I realise, that it's immaterial to the deniers of climate change,
whether we get our total annual allocation of Fahrenheit degrees and solar radiation in their usual mensual patterns of distribution, or kinda bunched up in weirdly floating, disassociated settlements, like chunks of Greenland bobbing past our gaze at the Outer Banks. I suppose, therefore, it will only be the empirical method we adopted today - sniffing the breeze, a suspiciously autonomous resort to a scientific instrument if ever there were one - and not its unambiguous finding, that a distinct whiff of Fall is in the air in the Piedmont on the 5th of goshawmighty-August-did-you-hear-me-Mr-Murdoch - that will test the mettle of my spam filter. We have had a hot enough Summer, the reasoning will go; who could care if August, freshened with Octobrist dawns, does not yield physiological ripening in the tannins of a grape on the vine down the road, when iced tea has all the tannins a guy could need? But our natural lives, unlike our sociopaths, do not bear grudges: if July had a lot of heat, it cannot make it natural for August to be chilly.
The sabbath of right-wing sociopathology and talk-show demagogy, the expropriated Christian sabbath, was an awkward day for this discovery, because we have many friends who simply don't know that their faith has been hijacked to interpose, as Clarence Thomas does for the US Constitution, absolute proof of the non-existence of reality if it is not anticipated, respectively, in Jeremiah or the Commerce Clause. More frightening, still, is what we might expect if these wingnuts discover that Jeremiah is not Mr Madison.
I have to admit, there is a deviant gratification to be held up to this same lens, in one's irrepressible embrace of the unseasonably penetrating breeze. If it didn't mean that the wine will be marginal, I'd still regard it as an eerie effect, but it would be entertaining. It is a pity that this is a deviation our hyper-heated culture can accept (not to the extent of hypocrisy, of course). Still, I marvel that the land is not swarming as we speak, with unregistered platoons of our local militia, detonating privately borne semi-automatic assault rifles and assassinating handguns into every cloud and turning leaf in sight, just to subdue this atmospheric beast of two backs, this lovely mild coolness on an early August day.
That anyone can still be in denial about the most important and, I fear, irrevocable global crisis of our time – indeed of our species – is simply further evidence that in climate change – as in gun control, as in marriage equality, as in income inequality – for some people, the inconvenience outweighs the truth. Alas, wishing these things away will not make them disappear. Hypocrisy is always ultimately unmasked.
ReplyDeleteI thank you for taking the trouble to distill this little pastiche, which one could only very reluctantly publish as a greeting to friends such as you without some smile of indomitability. I have gratefully in mind the page with which you are associated, as a model of this indispensable expository trait, and not merely as a matter of style. The fact of being civilised is father to the wish for its sustainability.
DeleteIt is easy to go down into Hell;
ReplyDeleteNight and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide;
But to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air —
There's the rub, the task.
And what, BL, would be Proserpina's golden bough, to make this round trip possible?
Delete"There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world the've never learned to live in this one"
ReplyDeleteHarper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
Silly, to say the least, and can be deadly - makes me sad, even in the middle of the exercise of trying not to worry about what can not be changed.
So much is compressed in that book, it just keeps growing. Thank you for this reminder and for visiting rmbl.
DeleteJust as my mind empirically spins... around and around, again. I love visiting here. Trying for summer bliss. Wishing you the same.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking, my notion of summer bliss could well be satisfied by your leading us on another walk in a Connecticut village (just in case you haven't anything to do....). Here the sabbath did not evolve as expected; with this entry's having been prompted by a surprise in the weather, it found itself enriched by the second visitor's citation of a famous speech in the Aeneid, which sent me off to various translations here and great happiness in the handling of this passage in the text, by John Dryden. I would have to say, I do love red mug, blue linen, too, for drawing this visit from you, a change in the history of one's day, always to the good.
ReplyDelete