Flint

When I last visited Flint, Michigan, in 2012, I wrote in American Apartheid: “Flint belies our image of urban decay. With no high-rise projects, it is a city of tree-lined neighborhoods of single-family houses where 200,000 people once lived, and half that number remains. But on those streets are hundreds of abandoned and burned-out houses, which remind you that Flint is the most violent city in America.” Flint is back in the news, this time because, in April 2014, its state-appointed emergency manager switched the source of the city’s water to the Flint River to save money. The water was cheap because it was filthy, and the complaints began immediately. Soon the city was telling its residents to boil their water before drinking it, and General Motors stopped using it altogether because it corroded engine parts. But the state government ignored the growing health crisis until it became a full-blown political disaster.

Flint is where environmental degradation meets social neglect. For over five decades the city, the birthplace of General Motors, has suffered the all-too-familiar urban pattern of disinvestment, depopulation and decay, unemployment, poverty and crime.

For a long time in this country, the environmental and social justice movements ran on separate tracks, focusing on different wildernesses. But it’s increasingly clear – from climate change to Flint’s water supply – that the first victims are the same: the poorest and most vulnerable, those who can neither move nor get out of the way. When governments deliberately abandon those people, it seems a betrayal of democracy.

Letters Real and Imagined

• Sir: I read with interest your report that Jeb Bush is paying $2,888 per vote. I work among men who have long provided those services for free, and we’re wondering if Mr. Bush pays that sum for each recorded vote, or just once per person.

Sincerely,

J.D. “Digger” Blagden, Jr.

Cook County Cemetery

• Defenders of James Buchanan and Bush 43 objected to my singling out the two gentlemen for censure (one pointing to Bill Clinton’s “thievery, lasciviousness, abuse of power and deceit”). First, I didn’t mean they were the only bad presidents. One thinks of Chester A. Arthur, Warren G. Harding and the two Andrews, Jackson and Johnson – and what to make of Millard Fillmore? – all of whom America survived. But I do believe that at least one criterion for evaluating a president is the state of the country at the end of his tenure – and on that score it would be hard to do worse than 1860, as Buchanan dithered on slavery while the country hurtled toward war, and 2008, after the work of the Bush-Cheney domestic and international wrecking crew. (Well, maybe there’s also a place for Mr. Hoover.)

• Dear Gillespie, wrong Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:52: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

• II Corinthians 3:17: It’s not two Corinthians, moron. It’s eleven Corinthians. @realDonaldTrump

Correction: A reader noted that my number of Democratic caucus goers was off by 171,109, which is embarrassing. Iowa Democrats, however, do seem to have an odd way both of counting voters and recording votes.

Why Didn’t Anyone Ask?

Fast forward to 2018. President Trump is giving a tour of his new wall. Surprisingly, he decided to build the northern one first. “We call it ‘Cruz Control,’” he said. “No more Cubano-Canadian presidential candidates sneaking down here. Everybody hates them.

“We’ll deal with the Mexican border later,” he added. “Right now we need the workers because of my huge business boom that's coming.”

Trump Construction, a subsidiary of The Trump Organization, built the wall, and much of its 5,525-mile length sits on land Trump Real Estate acquired through the recently expanded power of eminent domain.

“I couldn’t wait around for the thousands of pathetic negotiations,” Trump said. “I’m a leader. I do deals, and I needed to get this deal done.”

When Canada declined to pay for the wall, the Trump companies filed for Chapter 11 under the newly expanded bankruptcy law provision known as “the billionaires’ bailout,” which provides government-backed insurance for investors deemed too great to fail.

“That stupid kid [Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] wouldn’t even negotiate,” fumed Trump. “What a loser.”

Trudeau noted that the logo-emblazoned Trump Tower Tollbooths make it harder for Americans to cross into Canada to get affordable health care.

Asked why he hadn’t put his business holdings in a blind trust – or at least stepped down as Trump chairman – the president responded, “Are you kidding? I’m a businessman, not a politician. I'm not missing out on the greatest eight business years in history.

“What conflict of interest?

“I put the me in America.”

This Morning’s News

Let’s review this morning’s news. In Harney County, Oregon, Ammon Bundy, his brother and six other people involved in the 24-day occupation of Malheur Wildlife Refuge were arrested; one man was hospitalized; and LaVoy Finicum, the Arizona rancher who had announced he wouldn’t be taken alive, was killed. The heavily armed Citizens for Constitutional Freedom came to the facility, which Bundy called “the tool to do all the tyranny” (it's managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to demand the return of federal lands to “local control.” It’s probably worth noting that none of those arrested come from Harney County. In fact, none even live in Oregon. Governor Kate Brown, the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association and most local residents told the protesters to go home.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has pulled out of Thursday’s Republican debate because Megyn Kelly doesn’t like him. But he's found someone who does: former state Senator Jake Knotts will endorse Trump later today in Lexington, SC. Knotts is the guy who said of then-candidate, now-governor Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, “We got a raghead in Washington, we don’t need a raghead in the State House.”

It’s time to speak up against people brandishing guns in the name of freedom, wrapping themselves in the Constitution to commit crimes, and spewing racist hatred to protest political correctness – and it’s time to stop treating the politicians who fan these flames as a joke.

The silent majority, I keep hearing, stands with Trump. I’m betting the silent majority stands with me.

An Anthro-Skeptic Speaks: 13th in a Series

With the announcement that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record – soaring past defending champion 2014 – it’s time to check in on our “Climate and Energy” series. To refresh: the series seeks to foster a discussion that rises above the heated rhetoric “to define the issues and, more importantly, propose solutions.” I am not, as they say, a scientist, but I have long worked with scientists, and it seems clear that something is happening up there. The great majority of scientists believe that humans play a major role in the problem, but I have an old scientific friend who is not convinced.

“It should be remembered in all the flak, rhetoric, and hand waving now with us that the assortment of mechanisms and their mutual interactions that drive these cycles is still far from clear. It is also far from clear the extent to which anthropogenic activity over the last 250 years has exacerbated the process.

“No question about global warming, but it is sun-driven, not man-made. The big question is how much anthropogenic CO2 produced compared to terragenic CO2 produced as oceans warm, reducing solubility of CO2 in water. I am swinging to idea that anthropogenic is a butterfly belch compared to terragenic.”

This is no small difference of opinion, as it demands that we focus on adapting ourselves to inevitable warming, rather than on bending the natural world to our will.

Join the conversation.

Find this series on my website, where you will also find the other two 2015 series, “Rescue at Sea” and “Refugees.”

Carpe Diem

“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90, verse 10). Last evening a woman offered me her seat on the subway – the #2 uptown express, which I had pressed onto at Times Square.

“Would you like to sit down?” she said, standing and coming forward as if to help me to her seat. It was impossible to pretend she meant someone else, although I didn’t have a cane, I wasn’t wheezing and I try not to stoop.

“No, thank you,” I murmured, gripping the pole, with a look that led her to say, “I hope I didn’t offend you” as she retook her seat.

She had features and an accent that could have been out of the Middle East (or southern Europe), and she was of an age, although younger than mine, that I still dream about dating, a fantasy I am now reexamining.

When she went back to her iPhone, I looked furtively at the window. I didn’t think I looked that old.

“How did I get to be so old?” my mother once asked me, and the answer, of course, is because she was lucky, although, at the time, she didn’t see it that way.

Aging is a funny business. We know it’s coming, and yet we aren’t ready for it, and the truth is that, while we are all one day closer to our death than we were yesterday, we also have one more day to live.

I’ll likely never see that kind woman (and her New York immigrant values) again, but I’m standing taller today, and grateful I still can.

“So teach us," the psalm continues, “to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (verse 12).

Et Tu, DuPont?

We raised our kids in southeastern Pennsylvania, which was still largely rural, although the influence of the DuPont Company radiated powerfully from its Wilmington base 18 miles away. Many family members and company executives lived in Chester County, whose jewel is Longwood Gardens, once the country estate of Pierre du Pont and now one of the world’s botanical wonders. DuPont was considered a good corporate neighbor. Family members and employees served on many community boards, and earlier generations had created foundations that were particularly active in land conservation and environmental protection. The company itself had the reputation of being a leader in industrial sustainability and corporate best practices.

That reputation fell apart this month with Nathanial Rich’s revelation of DuPont’s decades-long efforts to conceal the environmental and human costs of its chemical pollution. “They knew this stuff was harmful,” said attorney Rob Bilott, “and they put it in the water anyway.”

You’d think we’d be inured to these stories by now. From the cigarette companies to Dan Fagin’s Tom’s River, 60 years of a single, numbing plot line: cover-ups, bullying and lying through their teeth. “I always thought [DuPont] was among the ‘least-worst’ of the polluters,” the former editor of the local newspaper wrote me. “Turns out they were horrendous” – not in their own backyard, of course, but in West Virginia where they thought nobody would notice.

I don’t think DuPont set out to be a bad neighbor, but before succumbing to the siren song of deregulation, it’s worth pondering how it became one.

So's His Momma

“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.” Now the blustering birther is going after Ted Cruz, although more quietly than his bombastic attacks – which he has never retracted – on Barack Obama’s presidential legitimacy. Cruz, as everyone knows by now, was born in Canada. His father was Cuban, his mother from Delaware. This is a problem, says Trump, not so much because Cruz is ineligible, but because the Democrats will sue and the case will drag through the courts for years. Why take the chance? Vote for me. I was born in Queens.

“Not a problem, experts say.” Cruz is a natural-born citizen because of his mother’s citizenship. So while there are many reasons he shouldn’t be president, this isn’t one of them.

Yet I know people who still doubt Obama’s legitimacy. In the eighth year of his presidency, they’re still talking about the typefaces on his alleged birth certificate. “An obvious forgery,” one said to me recently. Obama was born in Kenya. He was born in Indonesia. He was born – ready for this one? – in Hawaii, Kenya, “which sits right outside the Gates of Hell.”

This is damning stuff, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that Obama’s mother was born in Wichita, Kansas, which makes him as American as . . . Ted Cruz.

So why are people still demanding the president produce his "real" birth certificate?

Maybe they think Canada is more American than Kenya.

Hope Under Ground

I was walking last evening through the bowels of Manhattan, the New York subway system beneath Times Square, with thousands of other people hurrying in all directions, absorbed in our own journeys, seeing each other as little more than moving obstacles to be avoided, when a powerful voice pulled me away from my intended path. In a place where musicians, singers and young Black acrobats perform daily for spare change, Alice Tan Ridley sang songs blending gospel and blues that caused weary, distrustful people to stop, to listen and to acknowledge one another. At one point she was joined by a girl of 10 or 11 with a powerful voice for one so young, who appeared and then disappeared back into the crowd. So magical was the moment that even I deposited some greenbacks in the rapidly filling basket. Alice Tan Ridley, it turns out, has been singing in the subway for 20 years, earning money to support her family, which includes her daughter, Gabourey Sidibe, nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for her role in Precious. The 63-year-old Alice appeared on “America’s Got Talent” in 2010 and now tours nationally. Yet here she was, underground, part of Music Under New York, which since 1985 has provided over 7,500 performances annually by more than 350 artists at 30 locations throughout the city’s subway system.

In an underground tunnel, a place known for shoving strangers and urban crime, a metaphor for the dark life of a big city, a moment of beauty appears – a gift of hope for the New Year.

Solstice

It’s black everywhere when I wake up this morning, and while I don’t mind winter’s early evenings, I heartily dislike getting up in the dark. But I have an idea to write about “my Hillary problem,” to explain that I have never been a fan – that the emails and the foundation shakedowns are part of an ugly sense of entitlement the Clintons have acquired over the years – but also that she seems now the one candidate for whom the world is a complex place. The desk at which I sit faces east, and when I turn on the light, the window reflects my face looking out at the spreading dawn and simultaneously looking back at me. I am part of what I see. It’s the shortest day of the year; the winter solstice will arrive 12 minutes before midnight. I sit, with my coffee growing cooler, watching the sky turn from black to light blue (which the dictionary says is also called sky blue or angel blue) to gray and then to pink. The light frost lifts from the ground. There is no sound, not even the noisy geese who winter here now are up.

I glance at the morning’s news, but the world outside the window seems immune to the atrocities it reports, just as the press seems too often oblivious to the beauty of the dawn and the resilience of goodness.

I’d like to dwell on that thought. The days are growing longer again. My children are coming home.

Send in the Clown

Why is it that only Donald Trump seems to have any fun at the Republican debates? Unlike 18 million of my fellow citizens, I listened to Tuesday’s debate on the radio, and without the glitz of the Las Vegas background and the body language of the performers, I was struck by how humorless and wooden were the performances: Ben Carson’s impersonation of a schoolboy reciting recently memorized foreign policy facts; Chris Christie morphing into Rudy Giuliani and trying to scare everybody; Ted Cruz doubling down on carefully targeted “carpet bombing” (“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”).

Yes, we live in dangerous times, which demand seriousness, but we are also looking for a human behind the mask – which brings me back to Donald Trump, who seems to actually be enjoying running for president and whose off-the-cuff retorts contrast so sharply with the others’ carefully calibrated responses. I think part of his appeal, which has endured far longer than anyone thought, is due to his apparent openness, which gives one a glimpse into what kind of president this man would actually be.

What it has revealed, of course, is a man whom only Vladimir Putin could love – a man who insults all his Republican opponents but praises Putin as a strong leader whose poll numbers are more than twice those of Barack Obama.

His candor is good for us. Let's hope it sinks him.

Correction: in Wednesday’s post, the remembrance of Doug Tompkins was written by my son, Jake. The editor apologizes for the oversight.

Monday Morning: 12th in a Series

A concerned capitalist's nuclear argument: Real progress was made in Paris over the last two weeks. But optimism must be tempered by these realities: (1) the worldwide political process has rarely imposed short-term costs to produce long-term benefits, and it’s not clear they did so this time; (2) there is still no enforceable regulatory mechanism to ensure compliance at any level; (3) reliance on renewable energy alone will not reduce atmospheric carbon levels quickly enough; and (4) strategies that limit energy use in developing countries will slow the economic growth their people desperately need.

Economics, not politics, is the best hope for CO2 reduction. When energy production from low/no carbon sources costs less than fossil fuel energy, Mr. Market will drive substitution quickly.

But because current fossil fuel prices don’t reflect their true planetary costs, they inhibit investment in green-energy production and technology. A significant carbon fee, levied by the major industrialized nations and imposed on their imports, would make green energy more cost competitive with fossil fuels, but neither the United States nor India seems likely to impose one soon.

Until major improvements in storage technology can manage solar and wind power’s intermittent production, only advanced nuclear power can effectively supply base-load no-carbon electricity. While additional research is needed to reduce investment costs, we do know that both uranium and thorium advanced reactors could ultimately produce virtually unlimited carbon-free electrical energy at a competitive price.

The United States is ceding nuclear technology leadership to China and India, despite its potential benefits for our economy, our export markets – and for climate change. Let's change our nuclear technology trajectory immediately.

Suicides and Bombers

The day after the San Bernardino murders, I read Hanna Rosin’s sad story of teenage suicides in Silicon Valley. With two lethal epidemics, both invoking the name of suicide and each inspiring others – almost all of them young – to follow, I wondered if there were any connections. Almost every culture glorifies suicide in some form – suicide missions in wartime, protesters publicly immolating themselves, Romeo and Juliet. Still, when suicide bombings erupted in the early 1980s, they seemed to me unsustainable, as, by definition, the number of volunteers must diminish. Clearly I was wrong: according to statistics compiled by the University of Chicago, since 1982, when 15-year-old Ahmad Qasir drove a truck bomb into Israeli Defense Forces headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, there have been 4,814 suicide attacks in 48 countries, leaving 48,465 people dead and 122,606 wounded – 4,814 martyrs for an act the Qur’an considers a grave sin, and many more signing up.

On the surface, suicidal murderers and suicidal victims have nothing in common. We think of those who die by suicide as despondent and lonely, intent on ending their own suffering, inflicting violence only on themselves – the antithesis of the murderous lust for martyrdom that drives suicide bombers. Yet, many suicide bombers – a surprising number of them “mild-mannered members of the middle class” – are also marginalized and alienated, vulnerable to mystical or cynical calls to martyrdom that promise their short lives meaning and gain them entry into paradise.

Maybe better understanding what causes young people take their own lives could shed some light on these murderous sprees.