Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [67]
AT FIRST PHIL CHASE wanted to call his blog “The Fireside Chat,” but then someone pointed out to him that he was already doing those on talk radio, so he changed the name to “Cut to the Chase.” He wrote his entries late at night in bed before falling asleep, and hit send without even a spell check, so that his staff got some horrible jolts with their morning coffee, even though Phil had clearly stated right at the top of the home page that these were his private personal musings only, blogged to put the electorate in touch with his thinking as a citizen, and no reflection of formal policies of his administration. No impact whatsoever on anything at all—just the president’s blog.
CUT TO THE CHASE
Posted 11:53 PM:
We Americans don’t want to be in a state of denial about our relationship to the world and its problems. If we’re five percent of the world’s population and we’re burning one quarter of the carbon being burned every year, we need to know that, and we need to think about why it’s happening and what it means. It’s not a trivial thing and we can’t just deny it. It’s a kind of obesity.
There are different kinds of denial. One is sticking your head in the sand. You manage not to know anything. Like that public service ad where there’s a bunch of ostriches down on a big beach, and all the big ones have their heads in the sand, and some of the little ones do too, but a lot of the little ones are running around, and they see a giant wave is coming in and they start yelling down the holes to the big ones, There’s a wave coming! and one of the big ones pulls his head out and says Don’t worry, just stick your head in like this, and the little ones look at each other and figure that if that’s what their parents are doing it must be okay, so they stick their heads in the sand too—and in the last frame you see that all the holes in the sand are windows made of little TVs and computer screens. That kind of says it all. And there you are seeing it on TV.
But there are other kinds of denial that are worse yet. There’s a response that says I’ll never admit I’m wrong and if it comes to a choice between admitting I’m wrong or destroying the whole world, then bring it on. This is the Götterdämmerung, in which the doomed gods decide to tear down the world as they lose the big battle. The god-damning of the world. It’s a term sometimes used to describe what Hitler did in the last months of World War Two, after it was clear Germany was going to lose the war.
Of course people are offended by any comparison to the actions of Adolf Hitler. But consider how many species have died already, and how many more might die if we keep doing what we’re doing. It may not be genocide, but it is ugly. Species-cide. As if nothing else matters but us, and specifically the subset of us that agrees with everything we say. When you take a look at our own Rapture culture, these people pretending to expect the end of the world anytime now, you see that we have our own Götterdämmerung advocates, all very holy of course, as the world destroyers always are. And it’s an ugly thing. Countries can go crazy, we’ve seen it happen more than once. And empires always go crazy.
But right now we need to stay sane. We don’t want the United States of America to be hauled before the World Court on a charge of attempted Götterdämmerung. We can’t let that happen, because THIS IS AMERICA, land of the free and home of the brave—the country made of people