Zen And The Art Of Gorilla-Watching

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No Comfort From Chris Hedges

Reading Chris Hedges is never a fell-good experience. His unflinching assessments, his unsparingly bleak prognostications, offer no comfort. During the very trying times we are currently living through, why subject yourself to his analyses?

For a very simple reason: better a bitter truth than a sweet lie.

An interview in Salon shows that Hedges has little hope for any kind of renaissance in the United States after the Covid-19 crisis abates. There is a deep underlying rot:

The country's infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. [I had to look that word up.] The commons is being reduced to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people. A culture of distraction and spectacle has rendered many Americans incapable of being responsible engaged citizens. Our public educational system does not teach critical thinking skills. Radical right-wing Christians, white terrorist organizations and other neofascist paramilitaries and extremists are engaging in a campaign of thuggery, intimidation and violence against multiracial American democracy.

As handled by Trump, the coronona virus is but a foretaste of things to come,

as social inequality and political failure combine to create a full collapse of the country's already declining standard of living, as well as its ailing democracy.

And those who think the Democratic Party in general, and Joe Biden in particular, are capable of reviving the U.S. are deluding themselves:

Why? Because the Democrats are also part of the plutocratic establishment that has failed the American people.

Twelve hundred dollars to individuals suffering during this crisis is not sufficient. The Democrats were only really trying to block the equivalent of a $500 billion slush fund that is going into Mnuchin's hands, a man who acts like a criminal. That $1,200 is going to get vacuumed right up by the credit card companies and the banks who hold the mortgages.

The belief that Americans have a real electoral choice is an error in thinking.

America's current political system is a corporate political duopoly. A person can either vote for nativists and racists and climate deniers and creationists on one end, or a person can vote for people who speak in the language of tolerance and are willing to put gay people or women or people of color into positions of power as long as they serve the system.

In voting for Joe Biden, Americans will be voting for more of the same.

What is Biden's record? What is a person voting for if they back Biden on Election Day 2020?

The humiliation of courageous women like Anita Hill who confronted her abuser. You vote for the architects of endless war. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. Biden supports those things. With Biden you are voting for wholesale surveillance by the government, including the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs. You vote for the destruction of welfare. That was Biden. You vote for cuts to Social Security, which he has repeatedly called for cutting, along with Medicaid. You vote for NAFTA, you vote for "free trade" deals. If you vote for Biden, you are voting for a real decline in wages and the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

With Biden you are also voting for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to Christian "charter schools." With Biden you are voting for more than a doubling of the prison population. With Biden you are voting for the militarized police and against the Green New Deal.

You are also voting to limit a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You are voting for a segregated public school system. With Biden you are voting for punitive levels of student debt and the inability of people to free themselves of that debt through bankruptcy. A vote for Biden is a vote for deregulating banking and finance. Biden also supports for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.

A vote for Biden is also a vote against the possibility of universal health care. You vote for Biden and you are supporting huge, wasteful and bloated defense budgets. Biden also supports unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy the elections.

That's what you're voting for.

Things are very hard for all of us these days. If you accept Chris Hedges' dour outlook, there is much worse to come for the Benighted States of America.

"I'd Die For A Haircut"

Live in one of several jurisdictions in the Benighted States of America, you could very well get your wish:

But A Brief Reprieve

If our thoughts have been able, even briefly, to break out of their ongoing obsession with Covid-19 and death, we will have realized a couple of things:

One, that we really aren't masters of the universe, our supposed natural supremacy just a cruel delusion that has led us to this particular juncture in history. An invisible presence has sent us scurrying to our basements. How truly humbling.

And two, that our forced confinement has been extraordinarily beneficial to the environment, with a reported global average drop of 6% in greenhouse gas emissions; it is an improvement, however, that isn't nearly enough to mitigate climate change and will likely prove ephemeral.

But I fear these realizations will prove to be short-lived. Forced contemplation and reflection are uncomfortable. Teachable moments pass; lessons learned are quickly forgotten. Already, we passionately pine for a return to a normal that was never normal: getting and spending, overpopulating the earth, plundering the world's pantry with barely a second thought.

Yet some are hopeful that we can mend our ways, and that current hard-won environmental benefits can be retained:

...climate scientists and activists hope this moment can be a turning point, when our efforts to combat one global crisis inspire action against another, and governments use their unprecedented spending on economic recovery to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels and toward a green economy.

Robin Edger, executive director and CEO of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, sees this as our last, best chance:

Even before the pandemic it was going to take a massive investment and radical change to meet these targets, Edger said. “We were already talking about a public mobilization along the lines of nothing we’d seen since the Second World War. So now we’ve had this economic collapse as a result of a health crisis and the government has a choice to make: Are we going to make investments in line with our country’s stated climate goals and set ourselves up for the future, or are we going to try to cling to the past and pour money into shovel-ready but unsustainable projects?”

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres used the occasion of Earth Day earlier this week to draw a parallel between the global efforts to fight COVID-19 and climate change, calling the climate crisis an “even deeper emergency” and urging governments to target their economic recoveries toward a more sustainable future. “The current crisis is an unprecedented wake-up call,” he said. “We need to turn the recovery into a real opportunity to do things right for the future.”

Chantal Hebert, on the other hand, is dubious of the prospects for progress as she recalls what happened to Stephan Dion's Green Shift platform in the midst of the 2008 world financial crisis:

The 2008 storm hit as voters were headed to the polls in a federal election.

One of its immediate consequences was to sweep the campaign carpet from under then-Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and his climate-change platform.

As attention shifted to the quickly deteriorating economic scene, Dion came to look as if he had brought the wrong lines to the electoral audition. A plurality of voters opted to keep Stephen Harper in the role of prime minister.

Only a few months before the federal campaign, the climate-change issue had legs. It faltered quickly in the face of a looming recession.

Will history repeat itself under the Covid-19 scourge?

Back in October, an overwhelming majority of voters supported parties that promised more proactive measures to mitigate climate change.

An equally high proportion of Canadians also told pollsters that strong environmental credentials — in the shape of a credible climate change plan — should be a must for any party aspiring to power.

But whether the public and political commitment to addressing climate change will remain strong as minds shift to repairing the damage of the pandemic remains an open question.

Already, polls are showing a shift in voters’ priorities, with climate change taking more of a back seat not only to the economy but also to health care.

Will cash-strapped governments, under the gun to restore some sense of normalcy to the daily lives of Canadians in time for their next electoral appointments, be in a good place to walk the talk of a green big picture?

Will we prove to be apt students as we move forward? My three decades as a teacher require a less than definitive answer.

And the greatest teacher of all, history, unfortunately renders a far less ambiguous answer.

The Relentless, Indefatigable Chip Franklin

Most days I stop myself from reposting Chip Franklin's hilarious screeds. Today is not one of those days.

If you're a Trumper, and you think I'm a liberal doling out fake news, then make yourself a Clorox cocktail, get a few X-rays and book the next flight to Georgia. Let me know how that works out for ya...https://t.co/i17FfR2vAx pic.twitter.com/VqFOYYl8x6

— Chip Franklin (@chipfranklin) April 24, 2020

UPDATED: Another Sad, Mad Episode

Listening to Donald Trump prattle on is like bearing witness to the stream-of-consciousness ravings of a backward, depraved child:

“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said. “One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”

Dr Deborah Birx, the taskforce response coordinator, remained silent. But social media erupted in hilarity and outrage at the president, who has a record of defying science and also floated the idea of treating patients’ bodies with ultraviolet (UV) light.

I'll leave the final word to Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics:

“It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land and that there exist people stupid enough to think this is OK. I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to caution anyone listening to the president that injecting disinfectant could kill you.”

P.S. Should you be wondering how the Twitterverse is reacting, click here.

I am particularly fond of this one:

Lysol Counters Trump Briefing: Do Not Ingest Disinfectants. Normally they only need to worry about children or suicidal people ingesting their product, not psychotic president’s trying to kill their own people #lysol #disinfectant #injectingdisinfectant https://t.co/BBi4Aj2eXP

— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) April 24, 2020

UPDATE:

The Hits Keep Coming.

This certainly beats having to write something for my blog. Thanks to my friend Dom for sending me the following: