I’d like to flatter myself that Bob Herbert checked out my Memorial Day post before he wrote his column for today’s NYT:
"The first thing we can do," wrote Herbert, "is conserve more. That’s the low-hanging fruit in any clean-energy strategy."
Also, in response to that post, a friend put me on to James Howard Kunstler’s blog from yesterday:
"We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don't even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground -- we're digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster."
You get the sense that the Gulf tragedy has led to a climax of sorts—that maybe what we’re seeing all around us are mirrors: this is who we are; this is what we’ve done.
But history isn’t a play. There is no climax, no denouement. There are wars, catastrophic events, survivors, and victims.
There’s also an appalling lack of political and cultural will to solve any of the problems we face.
I’d write more but The View is starting, so I’ll have to get back to this later.
