From The Millerites To Trump: The Big Tease

William Miller was a farmer from the Adirondacks in upstate New York. He had a side job as a Baptist minister. He was also what passed for a “student of the bible” in the mid-Nineteenth Century. He had a strong hunch that he knew when the second coming of Christ was going to occur, and he talked about it quite a bit for ten or twenty years before the projected date. He must have been fun at parties.

According to his calculations, Christ would show up sometime in April, 1843, and all of the chosen people would ship out for heaven October 23, 1844. He had developed quite a substantial following by then, and they exhibited a broad range of aberrant behaviors following the absence of an event on that day. There was a lot of arguing about the date, fault-finding about the math employed by Miller, conversion to other extreme Christian sects, and all of the general floundering around that idiocy creates. They, the “Millerites,” became the model for all of the end-of-the-worlders that have followed them.

Even now, hardly a year goes by but that some genius announces an impending date for the end of the world. The incident in 2012 was blamed on the Mayans, but more often the Christian Bible is the source of the revelation. I am offended every time this kind of thing makes the papers. I would like nothing better than to have a first-row seat for the end of the world, and it was long ago that I got tired of being teased with the granting of that wish. “Quit teasing me!” I mumble, not at an actual newspaper anymore. Now I do my mumbling at a computer screen. “Bunch of fucking idiots!” Rude too, to tease people like that. Message to the next guy who believes he has discovered that date, or has had it revealed to him by the neighbor's dog or something: Make your own peace with God and keep it all to yourself. The rest of us have work to do.

We're getting much the same thing these days about Trump. We've been putting up with his sabotage of all of our institutions, rights, and freedoms for almost two years now, and for one of those years not a day has gone by without predictions that his downfall was imminent. Impending, even! Any day now! Mueller will be filing those indictments next (fill in day of the week)! (Fill in name of member of Trump's family) will be arrested this week! These bits of news are easy to find, but the sparks of the original reporting become prairie fires on social media. There are a lot of people out there who are apoplectic about this whole Trump mess/tragedy/catastrophe. They are all over every little hint in the news. “This is it!” they write, in large type. And then the week passes, and the month, and the year, and we are standing on the hillside like a bunch of Millerites, experiencing our own version of their “Great Disappointment.”

What we are witnessing is no less than a revolution, but it is not a Trumpist revolution. No, it's the same old Republican revolution that has been chewing our furniture since the 1970s. One reads that the entire Republican party, along with Trump, will be ejected into space before long and we will be able to get back to some mythical “way things were.” This is no less of a terrible tease than the old Millerite bullshit.

As much as I would love to see the actual end of the world, I would dearly love to see Trump and some of the more egregious Republican operatives sent to big-wall prisons to spend a decade or more in the general population. But the odds are that I will be denied the pleasure of either thing. Neither thing will be happening any time soon.

The odds are that we will be suffering without the comforting presence of Mr. Jesus right up until the time when the entire world ecosystem collapses on us. There will be no heralds and no horns on that day, I'm afraid. We will all simply join those already lost to oblivion.

The odds also favor the Republican party continuing to make it's vicious, selfish mischief for the foreseeable future. As for Trump, well, don't hold your breath waiting for the end of this nightmare.

When the end comes, Trump, useful idiot that he has been, will be unceremoniously dumped in his favorite brier-patch: bankruptcy court. There's no prison fantastic enough to hold him. My best guess is that he'll be allowed to retire for health reasons as part of a deal to keep the kiddies out of prison. I'd be willing to bet that within five years he'll be back on TV. “Washington Apprentice,” or something similar.

Nothing at all could surprise me in this WTF bonanza that we call the Twenty-First Century.

Trump's Unbuttoned Jacket

One of my professors in law school told us a story about his first appearance before the Supreme Court. He had thirty minutes for his oral argument, and about ten minutes in something went radically wrong. “Counsel,” said one of the Justices, “I can't hear a word you're saying with that jacket unbuttoned.” The lawyer fastened the button, and then he had to start all over, having squandered one third of his presentation on a rookie mistake.

As you travel down the scale of the prestige of the court there is a corresponding reduction in the need for sartorial perfection. Having said that, even in one of the lesser state courts that are devoted to some narrow corner of the law a lawyer is expected to dress respectfully.

In any state court you can wear a nice sports jacket and slacks with a colored shirt and you'll get away with it every day. As long as the tie is not loose and none of the colors are too wild you will pass the hearing without comment from the judge. Even there, though, it's a good idea to fasten one button on the jacket when you stand up. Judges appreciate the gesture, even if they would let it slide if you didn't.

In any Federal court, you really do have to dress up a bit, and you need to be very careful about that button. I worked on one case with two lawyers from Texas, and I attended their first hearing in the local Federal court. One of them wore a nice suit in a dark color, with a white shirt and a quiet tie. The other wore a very nice sports jacket and very dressy slacks, in subdued colors, with a white shirt and a conservative tie. He told me later he always does that at first status conferences to learn something about the judge.

The hearing went for about fifteen minutes, and when all of the business was done the judge spoke to the under-dressed lawyer. “Counsel,” at least the judge addressed him as counsel, that's a good start, “do you own a suit?”

Taken a little aback, the lawyer said, “why, yes, your honor.”

"Please wear it next time.”

Those Federal court judges can be funny. Some of them are angered by double-breasted suits. Most lawyers in Federal court are careful about what they wear, and careful about fastening that all important button, too.

Our fabulous “President Sparky the Wonder Horse's Ass” never fastens a button on his suit jackets. I'm sure that it's part of a grand plan. He wears those custom made, super long ties in shiny single colors, so long that they descend almost to the rise in his pants, and he never buttons his jacket. I would bet you good money that he decided at some point that it was a look that made him appear less fat than he is.

I'm sure that reasoning is shared by his customary way of always sitting forward with his elbows on his knees as though he were on the toilet. He's afraid that if he sits back, or even sits up straight, his giant belly will show in the pictures.

I will not even address his hairdo, or his make-up, preferring to leave such sensitive matters to experts.

None of this is any surprise. He is a vain man, and like any other big, fat, pasty skinned, lumpy, knock-kneed, out of shape vain old man he is sensitive about his lost looks. Not that he was ever a handsome man to begin with, but nature and time push us all down the scale from where we started out.

Trump's unbuttoned jacket bothers me every time. I learned as a lawyer that the manner in which one dresses is always an expression of respect, or the lack of respect. The way one dresses for court; to meet with clients; to attend depositions or meetings in the offices of other attorneys. It's all the same. If you are any kind of gentleman, you are expected to dress appropriately to show respect for the legal process, the judges, opposing counsel, clients, any observers that may be on hand, and respect for yourself as well. I look at Trump's unbuttoned jacket and I see disrespect. He wears the dark suits because he believes that they hide his weight problem. If he thought that track-suits were more flattering, he'd wear them everywhere. He leaves the jacket unbuttoned for the same reason, but the message remains: I have no respect for you.

This is only my opinion, of course, but I don't think that it will meet a lot of counter-argument, because the man obviously doesn't respect any damn body or any damn thing at all.

At this point, I almost wish that the military would step in and throw all of our government officials in some rough-ass camp somewhere for re-education. I wish they'd just take over and run the country. They could leave the courts and the police in place with some new instructions, and they could leave the rich in place as long as they smiled and kept their mouths shut. The military's version of a future for the United States would almost certainly be much closer to core American values than the version that the politicians are working desperately hard to achieve. The generals and admirals could hardly do worse than this bunch of pirates now in charge, and they could hardly do more damage to American traditions or culture. This solution is currently in place in many countries around the world where the politicians had clearly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted. The system often works fine. The military may guide the country back to democracy or not, depending on the likelihood of the returning politicians just resuming their destructive mischief. It might be worth a try.

That's what I think on good days. On bad days, I believe that the only workable solution for the world's problems would be to blast the entire planet down to bedrock and eject every molecule of the atmosphere and the oceans into space. Make it a lifeless rock in the void. Some days I think that's all that we deserve.

A Common Complaint, Revisited

Our leaders, what are they good for? I always complain about how our political leaders do nothing to help us. They always seem to me to take baby steps when a good idea comes up, and they always seem to react too slowly when something dangerous presents itself. They spend our money foolishly. A large portion of them seem to work only on self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement.  The world is rushing off to hell in a handbasket, and they, after all, are in charge of day-to-day operations. Maybe it’s a fair complaint, but maybe it’s possible that they do all that they can do, all that is in their power. Clumsily, usually, but maybe I’m overestimating their ability to affect change or control events. Perhaps it’s all out of control for another reason altogether.  

Question: who performs the actions that really form, or could affect change in, the world?

It occurred to me that the flow of history may be formed by a much larger group of entities, including individuals and groups from not only politics, but also from the business community and from society itself. It may be formed by the actions of selfish, local entities of all types, acting individually and reacting to the same or similar stimuli.

Identifying these groups gets out of hand quickly. It doesn’t have to be limited to political or economic groups that wield real power. It wouldn’t be only governments and corporations. Any individual who is truly rich would certainly qualify. So would powerful families. But why stop there?

It might be all of us that share collective guilt for the mess our society is in. I mean the society of human beings here on the earth. Autonomous humans, acting in what they perceive to be their own best interests, doing things.

Things like eating steaks; electing foolish politicians; having children; playing golf; discarding unpleasant facts; keeping a lawn; driving an automobile; embracing supernaturalism; flying commercial; fighting zero-sum battles for resources; backing wars; embracing nationalism. Just about everything that we do has a consequence in environmental terms, it all has some impact on the future.

What would it take to impose order on this chaos? Authoritarian solutions always seem to bring their own chaos, becoming counterproductive rather quickly. Democracy can’t do it, because it lacks the power to accomplish anything that would be unpopular with powerful interests or a recalcitrant general public. Enlightened rulers come along occasionally, but they are usually treated with love but not respect by their unenlightened subjects. Could we turn the world into one vast Denmark? Probably not, because there would be too many competing groups that would be too suspicious of one another.

I wonder how they did it on Star Trek. That Star Trek universe is certainly a dream of order, until the Ferengi or the Borg show up, anyway. Left to its own devices, the Star Trek world is a peaceful, prosperous place. Everyone is working, and happily, too. People have children. Diversity is embraced. There’s general health and income security. The environment seems clean and healthy. There doesn’t seem to be much of a government at all. But didn’t they build that world only after some vast military/environmental catastrophe? After enormous violence and loss of life? Maybe they started an authoritarian technocracy of philosopher-scientists. That might work in a fictional narrative, but it wouldn’t in the real world. Absolute power really does corrupt, absolutely. We’ve seen that happen often enough.

The only possible conclusion in all of this is darkly pessimistic. The train is out of control, speeding up at an alarming rate, and closing in on the final collision with the inevitable solid object. The current plan is obviously to push the pieces forward slightly from where they were yesterday, and I don’t think that anyone believes that that will work out well at all.

So, pessimism then. Not a bad way to go, after all. If anything but the worst happens, it’ll be a pleasant surprise! 

Chicken Little Says, "Watch Out For Global Warming!"

Perhaps you can forgive me for my fixation with the end of the world.  Perhaps you can’t.  Whatever, I’m stuck with it.  Put “end of the world” in the word-search box and you’ll see what I mean.  I blame it on having spent decades under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).  

I read a couple of good articles last week that fed my interest in the end times. 

One was a very serious article about global warming that went way, way beyond the usual levels of threat and urgency.  “Mass Extinction:  It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” by Dahr Jamail, for Truthout (and on to me through alternet.com). 

This one was more or less an interview with Professor Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural recourses and ecology at the University of Arizona.  He also has a blog, “Nature Bats Last,” but I haven’t checked that out yet.  The University of Arizona is on everyone’s list of serious institutions of higher learning, and the “professor emeritus” thing only comes with faculty/alumnae participation, so this guy is an academic big-wig.  The Professor is way over in the pessimistic end of the global warming debate.  WAY over.  He believes that it’s too late already, it’s a done deal, we’re toast, adios M.F., “by-by Brookleen.”  He presents compelling arguments. 

He has amassed a list of fifty of what he calls “self-reinforcing feedback loops” to prove his case.  One of these, taken as an example, goes like this:  permafrost is melting . . . methane is released into the atmosphere . . . this causes warming . . . more permafrost melts . . . more warming . . . etc.

Yup, he’s got fifty of those.  He makes it sound like the entirety of the support system for human beings could disappear any month now, and suddenly too.   Consider the imminent “ice-free Arctic Ocean.”  Either this summer or next summer there will be zero ice at the North Pole.  Freaky, eh?  Nobody seems to know or care, but the Naval Post Graduate School, no less, says that it’s true.  No ice up there means more methane released, and, you guessed it, more warming.  (And more methane!  And more warming!)

Professor McPherson is a Cassandra alright.  He’s so down-beat that after reading the article I wanted to start spending down my bank money to avoid being caught at the end of the world with money in the bank.  I thought, maybe now is a good time to go and see Venice, you know, before it sinks in the lagoon, and why not fly first class?  Maybe I’d just been looking for excuses to go to Venice and fly first class.  I got over the impulse in time, thankfully.

The Professor even mentions a recent paper in Science Advances that says that the sixth “great mass extinction” is already underway.  They could be right, species great and small are disappearing right and left.

We see these things in the paper all the time.  I say, “in the paper,” as though anyone reads newspapers anymore.  I mean on the Internet and TV.  The ice; the glaciers; Greenland actually becoming green; the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica running away faster than an abused teenager; the droughts in California, Thailand and elsewhere; the fires in the west of Canada and the United States (starting in June!); the floods; snow in Hawaii in July!!!  These are facts, and although guys like McPherson may be Cassandras, many times the Cassandras are correct.

The other apocalyptic article that I read last week had to do with earthquakes.  “The Really Big One,” by Kathryn Schulz, in a recent New Yorker Magazine.  It seems that the Pacific Northwest is way, way overdue for a huge earthquake, an earthquake that could range up to nine-plus on the Richter scale.  It's all settled science now, it's all been worked out.  The reason that it has only come to light recently is that "recorded history" in the Pacific Northwest only started in 1805 or so.  The last "big one" took place in 1700, unnoticed by scientists, historians, or anyone who could write.  Huge quake, huge tsunami, killed a lot of American Indians. 

We remember the Tohoku Earthquake in north-eastern Japan in 2011.  We remember the earthquake, with its associated tsunami.  That was a 9.0 earthquake.  I can hardly imagine those myself.  I’ve been caught in a lot of earthquakes, a lot, but most of them were in the 3.5 to 5.5 range.  Those aren’t bad at all.  I’ve experienced a couple in the low sixes, they make you sit up and prepare to do something, but they’re over before you get started.  The longer they shake, the stronger the quake.  I sat through the 7-point-something earthquake in Los Angeles in 1994, and that one really got my attention, I can tell you.  It shook for almost thirty seconds, and the shaking was very unpleasant.  By the time it was over, I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my pants on, both socks and one shoe on, watching bookcases fall over and a TV crash to the floor, listening to my wife screaming, standing over in the door jam as we’re told to do, and my big MagLite was already on the bed next to me.  Thirty seconds is a long time.  The 9.0 in Japan shook for four full minutes, and produced a tsunami that inundated a vast area.  A couple of tens of thousands of people were killed, and a couple of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage was done to property. 

So, the Cassandra.  It seems that earthquakes have an upper limit that scientists can predict.  Without much certainty, as it turns out.  The predicted upper limit for the east of Japan was 8.4, and Japan was the most prepared nation in the world for earthquakes.  Up to 8.4.  A guy named Jasutaka Ikeda, in 2005, told his colleagues at some seminar that Japan should expect an earthquake of 9.0 “in the near future.”  Yup, they didn’t listen. 

The Take Away

Earthquakes are one thing.  They can come this year or in a hundred years, or two hundred.  But global climate change is another thing altogether.  It doesn’t happen suddenly, like an earthquake.  It happens over time.  (Unless some of the Cassandras are right and it will reach a point and then just spring into action within a few weeks.) 

Scientists are in greater agreement than usual regarding the phenomenon of global warming.  There might be some disagreement about details, but as far as the big picture goes, they all get it.  It’s happening.  It’s accelerating.  It’s serious.  Something needs to be done.  Here’s the problem:  no one is listening to the scientists.  Not people in general; not politicians; nobody important except the pope.  Amazingly, Pope Francis is the island of reason in this non-debate!  No one really gives a shit what the experts say.  If you Google, “global warming warnings,” you get twenty-five million hits.  Most of these are middle-of-the-road “things you should know” kind of web sites, and some of them are global warming denial sites, but a lot of them are real, hard science sites with a serious message.  Real science publications; real science faculties.  The America Institute of Physics or something.  The research on the issue goes back to the mid-Nineteenth Century, and by now new research is being published daily.  It’s all very worrisome.  Shouldn’t people be paying attention? 

Lots of Americans are actively hostile to the scientific and academic communities in the first place.  Most Americans think that the time line is way too long to affect them personally.  American businesses don’t want to spend profits this year to create a potential and speculative benefit at some future date.  It is the first of these groups that I find most interesting, the hostile Americans.  Most of them don’t know shit about science, so why the hostility whenever global warming comes up?   

Look at a site, a “news site,” like the Daily Caller, for instance.  Maybe it’s a political site masquerading as a news site.  Most of the articles are about politics in general, and about how “Libtards” are ruining the world, specifically.  There’s very little that is newsworthy.  It loves to feature articles on the subject of global warming, although articles about other areas of science are largely absent.  These are always of the “actually, it’s getting cooler!” type; the “then why is it so cold this February?” type; the “it’s snowing in Hawaii!” type; the “Al Gore is a numbskull” type.  They sure do love to pile on poor Al Gore, and they love to make fun of science in a broader sense.  What do they know!  Why have we had some winters that were colder than usual!  Who cares if it gets “a couple of degrees warmer?”  This is obviously part of The Daily Caller’s agenda, an anti-caring-about-global-warming agenda.  (I’d say “anti-global-warming,” but you can’t be against something that you don’t believe is real.)

It’s political.  The site is part of the right wing echo chamber, they’re all wholly owned subsidiaries of the Republican Party.  The program here is to court the anti-intellectual vote, and to kiss up to corporate interests.  The platform is pro-business, and anti-academia; anti-science; anti-worker; anti-retiree; anti-minority; anti-woman; and anti-democratic.  It’s all about the short term profits. 

I hate to tell you, but the Republican politicians and the corporate big-wigs all understand that global warming, or more accurately “global climate change,” is a problem.  They know that it’s real.  The reason that they mock the scientists and deny the problem is naked greed.  The corporate types are protecting their profits, their fabulous salaries, and their shareholders from having to support an effort to tackle the problem.  The Republicans are protecting their positions and their prosperity.  None of them care about the inevitable result of our failure to take action in a timely manner to mitigate the effects that humans are having on the environment.  They care about their own short term economic interests. 

If push comes to shove, they’ll all be able to explain their behavior away somehow.  Probably by blaming President Obama, or Democrats in general. 

And yes, those Democrats, yes, they should be doing more.  They are, at best, the lesser evil when it comes to climate change.  The best that can be said is that Democrats are not out hard-charging, 24/7, blocking any effort to even acknowledge that global climate change exists.  The rest of the world are involved too, and they are a mixed bag of tricks at best.  What is needed is a lot of "we mean business and we will take the difficult steps," but what we're getting varies only from "we'll make a gesture to try to look good," down through, "we need to start working on this," and all the way down to, "who gives a shit?"  

Oh, I wish that it were not so easy for our politicians and our corporate news media to distract us with fluff.  The last thing you want to hear from a lawyer or a doctor is, “I wish that you had taken my advice when I offered it to you.”  You know, after it’s too late.  We may get that message from the scientists someday, too late.  That’ll be a bad day.

Joe Dimaggio, Mr. Coffee, And The End Of The World

During the early 1970’s, America was standing on the verge of the end of the world as we had known it.  The 1960’s had been a decade of great turmoil, a mix of social progress and social upheaval, a mix of war and prosperity.  The U.S. tried to simultaneously fight the War on Poverty, and the War in Vietnam, and the rush to get to the moon.  All the while, the stage was being set for the tremendous changes that have followed.  The coming of the end. 

In 1973, TV was saturated with commercials for Mr. Coffee, commercials that featured Joe Dimaggio in the role of product pitchman.  Most people seemed to take this new development in stride, but I knew instinctively that if Joltin’ Joe could do such a thing it meant that every single fucking thing in the world had been altered completely.  The world as we had known it was gone. 

I was too young to see Joe Dimaggio’s baseball career first hand, but you could not escape his importance to the culture of the 50’s and 60’s.  There was the marriage to Marilyn Monroe, for one thing.  My family regularly ate at his up-scale Italian restaurant in Flushing, Queens.  He was a tremendously dignified man, tall, handsome and highly intelligent.  I actually had him in my taxi one time, around the time of the Mr. Coffee ads.  I never mentioned Mr. Coffee, of course.  I drove him from JFK to the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue.  He was quiet, he just stared out the window for most of the ride.  He did ask me about the weather, but no conversation developed.   I liked Joe, and I respected his dignified solitude, which you could cut with a knife. 

In the years since the early 70’s we have seen the destruction of much of what was good and holy in American life.  The exponential rise in productivity has benefited only the tenth-of-one-percent; the unions have been destroyed and with them most of the working class; we have increasing debt-slavery; the middle class has been demoralized and largely impoverished; probable cause and due process rights have been destroyed; and forget the old fashioned covenant of good faith and fair dealing in business and politics.  The death of everything. 

It didn’t start with Joe and the Mr. Coffee gig.  Joe was just the wakeup call that something had happened while we weren’t looking.  The “wake up and smell the coffee” moment.  Maybe it was not obvious, but I think it was impossible not to become suspicious.  Joe D., the very personification of old school grace and charm, hawking a cheap coffee maker.  What’s wrong with this picture? 

I’d never suggest that the old world was a perfect place, but it did have a lot going for it.  There were progressive tax policies, policies that favored the middle class over moneyed interests.  Civil rights were on the upswing, although still under great stress.  Personal freedoms in the due process area were expanding.  And, as weird as it may sound now, the two major political parties could still work together and compromise when the needs of the country called for it. 

Something had happened at about the time that JFK was murdered, and within ten years it had been cut in stone.  After that the dominoes really started to fall.  Joe Dimaggio and the Mr. Coffee thing were the headlights on the highway.  That was a turning point.  Since then the truck has run all of our sorry asses over.  

Goodbye, Maybe

There's a rumor going around that Friday will be the end of the world.  Mayan calendar prophecy; good old Nostradamus; planetary alignment; reversal of the earth's magnetic poles; the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera; some damn thing.  It started with talk of the Mayan calendar and it just spun out of control from there.

There is no general agreement though, I guess that's a good thing.  Current day Mayans say definitely no; Nostradamus says maybe (as usual); and no one but the History Channel seems to be sure that the end of the world is a go.  The History Channel has been in apocalypse overdrive for at least a week now, all-apocalypse-all-the-time.  Me, I'm skeptical. 

But in the event that they're right, I suppose I mean if the programers and the consulted experts of the History Channel are right, let me take this one last opportunity to thank you for your patient readership.  It's been fun.

And I'll see you on Saturday.