Give Me a Break, John — Part 1

Back during the Bill Clinton era, I sat through a number of 20/20 episodes, and along the way, became acquainted with a host named John and his “Give Me a Break” opinion segments. At the time I didn’t identify a particular pattern to those segments, but I would sometimes agree with the viewpoint expressed, and sometimes I wouldn’t agree.

Then, around the turn of the new millennium, ABC aired an hour-long special by Mr. S, during which he expounded on not 1 but 10 grievances. Somewhere along the way, between his suggestion that the 1970s DDT ban constituted self-disarmament in the war against malaria and his assertion that environmental regulations aren’t necessary because the air and water are just fine, and would be so even without such regulations, I concluded that going forward, i wouldn’t need to waste time giving serious consideration to anything he said. Though John obviously doesn’t know it, DDT, over 4 decades after the ban began, still causes harm to certain wildlife species, and may also negatively affect the health of humans who unknowingly come in contact with trace amounts. For an example of the fallacious reasoning behind the libertarian view of air and water pollution regulations, see Beijing, if you can.

So then, not so long ago, John reappears on the radar, in the form of a syndicated newspaper opinion column. This time around, Mr. S wants the climate scientists to give him a break. While John himself evidently hasn’t quite decided whether to believe in climate change (as if it’s some kind of article of faith), he’s quite sure there’s no cause for alarm, or even cause for lowering fossil fuel use.

While I’m no climate scientist either, I could tell John one thing — if, 50 years ago, when I was in HS, someone had told me that within my lifetime, there would come a point at which, during the northern hemisphere late summer, the Arctic Ocean would be completely devoid of ice, even if for only a short period of time, I wouldn’t have needed a climate scientist to tell me that such a change constitutes a really big deal. Yet, concurrent with Mr. S’s opinion piece, I also read such a prediction by a climatologist, who expects that this late summer iceless phenomenon could begin before the end of this decade.

During my HS years, one science teacher spoke about the concept of global warming as an ongoing topic of discussion and study for the scientific community, but one without definitive answers or conclusions back then. When I related this to a distant relative who I recently reconnected with on Facebook who also had attended the same school, he jokingly admitted that he hadn’t paid much attention in certain classes. Not long after, though, like a true climate-science denier, he asserted that carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere, to which I replied that from everything I knew, Tyndall’s work was still considered foundational in that regard, though if he had evidence to the contrary from some other valid source, I would certainly look it over. This reply of mine, unsurprisingly, got no reply from him.

In addition to learning about the possibility of global warming 50 years ago in HS, I also learned and understood the fundamental greenhouse-gas concept, which was settled science from a hundred years earlier, but my relative must not have paid much attention in class that day either. If you understand this piece of science, then it doesn’t take much to add in the possibility that oxidizing fossil fuel sources containing significant percentages of carbon could increase the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn would increase the greenhouse-gas effect — not all that different from adding 2 and 2 to get 4.

Before the late 1980s, the climate change discussion had no political element, but then some members of the Big Oil gang started blasting propaganda to confuse the issue, although, to the best of my knowledge, that only happened in this country, which explains why only in the U.S. does a sizable percentage of the population, mostly belonging to a certain political party, question the science of climate change. That propaganda continues, as evidenced by Mr. S’s opinion piece, although it also loses efficacy over time as the weight of the truth tips the scales. 

Perhaps John should give all of us a break, and go back to school for a bit so he can learn some genuine science, but then, maybe that might be too scary for him, because the teacher might also belong to a union, which is another thing that bothers John a lot. Who knows, possibly Mr. S has himself suffered from some trace exposures to DDT that have blunted his reasoning capacity, in which case it would be pointless to try to explain to him a simple concept I learned in HS biology, which is that all living creatures on this earth share some basic chemistry, meaning that what’s poison to an insect is also poison to a human being, if ingested in a large enough quantity. I suspect that, just like my distant relative, John might have had better things to do in HS than listen to his teachers, but his ignorance of elemental science is no excuse, so when he asks us to give him a break, we can — a break from any sort of media credibility, since he shouldn’t have any.

The Donald and The Dreaded F-word

We certainly don't need this guy running a reality TV show 

in the Oval Office, especially considering how 

he might f-up the country (and by f-word, 

I mean one with 7 letters, not 4).

Back in the early to mid-‘70s, my friends and I had no difficulty tossing the dreaded f-word around amongst ourselves, whenever we thought it fit — if we thought someone was an f, we wouldn’t hesitate to use the term, as had been the fashion among young hipsters like us for probably a decade. If someone acted like a control freak, then he (almost always he, rarely if ever she) was an f. Generally, back then, I might guess that those f types voted Republican, but not know for certain, or even bother to give it much thought, often enough. If someone came across as a control freak, then he needed to lighten up, and loosen up. I didn’t think much then about the possibility that a control freak I knew might harbor actual fascist sentiments in favor of rounding up particular ethnic or religious minorities en masse, confining them to concentration camps and/or inflicting harm on them.

The word slowly fell out of fashion, and when I would hear someone tag Reagan, Goldwater, or certain other right-wing Republicans with the term, it sounded to me like a bit of a stretch. As the Supreme Court handed the 2000 election to W, the partisanship of the Republican majority in that case didn’t surprise me, but the extreme behavior of his administration did — when I saw Rumsfeld do his “We know where they are” bit, I had difficulty adjusting to the fact that a sitting Secretary of Defense would lie so openly and blatantly with the TV cameras rolling. Still, in that summer of 2003, when I saw a t-shirt with W and Adolf side by side, I smiled, understanding the message (Same S**t, Different A***ole), but it didn’t bring that f-word to mind, and to give W credit, whatever his faults, at least he did not demonize Islam or Muslims during his time in office.

At some point in the warmer months of the following year, that a-word came back to mind. I had heard about the new Trump TV show, and at some point I actually sat through an entire episode, to see the reality behind the buzz. I even gave it a second chance a few weeks later, although ten minutes was about all I could stand that time around, and it confirmed my earlier conclusion — I’d known enough egotistical jerks in my life, and I didn’t need to watch one on a reality TV show.

Then in the late fall, that f-word came bubbling back up, in the wake of a second stolen election. All the malfeasance of the first term seemed to multiply, and map out dark roads ahead for our representative democracy. As the second term disasters unfolded and built on each other, I started thinking about the word a lot more, and what it might mean in the modern era. I also began to grasp the fact that the fight against fascism didn’t begin and end with the Second World War. I read a treatise that identified the basics of fascism, and I made mental check marks as I moved down the list, feeling very strongly that if people like myself didn’t get more involved in expressing our dissatisfaction with the direction the Bush/Cheney gang was taking the country, we might lose our representative democracy completely.

As the opposition grew and gained momentum, the Ds won back both houses of Congress in the fall of ’06, and I felt a sense of hope that citizen involvement could and would prevent a slide into total f-land. I breathed a sigh of relief in January of ’09 when Obama took the oath of office, feeling that we had gotten past the possibility of looming war with Iran. Fast forward to the spring of 2011, and as the next presidential election started to gather focus, I began to hear whispers about that reality TV barker trying to move to a much different stage, though some political pundits labelled those rumors as cynical self-promotion for his TV career, which his quick turn towards the exit door seemed to confirm.

With that history in mind, and not knowing of his other earlier political flirtations, such as his attempt at the Reform Party nomination in 2000, I initially dismissed the clown’s suggestions of a genuine political move as more of the same empty self-promotion. However, over the previous year or two, I had connected the dots between the simplistic empty-headed mindset of such vapid self-promoters and the fantasy world where so many modern D.C. Republicans seem to dwell, so when the Donald made his official announcement, I could believe that perhaps he meant it this time, and that he had meant it 4 years earlier as well, but had promptly packed it in the last time around because he could sense that he didn’t have the necessary momentum in that cycle.

When Trump began his 2016 run with a xenophobic rant directed at Mexicans, it didn’t surprise me. The Donald, same as the Republicans who applaud him, lives in the fact-free magical-thinking Fox News primitive-brain sphere where logic and reason do not intrude, and where the world doesn’t turn according to established scientific principles but spins around huge dark clouds of fear. Watching his reality TV show, one might have quickly pegged him as an authoritarian control-freak type, but when you understand what makes someone act that way, then you recognize how all the pieces fit together, from the annoying egocentric pronouncements to the joking suggestions of murdering reporters. What the Donald doesn’t realize when he hits full fascist mode is that when he says, “We need to round up all of them,” whoever they are (fascist flavor of the month — could be Mexicans, Muslims, Asians, etc.), what he’s really saying is, “All of those people look alike to me — I’m so dumb, I can’t tell the difference.” When someone uses phrases such as the blacks or the Muslims, what they’re actually admitting, without realizing it, is that they lack the mental faculties needed to distinguish one member of the group from another. 

And so, as you might expect, the fearful control freak feels the need to try to control not just what reporters might say about him, but likewise, to the extent he can, he wants to control how the people who inhabit his world look and act, so they’re the same as him, as much as possible, and therefore less of a threat.

Making one final connection, at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on 12/15/15, as a protester was being removed, a middle-aged man in the audience shouted, “Sig heil!” I would guess that in one form or another, Trump’s entire following shares that sentiment, even if they wouldn’t all express it in that way.