Downhill
June 22, 2009
The sense of failure in the United States now is palpable and growing. It's hard to imagine anything in the near future that could turn it around.
The solution to every political and social problem is undercut by refusal to face the truth, which in turn grows out of virtually insane desires to hold onto privileges that cannot be sustained regardless of political position.
Last night on ABC, I watched a not very good end of the world drama titled Impact, whose plot is based on yet one more renegade meteor, which in this case banged into the moon. Not so bad, you might think, which is indeed what the characters in the melodrama did think for a while. But it turns out the impact affected the orbit of the moon in such a way as to drive the moon eventually -- actually in only thirty-nine days -- to smash into the earth.
Even weak TV shows sometimes offer insights. The best one in the first episode of Impact occurred in the back seat of a limousine taking an astrophysicist and two presidential advisors to the White House. The scientist is explaining what measures should be taken to protect the public against the immediate effects of the moon's altered orbit, when one of the advisors breaks in, "You can't just shut down everything. Can you imagine the effect it would have on the economy!"
With the moon only ten minutes away from obliterating the earth, there would be a lot of people trying to figure out how they could protect their investment accounts.
We have more than thirty-nine days before things fall radically apart, but the attitude of the sappy advisor is the attitude that keeps us racing towards disaster.
Yesterday morning on This Week, I heard Lindsey Graham denouncing effective health care reform with the silly metaphor that any measure which reduced the profits of the insurance companies would put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor. In the South Carolina senator's mind, those profits have to be maintained even if they destroy the entire national health care system. I don't suppose we can blame Lindsey Graham for being ugly, stupid and venal. That's who he was raised to be. But we might take a step towards recognizing that giving influence to persons of his stripe builds a wall between us and solutions to our problems.
Today, in the New York Times, Tony Judt has an incisive analysis about how Israeli politicians are using the U.S. government as a torpid cow, milking it for funds which keep the so-called settlements expanding. We keep the money flowing at the same time we sanctimoniously denounce the settlements as a barrier to Middle Eastern peace. And there's no sign that we will put conditions on the payments or that the settlements will give up engorging themselves. You see, a lot of people live well out of that $3 billion a year current, and they're not going to surrender it even if it leads to complete disaster for the country they claim to be protecting.
One could add endlessly to these examples, but in a way they are all elements of the big blindness that has to end if humanity is to have a livable place on this planet. The human race, with its modes of behavior, is putting a stress on the earth that is unsustainable.
If you don't believe it, read Elizabeth Kolbert's long article in the New Yorker for May 25th titled "The Sixth Extinction?" She tells us that many scientists believe the earth is in the midst of a destruction of species that rival the great destructions of the past, such as the wiping out not only of dinosaurs but of most other forms of animal life 65 million years ago. The difference now is that the cause of the extinction -- pressure exerted by human life on the planet -- will not go away as the causes of past extinctions have. Rather it will continue to swell.
To reduce that pressure ought to be the goal of all governments and social organizations. But we are a long way from facing the truth that toxic pressures exist.
Facing that truth is the only way to counter the sinking feeling that everything is failing. But there's not great evidence that the truth, at the moment, is turning the tide against the greed of blind vested interests.
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