Hubris and Hope

Scientists have reported detecting the origins of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Please don't ask me to explain the details, but “less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light” to its full size of 28 billion light years. To be sure, the theory has its skeptics, from those who insist the earth is 6,000 years old to those who say it’s impossible to go faster than the speed of light. I had two reactions – three, including incomprehension – wonder and depression. With regard to the last, if we truly are on the edge of unlocking the secrets of the universe, we should hurry, because the closer we get, the closer we seem to come to annihilating ourselves. We can’t say we haven’t been warned: from God’s rebuke of Adam in the Garden to the gods’ punishment of Prometheus, from Marlowe’s Faust to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have come dire predictions of the consequences of our hubris – warnings that seem particularly apt at a time when someone simply steals an airliner filled with people, nuclear powers thump their chests, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences issues a “stark” report on global warming, and manmade water crisis imperils the American West.

It’s easy to get depressed by the gap between our technological might and our human folly, but (as I’ll try to explain in my next post) I believe our unquenchable sense of wonder is our greatest hope.

An Appeal to Reason

It’s only the middle of March, and already the first salvos for November’s elections are hitting both inbox and mailbox. They are the political equivalent of pre-emptive strikes, characterized by bold type, underlining and lots of exclamation points (!!!!!), meant to convey shock and awe to the presumably sympathetic recipient. There is a sickening sameness about them, regardless of ideology or party affiliation – a formula that starts off touting the favored candidate but quickly veers into attack mode, painting the opponent as the most extreme example of degraded ideas and vile behavior imaginable. Our candidate is all that stands between the salvation of the republic and the apocalypse. There is no effort in these missives to replace jargon with thoughtful language because they are not intended to appeal to our reason, but to our prejudices. It is a tested formula, which has made political consultants rich and filled Congress with people who speak in mind-numbing sound bites and seem to have misplaced the art of negotiation. Think not of Plato’s Republic but of Plato’s Retreat.

Not only do these campaigns lower the bar of public discourse, but they lure us into giving our team a pass: “Well, if that’s what it takes to make sure those guys lose . . . .” But each time we say that (and believe me, I do), we erode a little more of the commons – the common ground on which we can discuss diverse ideas and negotiate solutions – which is the foundation of civil society.

Wonder Out Yonder

The day after the Soviet Union launched sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, Earl Ubell wrote on the front page of The New York Herald Tribune, "Our planet has a new moon tonight,” one of the most haunting leads in newspaper history, which both captures the wonder and hints at the hubris of humankind’s future in space. Sputnik launched the space race, deepening Cold War anxieties that the Russians had beaten us into orbit and driving the American satellite program to make sure that the first flag planted on the moon was our own. Space had become the new frontier, a vast place for American pioneers to explore and a challenge for American technology to conquer. But there was always a deeper element at work, one that all the technocrats could never crush, exemplified by William Pogue, an astronaut who died last week. About halfway through his 84-day stint in space, Pogue led the three-man Skylab crew on strike, protesting the long hours and tedious work. He did not demand increased pay or compensatory time, but, Paul Vitello writes in his obituary, “he and the others just wanted more time to look out the window and think.” The crew on the ground thought he’d gone nuts, but in fact Pogue had become “much more inclined toward humanistic feeling toward other people.” I like to think it is just that urge to understand the human condition and our place in the universe, more than military rivalry and commercial exploitation, that sends humans into space.

Janzen on Diversity

Dan Janzen, MacArthur Fellow and Kyoto Prize winner, divides his time between the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches biology, and Costa Rica, where he and his wife, Winnie Hallwachs, devote their lives to protecting  Guanacaste Conservation Area, one of the most diverse places on earth. Janzen is a blunt and colorful speaker on the importance of diversity, as shown in this excerpt from an article by Richard Coniff in takepart: [I asked Janzen] about ‘keystone species’ – the ones on which whole ecosystems depend – and the ripple effects when such a species goes extinct. “You tell me what species on the planet is not an important part of the life cycle,” he demanded. “As for so-called keystone species, that simply means a species whose removal happens to create a set of ripples big enough for a two-meter-tall, diurnal, nearly deaf, nearly dumb, nearly odor-incompetent, nearly taste-incompetent, urban invasive species to see, or bother to see, the ripple."

We manage not to care, or we pretend not to notice, that the “extinction of any species will impact the lives of a number of other species.” Humans have been doing that with “the attendant shrug of the shoulders,” since the Pleistocene. “We specialize in the elimination of species to make space for us and our domesticates, and we are now busily polishing off the entire field to zero competition, with very few of ‘them,’ leaving ourselves as the last competitor standing. Kind of obvious how that is going to end.”

Mud

Unlike many of my friends, I thrived this winter on the invigorating air and blinding beauty of bright blue skies and white snow (before plowing). But I am ready for the suggestion of spring now in the air, with its lengthening days and the stirring of life anxious to be born. And then there is the mud, ubiquitous, oozing under foot, forming deep tire ruts in the lane. Mud, the curse of early spring, the stuff sleazy politicians dig up on one another. But mud is but the mixture of soil and water, the two critical ingredients in growing our food – the same ingredients that modern agriculture seems bent on destroying: half the earth’s topsoil has disappeared in the last 150 years and water scarcity is endemic in many parts of the world. So I was interested to read that the new farm bill reflects changing American priorities. It provides unprecedented support to small farmers, organic farming and healthy food, all three of which have received the back of the hand in previous bills written by big agriculture. Passed with bipartisan support (although no Republicans showed up for the signing), the bill reflects changing attitudes in the country more than in Congress, where some are still slinging mud at Michelle Obama’s campaign for healthy eating. But childhood obesity is down by 43%, and small local and organic movements are spreading across the landscape, spurred on by dedicated young farmers and demanding consumers. It is the season of mud -- and of hope.

Justice Denied

On Wednesday the Senate rejected Debo Adegbile as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights because of his work at the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund. The Fund filed a brief on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1982 in a case that still ignites passions in the region. I thought of Owen Walker, a friend I haven’t seen since college, who was for 25 years the Federal Public Defender for Massachusetts. One of his clients was Richard Reid, who in 2001 tried to blow up an airplane by detonating a bomb in his sneaker. Curious about Owen’s reaction to the Senate vote, I called him and asked whether his defense of Reid means he is soft on shoe bombers. He is not. “In fact,” he said, “my views on criminal justice are very conservative. I am also very proud of the work my office did on behalf of our clients.” To punish Adegbile because of someone he represented, Walker said, is “outrageous”, and he pointed out that John Adams, who defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, “went on to become president of the United States.”

Adegbile, raised by a single mother, has lived what we used to call the American Dream. That dream is not just for the dreamer. It is the mythic glue that holds this country together. I expect Republicans to reflexively vote against Obama nominees. But it took seven Democrats to put politics above the promise of American life.

Words Matter

American politics has always been rough, far more so in the early days of the Republic, when Congressmen routinely carried guns to work and often threatened to use them. Open violence reached its zenith in 1856 with Congressman Preston Brooks’ near-fatal caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, a beating from which Sumner never fully recovered. Still, it’s been a while since a candidate felt he could reach for a gun and, at least rhetorically, threaten the president, as Todd Staples did in his “Come and Take It” ad during his campaign for lieutenant governor of Texas. But then, we’ve never had a black president before. Bigotry is rarely on overt appeal in the increasingly personal attacks on President Obama, but as a friend of mine, who is also a judge, said, “you don’t have to scratch very deep” before you get to the issue of race. Similarly, historians long denied that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, pointing to all kinds of other explanations – from Northern industrial expansion to the South’s embrace of a pastoral way of life to the preservation of the union – in an effort to refute the importance of race in the most critical event in our history. But it’s hard to imagine the war without slavery or to overstate the role of brutal language and imagery in any discussion of race in America. I believe absolutely in free speech, but I find the escalation of violent rhetoric a deeply worrisome thing.

Carpe Diem

The Dow was up again last week, closing just below its all-time high. Meanwhile, Russian troops seized the Crimea; violent protests gripped Venezuela; Uganda passed a law sentencing homosexuals to life imprisonment; sectarian killings remain epidemic in Iraq and Burma; 10,000 have died in the Central African Republic; car bombings killed 90 in Nigeria; violence ripped through Thailand. Here at home, a huge storm brought heavy flooding and mudslides to the West, but no relief from crippling drought; a growing wealth gap continues to erode our belief in opportunity and community; an unrepentant Arizona legislature turns to spot checks of abortion clinics. Each day seems to bring a new crisis from an unexpected quarter. It’s exhausting to feel so helpless in a world beyond our control.

So why would the market gain 49 points on Friday? Is this just more evidence of Wall Street's obliviousness to suffering in the world? Undoubtedly. But I like to think there's another message. The cataclysmic tone of today’s news merely amplifies what people have understood for millennia: we aren’t in control of our destiny. One response is to lock our doors and turn out the lights. In individuals that’s called depression; in nations it's called isolationism. Another is to accept the limits of our power and engage with the world as we find it. Beneath the chilling headlines, people get on with their lives, affirming their resilience and investing in a future they can’t foretell. That's called living. In the face of tragedy, life remains a wonder.

Stumble of the Week

• State of Denial. To blacks, gays and immigrants, we must now add business people to the enemies list of Arizona’s dogged silent majority. For it was the Chamber of Commerce that finally persuaded Governor Jan Brewer to veto Senate Bill 1062 – a bill, said Senator Steve Yarborough, aimed at “preventing discrimination against people who are clearly living out their faith.” It proposed to strike this blow for religious freedom by protecting the right of bigots to refuse service to gay people. But gays shouldn’t feel special. Arizona has long been a full-service discriminator. It was denied the 1993 Super Bowl for refusing to recognize Martin Luther King Day, then gained notoriety and lost business revenue when Brewer signed the state’s draconian anti-immigrant bill in 2010. Now the Religious Freedom Act, which another senator defended as “pre-emptive to protect priests”, has been vetoed. Next up? Unwed mothers? • The American Dream. According to an Economic Policy Institute report, 1% of the residents of Alaska, Michigan, Nevada and Wyoming have reaped over 100% of their state’s total income gains since 1979. If my math is correct, that means the other 99% actually got poorer.

• Family Seat. John Dingell, the longest-serving Congressman in history, announced that he will not seek reelection for the seat he inherited in 1955 after the death of his father. But fear not, dynasty fans. His wife, Debbie, seeks to extend the family’s eight-decade tenure in the House. So why is the 87-year-old Dingell quitting? “I find serving in the House to be obnoxious.”

Stumble of the Week

Good morning, readers. As I look out the window at a thick fog, which has given the snow-covered landscape an eerie, spectral look, and the Canada geese scratch what they can from the frozen earth, I realize that it is time to take a few days off from my morning musings to recharge my imaginative batteries. I love doing this. It pushes me to try to organize thoughts, feelings, ideas in ways that might, if I am lucky, make others look at the world a little bit differently for a moment. It makes me feel connected. But when I spend two hours trying to connect an English woman who was arrested for assault for throwing a piece of toast at her husband and then smearing butter on his face with Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law, well, I’d say I was overreaching.

Time for a short break. And thank you for reading my offerings. Talk to you soon.

Nor Any Drop to Drink

Here is all you really need to know about this winter’s meteorological divide between the inundated East and the parched West:

The map shows a line just east of the 100^th meridian that divides America into a wet half and a dry half, a map that has remained essentially unchanged since Americans began aggressively settling the west 150 years ago. John Wesley Powell, who navigated the Colorado River despite having lost his right arm at Shiloh, argued then that the West was far too dry for intensive development. But his prescient words were drowned out by Charles Dana Wilber’s crackpot theory that “rain follows the plow.”

And so, in southeast Nevada, which gets 4.2 inches of rain a year, we built the sprawling city of Las Vegas, home to two million people and endless fountains. And in California, where the worst drought in memory threatens drinking water supplies and agricultural production, we have created in the desert of the San Joaquin Valley “one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions” by extracting so much groundwater that the land itself is sinking.

Through a long history of damming, drilling, diversions, and water grabs, we have dried up the West’s rivers and extracted its ground water at rates that, it’s now clear, are unsustainable. Over the years, prophets have tried to tell us so – Wallace Stegner in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), John McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid (1977), and Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert (1993) – but we didn’t listen.

A Call to Service

At my daughter’s high-school graduation a decade ago, one member of her class was singled out for special notice. He would enroll in the United States Naval Academy that fall, and a Captain, in dress whites, had traveled all the way from Annapolis to hand him his diploma and publicly praise him. He was by all accounts a very good guy and is now a Marine officer who has more than earned the Captain’s commendation. So why did singling out a young man committed to serving his country bother me? There are many paths to service, and the graduation ceremony elevated one, that of warrior, above the others. In doing so, the school tacitly acknowledged a troublesome trend in America: the evolution of a separate caste of men and women we send to fight our wars so we won’t have to. We praise their courage and send them again and again into battle while we go about our business. In exchange, we let them board airplanes early and enable politicians to demagogue their gratitude. Last week, for example, only three senators – Republicans Dan Coats and Jeff Flake and Democrat Tom Carper – had the courage to vote against reversing a one-percent reduction in veterans’ cost-of-living raises already approved by the military.

I believe two things: (1) there are many ways to serve this country, and (2) everybody should do so. There is so much to do, not least of which is instilling a sense of community that only universal service can provide.

Beyond Chocolate

“Saint Valentine is a third-century Roman saint associated since the High Middle Ages with a tradition of courtly love.” It wasn’t exactly courtly love that four members of Al Capone’s Italian South Side gang had in mind when they lined up seven members of Bugs Morans’ Irish North Side gang against a garage wall at 2122 North Clark Street and opened fire 85 years ago today. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre, fought to control the bootleg liquor business, is Prohibition’s defining event. It’s an era we tend to glorify, filled with wonderful names (“Machine Gun” McGurn, Antonio “The Scourge” Lombardo, “Hop Toad” Giunta), although it was marked by murder, political corruption and income inequality (Capone made $100 million a year).

Nor did Ayatollah Khomeini seem in a loving mood 25 years ago when he issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for blaspheming Mohammed in Satanic Verses. That too led to a massacre, the Sivas Massacre, in which 37 people, primarily artists and writers, were incinerated when zealots set fire to their hotel.

Prohibition was the result of American fundamentalists trying to impose their personal morality on an unwilling people, who defied the law and eventually overturned it. Khomeini’s fatwa took things to a new level by making murder the goal, not a byproduct, of fanaticism. Like his predecessors, from Claudius (who beheaded Valentine for protecting persecuted Christians) to Stalin, he achieved his goal by making most of us afraid to speak out.

The heart is the source of love and courage. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

The Servant Problem

The difficulty with the help these days is that so often they turn out to be illegal. What was once a “nanny problem” for American office seekers has spread out from the nursery and across the Atlantic, where it recently toppled Mark Harper, who was – and I am not kidding – the immigration minister of Great Britain . . . until he discovered that his house cleaner of six years was an illegal immigrant. He fired her and resigned in “embarrassment” from the cabinet – too tainted to continue as point man for the Conservative government’s “go home” campaign, whose mission to rid the land of undesirables is embedded in its name. If it weren’t for their power to do evil, the lack of self-awareness of so many political leaders would be comical: Louisiana Senator David Vitter, the sponsor of legislation for abstinence-only education, turns up on a hooker’s telephone log; Newt Gingrich carries on an eight-year affair with a staffer while leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton; Larry Flynt outs the affair of Gingrich’s lieutenant Bob Livingston in Hustler magazine; Idaho Senator Larry Craig calls Clinton “a nasty, bad, naughty boy,” then gets arrested in an airport men’s toilet.

So as Speaker Boehner, under pressure from his Tea Party wing to turn back the “illegal invasion,” again jettisons immigration reform, I encourage our political leaders to carefully check their servants’ papers. For as Mitt Romney could have told Mark Harper, a good yard boy is hard to find.

Lords of the Lash

Last Friday evening, finding myself in want of entertainment, I decided to go to the movies. I went to see Twelve Years a Slave – and entertaining is not the word I would use to describe the most unflinchingly brutal film I have ever seen. Scene after scene of beatings, whippings, lynching and rape build on each other without respite and with no counterpoint of goodness. Almost more unbearable to watch than the vicious beatings and lacerated backs of hopeless slaves is the degradation that comes to almost everyone involved. The movie depicts a system of complete dehumanization, whose point, Stanley Fish wrote, is “to withhold from the audience an outlet for either its hope or its sympathy.” This is Schindler’s List without Schindler. Some want to see in the film an allegory of modern life, whose aim is to make viewers recognize parallels between the ante-bellum South and 21^st-century America. But history is not a morality play; it is the ever-unfolding autobiography of a culture, a complex effort to make sense of the complicated, many-sided and evolving portrait of who we are and how we came be so. Twelve Years a Slave is painful to watch and yet needs to be seen. We forced Germany and Japan to confront their pasts, but here, in “the land of the free”, we still gloss over our own two genocides. For our self-image to transcend hypocrisy, for our country to live her ideals, we must take ownership of our past.

The Arc of a Career

We turn from the Super Bowl to other sports, such as the Sochi Olympics, which open today amid terrorism threats, euthanizing stray dogs and construction delays: “OK, so my hotel doesn’t have a lobby yet,” tweeted Mark MacKinnon of Toronto’s Globe and Mail. Next week pitchers and catchers report to spring training – and speaking of catchers, it turns out that Chris Christie, who aspired to become the heftiest president since William Howard Taft until a bothersome traffic jam in Fort Lee snarled his plans, played one in high school. Christie’s athleticism initially surfaced as the New Jersey governor was  distancing himself from his old friend, David Wildstein, whom he’d appointed to the Port Authority: “We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and an athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.”

There is a touching backstory to Christie’s baseball career. Just before his senior year a better catcher transferred to his school. The Christie family considered suing to prevent him from playing, but ultimately decided not to, and Chris, a captain, buried his disappointment and cheered his team to the state championship from the bench.

My Republican friends insist that Christie manned up after Bridgegate, taking responsibility for the incident and firing those responsible. I read a different tale – of the aphrodisiac of power transforming a boy trying to throw out runners at second base into an ambitious politician throwing his friends under the bus.

The End of the Road

The trouble with kicking the can down the road is that someday the road will come to an end. The biggest can now on the political highway is the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the State Department’s final environmental analysis that construction will not significantly affect overall carbon emissions (primarily because Canada will develop the Tar Sands anyway) makes it hard to evade much longer. The pipeline is the defining issue of the Obama presidency. It lays bare the conflicting philosophies of the two major wings of the Democratic Party: economic growth and environmental protection. And when your (and your opponent’s) entire 2012 election campaign can be reduced to a single word – jobs – you’ve kind of painted yourself into a corner. Bridging this divide – which dwarfs the Republicans’ Wall Street/Tea Party split that obsesses the media – is the most important issue of our time. The pressure to accept the pro-growth arguments is enormous – it will create jobs, produce North American energy, spur the economy; and “if we don’t do it, someone else will.”

Politically, this is a lose-lose issue for Obama: the party’s progressive wing has a long tradition of defining economic growth as the pathway to social justice (and also to campaign contributions); while environmentalists, who insist that such a position is obsolete and ultimately ruinous, have dug in their heels on Keystone. But I also believe it is the president’s greatest opportunity, a chance to lead a national conversation on how we will live together on this earth without destroying the things that make life possible.

Note: This post did not go out yesterday because an amazing sleet storm took down limbs, trees and my power line. I’m not suggesting it was manmade. I’m just saying it was some storm.

e pluribus unum

Buried in a blur of ads in last night’s forgettable Super Bowl was an astounding one-minute spot by Coca Cola that featured the music of “America the Beautiful,” sung in eight languages as the camera panned across rugged rural scenery and gritty urban life in a patriotic paean to America. Even though I knew the ad was meant to increase the sales of an ubiquitous brand of sugared water which is very bad for you, I was captivated. This is not the first time Coke has celebrated diverse peoples: “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)” transcended mere product marketing and became a huge hit for The Seekers in 1971. It is perhaps a measure of the difference between 1971 and 2014 that last night’s ad, for all its seemingly saccharine patriotism, had a message with an edge: “America is beautiful. And it is getting more beautiful every day,” illustrated by scenes and people from across the country's physical and cultural landscape, asserts that diversity is not an add-on to white America; it is the core of the identity of an ever-changing nation. So naturally, the ad was greeted with outrage on Twitter from those who were offended by foreign-looking children singing “America the Beautiful” in languages that were not English – although it’s worth mentioning that the girl who sang in Spanish is Puerto Rican, not an immigrant, and the girl who sang in Tagalog is Filipino, whose country was an American possession for 48 years.

Stumble of the Week

• Republican Women. In 1970, Senator Roman Hruska (R, Neb) spoke in defense of G. Harrold Carswell, Richard Nixon’s cynical and mercifully unsuccessful appointment to the Supreme Court: "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.” His words came to mind Tuesday evening as Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ stunningly retrograde response to the State of the Union transported me back to the 1950s, when women’s roles in the [H]ouse were more clearly defined, and they appeared on TV to support their husbands and sell soap suds and refrigerators. The pollsters must know more than I do, but if Rodgers’ cliché-ridden, substance-free chat represents the Republican ideal of female leadership, the party really is in trouble. • Land of Opportunity. Both parties seek to embrace the issue of income inequality, which is greater now than any time since 1929. Republicans blame government for stifling opportunities for the ambitious; Democrats blame corporate greed, obscene bonuses and repressive taxation. But recent studies question whether economic mobility was ever more than an anecdotal reality in modern America, and a report this week by 24/7 Wall Street ranked America 19^th in providing opportunities for our children. Those providing the most were countries in what Donald Rumsfeld dismissively labeled “the old Europe” – those places, our history books insist, from which people fled in search of a better life in America.

The One-Eyed Soldier

In his 1938 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo communicates the horrible realities of war through the mind of a young soldier who wakes up in a hospital, his body literally obliterated by an artillery shell. In “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” Eric Bogle sings of a young Australian who returns legless from Gallipoli, as a searing criticism of those who glorify war. In his State of the Union address, President Obama used Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg for the longest – and almost the only – bipartisan applause line of the evening. My heart goes out to SFC Remsburg, an Army Ranger who was blown to pieces by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and who continues his long, courageous and painful struggle to recover. We should all stand for him. But we should also ask, what exactly is it we were applauding? Remsburg was wounded during his 10^th mission to Iraq and Afghanistan, which tells you all you need to know about our nation’s shared sacrifice in the war on terror. (Not to be outdone, Republican Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s response melded “the boundless opportunity that lies ahead” with the recent death of Sgt. Joseph Hess of Spokane.)

Trumbo’s hero wanted to tour America in a glass box to make people see what really happens in war. It is not enough that we give SFC Remsburg a two-minute standing ovation and then go home to bed, reinvigorated in our patriotism. We should walk in his shoes.