2019 July blog: Little We See in Nature That Is Ours (revisited)!
Charles Peek
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. -George Jean Nathan, author and editor.
The day will come when, after harnessing space, winds, the tide and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, [humanity] will have discovered fire. Teilhard de Chardin
We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it, chopped down its forests, leveled its hills, muddied its waters, and dirtied its air. That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago. Rose Bird, Chief Justice of California Supreme Court.
Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only ONE day, of modern warfare. Peter Ustinov
A man should never
be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other
words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. -Alexander Pope
A man who is ‘ill-adjusted’ to the world is always on the verge of finding himself. One who is adjusted to the world never finds himself, but gets to be a cabinet minister. Hermann Hesse
As I was reading in a now well-known and widely circulated article, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology” by the noted theoretical physicist Brandon Carter from Cambridge University, I couldn’t help but reflect—
Well, of course, that paragraph is 90% bull shit. I have read the article; it was given to each of us one night at Torch Club by our speaker, R. David Clark, a chemistry teacher by profession, now in his 80’s and a friend for almost 60 of those years and once the youngest person to do Post-Doctoral work in Chemistry at the University of Nebraska.
What I really know from the article stems mostly from his talk. All right, entirely from his talk!
The 10% that is not bull shit is that last few words: I couldn’t help reflect. And what I can’t help reflect on is the continuing sad state of our politics, or as it might be called The Misanthropic Principle!
It is, of course, hard to know just where to begin since the onslaught on American values is so pervasive and persistent, one of whose latest point of attack is the latest run of nominees for the Fed—what doozies they are! But they could be nominees for anything in this administration, even the bellyachers who got booted.
I guess, however, that I’ll begin with what may well be the root problem and consider all the other woes as symptoms, and the root problem is intellectual and moral dishonesty, the flagrant penchant for preferring lies to facts and the muddying of all the waters so as to cover up the lies, a phenomenon that Justices Thomas and Gorsuch just demonstrated fully in their dissent on a recent Supreme Court decision.
One way of stating this is that, if you want to know what the Trump administration is really guilty of (or planning to be guilty of), you need to look no further than to see how they accuse those who oppose them or stand in their way. Drain the swamp means we are bringing to Washington a swamp such as it has never seen, even before it was drained to build D.C. and our houses of government.
I wrote one of our Senators the other day urging her support for the Fulbright Program. I have never met anyone who disputes the value, humane and practical, of the program. Nancy and I had the privilege of seeing it at work first hand.
Senator Fischer’s response: yup, great program, but with the national debt soaring, we have to make cuts.
Who “soared” the national debt, Deb? You did with your votes for Trump’s budget, a budget that in the offing drew the warnings that its additions to the deficit would be the excuse to cut the programs they have yearned to cut for years. Fulbright, of course; and public radio and television, libraries, museums, anything but unremitting warfare and bloated Pentagon budgets. And, oh yes, Social Security and Medicare!
This is not telling lies with a straight face. This is telling lies with a smile!
In this anti-intellectual, immoral culture, enter again the duplicity that characterizes the modern right wing—even Goldwater, Reagan, and Buckley must be shuddering in their graves at its magnitude. In the hue and cry over oil spills and eminent domain for foreign gain and jeopardized vital natural resources, the Republican’s pitched in with legislation to bar energy companies from exercising eminent domain. Sounds good, right? That’s how they wanted it to sound. But the only energy companies affected are clean energy companies. For oil (read: tar sands sludge) pipelines they, well, carved out an exemption.
This is where telling lies with a smile turns into telling lies with a vengeance!
I won’t belabor the way Barr and Rosenstein dealt with the Mueller report—David Leonhardt (NYT) and others continue to lay bare that swamp. (And bear in mind we will miss Rosenstein because, bad as he was, he was better than the average bear shitting in that forest.)
Another example from close to home: In Nebraska, a former Speaker of the Legislature put together a little factual history of the legislative attempts to bring property tax relief to the state—it simply lists the bills and initiatives, what they purported to do, and how they were dealt with. This became a report to the legislature for the use of various Senators and committees.
When a state Senator wanted to push through her own approach, regardless of past history, someone called for starting from the facts of that report. Senator Linehan’s response? She isn’t a fan of the report! No, I’ll bet not. Al Gore’s label, an inconvenient truth, seems to become more useful every day.
Our most inconvenient and vexing truth lately being that, backed by big money, a handful of officials (our Congressional Delegation, Governor, and 4 or 5 vindictive and partisan state legislators) have pretty much laid siege to higher education, the result being we are losing a very fine system President. There are real consequences to their petty pocket lining!
Maybe the most comical episode in this saga concerns the One Book One Nebraska selection for 2019. Of course, since most of the results of this chicanery aren’t remotely comical, the field was sort of wide open, and into it stepped the Nebraska Center for the Book’s selection, Ted Genoways’s This Blessed Earth. By the way, Iowa followed suit and named it their “one book” selection as well. Why? Because it is a compelling story of the perils that these days face agriculture in general and the family farm in particular.
The selection is normally followed by a “proclamation” by the Governor . . . who in this case declined to issue the proclamation. Set aside the obvious, that Governor Rickett’s doesn’t know the difference between a proclamation and an endorsement. What was comical was that in his statement declining to issue a proclamation he indicated he hadn’t even read the book.
Now, of course he had to say that or there might have been rancor in the ranks, ranks that would think he’d deserted them if he had read the book…or any book!
But, then, it raised the question: if you haven’t read it, why are you refusing to make the proclamation. The comedy continued: he said it was because he didn’t like Ted’s Facebook posts. Agree with me or be cast into the wintry darkness beyond the proclamation wall! There be dragons!
Well, not quite. Because the comedy now came to fruition…the book’s sales soared in the wake of the Governor’s refusal to issue the proclamation. Rare for such a book, it went into a second printing! Several of us, including its author, have urged the Governor not to proclaim next year’s selection. What was it that Forrest Gump said about stupid?
But comedy aside, this was just a small incident from the hinterlands that indicates how far reaching the culture of lies as the core strategy of power has become.
We should, possibly, be a little grateful to the Donald. His election has opened our eyes to how pervasive is the culture of unprincipled wealth in our nation. We knew it existed, but we had ignored how powerful it had become. Now we know. Now we cannot ignore it anymore.
So now that we know, one consequence is the need, in ways small and large, to return to what nourishes a love of truth, integrity, and justice. That would mean,
No more sitting on our duffs but organizing for action, as our local KAN (Kearney Action Network) and Kearney Indivisible and Kearney Blue are doing. It would mean no more giving universities a pass on their current STEM-centered approach to education and the return of the liberal arts as the core of an education—to the disciplines of rational thought, historical accuracy, and effective communication. It would mean reexamining the results of deserting rather than reforming our faith communities. And it would mean reading—reading lists, reading clubs (like the joint NPR/NYT selections) that get us out of the echo chamber and into the world of reality.
It might even mean, for those of us who should know better, letting the 50 or 60 candidates for the Democrat nomination for President have a free and informed debate of issues without resorting to name-calling, hasty judgment, premature selection, or power politics. But possibly that is truly something too good to be true.
**
Reading? I suspect we all need to consider books that examine a reality for what it is rather than what we might like it to be. Some people on the right have actually been reading about global warming and are changing their minds. Some farmers and ranchers have been studying markets and coming to see they backed the wrong CTN (Chief Trade Negator).
Sadly, the book I once touted as a “real look” at things—Paul Theroux’s Deep South—became by the time I finished it, a disappointment. In his fourth “season,” he lets his visceral hatred of the Clintons obscure one after another of his reflections. By the end, his look at the deep poverty of the South has been twisted into a scenario—most of the problems of Arkansas, maybe all the Confederate States, are because the Clinton’s either caused them or didn’t do what Theroux thinks would have prevented or ameliorated them. If that seems an exaggeration, go read for yourself. I approached one chapter thinking, surely he won’t be able to bring the Clintons into this topic…but I was so wrong.
This, incidentally, is apparently the “moderate” stance. The “right-wing” stance is that the Clinton’s have done no good anywhere; the “moderate” stance is that they did great good all around the globe—except at home. Sad to see a book that starts out so well turning into ideological diatribe. You have to wonder why his editor allowed it. So, apologies for my overly eager early comments on what a good read Deep South seemed to be.
The other day, someone posted a response on Facebook to someone who is reading the Mueller Report—wow, imagine that dedication. The responder wasn’t interested in anything anyone had to say about Trump, but would like to read a report on Hillary. The Hillary Report, whatever that is, is quite simple and has been widely available: hours of probing investigation exonerated her on every count except the charge that, like many cabinet secretaries and other leading political figures, she used her own email server. So much for someone living in their own Bannon-created echo chamber!
But there are lots of fine books that take real and probing looks at real conditions. I’m just concluding This Blessed Earth and plan to follow it with Carson Vaughan’s Zoo Nebraska. Finishing, too, the gift book William Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers and the loaner Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman and the recommended Albion by Peter Ackroyd. On deck: Nature’s God by Matthew Stewart (another gift).
Possibly not a more diverse set of books in most anyone’s home library! But exactly such thoughtful attention to such interesting facts as was once the goal of life-long education and of good literary non-fiction. Dick Wood used to reserve the A grade for students he felt sure would pursue a thoughtful life! (By the way, the title This Blessed Earth was previously the title for John Wheelock’s New and Selected Poems!)
Just to brighten things us, a photo from the first of our summer 2019 journeys:
Sunset off Crisfield Maryland June 2019
Next blog in August…catching up on the summer
capeek 