Grieving This World

A swirl of seemingly disparate thoughts just might form something coherent.  It's all prompted by the stream of topics I run across--power, political movements, optimism, climate change, the Dream Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about when we think "good intentions" are enough and we forget our history.

Injustice laid the foundation for what the United States has become. Violence is a feature of empire. With our long history of subjugation and plunder, Mr. Coates states the U.S. is in no position to hold ourselves up as an example for other countries--we are not exceptional. And it's easy to overlook how those of us who are privileged benefit. Greg Epstein reviews Coates' Between the World and Me:

If you, like me, applauded with all your might at the election of our first black president, but had never truly stopped to re-evaluate your life in light of the fact that slavery was the single biggest industry in early American history and thus the “down payment” allowing us all to enjoy lives of relative, super-powerful comfort, welcome to The Dream.

I would still like to think that change can happen; that there's a reason to be optimistic. Political movements like #BlackLivesMatter emerge and make a difference, but power exists and power generally gets what it wants.

Injustice ties in with the question of our survival as a species as we hurtle toward environmental disaster. Epstein:

Fittingly, the book ends with an expression of profound fear: that the same human motives and frailties that created the institution of slavery have morphed into a technological juggernaut that now threatens every human life, and our very planet, in the form of climate change. Will we, together, come up with a better way to live?

Mr. Coates is not optimistic. He suggests that the arc of history bends toward chaos. It could be we face near-term extinction. How do we face that fear? How do we carry that sadness? How do we grieve something far beyond any personal loss?

And so I come to feel a need to understand more about grief. I suspect grief is not about comfort. And there is likely to be a lot of discomfort and suffering in the years to come.

Sometimes a loss is unexpected, but there are definitely losses to be anticipated. It seems that preparation, when possible, is preferred. Does it mean anything about our social mindset when a literary review indicates that "death is a hot topic right now"?

But I'm not really sure what preparation entails. There are the five stages. There are notions of a graceful exit or a planetary hospice. There are the regrets of the dying.

Mr. Coates talks about how distraught his teenage son was after Michael Brown got killed last year. He decided not to tell his son that everything was going to be OK. He allowed him to feel that pain. False comfort leaves that child ill-prepared for the real world. It's a "bitter pill" to take, but a necessary step toward finding one's place and purpose in that world. The worst thing is to not be ready.

Plankton

I admit I don't give much thought to microscopic creatures, but plankton do form the bottom of the food chain and produce half of the world's oxygen.  After a brief mention in some reading, a search uncovered a study led by Stephanie Dutkiewicz with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Global Change Science.  Ocean acidification will have a big impact on the survival and migration of plankton species.

Although recent, this is a story I hadn't come across in my regular browsing.  And yet, it serves as one more nail in our climate change coffin.

Update (November 15):  Carbon sequestration won't help reduce ocean acidity.

Update (November 29):  A study published in Science reports that coccolithophores have become ten times more abundant since the 1960s. That seems to correlate to higher levels of carbon dioxide, but the implications are unclear.

GOP is a Cynical Joke

Sean Illing says this party needs to go away:

The GOP, in many respects, is no longer a legitimate governing party. They’ve become a self-perpetuating hype machine, a jobs program for conservative political entrepreneurs. When running for office, Republicans are forced to say and do stupid things in order appease their disconnected base, whose worldview is shaped almost exclusively by conservative media. When elected, Republicans continue to say and do stupid things – and for the same reasons.

And Robin Marty reports on how the Right manufactures phony scandals to distract the public:

By releasing a number of videos a week apart, as the so-called “Center for Medical Progress” says it plans to do, Republicans can manipulate the media week by week, offering them a bright, shiny object to cover rather than report on their own internal battle for the endorsement, their congressional obstructionism, or the states under their leadership that are going bankrupt.

Update (July 29):  Jackie Calmes argues that conservative media have wrecked the Republican party.

The unanimity among establishment Republicans – many of them conservatives by the definition of anyone but purists – that rightwing media has become a big problem for the party, and their readiness to talk about it, was something of a surprise to this reporter of three decades’ experience in Washington. Of the establishment Republicans among several dozen conservatives interviewed, nearly all were flummoxed about how to moderate the party. Most expressed despair.

Update (August 9):  Mark Sumner says the Republicans have the candidate they deserve.

The GOP has discarded the idea that experience in government has value, that knowledge has value, that reason has value. Only saying what they want to hear has value, and what they want to hear is someone acting like an asshole. 

Having worked diligently to encourage the idea that Americans can't trust the government, shouldn't Republicans now be cheering the fact that their own candidates with government experience are getting bested by those with none? Having spent decades declaring that money is the only measure of a person, shouldn't the GOP be pleased that their leading candidate can get away with saying anything, so long as he also talks about his billions? Having dedicated so much time trying to tear down respect to every institution, shouldn't the GOP be pleased that they're now getting no respect? After all, this is exactly what they wanted.

You can't run a party for three decades on the idea that people who know something are the enemy, then complain when people want to follow an idiot.

Update (August 13):  Sean Illing highlights the insanity of mixing religion with politics.

[T]here’s a significant subset of the GOP that advocates for Israel on purely theocratic grounds: They yearn for the apocalypse. These people fancy themselves patriots, but they’re gleefully subordinating American Foreign Policy to religious dogma in order to hasten the End Times.

And Patrick Smith observes:

I have thought since the Tea Party’s appearance on the political scene half a dozen years ago that the American right was destined to destroy itself before our eyes. Last week’s GOP display—it was politics as spectacle, not a debate—convinces me of this. The Republican Party as it has been in history is already gone, more or less, and is being replaced—more swiftly than one would have thought possible—with what amounts to a fanatical fringe.

Smith views the Republican approach to foreign policy as dangerous.

The American right’s new hawkishness, thus, is not a sickness from which the rest of us can claim immunity. There is none for Americans. In a remarkable appearance at the Reuters newsroom in New York Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry put the point as forcefully as he has ever said anything: “Our allies are going to look at us and laugh,” he warned, if this country’s rightists kill the [nuclear] accord with Iran. 

Then this: “It’s not going to happen overnight. But I’m telling you, there’s a huge antipathy [to U.S. leadership] out there. There’s a big bloc out there, folks, that isn’t just sitting around waiting for the United States to tell them what to do.”

The current crop of Republican candidates

are all empty but for slightly varied poses. All they have for us is affect.

To substitute affect for thought, as all GOP candidates propose, is dangerous for two reasons. First and very practically, it almost inevitably produces bad results. Bush II’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-September 11 period are obvious but not isolated cases. The need was to look tough, to act without thinking, to declare “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck. 

Second, affect is a dangerous appeal to the subconscious in us. It addresses unsayable fears, resentments and insecurities, and fortifies idealized selves, self-images derived from impossible Hollywood plots and characters. In this respect it is the doorway to irrational politics and behavior, especially in our conduct abroad.

Update (September 20):  Conor Lynch reviews the race for the Republican nomination so far:

Sensible people would be extremely worried, . . . but Republicans are no longer very sensible people. Calling each other names is what gets an applause these days. Making fun of people is “entertaining,” and Republican voters are apparently swayed by the entertainment factor. . . .  In a Republican party, where childlike behavior is applauded, being a bully is considered a virtue, and facts are considered unimportant trivialities, you can never really guess what’s going to happen. One can only hope that the American people are smart and mature enough to see past all of the hyperbole and distortion, and see the Republican field as the farce that it is.

Update (September 26):  Pope Francis gave a speech to Congress that made a lot of Republicans uncomfortable. Did it help nudge Boehner out?  But ultimately, a leadership change will have no impact on how the party functions. Edward Rubin explains:

Why exactly are the Republicans so determined to ignore reality? Why won’t they listen to anyone? The answer is actually simple: The reality of climate change demonstrates that progressives are right and they are wrong. Not just wrong about the effect of human activity on the environment, but wrong about their basic approach to the problems of the modern world.

Update (September 27):  Heather Cox Richardson puts Boehner's resignation in context of the rise of extremists:

The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism. Last week, 43 percent of Republicans polled said they could imagine a scenario in which they would back a military coup. This week, Movement Conservatives in Congress knocked off a conservative speaker because he refused to sacrifice the American government to their demands. 

We should be very frightened indeed. If we are not careful, John Boehner’s will not be the only head on the block.

Update (October 1):  A dishonest chart from the Planned Parenthood hearing with a correction.

Also, a confession about a dishonest Select Committee from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.

Update (October 3):  Charlie Pierce reacts to political frustration in the wake of yet another mass shooting.

The fact remains we only allow ourselves two political parties in this country. And one of our political parties is completely insane. It's the party that when we have mine disasters, blocks mine regulations. It's the party that says when we want to fix our roads, you can't have an infrastructure bill. You can't raise the gas tax. It's the party that when some people have floods, like New Jersey, marks Chris Christie lousy because he accepted help from the federal government. And we have the same party who has somewhere between three and 600 people running for president, none of whom will do anything about the problem of mass shootings in America.

Update (October 19):  Fifteen reasons to not vote for Republicans.

Update (November 13):  Damon Linker wonders why conservative intellectuals aren't disgusted with the Republican crop of candidates.

Update (November 15):  Today's party isn't the party of Eisenhower.

Update (January 25, 2016):  Noam Chomsky says that the Republicans and their presidential candidates are

literally a serious danger to decent human survival.

Update (January 27, 2016):  This is how separated from reality Republicans can be:  Not only did a grand jury in Texas clear Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing, they turned around and indicted two people involved with producing the dishonest video. And yet Republican leaders still insist Planned Parenthood is a criminal organization.

Update (March 19, 2016):  One more reason to vote against Republicans--upon the death of Justice Scalia last month, Senator McConnell announced there wouldn't even be a hearing for a nominee. But President Obama is hitting back by nominating relative moderate Merrick Garland.

“[L]aw and order” rhetoric makes lefties nervous ...; but it makes conservatives — the smart ones, at least — downright scared. Why? Not just because they think it’ll make stopping Garland harder, but because they know a wedge issue when they see one. And they know that Obama will answer their obstruction by driving that wedge as deep into the GOP coalition as he can.

Update (August 12, 2016):  Gary Legum disputes the idea that Republicans could be winning the election if they had nominated someone else from their "deep bench".

More than organizational skills, though, none of these candidates had much in the way of policies to offer. What they had was a sense of grievance and anger, a solid belief that they would be facing the most corrupt Democrat the party had ever nominated. Whether that last fact is true or not was beside the point.

Which leads to the main reason why any wistfulness for a Republican nominee who would be beating Clinton is so silly: the GOP that would have nominated such a candidate does not exist. It has not existed for years. Why pretend that a candidate with more mainstream appeal could have come out of a primary season where he or she had to appeal to the basest instincts of the party?

The GOP that does exist, the one that vomited up [this year's nominee], has spent decades feeding its base a diet of angry rhetoric and personal attacks, instead of honest attempts at governance. It is a party that has spent 25 years hitting Hillary Clinton with dishonest attacks, driving down her favorability ratings even while alleged scandal after alleged scandal petered out into nothing. (And then blaming, ironically, the same press now carping about her for protecting her.)

The GOP that exists is a party that has spent the last eight years claiming Barack Obama is a unique threat to America, one who required unprecedented resistance to stop his agenda to turn the nation into a socialist hellhole. Then, having failed to stop him, the party is shocked, SHOCKED to see its base turn to the know-nothing authoritarian outsider who promises to save them all from the disaster their own party has convinced them the nation has become.

Fewer Poor, But Most Low Income

A Pew Research Center report called "A Global Middle Class Is More Promise than Reality" shows a large drop in the proportion of the very poor.  The number at middle income nearly doubled from 2001 to 2011, but the actual purchasing power is still low by comparison to the U.S. and western Europe.