But What Was the Name of the Cat?

"We even adopted a cat—a sweet indoor kitty with an autoimmune virus we named Wimbledon."

-- Paul M. Davis

I Dream Things That Never Were, and Ask, "Why Not?"

"They don't pay people $25,000 a month to be a historian."

-- Mitt Romney

(title cite)

"Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Clay, Charles De Gaulle, William Wallace, Pericles...

...The Duke Of Wellington, Thomas Edison, Vince Lombardi, The Wright Brothers, Moses, and 'a viking.'"

-- A list of the people to whom Newt Gingrich has compared himself (as reported here, in turn as distributed by the Romney campaign (whose word is worth the paper it was emailed on, so caveat lector on this one)).

For sheer entertainment value over the next ten months (which seems to be a non-trivial part of the value our increasingly farcical elections have these days), there's no question who you should root for as the Republican nominee.

Quote of the Day

Everything is so fragile.

There's so much conflict, so much pain. You keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on.

If happy comes along -- that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy -- I think you have to grab it while you can.

You take what you can get. 'Cause it's here, and then...

...gone.

-- Kitty Pryde in Astonishing X-Men #22, by Joss Whedon

This Post Intentionally Left Blank

Man, I'm messing up everything today.

Working Title of the Memoir of the Last Human Being Alive

No One But Myself To Blame.

(It will never get out of draft, of course: oh, it's good enough -- everyone who's read it liked it -- but all the remaining publishers think there won't be any sort of audience for it.)

Quote of the Day on the Most Important Political Issue of Our Time: a New Year's Eve Post

Climate change is the most important issue of our time -- both due to its urgency (the time frame for getting a solution into place is distressingly narrow) and the direness that will result if nothing is done. If you're not convinced of this, read these two posts by David Roberts (follow-up here) -- and worry. Even if you only posit a, say, 5% change that he's right (ludicrously low), panic seems a very appropriate response. Every other issue before us will affect only a few generations, or only Americans, or some other subset of humanity -- this issue will affect the fate of humanity, full stop. It's urgent and it's dire and it's terrifying.

Let's just pause on the consequences for a moment longer. To quote "Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain":

For humanity it’s a matter of life or death ... we will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 degrees.

‘‘If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving."

Read that again. We're talking about the death of 94% of the human race. (The above-linked articles talk about the fact that we are, in fact, heading rapidly for a 4 or more degree (celsius) temperature rise.)

So how is Obama, our "liberal" president, doing on this most pressing of matters? Well, they're working as hard as they can... to sabotage a small European-led effort to work on the problem. From Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (via):

It’s bad enough—more than bad enough, really—that the U.S. has failed to lead the fight against climate change. This is very nearly as true under President Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. As former Senator Tim Wirth, now the president of the U.N. Foundation, put it recently, “I don’t know who and where the climate leadership in the Administration is. It doesn’t exist.”

Now, by trying to block others’ attempts to tackle the problem, the U.S. is behaving in a manner that seems best described as unforgivable. Last week, in a letter to Secretaries Clinton and LaHood, the heads of several of the nation’s leading environmental groups noted that the Administration is “actively thwarting other countries’ efforts to effectively and efficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” a position that is incompatible with the Administration’s own stated commitment to avoiding “a dangerous rise in global average temperatures.” The groups urged the Administration to abide by the European court’s decision, “just as the Administration would wish other nations to respect the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

It’s pretty much impossible to imagine how the world can reduce the risks of climate change without imposing some sort of emissions limits, and airline emissions seems like as good a place to start as any. If the Administration disagrees with the European plan, then it would seem to be under a heavy obligation to propose its own. All it's doing now is shilling for the airlines. Is this any way to run a planet?

For those of you who like to blame the Republicans in Congress for all of the Obama administration's mistakes, please note that they are not involved here: this is Mr. Hope & Change, and his trusty deputies, all on their own.

To say that Obama is working hard to be the James Buchanan of climate change is far, far too optimistic. First, however horrific a crime slavery was, it did not threaten the extension of 94% of the human race. And, of course, Buchanan was followed by Abraham Lincoln -- whereas Obama-as-Buchanan is likely to be followed (whether in 2013 or 2017) by the climate-change equivalent of John C. Breckinridge.

Most people would probably think that I was being histrionic in saying Obama could and should be impeached for this. But the truth of the matter is that it would be ludicrously slight. Obama will be -- to quote a President whose name Obama is not fit to utter -- "damned in time and eternity" for his inaction -- or, rather, for his positive actions on the side of mass death and destruction.

Obama has been a utter disappointment in so many important areas -- civil liberties, executive secrecy, American military adventuring, coddling of 1% lawbreakers, a failure to aggressively address unemployment, a failure to confront inequality, a pathetic tendency to pre-capitulate to the forces of reaction, and an utter failure to use his famously powerful voice to articulate an alternate language to the Ayn Randian culture we have created (something which was begun -- just begun, but begun -- this year by Occupy Wall Street). But I think I could forgive all of that if he had genuinely confronted the environmental crisis. After all, if politics is about utilitarian compromise, then you could certainly argue that the climate crisis outweighs all of the rest put together.

But far from addressing it, Obama is fighting on the wrong side (just as he is in at least the first four of the items in the first paragraph, and arguably the first six (the last two he is clearly just failing miserably, or giving up without trying, rather than actively aiding the forces of Malevolence.)) What, in fact, does he have to show for all his meekness and compromise? A Republican health-care plan, and a number of small symbolic victories -- boy scout medals which he can hang on the wall moments before it is washed away by the flood which will drown the world.

So this is where we are: a crisis of unprecedented proportions, dire urgency, and the mainstream of political life caught between a conservative, business-agenda hack, and whichever loon the Republicans put up to run against him.

I don't, as a principled matter, believe in despair in the realm of the political. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light": yes. But at the moment I don't even see how to forward the hopeless struggle. If we are to fight the long defeat, we at least need to know how to do that. But now, where do we line up to fight in the hopeless battle? If that is the only question left, then I'd at least like an answer to that.

And that's where I see us located, now, on the last day of 2011. Happy new year to you all.

Happy Birthday Joseph!

Joseph Saperstein Frug is 3 today. Happy Birthday!

Pictures from his third birthday party, held at the Science Center on Sunday. (Not unlike George Washington, Joseph's birthday is celebrated on a different day than its actual calendrical date.) The Science Center throws a great birthday party; fun was had by all.

Coates on Greenwald on Hitchens: The Cohabitation of Virtues and Sins

After this long linkfest, I had not intended to return to the topic of the late Christopher Hitchens. But I am drawn to do so by the fact I still have grading to procrastinate on Ta-Nehisi Coates, who continues his irritating habit of being a better and wiser writer than anyone has a right to be, and showing the rest of us up. In response to Glenn Greenwald's thoughtful (negative) posting about Hitchens and the reaction to his death, Coates first noted (via) that "over the last decade, Hitchens sins actually injured his prose" -- an incredibly important point all by itself. But then he goes on to say this:

Nevertheless, I think Glenn's frame is wrong. Virtues don't excuse sins; they cohabit with them. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. Perhaps worse he was a slaveholder who comprehended, more than any other, the moral failing of slavery, and it's potential to bring the country to war, and yet at the end of his life he argued for slavery's expansion, and on his death many of his slaves were sent to the auction block.

At his end, Jefferson sided with those who would eventually bring about the deaths of 600,000 Americans. He argued that the antebellum South would have either "justice" versus "self-preservation." To paraphrase Churchill, it chose the latter and consequently got neither. But Jefferson was a beautiful writer, and a great intellect, whose thinking and prose I consistently find stunning. This admiration does not negate his moral cowardice. Both are true at the same time. (The same point could be made in regards to our conversation over Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)

Given Hitchens own ties to this magazine, of which I'm very fond, I'd like to say that--at least in this space--there's no demand for exclusion, or any sense that Hitchens worthy of unalloyed admiration. No one should ever receive, or wisely desire, such a thing. I can't really speak for other people, but I don't believe in an essential, irreducible moral nature. I don't see Hitchens, or anyone else, as a case of either/or.

Word. Yes. "Both are true at the same time": "Virtues don't excuse sins; they cohabit with them". That captures it -- not just for Hitchens, but for the human experience.

Coates says more in comments:

I don't know that his "virtues outweigh his vices." That presumes a kind of grand authority that I neither want, nor feel qualified, to exercise. It's just not a case I would ever make. Nor am I really interested in making the case, it's sort of irrelevant to me. It seems to originate from the need to either declare someone a "good person" or a "bad person." I think it's clear from my writing on slavery and race that I don't really see the world that way.

...If I disqualified people for the horrendous ideas they held or advanced, my personal canon would be sliced in half. I don't think those horrendous ideas should be shooed away. But they aren't a counter to whatever better ideas the person espoused. You can be a horrendous bigot, and a great father. You can be a raving misogynist and a great novelist. Neither cancels the other out--though I understand people often write as though it should.

(Still more here.) "Neither cancels the other": the simple, basic truth about human beings, human merits and vices, human reality that seems so hard for people to grasp. (Including some of Coates's commentators, a fair number of whom seem, uncharacteristically for his comments section, to miss the point.)

It seems that one fair criticism you could make of Hitchens is that he himself did not recognize this truth at all: that he tended to support or condemn people whole, without the least nuance, without any understanding that virtue and sin can and do cohabit. In that sense (as well as in others) I think that Coates is a wiser writer than the man he credits with inspiring him so.

Poem of the Day: Rudyard Kipling Waxes Metaphorical About Fifteenth Century England

The Dawn Wind

The Fifteenth Century

At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and lie down,
Dozing and chewing the cud; or a bird in the ivy wakes,
Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless Wind strays on,
Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly, the darkness breaks.

Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an angel's wing,
Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts: "The Sun! The Sun!"
And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin to sing,
And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is day and his work is done.

So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,
Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own!
-- Rudyard Kipling

I'd always known the opening quatrain only in the context of its use as the epigraph for The Citadel of the Autarch (the fourth book of Gene Wolfe's masterpiece The Book of the New Sun). Recently it occurred to me to wonder what poem it came from; the above is the answer. It's one of a cycle of poems first published in A School History of England (1911) by C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling. Peter Keating notes that "It was used to close chapter VI, ‘The End of the Middle Ages: Richard II to Richard III, 1377-1485.’ An entry in the right hand margin beside the poem reads: ‘The hour before the dawn’ which might – given that the poem is centrally about process rather than achievement - make a more precise title for the poem than the one it carries."

Christopher Hitchens, 1949 - 2011

Christopher Hitchens -- a man who wrote some genuinely fine sentences -- died yesterday. I have mixed feelings about the man's work (which I won't elaborate on now), but none about his death, which is utterly shitty, as all death is. Particularly death too young, when the person had work left to do.

Here are some things that some other people have said.

PZ Myers:

Hitch is dead. We are a diminished people for the loss. There can be and should be no consolation, no soft words that encourage an illusion of heavenly rescue, no balm of lies. We should feel as we do with every death, that a part of us has been ripped from our hearts, and suffer pain and grief — and we are reminded that this is the fate we all face, that someday we too will die, and that we are all “living dyingly”, as Hitch put it so well.

As atheists, I think none of us can find solace in the cliches or numbness in the delusion of an afterlife. Instead, embrace the fierce strong emotions of anger and sorrow, feel the pain, rage against the darkness, fight back against our mortal enemy Death, and live exuberantly while we can. Confront mortality clear-eyed and pugnacious, uncompromising and aggressive.

It’s what Hitch would have wanted of us.

It’s how Hitch lived.

The NYT Obituary:

He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

David Frum:

A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.

“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club. No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

Dave Zirin:

Christopher Hitchens was a man of prodigious gifts, but in the end, he used those gifts to promote wars that produced a killing field in the Middle East. That, tragically, is his lasting legacy to the world, and no amount of flowery obituaries can change this stubborn fact.

(The Nation's more cordial official obituary is here.)

Andrew Sullivan has a very moving video here. Unsurprisingly, Sullivan's blog has been Hitch central today (many of these links are from there): his first reaction to the news is here; he links to Auden's poetic porn "The Platonic Blow" in Hitchens's memory; two quotes from Hitchens's writings here. With doubtless more to come. (Update: Sullivan has a link round-up of his own Hitchens-related posts here, including a fair sampling of Hitchens quotations too.)

Here's a nicely-done collection of quotes from Hitchens about various subjects. And here are his answers to the so-called 'Proust questionnaire'. Selections from Hitchens's writing in their magazines have been posted at The Nation and The Atlantic.

Hitchens's brother, Peter.

No particular quotes, but here are memorial notices or other quotes, clips, etc from other people:

• Spencer Ackerman
• Christopher Buckley
  
• Paul Campos quotes Hitchens about meeting Borges
• Greta Christina
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Jill of Feministe
• Scott Eric Kaufmann
• Dennis Perrin
  
• Abbas Raza
  
• Benjamin Schwartz

I may add more later if I see them. (Update: yep. Paragraph List below, too.)

Some more negative responses, which I'll separate in case anyone wants to obey the "hear no evil of the dead" rule:

• John Cook
• Echidine of the Snakes
  
• Glenn Greenwald
• Scott Lemieux
• Michael Lind
• Katha Pollitt
• Melissa McEwan
• Alex Pareene
• Corey Robins (moved from above list)
• Richard Seymour (aka Lenin)

Interesting to note that as time's gone on (and yes, I keep adding to this -- I don't mean to, but I keep seeing things here and there) the latter list has grown and grown after the former one has stopped expanding. I guess the backlash is well and truly on.

***

I said above that I wouldn't go into what I disliked about Hitchens's work; I didn't say so, but it was out of respect for the man the day after his death. But maybe I was wrong to do so: Hitchens himself set another standard, as this video clip of his appearance on Fox news right after Jerry Falwell's death shows. Perhaps it would be true to the man to light into his errors, even today?

But no. It wouldn't. For above all, Hitchens was true to himself, and refused to mold himself to fit the opinion of the world. He possessed, in this way, what Emerson called "self reliance" -- a refusal to bow to conformity (or consistency, for that matter.) And if it is Hitchens's way to speak ill of the dead, I do not wish it to be mine.

For the same reason, I will not refrain (as PZ Myers and Greta Christina have urged) from saying "rest in peace" -- not because I have any more belief in an afterlife than they or he, but because I don't actually think it means that: it's just a ritual, something to say when you hear about a death and feel that "every man's death diminishes me, because I am part of mankind".

So I won't say what I dislike about his work; I will wish him (not really, just verbally) a peaceful rest. Because Hitchens exemplified being true to one's beliefs, right or wrong, in the face of the world's lashing you in the face with its displeasure.

And that, Noble Readers, is a legacy. And a loss.

Rest in peace.

Still later update: I keep seeing Hitchens pieces -- I guess because this damn grading is taking forever they're being published everywhere. Most of it has been said well enough in the above (or here), so I shan't update any more. (Probably.) But I can't resist linking to this genuinely brilliant satire of the entire affair by Neal Pollack, "I Knew Christopher Hitchens Better Than You." (Via 3quarksdaily, which notes that within a mere "72 hours we've gone from obsequy to backlash to satire".) If you've read even a fraction of the above-linked items, you should read that -- it's quite hilarious.