Nature's Tears

My wife loves the little stuffed animals she receives when she contributes to wildlife protection organizations.

The most recent one represents a howling wolf, but viewed from a certain perspective it more resembles a weeping wolf.  How appropriate!

Not just scores of species are on the brink of extinction.  The shared home of every living creature, our host planet, is being murdered by the one species that fancies itself dominant.  Homo sapiens.

Such a misnomer. “Wise man.”   Better “greedy man.”  “Arrogant man.”  “Ignorant man.” “Self destructive man.” “Despicable man.”

The wolf shall weep.  For the poisoning of the water, and the air, the dying trees and plants, the vanishing prey, the lethal heat. As the great cats must weep, and the raptors, and all the creatures that fly, and those that burrow,  and those that swim; those that nimbly leap from crag to crag high on the  mountain, and those that roam and rumble and  prowl the jungles and the vanishing rain forests.  All must weep as vain, vile, war-making, greedy man first despoils and then destroys our home. Foremost among the destroyers is the loathsome creature in the White House, simpering and proud of his willful ignorance of science, of his disdain for truth. By withdrawing this country from the Paris climate accord he has assured his place in history — beside Hitler and the Holocaust in the chapter on genocide.

Forty-seven scientists have now been fired from the Environmental Protection Agency.  Its director told Congress that more dismissals will come because what's important is to stop wasting money on such profligate activities as regulations to keep water and air clean. He mocks the notion that human activity is causing climate change, despite the overwhelming weight of science to the contrary.

Protected public lands will be opened up to polluters, drillers, miners, rapists of the land. Animal habitat will be destroyed, rivers and streams befouled, irreplaceable cultural and  historical artifacts obliterated and a handful of billionaires will get richer.  Three-thousand-year-old giant sequoias  will be cut down. The unspeakably beautiful American west will become a vast wasteland.  

The wolf shall weep.

Roadrunners have built a nest in  the tree outside our door in the northeast corner of the patio. We have lived here nearly 20 years.  Never have we seen the fiercely independent roadrunner nest so close to an occupied house.  Our neighbors have a nest, too.

Drought? Habitat destruction? Climate change? All of the above.

Today one of the roadrunners hopped from the tree-nest to the stone wall around the patio.  She strutted a bit, then paused and faced east toward the Organ Mountains. These are the crown jewels of a vast new national monument, established by President Obama to protect an area of beauty, cultural significance and religious veneration for the Native American tribes of souther New Mexico.  Now the barbarians of Washington will dismantle it.

The roadrunner stood motionless on the patio wall, staring toward the mountains.  Surely she, too, was weeping.

The Good Old Days of Tricky Dick

One day during the Nixon Administration I had lunch with Bob Semple, the New York Times White House correspondent, and Dan Rather, then the CBS White House reporter.

They were trying to plot a strategy for the President’s next news conference that would maneuver Nixon into a corner so that he could not avoid a follow- up question when he gave an evasive answer.  Nixon was adept at dodging  tough questions.  Reporters who sought clarification from the press secretary, Ron Ziegler, got more evasions.  The White House press corps was irate.  

Press conference?  Mere evasion? What kind of fairyland was this? Today, a substantial minority of those covering the White House are right-wing whores who not only do not care about being lied to, but are actually complicit in the lies. News conferences have virtually ceased to exist. Reporters are called into staged events where cameras and audio recorders are not allowed.  Neither is truth.

Nobody is protesting.  Even the reporters for major, responsible news organizations troop into these little bits of theater and dutifully take notes on the latest bovine excrement from Spicer or Conway or the designated liar du jour.

The New York Times recently compiled a list of just the most blatant, obvious lies uttered by the so-called president in his first five months in office.  They filled an entire page!

The people shrugged.

American media have entered into a conspiracy of silence on the work of Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who exposed U.S. war crimes in Viet Nam and has been turning over rocks ever since, catching government sleazes and sinners in the act.

Now, so-called news outlets in this country reject his best work.  It appears in the London Review of books or, in the case of his latest truth-bomb, in a German publication. It reports in excruciating detail how Donald and his minions lied to the American people about an invented sarin gas attack in Syria.  There was no such attack and the officials knew that, from their own most senior intelligence officials.

And the people yawned.  

The highest officials in the Environmental Protection Agency ordered a scientist to lie about the dangers of weakening the Clean Water Act and when he refused, they fired him.

On and on.

In 1979 the Reaganites, the media and the armchair patriots deemed Jimmy Carter unfit to continue in office because he told a truthful tale about an angry swamp rabbit.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has told a pageful of lies about the important issues of our times — and he remains in office with a 40 percent approval rating.

In the rest of the world, 75 percent of poll respondents disapprove of or distrust him, the worst scores ever for a U. S. president.  It is not merely sad, but terribly dangerous that we cannot see ourselves as others see us.

We Broke It, We Own It

There is only one political party in the tragi-comic, third-rate banana republic that still calls itself the United States of America.

It is an amalgam of angry white male ignoramuses, rich and powerful oligarchs and military-industrial despots, titularly headed by a perpetual adolescent devoid of ethics or morality whose mental stability is questionable.

The last vestiges of opposition are rotting in the political sewer where a moribund Democratic party went to die after declaring itself “centrist.”

Recent special elections, especially yesterday’s fiasco in Georgia, have affirmed that American voters neither want nor deserve good government.  They want only to have their mindless rage and hatred ratified by hearing it repeated by the unfit little demagogues they have put in public office.

Have recent electoral surprises in other democratic nations given a glimmer of hope to those thinking few who seek to save a semblance of our own original democratic republic? Two years ago, Emmanuel Macron’s Le Republique en Marche party did not exist.  Now Marcon is president of France and his party firmly controls Parliament with a mandate to clean up the sleaze of traditional politics.  In France, Marcon and his followers are called centrist, but in America their positions would be well to the left of the corrupt notions that now govern us. Could a brand-new party of the left pull off a Macron miracle in the U.S.? Not likely.

Once dismissed as a silly sideline act, Jeremy Corbyn, who heads the United Kingdom’s lefty Labour Party, led an electoral surge in the recent election that all but unseated Prime Minister Theresa May’s repressive Conservative coalition. Could, say, Bernie Sanders become America’s Jeremy Corbyn?

There remained in France and Britain pockets of thinking voters to whom Macron and Corbyn could address their appeals. Such voters amount to a mere handful here.  Those who still espouse an enlightened liberalism that might yet rally a redemptive revolution are dispersed, dispirited and seemingly incapable of actually organizing anything like a movement.

As a people, we are stuck with the fading, failing system of so-called government that we deserve.  We voted for it.