Review: Planet of the Humans

I’ll try to be relatively brief, since I’ve been blogging about industrial and ecological collapse for more than a decade. Jeff Gibbs released a new documentary called Planet of the Humans (sideways nod to the dystopian movie franchises Planet of the Apes — as though humans aren’t also apes). Gibbs gets top billing as the director, but this is clearly a Michael Moore film, who gets secondary billing as the executing producer. The film includes many of Moore’s established eccentricities, minus the humor, and is basically an exposé on greenwashing: the tendency of government agencies, environmental activists, and capitalist enterprises to coopt and transform earnest environmental concern into further profit-driven destruction of the natural environment. Should be no surprise to anyone paying attention, despite the array of eco-luminaries making speeches and soundbites about “green” technologies that purport to save us from rendering the planet uninhabitable. Watching them fumble and evade when answering simple, direct questions is a clear indication of failed public-relations approaches to shaping the narrative.

Turns out that those ballyhooed energy sources (e.g., wind, solar, biofuel, biomass) ride on the back of fossil fuels and aren’t any more green or sustainable than the old energy sources they pretend to replace. Again, no surprise if one has even a basic understanding of the dynamics of energy production and consumption. That admittedly sounds awfully jaded, but the truth has been out there for a long time already for anyone willing and able to confront it. Similarly, the documentary mentions overpopulation, another notorious elephant in the room (or herd of elephants, as aptly put in the film), but it’s not fully developed. Entirely absent is any question of not meeting energy demand. That omission is especially timely given how, with the worldwide economy substantially scaled back at present and with it significant demand destruction (besides electricity), the price of oil has fallen through the floor. Nope, the tacit assumption is that energy demand must be met despite all the awful short- and long-term consequences.

Newsfeeds indicate that the film has sparked considerable controversy in only a few days following release. Debate is to be expected considering a coherent energy strategy has never been developed or agreed upon and interested parties have a lot riding on outcomes. Not to indulge in hyperbole, but the entire human race is bound up in the outcome, too, and it doesn’t look good for us or most of the rest of the species inhabiting the planet. Thus, I was modestly dismayed when the end of the film wandered into happy chapter territory and offered the nonsensical platitude in voiceover, “If we get ourselves under control, all things are possible.” Because we’ve passed and in fact lapped the point of no return repeatedly, the range of possibilities has shrunk precipitously. The most obvious is that human population of 7.7 billion (and counting) is being sorely tested. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we also know that post-pandemic there can be no return to the world we’ve known for the past 70 years or so. Although the documentary could not be reasonably expected to be entirely up to date, it should at least have had the nerve to conclude what the past few decades have demonstrated with abundant clarity.

Addendum

This review provides support for my assessment that “green” or “sustainable” energy cannot be delivered without significant contribution of fossil fuels.

Budgets and License

Here’s a rather strange interaction: destruction budgets and moral license. The former refers to a theoretical or proposed budget for allowable environmental destruction. The latter refers to how doing something good allows rationalization of doing something bad as though one offsets (recognize that word?) the other. A familiar example is a physical workout that justifies a later sugar binge.

So just maybe some (outside executive offices anyway) are coming round to the idea that ongoing destruction of nature ought to be curtailed or better regulated. That’s the thrust of an article in Nature that mentions emissions budgets, which I’ve renamed destruction budgets. The article provides a decent overview of the largest threats, or environmental tipping points, that lead to an uninhabitable Earth. Human activity isn’t only about greenhouse gas emissions, however. Because industrial civilization has essentially had an unlimited destruction budget in the past, we’ve depleted and toxified air, soil, and water at such an alarming rate that we now have a limited number of harvests left and already face fresh water shortages that are only expected to worsen.

Turning to the viral pandemic, large segments of the population kept at home on lockdown triggered a different sort of destruction budget that didn’t exist before it suddenly did: economic destruction, joblessness, and financial ruin. For many Americans already stretched thin financially and psychologically, if the virus doesn’t get you first, then bankruptcy and despair will. Several rounds of bailouts (based on money that doesn’t exist) followed the economic slowdown and are freighted with moral hazard and moral license. Prior bailouts make clear where most of the money goes: deep corporate pockets, banks, and Wall Street. According to this unsophisticated poll, a clear majority do not want banks and financial institutions bailed out. There is even stronger public support for conditions on corporate bailouts, especially those conditions designed to protect employees.

Since we’re in wildly uncharted terrain from only 1.5 months of whatever this new paradigm is, it’s nearly impossible to predict what will occur by summertime or the fall. We’ve blown way past any reasonable destruction budget. In truth, such budgets probably never existed in the first place but were only used as metaphors to make plans no one expects to be binding, much like the toothless 2016 Paris Agreement. Every time we set a hypothetical self-imposed limit, we exceed it. That’s why, to me at least, 350.org is such a cruel joke: the target ceiling was breached decades before the organization was even founded in 2009 and hasn’t slowed its rate of increase since then. In effect, we’ve given ourselves license to disregard any imaginary budgets we might impose on ourselves. The pertinent question was raised by Thomas Massie (KY-Rep.) in the first new bailout bill when he openly challenged the number: “If getting us into $6 trillion more debt doesn’t matter, then why are we not getting $350 trillion more in debt so that we can give a check of $1 million to every person in the country?” How weird is it that both issues cite the number 350?

Everything and Nothing

In the introduction to an article at TomDispatch about anticipated resumption of professional sports currently on hiatus like much of the rest of human activity (economic and otherwise), Tom Engelhardt recalls that to his childhood self, professional sports meant so much and yet so little (alternatively, everything and nothing). This charming aspect of the innocence of childhood continues into adulthood, whether as spectator or participant, as leisure and freedom from threat allow. The article goes on to offer conjecture regarding the effect of reopening professional sports on the fall presidential election. Ugh! Racehorse politics never go out of season. I reject such purely hypothetical analyses, which isn’t the same as not caring about the election. Maybe I’ll wade in after a Democratic nominee is chosen to say that third-party candidates may well have a much larger role to play this time round because we’re again being offered flatly unacceptable options within the two-party single-party system. Until then, phooey on campaign season!

Still, Engelhardt’s remark put me in mind of a blog post I considered fully nine years ago but never got around to writing, namely, how music functions as meaningless abstraction. Pick you passion, I suppose: sports, music (any genre), literature, painting, poetry, dance, cinema and TV, fashion, fitness, nature, house pets, house plants, etc. Inspiration and devotion come in lots of forms, few of which are essential (primary or ontological needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy) yet remain fundamental to who we are and what we want out of life. Accordingly, when one’s passion is stripped away, being left grasping and rootless is quite common. That’s not equivalent to losing a job or loved one (those losses are afflicting many people right now, too), but our shared experience these days with no bars, no restaurants, no sports, no concerts, no school, and no church all add up to no society. We’re atomized, unable to connect and socialize meaningfully, digital substitutes notwithstanding. If a spectator, maybe one goes in search of replacements, which is awfully cold comfort. If a participant, one’s identity is wrapped up in such endeavors; resulting loss of meaning and/or purpose can be devastating.

It would be easy to over-analyze and over-intellectualize what meaningless abstraction means. It’s a trap, so I’ll do my best not to over-indulge. Still, it’s worth observing that as passions are habituated and internalized, their mode of appreciation is transferred from the senses (or sensorium) to the mind or head (as observed here). Coarseness and ugliness are then easily digested, rationalized, and embraced instead of being repulsive as they should be. There’s the paradox: as we grow more “sophisticated” (scare quotes intentional), we also invert and become more base. How else to explain tolerance of increasingly brazen dysfunction, corruption, servitude (e.g., debt), and gaslighting? It also explains the attraction to entertainments such as combat sports (and thug sports such as football and hockey), violent films, professional wrestling (more theater than sport), and online trolling. An instinctual blood lust that accompanies being predators, if not expressed more directly in war, torture, crime, and self-destruction, is sublimated into entertainment. Maybe that’s an escape valve so pressures don’t build up any worse, but that possibility strikes me as rather weak considering just how much damage has already been done.

Updates to Blogroll 04

This is an infrequent feature of this blog: additions to and deletions from my blogroll. Other bloggers attract my attention for various reasons, mostly the quality of writing and ideas (interrelated), but over time, some start to repel me. This update has several in both categories.

At Wit’s End, Three-Pound Brain, and Bracing Views were are all added some while back. The first two have new posts very infrequently, but the quality is very high (IMO). The last is far more active and solicits commentary openly. Subject matter at these blogs varies widely, and only the third could be accused of being an outrage engine. It’s a worthwhile read nonetheless if political dysfunction doesn’t ignite in you a firestorm of rage and indignation.

Dropping Creative Destruction, Gin & Tacos and Pharyngula. The first has been dead for a long time; nothing there to see anymore besides the backblog. I thought it might eventually revive, but alas, no. Updates to the second have dropped significantly as authorial attention shifted to podcasting. The commentariat there was especially worthwhile, but with so few new posts, the disappearance of whimsical history lessons, and irritating focus on racehorse politics, the blog has lost my recommendation. The third used to be a fun read, especially for being well argued. The tone shifted at some point toward smug, woke felation service of an in-group, by definition excluding everyone else. Like another unmentioned blog dropped from my blogroll some years ago, the author behaves like an omniscient bully: being absolutely correct about everything all the time. The lack of humility or tolerance for ambiguity — or even the very human admission once in a while “I dunno …” — is exhausting.

Final admission: traffic to and from this blog is chronically low, so no blogger cares about being added or removed from my blogroll. No illusions about that on my part. However, respectable curation is a value worth periodic updates.

Calling All Directors

The old saw goes that acting may be just fine as a creative endeavor, but given the opportunity, most actors really want to direct. A similar remark is often made of orchestral musicians, namely, that most rank-and-file players would really rather conduct. Directing and conducting may not be the central focus of creative work in their respective genres. After all, directors don’t normally appear onscreen and conductors make no sound. Instead, they coordinate the activities of an array of creative folks, putting directors in a unique position to bring about a singular vision in otherwise collaborative work. A further example is the Will to Power (associated with Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer) characteristic of those who wish to rule (as distinguished from those who wish to serve) such as regents, dictators, and autocrats. All of this sprang to mind because, despite outward appearance of a free, open society in the U.S., recent history demonstrates that the powers that be (PTB) have instituted a directed election and directed economy quite at odds with democracy or popular opinion.

The nearest analogy is probably the directed verdict, where a judge removes the verdict from the hands or responsibility of the jury by directing a particular verdict. In short, the judge decides the case for the jury, making the jury moot. I have no idea how commonplace directed verdicts are in practice.

Directed Election

Now that progressive candidates have been run out of the Democratic primaries, the U.S. presidential election boils down to which stooge to install (or retain) in November. Even if Biden is eventually swapped out for another Democrat in a brokered nominating convention (highly likely according to many), it’s certain to be someone fully amenable to entrenched corporate/financial interests. Accordingly, the deciders won’t be the folks who dutifully showed up and voted in their state primaries and caucuses but instead party leaders. One could try to argue that as elected representatives of the people, party leaders act on behalf of their constituencies (governing by consent of the people), but some serious straining is needed to arrive at that view. Votes cast in the primaries thus far demonstrate persistent desire for something distinctly other than the status quo, at least in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Applying the cinematic metaphor of the top paragraph, voters are a cast of thousands millions being directed within a larger political theater toward a predetermined result.

Anyone paying attention knows that voters are rarely given options that aren’t in fact different flavors of the same pro-corporate agenda. Thus, no matter whom we manage to elect in November, the outcome has already been engineered. This is true not only by virtue of the narrow range of candidates able to maneuver successfully through the electoral gauntlet but also because of perennial distortions of the balloting process such as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election fraud. Claims that both sides (really just one side) indulge in such practices so everything evens out don’t convince me.

Directed Economy

Conservative economists and market fundamentalists never seem to tire of arguments in the abstract that capitalist mechanisms of economics, left alone (unregulated, laissez-faire) to work their magic, deliver optimal outcomes when it comes to social and economic justice. Among the primary mechanisms is price discovery. However, economic practice never even remotely approaches the purity of abstraction because malefactors continuously distort and game economic systems out of self-interest greed. Price discovery is broken and equitable economic activity is made fundamentally fictitious. For example, the market for gemstones is famously inflated by a narrow consortium of sellers having successfully directed consumers to adopt a cultural standard of spending three months’ wages/salary for a wedding band as a demonstration of one’s love and devotion. In the opposite direction, precious metal spot prices are suppressed despite very high demand and nearly nonexistent supply. Current quoted premiums over spot silver price, even though no delivery is contemplated, range from roughly 20% to an absurd 2,000%. Supply and demand curves no longer function to aid in true price discovery (if such a thing ever existed). In a more banal sense, what people are willing to pay for a burger at a fast food joint or a loaf of bread at the grocery may affect the price charged more directly.

Nowhere is it more true that we’ve shifted to a directed economy than with the stock market (i.e., Wall Street vs. Main Street). As with the housing market, a real-world application with which many people have personal experience, if a buyer of a property or asset fails to appear within a certain time frame (longer for housing, shorter for stock, bonds, and other financial instruments), the seller is generally obliged to lower the price until a buyer finally appears. Some housing markets extraordinarily flush with money (e.g., Silicon Valley and Manhattan) trigger wild speculation and inflated prices that drive out all but the wealthiest buyers. Moreover, when the eventual buyer turns out to be a bank, corporation, or government entity willing to overpay for the property or asset using someone else’s money, the market becomes wholly artificial. This has been the case with the stock market for the last twelve years, with cheap money being injected nonstop via bailouts and quantitative easing to keep asset prices inflated. When fundamental instabilities began dragging the stock market down last fall, accelerating precipitous in early spring of this year and resulting in yet another crash (albeit brief), the so-called Plunge Protection Team (PPT) sprang into action and wished trillions of dollars into existence (taxpayer debt, actually, and over the objections of taxpayers in a classic fool-me-once scenario) to perpetuate the casino economy and keep asset prices inflated for the foreseeable future, which isn’t very long.

The beneficiaries of this largesse are the same as they have always been when tax monies and public debt are concerned: corporations, banks, and the wealthy. Government economic supports are directed to these entities, leaving all others in the lurch. Claims that bailouts to keep large corporate entities and wealthy individuals whole so that the larger economy doesn’t seize up and fail catastrophically are preposterous because the larger economy already has seized up and failed catastrophically while the population is mostly quarantined, throwing many individuals out of work and shuttering many businesses. A reasonable expectation of widespread insolvency and bankruptcy lingers, waiting for the workouts and numbers to mount up.

The power of the purse possessed by the U.S. Congress hasn’t been used to help the citizenry since the New Deal era of FDR. Instead, military budgets and debts expand enormously while entitlements and services to the needy and vulnerable are whittled away. Citizen rebellions are already underway in small measure, mostly aimed at the quarantines. When bankruptcies, evictions, and foreclosures start to swell, watch out. Our leaders’ fundamental mismanagement of human affairs is unlikely to be swallowed quietly.

Fiction Intrudes on Reality

Purpose behind consumption of different genres of fiction varies. For most of us, it’s about responding to stimuli and experiencing emotions vicariously, which is to say, safely. For instance, tragedy and horror can be enjoyed, if that’s the right word, in a fictional context to tweak one’s sensibilities without significant effect outside the story frame. Similarly, fighting crime, prosecuting war, or repelling an alien invasion in a video game can be fun but is far removed from actually doing those things in real life (not fun). For less explicit narrative forms, such as music, feelings evoked are aesthetic and artistic in nature, which makes a sad song or tragic symphony enjoyable on its own merits without bleeding far into real sadness or tragedy. Cinema (now blurred with broadcast TV and streaming services) is the preeminent storytelling medium that provokes all manner of emotional response. After reaching a certain age (middle to late teens), emotional detachment from depiction of sexuality and violent mayhem makes possible digestion of such stimulation for the purpose of entertainment — except in cases where prior personal trauma is triggered. Before that age, nightmare-prone children are prohibited.

Dramatic conflict is central to driving plot and story forward, and naturally, folks are drawn to some stories while avoiding others. Although I’m detached enough not to be upset by, say, zombie films where people and zombies alike are dispatched horrifically, I wouldn’t say I enjoy gore or splatter. Similarly, realistic portrayals of war (e.g., Saving Private Ryan) are not especially enjoyable for me despite the larger story, whether based on true events or entirely made up. The primary reason I leave behind a movie or TV show partway through is because I simply don’t enjoy watching suffering.

Another category bugs me even more: when fiction intrudes on reality to remind me too clearly of actual horrors (or is it the reverse: reality intruding on fiction?). It doesn’t happen often. One of the first instances I recall was in Star Trek: The Next Generation when the story observed that (fictional) warp travel produced some sort of residue akin to pollution. The reminder that we humans are destroying the actual environment registered heavily on me and ruined my enjoyment of the fictional story. (I also much prefer the exploration and discovery aspects of Star Trek that hew closer to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision than the militaristic approach now central to Star Trek.) A much more recent intrusion occurs in the rather adolescent TV show The 100, where a global nuclear exchange launched by an artificial intelligence has the follow-on effect a century later of remaining nuclear sites going critical, melting down, and irradiating the Earth, making it uninhabitable. This bothers me because that’s my expectation what happens in reality, probably not too long (decades) after industrial civilization collapses and most or all of us are dead. This prospect served up as fiction is simply too close to reality for me to enjoy vicariously.

Another example of fiction intruding too heavily on my doomer appreciation of reality occurred retroactively. As high-concept science fiction, I especially enjoyed the first Matrix movie. Like Star Trek, the sequels degraded into run-of-the-mill war stories. But what was provocative about the original was the matrix itself: a computer-generated fiction situated within a larger reality. Inside the matrix was pleasant enough (though not without conflict), but reality outside the matrix was truly awful. It was a supremely interesting narrative and thought experiment when it came out in 1999. Now twenty-one years later, it’s increasingly clear that we are living in a matrix-like, narrative-driven hyperreality intent on deluding ourselves with a pleasant equilibrium that simply isn’t in evidence. In fact, as societies and as a civilization, we’re careening out of control, no brakes, no steering. Caitlin Johnstone explores this startling after-the-fact realization in an article at Medium.com, which I found only a couple days ago. Reality is in fact far worse than the constructed hyperreality. No wonder no one wants to look at it.

God’s Eye View (redux)

The first time I wrote on this title was here. I’m pretty satisfied with that 11-year-old blog post. Only recently, I copped to use of reframing to either zoom in on detail or zoom out to context, a familiar rhetorical device. Here I’m zooming out again to the god’s eye view of things.

The launching point for me is James Howard Kunstler’s recent blog post explaining and apologizing for his generation’s principal error: financialization of the U.S. economy. In that post, he identifies characteristics in grandparents and parents of boomers as each responds and adapts to difficulties of the most self-destructive century in human history. Things destroyed include more than just lives, livelihoods, and the biosphere. After several centuries of rising expectations and faith in progress (or simply religious faith), perhaps the most telling destruction is morale, first in the reckless waste of WWI (the first mechanized war), then repeatedly in serial economic and political catastrophes and wars that litter the historical record right up to today. So it’s unsurprising (but not excusable) that boomers, seeing in unavoidable long-term destruction our powerlessness to master ourselves or in fact much of anything — despite the paradox of developing and obtaining more power at every opportunity — embarked on a project to gather to themselves as much short-term wealth and power as possible because, well, why the fuck not? Kunstler’s blog post is good, and he admits that although the masters-of-the-universe financial wizards who converted the economy into a rigged casino/carnival game for their own benefit are all boomers, not all boomers are responsible except in the passive sense that we (includes me, though I’m just as powerless as the next) have allowed it to transpire without the necessary corrective: revolt.

Zooming out, however, I’m reminded of Jared Diamond’s assessment that the greatest mistake humans ever committed was the Agricultural Revolution 10–13 millennia ago. That context might be too wide, so let me restrict to the last 500 years. One theory propounded by Morris Berman in his book Why America Failed (2011) is that after the discovery of the New World, the cohort most involved in colonizing North America was those most desperate and thus inclined to accept largely unknown risks. To them, the lack of ontological security and contingent nature of their own lives were undeniable truths that in turn drive distortion of the human psyche. Thus, American history and character are full of abominations hardly compensated for by parallel glories. Are boomers, or more generally Americans, really any worse than others throughout history? Probably not. Too many counter-examples to cite.

The current endgame phase of history is difficult to assess as we experience it. However, a curious theory came to my attention that fits well with my observation of a fundamental epistemological crisis that has made human cognition into a hall of mirrors. (See also here and here, and I admit cognition may have always been a self-deception.) In a recent Joe Rogan podcast, Eric Weinstein, who comes across as equally brilliant and disturbed (admitting that not much may separate those two categories), opines that humans can handle only 3–4 layers of deception before collapsing into disorientation. It’s probably a feature, not a bug, and many have learned to exploit it. The example Weinstein discusses (derivative of others’ analyses, I think) is professional wrestling. Fans and critics knew for a very long time that wrestling looks fake, yet until the late 1980s, wrestlers and promoters held fast to the façade that wresting matches are real sporting competitions rather than being “sports entertainments.” Once the jig was up, it turned out that fans didn’t really care; it was real enough for them. Now we’ve come full circle with arguments (and the term kayfabe) that although matches are staged and outcomes known in advance, the wresting itself is absolutely for real. So we encounter a paradox where what we’re told and shown is real, except that it isn’t, except that it sorta is, ultimately finding that it’s turtles all the way down. Enthusiastic, even rabid, embrace of the unreality of things is now a prime feature of the way we conduct ourselves.

Professional wrestling was not the first organization or endeavor to offer this style of mind-bending unreality. Deception and disinformation (e.g., magic shows, fortune-telling, con jobs, psyops) have been around forever. However, wrestling may well have perfected the style for entertainment purposes, which has in turn infiltrated nearly all aspects of modern life, not least of which are economics and politics. Thus, we have crypto- and fiat currencies based on nothing, where money can be materialized out of thin air to save itself from worthlessness, at least until that jig is up, too. We also have twin sham candidates for this fall’s U.S. presidential election, both clearly unfit for the job for different reasons. And in straightforward fictional entertainment, we have a strong revival of magical Medievalism, complete with mythical creatures, spells, and blades of fortune. As with economics and politics, we know it’s all a complex of brazen lies and gaslighting, but it’s nonetheless so tantalizing that its entertainment value outstrips and sidelines any calls to fidelity or integrity. Spectacle and fakery are frankly more interesting, more fun, more satisfying. Which brings me to my favorite Joe Bageant quote:

We have embraced the machinery of our undoing as recreation.

Life Out of Balance, pt. 3

I had at least two further ideas for this third part of a series, but frankly, given the precipitous turn of events over the past month or so, nothing feels appropriate to write about just yet other than the global pandemic that has staggered society, reeling from being forced apart from each other and the way of life to which we are adapted being suddenly ripped out from beneath us. As the voiceover at the beginning of one of the Lord of the Rings movies intones rather soberly, “The world … has changed ….” That was my assessment here, though I was really thinking of the post-truth public sphere.

Many are already admitting that we will never be able to go back to what once was, that what broke will stay forever broken. And while the eventual response may be interpreted in sweet-lemon style as a reform opportunity or beckon call to greatness, I daresay a far more likely result is that mass death, sickness, and ruin will create a critical mass of desperate people not so willing to stay hunkered down waiting for the extended crisis to pass. Indeed, the bunker mentality already imprinted on our minds as we cringe before the next in a series of injurious blows can’t be expected to endure. Folks will take to the streets with all their stockpiled guns and ammo, seeking something, anything to do, rather than dying quietly, meekly, alone, at home. The metaphor of being pummeled into submission or to death is probably incorrect. Right now, we’re still only partway up one of those parabolic curves that ultimately points skyward. Alternatively, it’s a crescendo of pain that overwhelms until nothing functions anymore.

If surviving historians are able to piece together the story some time hence, one possibility will be to observe that the abundance we sorta enjoyed during two centuries of cheap energy did not develop into anything resembling an enlightened style of social organization that could be sustained or indeed even prepare us adequately for inevitable black swan events. Such discontinuities are entirely predictable by virtue of their inevitability, though precise timing is a fool’s errand. Natural disasters are the obvious example, and despite organizations and agencies scattered throughout all levels of government, we’re found flat-footed nearly every time disaster strikes. This global pandemic is no different, nor is the collapse of industrial civilization or runaway climate change. The current crisis is the first major kick in the teeth that may well cascade domino-style into full-on collapse.

As the crisis deepens, top leaders are often found to be worthless. Where is Pence, appointed more than a month ago to coordinate a coronavirus task force? It’s quite unlike a major political figure to do his or her work quietly and competently without media in tow. Even incompetence gets coverage, but Pence is nowhere to be seen. Must be self-quarantining. Some leaders are even worse than worthless; they actively add to the misery. Mainstream media may also have finally gotten hip to the idea that hanging on every insipid word uttered by that gaping chasm of stupidity that is our president is no longer a ratings bonanza to be tolerated in exchange for fruitless fact-checking missions. I fantasize about press events where correspondents heckle and laugh the fatuous gasbag (or his apologists) off the podium. Regrettably, there seems to be no bottom to the humiliation he can withstand so long as attention stays riveted on him. Perhaps the better response to his noisome nonsense would be stone silence — crickets.