The World at 350: A Last Chance for Civilization
McKibben is a necessary writer, and his approach to organizing against global warming is practical, international, and urgent. I hope he’ll be remembered as one of the leaders who helped us save ourselves.
I really didn’t know that visitors from freaking Italy, who don’t need a visa to come here, can be prevented from entering or leaving because of “a hunch”.
I did know that people who are either being deported or seeking asylum can be held, in effect, forever, with no legal recourse. Unfortunately, that was something I learned from Bill Clinton: all through the ’90s, stories of Kafka-style INS abuses kept getting worse, and Clinton ignored half of them and made the other half legal. (He also was the first president who had to be court-ordered to let innocent people out of Gitmo.) But, silly me, I hadn’t realized that a customs agent can just say you’re seeking asylum when you’re not, just because he wants to lock you up.
And oh yeah, when they finally put you on that plane back home they may shoot you full of Haldol, just because.
This isn’t just about stealing people’s time and freedom. When we arrest them and put their lives in the hands of idiots, people die, just as sure as they do when we drop bombs on them.
I’m sure that at some point some presidential candidate has said a few words about how we should be more welcoming to the rest of the world (the nice part of it anyway), make our visa and immigration and asylum rules more transparent and fair, and perhaps not staff all our borders with brownshirt morons. And I’m sure those few words were met with a deafening “whatever” by the press, and by just about everyone who wasn’t born elsewhere and doesn’t happen to know anyone who was. This has been going on since way before we had the “we can’t be too nice because what about 9!! 11!!!” excuse, and almost no one gave a crap. It’s sick. And I’m not just talking about the “first they came for...” effect, either. If you’re trying to convince someone that we shouldn’t be able to step on the necks of helpless people who aren’t from our crowd, and they’re not convinced until you say “well some day someone might step on your neck too,” then you already have a big problem.
One of our elected critters who’s been paying some attention to all this, despite being a big jerk, is Joe Lieberman. I hope he’s serious.
...to the previous post, and/or evidence that I've lost my marbles,
provided by my sweetie here.
Booze and intoxication in general should be fertile material for spiritual fantasy authors, but I can’t think of a lot of examples. Tim Powers’s Earthquake Weather is a good one. Powers is a Catholic and a non-drinker, and his earlier great book Last Call is partly about Dionysus-as-Death in a bad way, but in Earthquake Weather—which is partly about California wine, and Dionysus-as-Death in a good way—he did a startling job of bringing together themes of sacrifice and release and duty and whoopee. A very pagan Christian book, or vice versa, in a way that probably would’ve freaked Lewis out a bit during his lifetime but that I bet he’s cool with now.
Anyway, this all fits well with the theme of last weekend for me. Two friends had birthdays, and a whole passel of good folks drove me around Napa to wineries (much like the movie Sideways without any of the angst), and I spent a lot of time altered by the fruits of the earth and/or by good company. And now there’s a puppy on the floor who can get high on tug-of-war. Cheers.
Rory always seemed like an eternal Berkeley deity to me, because Comic Relief was the first thing I ever saw in Berkeley... and also because he just was kind of the way you’d expect an eternal Berkeley deity would be, just a big sloppy jolly presence. He did a lot to create a small-press comics scene around here that shares in the same spirit. I never really got to know him, although I found out recently that he was a friend of some non-comics friends of mine—small world this is. Bye.