If you pay much attention to the news, you will almost certainly have concluded by now that everything is ruined. You will be certain that even if this is not the very last week of human civilization (which obviously it is), that we are, at least, in one helluva tailspin and things haven’t been this bad since the plague. You can be forgiving for feeling this way.

I mean, goddamn. We’ve got genocides going in, like, five or six countries as you read this. The largest economy in the world is unwilling to pay its most vulnerable employees. Native American women are still disappearing at an unbelievable (and barely reported) rate, 15,000 refugee children have been separated from their families (and two have died in custody), and Americans are finally more likely to die of a drug overdose than in a car wreck. Hell, there are even inches left over to report on the whole Jayme Closs thing, which, wtf.

Then there’s fact that most of the large-scale human tragedies confronting the planet now have direct roots in two things: a legacy of imperialist fuckery and global warming. We, as humanity, haven’t demonstrated that we’re all that interested in changing any of that stuff, and have more or less agreed that the next best thing is to just make a lot of money not solving anything. Like, by building walls, and arresting children, and things like that. It should make us all feel pretty queasy that we look to a shaving cream company with a history of “literally false” advertising and price fixing convictions as a beacon of morality.

Because at its most basic root genocide, toxic masculinity, and corporate impunity all stem from essentially the same premise: me first. Ultimately, it sort of comes down to whether or not we believe that we should be able to do whatever we want whenever we want to. Obviously the dynamics of power come in when start looking at what it is we can get away with, but the basic issue is the same: should everyone else just go fuck themselves?

And how we answer that question speaks volumes to where we land on issues like human migration, the #MeToo movement, white supremacy, etc. An earnest effort to understand and address the problems facing our communities, nations, and species must stem from the basic assumption that other people matter.

The reality is that pretty much everyone reading this is in no danger of ethnic cleansing, and we’ll all be dead at least a few years before a warming climate touches off a human extinction. The relatively new public embrace of conversations surrounding racial, gender, and sexual equality represent the fact that we’re just now acknowledging that our families and neighbors matter. Nevermind people we’ve never met.

 

We’ve got plenty of runway left for self-serving people to manufacture problems for which they are selling a self-serving short-term solution. We can lie to ourselves about “clean coal” eight years at a time. Bloviating about a useless/impossible border wall is a great way to not talk about actual solutions to actual problems. Let’s be honest, it’ll take a lot of genocides before there aren’t enough people left on earth to buy razors and keep Proctor and Gamble profitable.

Meaningful change can only grow from a true, honest belief that other people’s lives have meaning. Of course we’re behind the ball there, having embraced a political/financial system with a robust record of placing profitability over humanity, and if we’re honest industrialized communism doesn’t have the best track record for human rights. While a violent leftist revolution would feel really good, it probably wouldn’t solve all of the issues we’re facing today.

And that’s probably a good thing, because a violent revolution sounds like it would make a real mess and besides, really, it’s the right-wing extremists that have all the guns.

No, I think that we can get a lot done without burning down the White House. But the trick is that we actually have to care. Gillette made a great marketing video about toxic masculinity, but grooming products targeted at women cost 50% more than those marketed to men. That hybrid Suburban drips with self-satisfied sex-appeal when you take your kids at Montessori school, but it’s not doing a damn thing to make sure there will be glaciers in Glacier Park when those same kids go to college.

A Green New Deal sounds like a great way to motivate a liberal base, and represents a good start, but the fact is that we don’t need to ask Congress for permission. The same tools and forces that have given the oil and gas industry carte blanche to write US policy (foreign and domestic!) are available to effect meaningful change. Our #1 contributor to greenhouse emissions is transportation. Don’t like it? Stop buying gas. Saw a heart breaking video about orangutans? Great. Drop the palm oil and imported beef. The only trick is that you actually have to do it. Posting on Facebook isn’t enough.

The greatest issue confronting the left is not Donald Trump. It is not right wing extremists. It is not even global warming. It is the uncomfortable reality that the tools for change are readily available, and that when the rubber meets the road we are, perhaps, not quite so resolute in our convictions as our bumper stickers say.

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The longer that a person lives, the nearer the probability that that person finds him or herself with a freezer full of mountain lion steaks creeps toward 1.

And when that day eventually comes, it has been my experience that such a person will shortly thereafter find himself annoyed that even Steve Rinella lacks an honest guide to preparing sirloin of puma. The internet suggests parboiling the meat before marinating. Good lord. Is nothing sacred?

It looks a bit like pork, this person may conclude, and at least that’s a place to start. And isn’t necessity the mother of innovation, after all? This person may brine it, pound it flat, dredge it in flour and egg and pretzel crumbs and fry it in oil until the trichinosis cysts are probably mostly pretty much zapped and then enjoy it over a bed of spaetzle and mushroom gravy.

“Triumph!” this person will say and celebrate this new regional curiosity before conceding at last that this really is just schnitzel.

Because after alcohol, weapons, and sandwiches, the next thing the various cultures of humanity have independently derived is the process of breading something and boiling it in fat. This is not a new concept at all, and smilodon steaks were probably some of the first delicacies enjoyed by humans. Go figure.

Which is reassuring as we look to our current political climate, that nothing, really, is unprecedented. We have a tendency, as Americans, to forget that our nation is a mere 250 years old, and that we are not special.

After all, who is more a modern day Don Quixote than Don Trump? The delusional megalomaniac who is inspired by fictions to joust windmills and abuse hotel staff? (Sancho Panza, in this analogy, is, of course, the Republican Party, biding its time and suffering indignity for the promise of a castle that will never come*). The tragic hero and patron saint to generations of dreamers has finally found a host.

And we should not be surprised that when, in 1939, Henry Miller was appalled by the spiritual decay of the American worker, he coined the minimalist movement: “Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable.”

And spoke directly to Colin Caepernick and the BLM: “the flag has become a cloak to hide iniquity. We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it it means danger, revolution, anarchy.”

And could not possibly have known the prescience of his words, “We’ll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye – just wait and see. The capital of the new planet – the one, I mean, which will kill itself off – is of course Detroit.”

This is, of course, a step beyond the generational gripes about “kids these days,” as old as Socrates. It should be unnerving that Miller’s observations on the social landscape of the United States at the dawn of the second world war feel so relevant.

That his warnings that our “passions are easily mobilized by demagogues” feels written for the present, and “to-day when a man or woman succeeds in escaping from the horrors of Europe, when he finally stands before the bar under our glorious national emblem, the first question they put to him is: ‘how much money have you?’ If you have no money but only a love for freedom, only a prayer for mercy on your lips, you are debarred, returned the slaughter-house, shunned as a leper,” need only replace “Europe” with “Honduras” to represent perfectly our southern border.

It is right that we should wring our hands. But then we continue to read, if we wish, we can see a glimmer of optimism there. Because Miller reminds us that “a great scourge never appears unless there is a reason for it,” and Cervantes concludes that “neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.”

We have the benefit of looking back to recognize that our missteps are not special. That as hopeless as it sometimes looks we have not blown it yet, and while, sure, the last time we all elected nationalistic demagogues 60 million people had to die, if we would like things can be different now.

 

*and clapped-out, in-too-deep, just-wants-a-nap Rocinante is Mike Pence, duh.

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The environment is so hot right now.

Anymore it seems like most everyone is either going blue in the face as we connect the dots between natural disasters, a warming climate, and its anthropogenic nature (and the fact that we have been predicting this for decades), or passing the buck down the road a few more years until those coal industry checks clear.

The newly  minted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is hard at work  to build a caucus around a Green New Deal, right wing leadership is doubling down on being comically uninformed, and everyone else is pretty much drowning, burning, or sleeping peacefully at night now that they’ve bullied their city council into banning straws. Because that will fix all this, obviously.

And the straw thing is important. I’m serious. Not because a ban on plastic straws will fix anything, but because it is the most recent iteration of wildly misguided greenwashing from the left. It represents a failure to understand the scope, scale, and nature of the problem so profound that it is hard to take these people seriously as they mock our current president for suggesting that superfires could be prevented by raking leaves. It is the same.

And to be clear, there is a fundamental difference at play: the President of the United States is the single person on earth best-suited to make a meaningful difference on climate change. His failure not only to act, but to actively divest from the inadequate measures that were already in place is a disgrace. His smug refusal to acknowledge the consensus of the scientific community and the seriousness of the problem makes it easy to understand how the rest of us might grasp at straws* for any way to make a positive change, no matter how ineffective.

Unfortunately our best intentions, whether its banning straws, or giving up single-use cups, or switching to a more fuel-efficient car are nothing more than emotional palliatives to give us the sensation of control.

The premise is correct. Meaningful action on climate change is necessary to avoid catastrophic mass extinctions on earth in our lifetimes. This action needs to have grass roots at its base, but not in the way that we are seeing it. For instance, your new Clean Canteen looks cool clipped to your new Fjällräven backpack, sure, but you’ll need it to replace as much as 1,000 paper cups to offset the environmental impact of mining, manufacturing, transporting, cleaning, and eventually disposing, of that stainless steel cup. And that paper cup takes about 0.55 megajoules of energy to manufacture, while your Toyota Prius burns about two megajoules of gasoline per mile.

When we say that climate action requires meaningful, grassroots change, we mean that we have to make actual changes. The marginal feel-goods of sipping your chair from a designer mug are not it. It means a fundamental, catastrophic shift in how we operate, which can only happen in a broad way through financial incentive. Meaningful change does not mean forcing auto makers to average 22mpg rather than 16mpg; it means agreeing that gas should cost $15 a gallon and we should invest that tax revenue in livable cities and public transportation. It means “hopping on a plane” should cost $5,000 each way.

It means recognizing that the US Military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on earth, and the primary driver of US foreign policy is energy security. It means divesting from coal-fired power in favor of renewables, sure, (heating and domestic energy use account for 25% of fossil fuel emissions globally) but it also means that we’re going to be hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and that if you can’t stand the heat maybe you shouldn’t buy a house in Phoenix. It means, simply, using much, much less of everything.

And of course you may recognize themes here from some socialist hellscape. It’s un-American, you say. It will never happen.

And, unfortunately, you’re right, for the time being anyway. Because we, as humans, are not that good at looking far into the future. We are, however, excellent at engineering our way out of a pickle. And whether those engineered solutions are levees, or storm walls, or vast climate-controlled hydroponic factory farms (for when drought/fire/disease wipes out our agricultural hubs), they’ll probably do a fair job of keeping humanity around. We’re good at that, and will not effect meaningful change until we are forced to by real catastrophe.

So screw it. There’s a few cigarettes left in the pack. I wonder if we can smoke ’em all in one go.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

*pun very much intended. sorry not sorry.

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Ok, great. So you voted. Now what, right? You go back to work for a while and wait for the mid-term election parties tonight? Are mid-term election parties a thing? I don’t think so. And besides, how is this thing really going to play out, anyway? Let’s look at it, there’s a few ways, on the national level, that this can go down.

Right now Republicans hold the presidency and both houses of Congress, and democrats are making a run at taking back at least one chamber. The contests are both pretty heated, and it could go one of three ways:

Neither Chamber of Congress Flips

This would be bad. When Donald Trump began to gain momentum in the republican primary a constituency of moderate republicans formed the “Never Trump” caucus of so-called reasonable republicans. This constituency shrank, but galvanized, during the general election, and even continued to putter along after we elected Donald Trump president.

However, the ideological red line that Trump seemed to cross on a daily basis turned out not to be a red line at all once his polling numbers among republicans never really suffered in the face of unapologetic lies, racist nationalism, and white supremacy. It turned out that the “Never Trump” movement was really just political hedging and the republican party of today has more or less embraced his white nationalist platform.

For us, as an electorate, not to reject that platform will serve as an embrace of that platform. For us to not flip at least one chamber of Congress will cement our country as one that celebrates an authoritarian, ultra-conservative government in pursuit of a white ethno-state. We’re talking, like, Eastern Bloc shit, you know?

Deflated, the political left (which is how we’re describing human rights now) will be further disillusioned, and extremists will probably conclude that the electoral process is broken, this nation is broken, and that a violent socialist rebellion is the only choice left. They will take to the hills with rifles where they will be killed pretty quickly in DHS drone strikes, and a small, impotent resistance will be hunted and killed by DHS,  ICE, and the (now) pro-government militias that have been busy for the last few years not paying for grazing leases, storming federal buildings, and serving as your local law enforcement.

This guerrilla street fighting will trigger more Patriot Act-style legislation to curtail civil rights and increase surveillance in the interest of homeland security, we’ll probably abolish presidential term limits, and then yeah, there you go, we’ve got Trump until we all die.

You’ve seen the Handmaid’s Tale. You get it. Let’s not do this.

The House Flips

Sure, it’s possible that the Senate will flip and the House won’t, but that’s kind of a long shot it seems like.

So if democrats retake the House, ho man, Trump would love that. Because here’s the two things that will happen:

1. President Trump’s legislative agenda will be done with for at least two years. This is a guy whose party controls the presidency and both chambers of Congress, and still complains that everyone is out to get him. If the House flips he will see actual obstruction, and that is basically emotional validation for a guy whose entire platform is to complain that everyone is wrong and only he can save us. He’s already got a legislative win in the tax cut bill, so all that’s left to do is sit back, spew white nationalist vitriol, and sign unconstitutional Executive Orders. This is basically retirement. He’s no longer even expected to get anything done.
2. There will be an effort to impeach him. There’s good reason to believe that Mueller is hot on his trail, and a fired up left-of-center House probably won’t need much prodding to bring articles of impeachment with a simple majority. God, Trump would love that. The House flips and the first thing they do is vote to impeach? That’s essentially handing him a second presidential term as it whips his constituency into a whole-milk froth like we’ve never seen. Especially because with democrats only holding the House and Trump’s base furious, it’s hard to imagine a republican Senate mustering the 67 votes needed to convict. He’s probably pretty safe, still. The only real exception here would be if the Mueller investigation turns up something really, really gnarly, at which time the erstwhile Never Trumpers say “I Told You So” and we wind up with the next guy. This would look a lot like Both Chambers Turning, below.

But before that happens, what happens nationally? What does a flipped House mean? Trump’s white nationalist base is out in the open now. The 30% or so of the population who think he’s about as neat as sliced (white) bread are ride-or-dies. Another 25-30% or so of the population votes the democrat ticket because it’s the lesser of two evils, and will continue to vote for more progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in primaries and downballot contests.

Meanwhile, moderate republicans (looking at you, college educated women and Zuckerbergs) will finally have had enough of being a Nazi sympathizer and find refuge in the mainstream democratic party, which now holds a comfortable plurality. This will shift the party to the right, where it will maintain its position on things like abortion rights, gun control, and climate science, but will be soft on regulating Wall Street and the tech industry. You can say goodbye to campaign finance reform, that’s for sure.

Both Chambers Turn

This is another nuclear outcome. If both chambers flip, that will indicate that more Americans are not white nationalist Nazi-sympathizers than previously thought. It will mean that the hedging of the “Never Trumpers” will be back, and an impeachment conviction is on the table. This is bad for everyone.

We need to vote Trump out of office, obviously. But to impeach him would be the final validation that he was the victim of a deep state conspiracy and martyr him to the 30% of the population who are drinking the Cool Aid, or milk, or whatever. This time the armed militias taking to the hills will be right wingers. Right wing extremists are already the most violent terror organizations targeting Americans, and this would be a declaration of war. Impeachment of Donald Trump will catalyze an armed insurgency that we have not seen in our lifetimes (except for where the US has destabilized democratically elected governments elsewhere in the world), essentially giving the US the ol’ US treatment. You remember Guatemala, right? Same deal.

 

Now, all of these options look pretty bad. It’s like best case scenario we kind of just shrug our shoulders and give in to our technocratic overlords at Google, Facebook, and Amazon and just put as much as we possibly can on our credit cards until we die. And call me jaded – until we see meaningful change at a smaller scale, that’s pretty much what national politics is going to look like.

However, all is not lost.

There are incredibly compelling initiatives and local candidates on your ballot right now. We cannot pretend to change the course of a ship the size of the US Federal Government if we can’t even steer the speedboat that is your city council. If we can’t pass bonds and initiatives to fund schools, healthcare, and open space.

If we can’t take it on ourselves to research candidates and issues, and vote based on that information, then honestly, we deserve the outcomes of the national elections that boast billion dollar advertising budgets.

It is impossible to look to national level politics clearly and not feel physically ill. But on the local level we have the power to effect meaningful change. National attack ads and voter obstruction is designed to disenfranchise you from local issues as well as national ones. Fuck that. Vote the whole ballot, do your own research, and once we get our local politics sorted out, we can look to the larger problems facing this country. Don’t worry, they’ll still be here tomorrow.

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