A rant about the phrase “most Americans”
is live on The Compulsive Copyeditor:
“A new CNN poll shows that most Americans want the Senate to remove Trump from office (51 to 45 percent), most want to hear from the witnesses that Trump blocked from testifying in the House (69 percent), and most believe that he abused the power of the presidency (58 percent) and obstructed Congress (57 percent).”
~ Teresa Hanafin, “Fast Forward” (Boston Globe newsletter)
I’m sorry, but no matter where you stand on Trump, the Senate, impeachment, or CNN, 51 percent is NOT “MOST” Americans. It is, for all practical purposes, half.
Strange tree dream
A grove of tree trunks is standing deathly silent and still in a dim, shadowy place that is somehow indoors. I don’t see beyond the trunks, but the feeling is undergroundish, like a parking garage or deserted warehouse. The trunks are close together, and the darkness thickens between them. They’re a deep brown, very straight like pillars, more than twice as thick as my arms would go around, with regular, vertically grooved bark. Thinking of it now they could be redwoods, but in the dream I thought of them as elms.
My brother is with me and I’m calling a report back to him. I find myself climbing one, or find that I have climbed it. At first I thought of grasping the grooves, but it’s easy to shinny straight up because the bark is almost sticky, not in an icky way but in a pleasant, textured way, like rough fabric (burlap? corduroy?) with a rubbery coating, conferring on me the sense of having sticky pads for fingers like a lizard. It welcomes climbing; it has a gravity-canceling effect, so that climbing is almost effortless and feels safe.
But before I can climb up into any spreading branches, I am stopped. The upper part of the tree has been sealed off by a badly made cement (concrete?) ceiling that closes in tightly around the trunk. I can see cracks and nails and corners in it, it’s not form-fitting—made with brutal indifference—but no light or air or sight can squeak through. And it’s certain that as the tree continues to grow the cement will press into it.
Above this ceiling branches must still spread and wave, there must be leaves to feed each tree and air and sky, but all that is sealed off from the trunks. It’s been done with the assumption that trees don’t “know” or “care,” but how could they not?
Other than having been surprised to read in the course of work that robust sequoias are dying, and that there are elms in coastal wetland forests being inundated by salt water from sea level rise—they were the trees of my childhood street and I thought they’d all been killed long ago by dutch elm disease—I have no associations to this and no idea what it “means.” But it feels like life now, public and private, they can’t be separated.
UPDATE: Speaking of trees, Republicans want to plant trillions of them. See, says House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, “we care.” In the words of one of his colleagues from Arkansas, “Trees are the ultimate carbon sequestration.”
I wrote about gender and 2020
The picture is chaotic and infuriating, ruled by a nasty mix of timidity and calculation. Progressives think a centrist is not electable; centrists think a progressive is not electable. Significant numbers of each group seem prepared to make their prophecy self-fulfilling by staying home or casting a protest vote if a candidate from the other group wins the nomination. Many women who say they would welcome a female president are so sure that the majority of their fellow Americans wouldn’t that they are hedging their bets by supporting a (white) man. . . .
(Whether or not Bernie Sanders [shares that view] I will leave to your speculation. I am quite sure he believes a woman would be capable of serving as president. I am not so sure he is immune to the widespread worry that America is not capable of electing one. But that’s a subtle distinction long since trampled by the wildebeests of propaganda.)
Amazing Stuff 3
These undersea photos are past amazing, they’re astounding—for the beauty and strangeness of the creatures, for the technical brilliance of the photographs and the excruciating patience it must have taken to get them, and in a sadder way, for the evidence of our impact in every part of the ocean—the plastics that creatures cannot avoid breathing or swallowing, the strangling nets. Photographers no longer seek out the illusion of “untouched” nature. We’re forced to admit there is no such thing.
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell . . . ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (1877)
The rain bore a brand; it was a steer, not a deer. And that was where the loneliness came from. There’s nothing there except us. There’s no such thing as nature anymore. ~ Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (1989)
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INTERACTIVE: EARTH OVER TIME
Smithsonian Magazine lets you scroll through the eons.
We once had orange skies and bright-green or blood-red waters, says Ferris Jabr, exploring the evolution of Earth’s palette.
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The Ultimate Emotional Support Animal . . .
. . . if you consider the trope, “How do porcupines make love?” “Very carefully.”
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Where the census begins, and why.
Alexander Hamilton’s Prophecy
He foresaw our moment with chilling precision. Ticked off every particular.
When I flagged only one questionable item—”having the advantage of military habits”—my brother said, “Well, he did go to military school.”
The view from 5 a.m.
Particularly since we lost our moorings in nature, we’re carried along in the torrent of human culture, trying to make a little mark, pitch a small shelter in the midst of this moving mass. But there is no fixed point of reference, the coordinates are constantly changing, driven now mainly by commerce, propaganda, psychopathology, and technology, and the directionless ferocity of trends. There is no way for an individual mind to get any purchase. And now this mass is accelerating like the Niagara above the falls. What do we do while we’re carried along toward the precipice? Our past plans have been pulled apart multiple times by the dissolution of their context, like a house frame in a flood.
Plans presuppose a world that holds still enough for long enough so their enactment still makes sense when it’s complete, if it can be completed at all. Interruption by crisis feels imminent: why commit yourself to a course of action that you’ll have to drop at any moment to simply survive? The universe wasn’t “absurd” until we made it so.
Is dematerialization and digitization, the dissolving of everything into a torrent of electrons, a response to this or a cause of it? Only a torrent is adapted to a torrent, only total fluidity and nonattachment can thrive. Momentary insights form and dissolve like snowflakes. If the material world once kept us anchored and sane, we’re dissolving that too, with the help of fire and flood . . . and finance.
Political tensions and doubts…
. . . in rural Wisconsin, one of the swing areas that are crucial to Trump’s chances of reelection. It’s not a simple or monolithic picture. And it’s embodied in the falling-out of two women friends, who previously worked together for Trump’s campaign. One has changed her mind, and has had the guts to go public about it, though she’s fearful of the consequences:
“I’m worried about retribution. My barn is made of wood. People have matches. Do two plus two,”
The other expressed the pragmatic, goal-directed point of view of many evangelicals:
“I’m not voting for him to be my pastor, my father, my role model. I’m voting for him to get some things done in Washington DC that have never been done before. We forgive him because of other things.”
As a single parent in mid-divorce, she had once temporarily needed public assistance, but sees no contradiction with Trump’s cuts in food stamps:
She agrees with the move, she said, because the restrictions do not apply to families with children or those with disabilities.
“Of course, we want to make sure the children are taken care of,” she said. “But single adults, you need to get out there and work. Life is hard. Sorry. Life was hard for me too.”
She’s not against some version of public health insurance, though (“I think that’s good. Who wouldn’t?”) . . . as long as it doesn’t raise taxes too much:
If somebody told me my taxes would go up $500 a year for Medicare for All, I might do it. That’s pretty good. But if somebody told me my taxes would go up $10,000 a year, oh no.”
The two women no longer speaking to each other. Meanwhile, a pastor worries about “an unquestioning and even aggressive adulation for Trump” among some congregants who have crossed a line between pragmatism and idolatry:
“It seems like there are many evangelical Christians that are willing to die on the hill of supporting the Republican president, supporting Donald J Trump. And to me, that hill is not worth dying on. No matter who the candidate is, no matter who the individual is,” he said. “To put all your hope into that individual is a dangerous road. Scripture would warn us against that.”
I consider this a must read, especially for us city kids.
Ambiance 