Saturday, November 14, 2020

Would Joe Biden Be President Elect Without Jo Jorgensen?

Update, 1.12.21 As time passes, it becomes more and more clear that if not for the pandemic, Trump would have won reelection, and democracy and government would likely be irretrievably damaged. If not for nature's intervention in the form of an invasive species, voters would have focused on the economy, which Trump had poured fuel on much like the dazzling flames that generate a sense of awe in the "man behind the curtain" scene in Wizard of Oz. In the movie, it is a dog that pulls back the curtain and reveals the fraud behind it. In real life, a coronavirus served that role. Without a pandemic, Trump could have continued to project all evil outward onto someone other than himself. With his imperial facade and silky voice, and his skill at playing an audience, the speech and rally format of a normal campaign would have favored him over Biden. 

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Friday, August 14, 2020

A "Pre-review" of Kurt Andersen's EVIL GENIUSES: The Unmaking of America

Though I haven't read Kurt Andersen's EVIL GENIUSES: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, a review in the NY Times points to some important elements to look for in this account of what went wrong in America beginning in the 1970s. 

What America lost, according to Andersen, is "an openness to the new" in favor of a "mass nostalgia." I experienced this in multiple ways--culturally in music and politically in the resistance to the new technologies needed to spare the world the ravages of climate change. 

Andersen's book is described as "saxophonely written," and since I'm a sax player, I will point out that a look backward is not necessarily a bad thing, if the aim is wisdom rather than nostalgia. Both classical music and jazz spent most of the 20th century pushing forward into ever greater abstraction and complexity until the music became largely unlistenable. If the audience rejected the new music, the composers and performers would point out that past innovators like Stravinski or Charlie Parker had also experienced resistance to their innovations. Ultimately, this means of rationalizing increasingly abrasive music began to wear thin. 

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Wednesday, June 17, 2020

How Numbers Drive News Coverage


A picture is worth a thousand words. Though Andrew Cuomo has said a lot of things worth saying through the crisis, this television screen is speaking volumes. As of late April, the pandemic's daily count of infections and deaths had pushed the stock market indexes down into the bottom corner of the screen, where they're barely visible.

The stock market had long been the reigning champion of the screen,  producing a steady stream of new numbers of seeming portent for people to digest. Even when the news was about something else, the digits would parade across the bottom of the screen, rising, falling. Sports and weather also demand attention by generating massive amounts of numbers, but other important aspects of reality simply can't compete. Climate change? Sorry, it may determine the destiny of civilization and much of nature, but it's slow-moving numbers seem disconnected from what we experience day to day, and are either too big for us to fathom or too small to seem of import.
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Monday, March 16, 2020

Repost: Shedding Our Martian Ways: Coronavirus and H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds

This is a repost from PrincetonNatureNotes.org.


A deserted airport. A civilization shut down by a virus. It makes me think of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, in which Martians conquer England with heat-rays and "black smoke", and seem unstoppable until, suddenly and surprisingly, they succumb to lowly pathogens to which they have no resistance.

We have watched as civilization has been taken over by forces alien to reality, as cold and unsympathetic as Wells' Martians, with a rigid ideology that aims all skepticism outward, and denies the connection between combustion and climate change, between spending and taxation, present and future, self and responsibility, words and truth.
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Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Anti-Science Ideology Destabilizes Economies

My friends have voiced a broad range of opinions about the coronavirus. Some think it poses a big threat, while others think the whole thing is overblown. Meanwhile, the stock market swoons, and our local university with all its magnificent facilities is switching to virtual education for the rest of the semester, and telling students to stay home after spring break.

The swoon in the stock market brings back memories of a similar swoon during the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. Back then, the great uncertainty was in the mortgage-backed securities--those bundles of home loans. Which loans were bad and which were okay? No one could tell because they came in bundles, sort of like a bunch of passengers on a plane, or students in a classroom. If one person in the group has coronavirus, then the entire bundle becomes suspect.
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Friday, February 21, 2020

Scandalizing, Minimizing, and the False Objectivity of "Both Sides" Journalism

News headlines and opinion pieces flash for a moment on our consciousnesses like fireworks in the evening sky, each making its momentary splash before quickly being displaced by others in an endless stream of efforts to light the darkness. One of the more illuminating opinion pieces, and one whose insight is worth capturing in a bottle to light one's long walk home, is a piece by Nicole Hemmer called "Scandalize! Minimize! Repeat as Necessary." It offers a quick history of what it calls the "conservative media's scandalization project." Dating back to the 1940s and gaining momentum in the 1990s and 2000s, it describes the conservative "effort to create an air of nonstop scandal around previous Democratic presidents and presidential hopefuls."
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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

False Strength and the Artificial Polarization of Our Era

Most of the polarization of our time is due to people's failure to direct their skepticism inward. Skepticism is associated with strength of mind--an ability to resist and scrutinize what others accept as true. But people who claim, for instance, to be climate skeptics are merely pretending to be tough minded, because they practice one-way skepticism, aiming it all outward. True skepticism, the kind that demonstrates strength of mind, is directed inward as well. The current president is an extreme example of directing criticism outwards but none inward. He's tough on others, soft on self. Scientists have an incentive to practice two-way skepticism, because the rigor of their profession requires that they look for flaws in their own data and conclusions, lest they later be discredited by their peers. They have to be tough on themselves, as well as others.
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Thursday, January 16, 2020

A-Team and B-Team Politicians--Looking and Listening Beyond the Words

Looking back across the tattered landscape of American politics, in my case extending back to the 1960s, is like having witnessed a six decades-long military convoy under attack. Politicians from Kennedy to Clinton slog forward as potshots and straifings generated by media and political opponents come from all sides. Some endure the onslaught, while others lie burning along the roadside. Some politicians in the 60s were dropped by real bullets, but character assassination has proven just as potent for eliminating potential leaders. The focus here is on candidates' varying capacity to survive intense scrutiny and brazen lies.

Across that arc of six decades, it's possible to see that some had a gift that lifted them above the rest--a resonance of voice, charisma, a compelling message that allowed them to survive attacks by connecting at a deeper level and with a broader swath of voters. While some of us vote according to which candidate best represents our beliefs, there seem to be many who are drawn more by an emotional connection to the leader, and this can cause the ship of state to lurch back and forth, from left to right, from election to election, according to the political heft and magnetism of those running for office. As the rightwing in particular becomes more radicalized, whether in the U.S., Brazil or elsewhere, these swings from left to right develop an increasingly destabilizing quality.
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