Nature Bats Last

I’ve added Guy McPherson’s blog Nature Bats Last to my blogroll. I like the name of his blog a lot better than my own, and his blog is populated by posts about the coming industrial collapse (which will regrettably bring with it ecological collapse) and comments by folks who appear to get it, though most appear to still be seeking solutions or escape hatches. It’s one of a handful of blogs where I go to get my doom on, and I sometimes comment. No one is a regular reader or commenter here at The Spiral Staircase, so I’ll offer (again) that doom is not my primary blogging focus, since it’s too horrific and soul destroying for me to blog about full time. I’m more of an armchair social critic. Prof. McPherson earns my admiration for being one of the few truth-tellers I have read, and he’s free of the New Age delusions commonplace at many similar blogs. In addition, he blogs with authority as Emeritus Professor of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Whereas some have considerable disdain for scientists and academics, who are sometimes revealed to be just as human as the rest of us, I’m more inclined to believe the truth claims of science once evidence is weighed and consensus is reached. In fact, the whole point of scientific inquiry is that knowledge and understanding are sharpened and corrected by continuous reexamination, which is a procedural strength few other areas of inquiry can claim to uphold as diligently.

The reason Nature Bats Last is being added to my blogroll is that Prof. McPherson was kind enough to post an entry called Entropy Revisited at my request. A correspondent of mine had accused me of misunderstanding the Second Law of Thermodynamic, and although I’m confident I have the basic principle correct, I doubted my ability to describe the details accurately. So I contributed the basic idea of the blog entry, an initial draft, and some editorial effort. Prof. McPherson gets most of the writing credit, so I only quote a bit of it here. Go there to read and comment. The intro provides a nice snapshot:

You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game. Those kernels are my favorite descriptors of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. Respectively, the clauses mean (1) energy is conserved (First Law), (2) entropy never decreases, thus precluding perpetual motion machines (Second Law), and (3) it is impossible to cool a system to absolute zero (Third Law).

The thrust of the blog entry is that we’re poised to fall off a cliff with respect to available energy, mostly the fossil fuels we’ve been using up for the past 200 years or more. The Second Law binds us to that fate. Two familiar images of Wile E. Coyote from the old Roadrunner cartoons come to mind: (1) the character suspended in midair before plummeting to the ground as sheer momentum carries him past the edge of a precipice, and (2) some hairbrained scheme that ends by bringing some large piece of the cliff down upon himself. Both scenarios apply to our current situation. The first is sometimes chalked up to simple population overshoot, but the second is what haunts my sleep, which is that we’re actively engineering our own awful fate. Or to extend the metaphor “nature bats last,” we know that Nature (the reified form) is a far more powerful contestant than are we and will assuredly get the final say or at bat, yet we’re determined to pitch a series of beanballs to crush her skull and spine before we take the inevitable line drive to the face. That makes us a tragic species, not merely because the principles we set in motion bring about our own destruction but because we know it as we enact it and are determined to commit ecocide alongside suicide. Prof. McPherson professes an optimism I can’t share. Perhaps I’ve succumbed to a learned helplessness, or what I’ve heard called a convenient fatalism. Still, I haven’t progressed to full-bore nihilism and doubt I ever will. The best I can manage seems to be admitting reality, understanding its harsh mandates, and reporting.

Review: Up in the Air

Buzz about Up in the Air is positioning the film and George Clooney’s performance for Oscar consideration. Critical consensus appears to be driving this assessment, with the film appearing on nearly every best-of-2009 list and some best-of-200x lists, but the power of the studio’s own marketing machine can’t be dismissed. (The term Oscar bait exists for a reason.) I see movies to be entertained, and Up in the Air succeeds remarkably well on that level. Oscar worthiness is something else, however, and my critical assessment diverges from consensus, which is why I’m offering a review.

The set-up is in fact entertaining and clever: a consultant who specializes in firing people from their jobs, thereby insulating management from that miserable, brutal task, spends most of his life on the road while keeping all attachments and entanglements nonexistent. In short, he avoids having any sort of meaningful life at all as most of us understand it. His sole hope beyond surviving into the next week, month, and year is to rack up enough frequent flyer miles to achieve rare top-level status. (Whether such status truly exists is irrelevant, as its function as a plot and characterization device doesn’t hinge on plausibility.) In real life, this character would be considered a heel or villain, but within the frame of the film, he’s the hero, the enlightened one, the guru by virtue of his moonlighting gig as a motivational speaker. To sell this jerk as a hero, the movie enlists the preternatural charm (and inseparable smarm) of George Clooney. This fact all by itself invalidates any pretensions to Oscar worthiness, as everyone knows that star vehicles are rarely ever Oscar-caliber films in which any real acting takes place except by supporting actors. Clooney, Pacino, De Niro, Eastwood, Hanks, Cruise, and others, after achieving superstar status, inevitably and invariably bring themselves too much into their movies and are relegated to playing variations of either themselves or some character they’ve already portrayed. They still draw people into theaters and entertain us, but they’re effectively banished from any real acting. Eastwood is forever grizzled, Hanks is forever earnest, Clooney is forever charming, and Cruise is forever weirdly intense. There are notable exceptions (e.g., Nicholson the forever iconoclast playing frumpy in About Schmidt), but in general, those singular characteristics are precisely why those actors are hired and rehired.

That’s the cardinal error of the film, but there are others. As all narrative forms require, conflict arises, leading to an epiphany for the main character. It’s a practically indispensable plot device — a character arc for one of two characters who should have none (the other being the quintessential organizational man, the manager of the consultancy) — and it’s both predictable and banal except for the charming and clever hoops Clooney has to jump through. (Yes, it’s Clooney doing the jumping; call him by some other character name, give him a few minor tics and preoccupations, but you can never forget you’re watching Clooney.) Through a web of tightly knit though implausible events and details that only exist in the telescoped timescale of narrative, with life-altering events piled high and deep, you witness how Clooney’s character armor and self-imposed isolation are unintentionally broken down, he tries going to the dark side (normalcy) but is ultimately thwarted, and he returns to being a no man from nowhere as opposed to an everyman from anywhere. A tragic ending, sort of, if only Clooney weren’t still so damn charming. Let’s turn to some of those implausible details that drag you through the story kicking and screaming if not for the suspension of disbelief.

It’s a Free Country, After All

Only the most jaded cynic could fail to be dumbfounded at recent and extraordinarily vehement criticisms of Barack Obama. All U.S. presidents have been magnets for detractors, as something is always going wrong somewhere. However, it’s also pretty amazing that very little of the criticism seems to stick. Ronald Reagan earned the sobriquet The Teflon President for his ability to avoid any lasting judgment, but the effect has outlasted old Ronny. Clinton survived two terms of the worst partisanship, damning criticism, and an impeachment; George W. Bush survived two terms of crowning stupidity, a major terrorist attack, two preemptive wars, and nonstop calls for impeachment; and now Obama appears to be able to withstand even the most vengeful attacks, even gathering an international prize despite the most meager accomplishments thus far. It’s not that Obama’s approval rating hasn’t suffered; it has. Rather, no change of policy (those in effect, not those promised) or alteration of course results from every new revelation of corruption, ineffectualness, or abandonment of principles. Nothing seems to penetrate the cocoon of advisers surrounding the president, who must be counseling what is political possible rather than telling the truth about what must be done. Yet the charges from the media and the blogosphere continue to mount, and every analysis ends up suggesting Obama must have a hidden endgame. How else can one account for the president’s actions? The avalanche of criticism demonstrates that one can say the worst things about another person or the president short of libel or slander. It’s a free country, after all. That one notable feature of Western democracy remains despite rollbacks of all sorts of other civil liberties.

So what are some people saying about Obama?

Desert Island

In the course of riding around en route to some endeavor with a friend — someone whose judgment, intelligence, and sensibilities I trust implicitly — we indulged in some idle banter during which he asked what my desert island drink would be. Everyone is familiar with this sort of question. What is your favorite color? Who is the one person in history you would most like to talk to? Who is your favorite rock band or composer? What is your favorite food? What are your desert island book and movie? The added limitation of the desert island focuses the answerer on the choice he or she can live with until the end. The whole genre isn’t so far removed from the top ten list or the best of year and best of decade lists that should start appearing any day now. Best of all time lists have the built-in weakness that one can’t glimpse the future and know if something better won’t come along.

I don’t normally feel obliged to have answers for these questions, as they (questions and answers) seem to me rather arbitrary — the stuff of long summer holidays from school in the early teens spent lying on one’s back, staring at clouds, and filling time with meaningless, nonbinding contemplation. The answers can’t be wrong, really, but often lead to lighthearted justifications and some feigned disbelief in another’s answers. My friend was taken aback that I didn’t have answers at the ready and that the questions didn’t especially interest me. Perhaps that’s because I’m often accused of snobbery with respect to my tastes. (Do colors plot on a snob scale?)

We didn’t get far into these questions as I got side-tracked with the nature of the questions themselves. My friend chose Coke as his desert island drink; I chose orange juice. We agreed on Richard Strauss as a desert island composer with hardly any justification necessary. Of course, in hindsight, I’m wondering if I made the right choices and can I live with them?

Batmobile Limo

One of my first blogs at The Spiral Staircase was about the LimoJet, which I found tacky beyond belief.  Well, a new contender has appeared: the Batmobile Limo.

OK, so this transgression against all things holy isn’t exactly killin’ babies or anything, but as I wrote before, there is something deeply wrong about a culture that celebrates this sort of junk, which we do. It goes without saying that if you build the tackiest possible limo, someone will rent it. So bring on the “lighten up!” remarks in the comments. I’m ready.

Living in Place

I have struggled from time to time to describe to friends and acquaintances why I’m disinclined to travel these days. They reply with the same blank incomprehension upon learning that I don’t watch TV: “Wha? How can you not …?!” If this blog were ever truly destined to help me work out my ideas rather than using it to proselytize to a vast, silent readership, this is probably the time.

If you’ve read more than a couple posts after being directed here following some heedless Google search about skyscrapers, the night sky, or living among refuse (which continue to drive perusal readers my way), or you’re merely curious about me from some comment I made on someone else’s blog, you know already that I’m twisted about prospects for the future, namely, foreseeable calamities as industrial collapse and climate change get rolling. Of the many bloggers facing down these issues, Dave Pollard expresses better than most the sense of horror and mourning I share over anticipated losses — not our ridiculous standard of living or institutions that have outlived their usefulness but the billions of people in what will be a great cull of human population. I have friends who believe in this eventuality and those who don’t, both camps being largely unconcerned. I haven’t arrived at that attitude yet.

In the meantime, I’ve been rather selective and probably more than a bit irrational about how I deal with my foreknowledge of some really bad things. For example, permaculture and sustainability activists frequently advocate becoming a locavore, or consuming only foods produced locally. This behavior represents a commitment to live in place in some small respect and is an ethical response to the growing awareness that transporting foods thousands of miles, often out of season, is a destructive practice, though perhaps necessary for now. It’s not unlike so many vegetarians who can’t bear in good conscience to consume animal flesh after learning of the horrible treatment animals endure before being fed to us. I recognize both issues as honest and well intentioned, yet I’ve embraced neither.

If foods gathered from all compass points and transported to the local grocery don’t bother me, how about household and lifestyle goods? When it’s suggested that Americans should buy American, it’s usually a labor and employment issue. The rhetoric is that our hard-earned money (is there another kind?) should not be exported for the benefit of (gasp!) foreigners or foreign-owned companies. Considering how American companies have been outsourcing fabrication for decades now, it’s often difficult to find a product of American manufacture without going considerably out of your way. Everything comes to us these days on ocean-going vessels laden with shipping containers full of consumer goods. Interestingly, I’ve read of Americans being compared fairly accurately to cargo cults, South Pacific islanders who formed a religion of sorts following their initial exposure to technologically advanced cultures. Consumerism in the U.S. has achieved religious status, and it’s based in large measure on cargo coming from overseas. On this issue, I’m half-in, half-out. Whereas I don’t care about source of origin, a profligate lifestyle is for me an embarrassment, so it’s easy to forego creature comforts, pointless electronic gadgetry, and overpriced designer nonsense. Even still, I recognize that I enjoy an opulent lifestyle compared to most of the rest of planet’s denizens, though fairly modest compared to my friends and acquaintances who are untroubled by thoughtless purchase-and-discard consumption.

Let me return to my disdain for travel. For years, I had the same wanderlust and yen for travel that many Americans feel. (That sense is not universal, as many Murricans are so provincial in their attitudes they have utterly no interest in traveling beyond their immediate confines.) I’ve been overseas numerous times and done road trips through many U.S. states. Various discounts and professional obligations provided ample incentive to travel, and I didn’t hesitate to hop a plane or hit the road. I’ve even ridden the rails on occasion. However, in the wake of learning how historically exceptional our lives are compared not just to our contemporaries but to our forebears, and yes, our descendants — all because of an energy binge that will be impossible to repeat — travel is the one aspect of resource consumption I’ve taken most to heart. Why, I can’t say. But the enjoyment of travel and desire to see unfamiliar places has drained out of me. Before long, a couple decades perhaps, I suspect that we’ll all be forced to accept far more austere food options, abandon our worship of cargo, and stay put. Transportation costs in the post-Peak Oil era will require that we learn how to better live in place.

Grace is Gone

Lots of joke memes develop at Fark.com, some of which make it into the mainstream while most appear to live and die at that website alone. One that always tickles me goes something to the effect “let it go, man, ’cause it’s [already] gone.” The newsbit to which it’s attached is typically someone chasing after a dropped cellphone, but the kicker is that he or she goes down a sewer pipe with a lighter or into an animal habitat at the zoo, both with predicable results. It’s unlikely that most of these Darwin Awards candidates believe they’re risking life and limb for some easily replaceable piece of electronics. Rather, it’s that they’re asleep at the switch, lulled into a false security that nothing can go wrong. In other cases, I suspect what’s at work is an adamant refusal to accept what is obvious to nearly anyone else, namely, that it’s irretrievably gone, whatever it is. That’s the launching point for a list of things — all institutions — that are all beyond their use-by date but continue to creak along on momentum, unable to muster the grace of acceptance that their time under the sun has come and gone.

The Butterfly Effect

I saw a recent documentary film on Russian ballerinas. I don’t really get dance, and though I’ve seen my fair share, I usually can’t distinguish merely good from truly excellent execution in terms of either technique or expression. However, in the course of the film, one of the profiled ballerinas rehearsed what I am guessing must be her signature solo and pose, the sort of thing that appears on ballet posters. I found the image below:

Turns out it’s Uliana Lopatkina as a dying swan, danced to music of Camille Saint-Saëns. Pretty extraordinary. I also found the following video:

There are videos on YouTube of other ballerinas interpreting the same dance for comparison.

One of the curious things about ballerinas is the total devotion to the art necessary to achieve success, something few average folks can muster. But unlike most other artistic pursuits, dance careers are typically over by age 40 (or much earlier). Athletes have similarly short careers, limited by the fact of aging.

Perhaps inevitably, my mind wandered to this memory while at the pool swimming (a regular part of my ongoing triathlon training, which I don’t approach with total devotion), only in my mind the swan became a butterfly. Considering the obvious physical demands on a ballerina and their ability to persevere, I thought I could at least swim a few lengths of butterfly. Suffice it to say that I don’t have such extraordinary extension in my arms, but I do have the body control and coordination to swim the stroke properly. I also know it takes everything I’ve got just to do butterfly at my age, even though I’m in good shape for swimming. So for two lengths of the pool, I was totally committed to doing something both powerful and maybe a little graceful. I paid for it for a few days.

Again with the Torture

There you go again, I can imagine my interlocutors saying in a Reaganesque moment, again with the torture. Between torture and the closely related modern security state, I’ve blogged numerous times (sorry, no links — just do a search) to report my disgust and condemnation, not that any of it matters. Registering those sentiments is irrelevant. So why bring it up again? Because it just stinks, and much as I hate to have knowledge of it, the problem needs repeated airing.

The precipitating news this time is a Salon article by Glenn Greenwald about a recent Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Arar vs. Ashcroft (searchable here). The case is “just” another instance of extraordinary rendition and subsequent torture of an innocent person over the course of ten months, which actions are by now so routine that the terms extraordinary and torture have lost all their impact. Business as usual. Move along. Nothing to see. Greenwald nails it with this comment:

So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror.  The permanent claims of existential threats from an endless array of enemies means that secrecy is paramount, accountability is deemed a luxury, and National Security trumps every other consideration — even including basic liberties and the rule of law.  Worst of all, the President takes on the attributes of a protector-deity who can and must never be questioned lest we prevent him from keeping us safe.

The court decision (granting blanket immunity to government functionaries in cases of presumed national security) appalls me, not just because it fails so utterly in basic humanity but because the courts are (or once were) our best hope for checks on excesses of the Executive Branch. Congress certainly isn’t applying the brakes.

The state hasn’t merely set its sights on foreigners traveling to or through the U.S. Here is a glimpse of what’s to come as the civil authorities wage domestic battles against the citizenry: “Robocops Come to Pittsburgh.” The array of high-tech assaults now becoming available to police (which now resemble the armed forces) is just astounding. Although these devices are rationalized as means to quell unrest or disperse protesters, those folks out on the streets are usually Americans, and they’re typically reacting to something, sometimes with inchoate, unfocused violence. But they’re increasingly recharacterized by those charged to protect them as un-Americans, anti-Americans, terrorists, or evildoers. Sure, sometimes they’re mere vandals or criminals, but not often. Yet they and others on the scene unfortunate enough to be guilty by proximity (including journalists) are swept into whatever administrative action is decided upon by civil authorities, which typically entails catch-and-release dragnets completed within the 24-hour window where charges must be filed yet function to dispirit and nullify all forms of public protest.

This is what is meant by the dictum Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. The holders of power are insulated from accountability and derive erotic pleasure from deploying power. The connection between sexuality and death is pretty well recognized in the marketplace of ideas. Here is one of many such analyses tied to recent ideology. Will it go away in time with education, shame, moral uplift, protest, etc.? I doubt it. Like other Machiavellian behaviors and institutions, such as slavery, they keep cropping up again and again in disguised or subtly altered forms because their underlying appeal or utility never goes away fully. I guess the dream of world peace is the stuff of beauty queen pageant contestants, who mouth the words for us, telling us what we want to hear about both them and ourselves, so that we can sleep quietly at night. Meanwhile, the atrocities continue.

Generosity and Enslavement

A friend gave me the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson to read. I don’t read a lot of fiction, but this is a nice diversion from my usual fare. The novel is so thoroughly derivative of Tolkien I find myself irritated frequently, but it has its own ideas and devices, too. Though only halfway into the book, one idea caught my attention distinctly.

Among the numerous races of people and characters are the Haruchai, a warrior class that serves the Lords of the Land. The Haruchai are reminiscent of the Samurai. What struck me, however, is the manner in which the Haruchai came into the service of the Lords. Some 2000 years before the time of the first novel, the Haruchai prepared to wage war against the Land, but the Lords refused to go to war lest the Haruchai be destroyed utterly. Instead, the Lords gave to the Haruchai precious gifts. Oddly, the Haruchai responded by taking a vow of service to the Lords for a debt that could never be fully repaid. Although never quite stated so baldly, the Haruchai basically enslaved themselves to the Lords, presumably out of gratitude.

These two acts — refusal to destroy one’s enemy and self-enslavement — are pretty remarkable. If applied to our current geopolitics, it would suggest that the U.S. might think twice about its preemptive wars against minor powers, and those minor powers might consider some form of tribute for the greater power’s refusal to invade or otherwise engage. Of course, that’s idealistic. What we have instead are the lone world superpower beating up on everyone else, like the tantrums of a schoolyard bully, and the irrational promises of the victim of our aggression to deliver the mother of all battles, only to fail in less than a month yet subsequently mount a surprisingly effective insurgency. If the situation in the Covenant novel is slightly comical, it’s certainly matched by the situation in which we find ourselves.

Like Tolkien’s novels, Donaldson’s work appears to be the subject of considerable analysis. I haven’t read any of it, since I don’t want to spoil my reading pleasure. So I don’t know if this observation has been made, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Donaldson has conceived of his characters and their world as being profoundly stupid, as in cognitively challenged. Sure, they adhere to strict codes of honor and integrity (an almost child-like allegiance), and their florid, Tolkienesque language is sophisticated, but from what I’ve read so far, they’re also bumbling fools in their absolutism and inability to regain lost lore and knowledge. What else but sheer stupidity would compel a people to enslave itself out of gratitude or a generous people to accept such an arrangement?