But our Icarian thoughts returned to ground
And we went to heaven the long way round.
—Thoreau
Today’s post:
I think for a long time we forgot what was possible. Our way of life damaged our ability to imagine anything different. Maybe we are rarely good at imagining things could be different. Maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about the Enlightenment. For a while there we understood that the ultimate source of power is the imagination.
Listen to this: “Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the Fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into the service of economic royalists. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control of government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of the Government.”
That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president in 1936. Is that radical enough for you? Is it beautiful enough? In the same speech he said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” And by God they met that destiny. They did what they could in their time.
But then we forgot. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they are. We lived into a strange new feudalism, following ways that were unjust and destructive and yet were presented as the only possible reality. We said “people are like that,” or “human nature will never change” or “we are all guilty of original sin,” or “the free market is reality itself.” And we went along with those old ideas, and made them the law of the land. The entire world became legally bound to accept this feudal injustice. It was global and so it looked like it was universal. The future itself was bought, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts—all spelled out by law and enforced by police and armies. Alternatives were unthinkable. Even to say things could be otherwise would get you immediately branded as unrealistic, foolish, naïve, insane, utopian.
But that was all delusion. Every few years things change completely, even though we can’t quite remember how it happened or what it means. Change is real and it’s unavoidable. And we can organize our affairs any way we please. We are free to act. It’s a fearsome thing, this freedom, so much so that people talk about a “flight from freedom”—that we fly into cages and hide, because our freedom is so profound that it’s a kind of abyss. To actually choose in each moment how to live is too scary to endure.
So we lived like sleepwalkers. But the world is not asleep, and outside our dream things continued to change. Trying to shape that change is a good thing to do. Some pretend that making a plan is instant communism and the devil’s work, but it isn’t so. We always have a plan. Neoliberal economics is a plan—it plans to give over all decisions to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And, you know—it’s blind. To deal with the global environmental crisis we now face without making any more plan than to trust the market would be like saying, We have to solve this problem so first let’s put out our eyes. Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brain?
Because we’re going to have to imagine our way out of this one.
That’s why we made the recent deal with China. It’s one of the greatest win-win treaties of all time. Consider that we had a massive trade deficit running with China, and they had bought a lot of our debt as well. And because of their population and their manufacturing capabilities, and their low wages, which of course depressed wages for every other worker in the world, there wasn’t an obvious way out of that huge imbalance. They had us. We were getting whipped in the market by a command-and-control political structure that could inflict austerity measures on its own people, allowing them to win that particular competition. So a dictatorship was doing better at the market than democracies were. I leave it as an exercise for my readers to hash out what that might mean in political science terms, but in the real world it was a big problem!
And yet at the same time this so-called success of the Chinese was achieved partly by treating their people and landscape like disposables, and that simply isn’t true. So those false economies were backlashing on them in bigger and bigger ways, creating terrible physical problems, worse problems than ours, really, because we’ve been cleaning up our land and air and water for decades now, as part of the smart governance of the people, by the people, and for the people, so that our troubles are mostly on paper. But the Chinese have trashed China itself, and had entered a major ecological crash. Maybe global warming and the giant drought it caused in East Asia was the final push, but certainly their own poisonous habits had pooled up on them, and the cumulative impacts were going to kill entire regions and endanger the lives of one-sixth of humanity.
That wouldn’t have been good for any of us. I know there are people saying that the worse things go for the Chinese, the better off we are, but it doesn’t work that way. The carbon they put in the air was going everywhere on Earth, even if China took the brunt of it. And in any case they were desperate enough to be in need of our aid, and to ask us for it—so we were obliged to help, just as fellow human beings. The fact that it gave us bargaining leverage with them that we hadn’t had before was just the silver lining on a big black cloud.
Ultimately, everyone on Earth had an interest in helping the Chinese escape an acute extinction event. We needed to help, and the situation was so urgent that ordinary procedures weren’t going to do it. So I talked to President Hu (and yes, he was on first) and our teams hammered out a deal in record time, which the Senate immediately approved 71 to 29, because it was that good a deal.
So then, at the invitation of the Chinese government, we docked sixty ships of our nuclear fleet in Chinese ports, and provided them with well over five hundred megawatts for essential services. They shut down the dirtiest coal plants in the affected areas, and replaced them with new clean plants, in less than two weeks. We also helped to pay for these plants. We also gave China all the scientific help we could, everything our environmental science community has learned. Our Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Agriculture went there to consult, and we’re also sending over security experts to help keep track of expenditures, so that we don’t have any of the contract corruption that occurred under some lax previous administrations. My recent reorganization of our nation’s intelligence services (see my earlier post on the cleaning up of that swamp) has created some redundancies that give us the personnel to fulfill some of these new cooperative security responsibilities, both in Beijing and on-site in the drought-affected areas. We were pleased to send one entire group to the Takla Makan.
So we’re doing a lot for them, and they’re doing a lot for us, and everyone is benefiting. What are they doing for us? They’ve agreed to cut their carbon emissions so steeply that they will be challenging the rest of the Asia Pacific Six, which is us, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and India, to match them, and they are committed to investing heavily in clean renewables in the other five countries in the group. As part of that effort they will be building zero-emission power plants for us in the United States, on federal land, to be run by the Department of Energy. Clean renewable power will quickly become part of the public trust. A public utility district, very large.
The Chinese have also negotiated a successful compromise with the Dalai Lama, so that Tibet will take its rightful place among the semiautonomous ethnic regions that are important features of both China and the United States, here in the form of our Native American reservations. The Chinese leadership has embraced diversity, and the world rejoices at the Tibetan settlement. I particularly appreciate the extension of civil liberties and personal security to all Chinese religious groups, including all Buddhist monks and nuns and their leaders. That’s all been very good accommodation of everyone’s interests.
I’ll add more on that later, but now Diane says it’s time for bed. Thanks to everyone for their best wishes, by the way!
Phil’s response to respondent 3,581,332:
I know people have been saying I have put the pedal to the metal ever since I got shot, and you know what? It’s true. So sue me! (But don’t.) I know people also say I’ve gotten to be like Paul Revere—you know, a little light in the belfry—but that is not true. I am more sane now than I have ever been.
So, thanks in advance.
Phil’s response to respondent 4,520,334:
What I do is mix soy sauce and a dry white wine about half and half, and then add a big dash of tarragon vinegar, and a teaspoon of brown sugar, a tablespoon of olive oil, and about a teaspoon each of ginger and mustard powder, and a dash of garlic powder. Mix that up and the longer you marinate things in it the better, but just dipping it in will do too, if you’re in a hurry. Best on veggies, chicken, and flank steak. Sear the meat and then cook at a lower heat.
Cookbook to follow, when I get more time.