New Dawn Coming

This is how it was.

It started just before dawn with a peep here and a warble there and before you knew it, a fabric of bird song was unfurling, birds in the hundreds, saluting the new day, claiming their ground, making a joyful noise. If you were familiar and so inclined, you could tease out the individual threads, or you could just allow the whole brocade to weave itself and wrap around you.

There are places that still host such a wonder, and maybe it's every bit as splendid as it once was, but who's to say? Who remembers? I heard it in West Virginia, a wealth of warblers in their spring migration, returning to the same trees and the same woods in the same mountains they were born. It's an extravagance of life, except where the mountains were decapitated for coal and their dismembered bodies dumped in the streams.

But most of us do not wake to the dawn chorus anymore. Maybe we snarl awake to one crow we find annoying. Most likely there are three or four birds in our yard and we can't tell one from the other, or aren't moved to. Three or four ignorable birds seem like the normal amount. We were born yesterday. We have no idea what is missing, so we don't miss it.

That's what happens. Whatever condition you find yourself in, you get used to it quickly. One day you're utterly amazed that you can take a stack of books on vacation on a device the size of a playing card. The next day you find yourself picking up an old paper book and spreading your fingers on the page to enlarge the font.

So it turns out to be really easy to persuade people that global warming isn't a big deal, or that we have nothing to do with it, or even that it isn't really happening. Doesn't matter that it was predicted over a hundred years ago, or that everything scientists have warned us about is already happening, or that the only thing they missed is the torrid pace of it. All it takes is a bunch of money; a disinformation campaign and propaganda outlets created and funded to spread it; and an underlying resentment to exploit, a suspicion that over-educated scientists are scolds who think they're better than we are. And that bumbling fop Al Gore, annoying as a morning crow, is just in it for the money.

Because it's simply not possible. There's no way humans could have an effect on something as huge as the climate. That's ridiculous. The climate changes. It always has. It can't be us.

But it's not only true, it's obvious, if you take just a step back and pack a few facts in your pocket. The composition of the atmosphere has changed a number of times for a number of reasons. Ultimately it comes down to where the carbon is. At one time plants grew so large that they pulled carbon from the air and loaded it up with oxygen. Firestorms released the carbon again. Plants were submerged in warm, rising waters and the carbon was buried in the ground in the form of oil and coal. Quarantined. For 300 million years. If we come along and pull sixty million years'-worth of safely buried carbon and burn it up again in a matter of a hundred years or so, it's back in the air. Fast.

So what people who scoff fail to appreciate is what a special time we are living in. Being able to keep large uninsulated houses the same temperature all year is nice, but it's not normal. Being able to motor a hundred miles for a day trip is nice, but it's not normal. We're on a heck of a ride, but it's costing us. It's more than we can afford.

Our weather isn't normal either. Almost everyone can see that now. Greenland is melting. The Arctic is on fire. More and more, people are coming around to the idea that we really have started something we need to fix. Some day. And now that the writing is on the wall, and we're told we have maybe a decade to kick our fossil fuel addiction--to leave it in the ground--it's more important than ever that we learn why. Facts we got. It's wisdom we need.

Because it's going to be damned hard. And, as always, it's going to be even harder on the poor. Our task is nearly impossible, but the alternative is not survivable. We all need to understand how urgent our situation is, or we will be conned once again by the first rapacious gasbag who tells us that the liberal elites want us to pay a buck more for gasoline. Or take away our "freedom" to use plastic straws. Or foist "socialism" on us, whatever vague horror we imagine that to be.

We're in a stupid amount of trouble.

These liars are not on our side. They're not even on their own side. We are sunk if we believe life began with us, that our unfathomable, unprecedented power is our birthright, if we believe our diminished world, our endless striving for material accumulation, and our dissatisfaction with it--that all of that is normal. What birds? We never had birds here.

Brain Lube

Dear Facebook thread person,

I'm back. I had a sudden need for a beer, and now I feel calmer.

With regard to your suggestion that we "agree to disagree LOL," fine. We can agree to disagree on the topics of abortion and where exactly to draw the line on socialism, and we can move on. As for the rest, I will agree to disagree with you right after I finish discussing trouser design with a sea urchin. At that point I will consider your suggestion, if you complete and submit the following exam. Please use the #2 pencil you will find up your butt.

1. Look at the following graph depicting global temperature rise and atmospheric carbon concentration over the last two hundred years. Are the two lines:
     A. Similar
     B. Different
     C. Matched up snugger than lube in a rectum

2. Explain the semantic difference between the theory of evolution and that theory you have about the pharmaceutical industry slipping vaccines in Skittles in order to make a killing on autism medication later.

3. Re: Colin Kaepernick's demonstration of discontent during the national anthem. Was he:
     A. Protesting the American flag?
     B. Disrespecting our armed forces?
     C. Other?
Support your answer using original source material (Colin Kaepernick's own words).

Not him. You don't know him.

4. If you answered A or B above, name at least one African-American friend of yours, and the amount of time you have listened to them explain what the Black Lives Matter movement means to them, without interrupting.

5. Essay: Write 500 words about that time someone online called you a racist and it really really pissed you off for days because nobody has any goddam right to make assumptions about you when they don't even know you. What can we learn about how that feels?

6. On a scale of one to ten, how likely do you think it is that Hillary Clinton was personally involved in a child molestation ring out of a pizza joint in Washington, D.C. while simultaneously selling uranium to the Ukraine and arranging for the murder of up to a dozen individuals?

7. If you answered any number higher than zero, above, does this indicate Ms. Clinton's superior stamina and skill, or Satanic possession?

8. Take a look at the following two photographs: a diverse intact mountain ecosystem in West Virginia, and a poisoned, barren butte emptied of coal, all of which has already been burned up. List ten advantages of each. If you cite "bocce ball" as a plus in the barren-butte column, please note the last time you got on your hands and knees to personally admire a salamander. If you can't remember, please go back to your childhood and start the fuck over. Get a decent education along the way, with a foundation of critical thinking skills and a good grounding in science and history.

If you then make it past voting age and still want to agree to disagree, we can discuss appropriate medication at that time.

The Empty Hutch

It's quiet at first. Tater the cat has been swatted off the keyboard or plucked off the newspaper or punted from the quilt-in-progress or otherwise discouraged from expressing herself inconveniently. Minutes slide by.

Then comes the first "plink" from the dining room. Her favorite lightweight battable item, a small wooden chicken on the first shelf of the hutch, has hit the floor. It will be fine. There are three more wooden chickens on the hutch and in due time they too hit the floor. Plink. Plink. Plink.

It is important to not reward this activity by running into the dining room waving your arms and yelling "Potato Brewster, get down from there." There's nothing Tater would love more than to see you do that. That would be the highlight of her day.

There is a pause and then a new sound. The soft thub thub thub of a felted sculpture plummeting from the second shelf. Another pause. Then the scraping of a heavier item being relocated toward the front of the shelf. An ominous thunk and clatter.

At this point the human is no longer working. The human is mentally reviewing the contents of the hutch, and plotting the trajectory of the cat. Then a disturbing rattle is emitted from the dining room, its provenance sussed out, and the next target in line identified as a Steuben glass bud vase. No! The human vaults into the dining room waving her arms and screaming.

Cat, rewarded.

This is how I thought the Trump regime would be. In wave after heartsick wave of insomnia, I visualized the losses, totting up the horrors that would soon enough be coming our way: the demonization of entire segments of our society, the sharpening of the divisions among our tribes and creeds, the erosion of women's rights, the denial of science, the stripping of regulations from the financial sector, the accelerated transfer of wealth to the wealthy, the privatization of schools and public lands, the despoilment, the isolationism, and--the sharpest arrow to my aching heart--the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and the resumption of headlong investment into a fossil-fuel economy that will undo us all. I imagined each horror as another wooden chicken falling to the floor while the evil agenda churned inevitably through a Congress with an inadequate opposition, and periodically we the faithful would turn out to holler as the next beloved item hit the floor.

I did not think the soulless son of a bitch would clear the whole hutch in ten days.

But in ten days all of that was set in motion. A woman who made her millions undercutting public education is proposed to oversee education. Sheer fiction is employed to encourage Americans to fear each other: Muslims, Latinos, immigrants, protestors, and--oh, let's call them "inner-city types" and wink at Ben Carson. Innocents are scapegoated, assuring future carnage that will then be used to justify war or a police state. A former CEO of Exxon is installed as Secretary of State and already working on easing sanctions on Russia, allowing Exxon to drill the last oil in Siberia. The infamous abortion gag bill is reinstated with repercussions for the health of women worldwide including, not coincidentally, a spike in abortions. Diplomacy is abandoned for belligerence. Oil pipelines are approved and the military marshaled to quash dissent. Any constraint against Wall Street rapaciousness is to be repealed. The Stream Protection Rule is tossed out. Oh, let's slow down and have a look at that last one, shall we?

Coal mining is dying a natural economic death fast, due to better alternatives. The Stream Protection Rule, which prohibits the dumping of coal mining debris in waterways, is the only tool in the bucket for preventing companies from blasting entire mountains into oblivion, burying natural streams, and ruining watersheds for all time. The precious coal itself is all burned up by the time the coal companies haul up stakes and move on, stranding their workers and leaving residents to contend with poisoned water and a lifeless moonscape. Putting the Stream Protection Rule on the chopping block in the first two weeks is not about jobs: it takes far fewer men to dismantle a mountain than to mine it conventionally. It's not about energy, which is cheaper and cleaner any other way. It's certainly not for the health and safety of populations either local or worldwide. It is for the enrichment of a select few who can scrape out that last smudge of filthy energy and turn it into private fortune, and the hell with absolutely everybody else. And it's to give Mitch McConnell the woody of his dreams. That's all.

But none of that was enough. There was also the gratuitous assault on the separation of church and state. There was the transparently specious vilification of refugees for no reason other than to invent a class of enemies and grease the rails for the war machine. There was--could we possibly have made this up?--the elevation of an actual authentic fucking Nazi to the National Security Council--a man who is on record as being devoted to tearing down government and advancing the cause of white supremacy.

The hutch is empty. I don't know where Tater is, but I smell gasoline.

The Brazilians Killed The Lice

I was eating an ice cream cone the other day when I tipped it a little, to discipline a drip, and the whole scoop fell out of my cone. My immediate reaction was to cry like a little girl, but I didn't. Get hold of yourself, I said. You're a grown woman. Pick the scoop off your left breast and jam it back in the cone. Evolutionarily speaking, it is indeed the horror of dropped food that caused women's breasts to swell and men's bellies to jut out like a TV tray. There is no similar rationale for the development of pubic hair. That has nothing to do with us; that's just something the lice cooked up.

The lice are suffering a terrible decline, we're told, because of the usual culprit: habitat destruction. Critters get so well-adapted to certain niches that any disruption can have devastating impacts on the population. Mow down the milkweeds and Monarch butterflies are at a loss. Burn a jungle forest and lose the whole snake population. Slice off the entire Appalachian Range to get at the coal seams, and lose the mayflies, salamanders, squirrels, migratory songbirds, clean water, berries...stop me anytime...which is not to say we shouldn't do it. Because gosh, weren't we warm and well-lit for a little while there? And now the mountains are suitable for bocce-ball. Can't hang a price tag on that.

So the pubic lice are running into the same kind of problem. They're specialists. There's one place they'd like to be--same place a lot of us would like to be--and they don't have another plan. They're like folks on the Jersey shore. Hurricane comes in and rips away their homes, and all anyone wants to do is somehow put the sand back and start over. The real housewives of New Jersey are not moving to Iowa, and the pubic lice are not developing condos in Greater Metropolitan Armpit. So they're in trouble. And why? Because enough people are landscaping their hoo-hoos now that they have nothing to hold onto. The boardwalk has blown away.

I found this startling. How could enough people be waxing their nethers to threaten a perfectly sturdy arthropod population with thousands of years of success? But apparently, in a certain age group, up to eighty percent of women AND men spend time and money tidying their personal scenery. Brazilians, Landing Strips, and the works. And that age group tends to coincide with the same group that likes to swap pubic lice on a regular basis. This is new to me. I came of age in an era in which we regarded each defiant follicle as a political statement. We liked to study eastern philosophy and read books by dead Germans and do twirly dances in the middle of the street, and we didn't know how to weld or fix our own cars or hammer a birdhouse together but by God we could grow hair, and that's what we did, like Chia pets with ambition.

For women, that meant not shaving legs and armpits. Nobody shaved pubes anyway, except for the bits that straggled outside the bathing suit, which were considered more unsightly than the patch of raised red bumps we replaced them with. For ten years or so women strutted their leg hair, until the war went away and they were able to get credit cards in their own names and people quit paying attention and the Eighties came along and disco music and everyone started shaving again with a sigh of relief, because honest to God, they never really got used to all that leg hair.

Things have changed for me. I don't hang out in the same neighborhoods as pubic lice anymore, and landscaping would be a redundant exercise for me anyway. Post-menopause, I couldn't even achieve a landing strip without a combover.

Swear to God, I was planning to write about ice cream.