in the housing tract, I told Oscar I would give it a try, and then opined that maybe Dostoevsky was suggesting that St. Petersburg was too carefully planned and constructed, leaving one with the disturbing feeling of living somewhere unnatural and contrived, "alienating the psyche from its habitat." I thought that last phrase had a genuine Berkeley pseudo-intellectual flair, and Oscar seemed to like it, even if there was no communication between us of what either of us thought it meant.

Nevertheless, when Oscar Pemantle gave his formal lecture on the book, he did not adopt this insight as his own. These were performance pieces, by the way, these "definitive" lectures. The class was full to overflowing with the regular students, and with other professors and their teaching assistants sitting in, along with many drop-ins from Berkeley's endless supply of scholastically omniverous intellectuals, all there just looking in on the high-minded fun. Oscar would don a three-piece blue suit, a silk tie, wing tips, and even sport a gold watch chain for good measure, which he would ostentatiously consult during his oration. Magnificent in his glowing, unlined mahogany skin and stylish barrister's attire, his dark hair swept back, his gold-framed glasses glinting, his voice, with its faint Indian intonation, chopping and parsing words with great precision, prancing and preening, wheeling and dipping as he walked back and forth across the classroom, Professor Pemantle told us that the book was really about...love.

I didn't buy it, myself. I thought he was just trying to be controversial.

I think I understand abstraction, because I lived it first-hand. Bear in mind also that my generation was really the first to go all-in for video life. I doubt seriously that life would have been conceivable in the housing tract without it, unless you were from one of those extraordinarily weird families who sat around a table reading Bible verses to each other, and then plotting the axe murders of everyone they knew. Thus, outside in the "real world" (the abstract suburb) was nothing recognizable as nature, and in the house was a television.

In 1968 I bought Mason Williams's music book, a book called "Music" in his usual deadpan way, for $2.50. If you've been paying attention, you know that by 1968 I could read music for the guitar, and I wanted to learn "Classical Gas," the better to charm Berkeley co-eds with. Mason included some poetry in his book, such as "The Censor," which had a line about television which knocked me out:

"And light up like welding shops the ho-hum rooms of America."

I used to walk or ride a bike home at night through the tract, often after hanging out with the buddy who is co-author of the unwritten book. There were no easy paths home since in my part of the subdivision the blocks were laid out in long, parallel, dogleg fashion, with no cross-streets breaking through. You can imagine why. It would have been much nicer to relieve the monotony of a long street lined with identical houses, but you lose a lot or two every time you penetrate the avenue with something as useless as a cross-street. Anyway, I would gaze into the ho-hum rooms of America as I walked in the cold, windy air, and that's exactly what they looked like: blue welding shops, fusing the families together with an alloy of intense boredom and self-loathing.

Later, years after university days, I read the social critic Lewis Mumford's observation that the experience of living in suburban houses ruled by television sets "inured" the American populace to the idea of nuclear annihilation. To wit, at least a thermonuclear holocaust would be something to do, strange as it might be, and Americans were already thoroughly imbued with the sensibility that life was, at base, kind of preposterous in its usual routines. In a sense now we have taken television culture to an exponentially higher level, since electronics permit forms of television to be carried on the person at all times, so that even the outdoors can be included within the ho-hum regions of America, since the generations that succeeded mine have eschewed the natural world altogether in favor of its holographic representations.

I don't know what Mumford would make of the present situation. The United States these days appears to be deliberately provoking Russia in the service of a geopolitical "strategy" to maintain American hegemony. President Obama, in his utterly goofy, clueless way, is being wheeled around like a ventriloquist's dummy by various D.C. "power players," and since Mr. O can't really tell the difference between a good idea and a very bad one, he goes along, since the alternative would be to disagree, mounting a powerful, cogent argument of his own, forcefully delivered.  More or less in the style, come to think of it, of Oscar Pemantle in days of yore, and I don't see that happening.

If a thermonuclear holocaust begins (and it all simply depends on whether Vladimir Putin decides to start one in response to relentless American provocation), there will be a lot of "platforms" to get the word out, providing a lot of "content" which will instantly go "viral" until an electromagnetic pulse shuts it all down. That will be the main bummer about the whole overkill thing; since nothing in our times can be said even to exist until it is Tweeted or texted, captured by cell phone camera or iPad and included in a conversation thread on Facebook, in a way the end of civilization won't really happen in terms we can grasp anymore. There will just be time for a cliche or two: "Didn't see that coming!" "WTF?" And then our abstract habitations, such as they are,  will all be fused glass.

Ho-hum.