July 6, 2009 -- As my first granddaughter reached toddler stage I came across an unusual item I thought would be fun for her to have, and bought it for her. It was a big, rotund, life-like inflatable plastic gorilla, sitting on its hunches, about four feet tall. I inflated it, visualizing her laughing, punching it, jumping on it, moving it around the floor. She toddled into the room, took one look at it, spun around, and toddled out as fast as her little legs would take her. I was stunned. At just a little over a year old, from where or what did she get her fear of gorillas? With no time or experience to acquire it the fear had to be inborn.
It all goes back to the Pleistocene Age as Nicolas Kristof writes in the New York Times addressing out slow reaction to climate change. “Evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes and enemies with clubs,” (and apparently gorillas) “but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.” Ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at an accelerating rate? Temperatures will rise an estimated 9 degrees or more by the end of this century? Tsk, tsk, we ought to think about this just as soon as we kill this snake. “We have no ‘preparedness’ to fear a gradual rise in the Earth’s temperature.” Kristof quotes Professor Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia as saying, “most Americans prefer $50 now to $100 in six months.” It’s the Scarlet O’Hara mind set, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
The House managed to pass the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill in a squeaker. Not a perfect bill, but a start. Now it is up to the Senate where it faces Senators from five coal producing states and the climate change deniers, like the one who says it is all a big hoax, a sort of conspiracy we presume among a thousand or more evil scientists world-wide who have banded together for the sole purpose of ruining the economy of the Great State of Oklahoma. If he has a grandchild born about now who lives to be eighty there will be no rich wheat farms in Oklahoma which will resemble the Sahara desert that only a camel could love. To quote again from the Kristof article, “This short-circuitry in our brains explains many of our policy priorities.”
There is another side to this argument, an economic one. What’s the point of our trying to go green if China does not? Well, according to NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, the Chinese have drastically switched gears. Whereas they used to tell him “Hey, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years, using cheap coal and oil. Now it is our turn,” sees it differently today, not only for self preservation since they have been drowning in their own pollution, but because “energy technologies that produce clean power and energy efficiency — is going to be the next great global industry.” Instead of cheap tennis shoes and plastic salad shooters they want to be the big exporter, the source of everything to do with wind, solar, and nuclear power. In a world that is adding one billion people about every 15 years it is a huge market that we are going to lose out on if we don’t get with it. As in the movie “The Graduate” where Dustin Hoffman was given career advice as “Plastics,” today it should be “clean energy.”
I can’t tell you why, and I should be ashamed of myself, but Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, soon to be ex-governor, makes me think of Mrs. Robinson. It is an aura of meanness about her I think. NYT columnist Maureen Dowd sees her worse than that, saying “Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.” Dowd called the speech the Governor made giving up her position with 18 months to go, “incoherent, breathless and prickly stream of consciousness,” which pretty much described it for me.
Abrupt, unexpected, peculiarly timed in front of a handful of people in her back yard, downright weird, her resignation is and will be fueling commentary, analysis, and speculation that will have media bursting at the seams to handle it all. Why did she do it? If she really did not want to be a lame duck governor, since she was not going to run for reelection, wouldn’t that have made her a lame duck the moment she took office? According to Todd Purdum in the Vanity Fair article on Palin, some Alaskans believe she fits the description of “narcissistic personality disorder.”
So why did she do this weird thing? Pick your commentator, take your choice. Her biggest fan, the man most responsible for bringing her to national attention in the first place, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, with tongue hanging out and salivating as usual as the mere mention of her name, says she may be “crazy like a fox” using the next eighteen months to write her book and prepare herself to run for the presidency. NYT columnist Gail Collins writes “Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon” referring to Palins remark about “only dead fish go with the flow.” And a move to interrupt plans of “TV newscasters to spend the entire weekend pointing out that Michael Jackson is still dead,” a “canny move to get her back down to the lower 48, with as much time on her hands as Mitt Romney.” I love this woman.
Other speculation has it that Palin may be faced with another and more sever ethics violation charge as suggested by writer Shannyn Moore as well Max Blumenthal and other bloggers on the Web. That brought a reaction from Caribou Barbie’s lawyer: "This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law." So there. Can Obama go back and sue Palin for accusing him during the campaign of consorting with terrorists? Do I need a lawyer because I wrote this?
What I hold against Palin the most is being the flag bearer for a movement that denigrates intellectualism. Being educated, being smart is bad. Only people like Joe the Plumber should run the country. They are not bothered with too much acquired knowledge. On that subject we might examine the qualifications of Al Franken as the new Senator from Minnesota. Yes he comes from show business as an award-winning writer of comedy and political satirist as well as a book author, but in his upper fifties he has spent his life as a close observer of politics. He has a degree from Harvard to boot. This makes him easily as qualified as fellow show business politicians such as Fred Thompson, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the bar tender on the TV series “Love Boat” who served in Congress. He is a serious guy about to find out what it’s like to be on the receiving side of the barbs. I expect him to be a kind of straight Barney Frank after he is finally sworn in on Tuesday.
Franken participated in six Independence Day parade. The President hosted 1,200 military families for a Fourth of July barbecue on the South Lawn of the White House. Vice President Joe Biden spent a few days in Iraq meeting with top officials. He also had breakfast with his son Beau, an Army captain in Iraq. Second Lady Jill Biden observed Independence Day by visiting American troops in Germany en route to an education conference in Paris. “Sparky Sanford” as Maureen Dowd calls the disgraced “family values” Governor of South Carolina spent the holiday with in-laws in Florida, which I have to say called for a lot of guts under the circumstances. No word on Sen. Ensign from Nevada. All said and done it seems to me the Democrats did a pretty good job of showing “values” and patriotism this Independence Day.
It seemed to be a week of unending obituaries, with pundits looking for significance in every death. NYT columnist Bob Herbert, for example: “The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death — not just an appreciation of his music, but a giddy celebration of his life — is yet another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life. As with so many other things, we don’t want to know.” Farah Fawcett was mourned as a kind of symbol of an age that came and went. Karl Malden? A rugged, no nonsense actor that belied the pretty boy found today. The shooting death of Steve McNair, Super Bowl quarterback just occurred so we have yet to learn what to make of that one. Murder-suicide? Why? Sex, or love if you prefer, may have had something to do with it.
One kind of sex or another seems to dominate the news. Don’t ask, don’t tell is still a controversy. Britain, Denmark, and Israel, among other nations, allow openly gay men to serve in their armed forces, but over here since 1993, more than 13,000 troops have been discharged for being gay. Last year, 619 military personnel got the boot, about average in recent years. Some of them had invaluable specialties, such as fluency in Arabic. The problem must be that unlike women in the WAVES, or women in WACS or the Tuskegee air men, gay people did not earn their stripes by first having their own unit before being integrated to serve alongside straights. An all-gay unit first just to show how they, too, can shoot to kill, and then allow integration. We always do things the hard way.
When old guys in retirement sit around over lunch or a drink the topic of conversation is usually sex or politics. Now they seem to be one and the same. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of promiscuity. The political world has been and is awash in revelations of affairs. Since it is personal, do we care? Should we care?
There is the hypocrisy of all of those “family value” conservatives who don’t seem to be able to control themselves any better than the people they like to lord “holier than thou” over. As columnist Gail Collins put it in reference to the tolerance South Carolina conservatives are showing to wayward Governor Mark Sanford: “Sex is irrelevant unless it leads to a tax increase.”
But in a NYT column by Eduardo Porter he notes that in the family values branch of the Republican Party they rank philandering as less morally acceptable than the death penalty, cloning humans, or suicide. “Pew Research Center three years ago found that Americans considered adultery worse than abortion, smoking marijuana or cheating on taxes.” In the last decade, adultery’s approval rating has never risen above 9 percent (adultery has an approval rating?). You remember Kinsey. According to his statistics half of married men reported having an extramarital affair at some time during their marriage. A quarter of married women had an affair by the time they were 40 (isn’t that two men for every woman? Doesn’t sound fair).
This brings up the question that was raised last week: “is monogamy normal?” Like everything else, I suppose, our sexual activities and attitudes probably developed in Pleistocene Age and we’ve stuck with them ever since. Governor Sanford could have used that in one of his several explanatory apologetic press conferences.
About fifteen years ago The New Yorker Magazine had an in-depth article by an anthropologist detailing the correlation of the size of male testicles of mammals and the promiscuity of the female of the species. The larger the testicles, the more promiscuous the females. The testicles of man in relation to body size are the largest of all of the primates. And then there is this: 40 years ago the biologist Robert Trivers predicted that the evolutionary imperative to maximize offspring would lead to mostly promiscuous males and non-promiscuous females. It would seem that we have a predilection to extra marital sex that requires will power to overcome, and apparently that’s a lot to ask of politicians, especially uptight, family-value conservative ones.
But then there is a certain allure about political figures, maybe it’s the power thing, that attracts females. An evolutionary ecologist who studies fireflies says if the males have certain traits that make them attractive to females they will mate more often than other males (that enzyme in the firefly’s tail that drives a chemical reaction that makes light, and one male’s tail can be brighter than another’s, and so it must be with politicians). Right now the political field looks like a meadow full of fireflies, blinking away, ready to mate.
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