Obama, Oil and The Deep Blue Sea

You have to feel sorry for anybody who sits in the White House. It’s a trap. You can’t go out for pizza; you can’t take a walk; you can’t put the place up for sale and move. Bush found that out when Katrina landed on him five years ago.
The City of New Orleans had spread out into lowlands that no one in his right mind would have built a house on during its first couple of centuries. But it had gotten crowded and poorer people had moved out where land was cheaper—and far less safe.
Whooooosh. Everything was gone. Somehow it became Washington’s job to move tens of thousands of people out of the way of a massive (and entirely predictable) natural disaster overnight—in moments. This while New Orleans police and rescue personnel were going AWOL in great numbers to rescue their own families, and mayor was holed up in the upper stories of a hotel.
Everybody hates Washington—until the floods come. Reminds one of Kipling’s poem dedicated to “Tommy” the soldier. Despise him, keep him away—“until the guns begin to shoot. Then it’s Tommy, savior of your country!” In this country, it’s why can’t Washington do the impossible—yesterday or even the day before.
Now it’s Obama’s turn. I watched on ABC News as Obama knelt down on a Louisiana beach and vowed to do something, to stay with you. And do what—send several million gallons of gushing oil into outer space?
Then the cameras switched to some civilians in diners and on the street. Did they believe him? The headshakes were eloquent. Of course they didn’t and, unless Obama is far less sane than I think he is, he didn’t believe himself.
What are you going to DO about millions of gallons of oil pouring out into water one mile straight down? Realistically? Kneel down and the beach, get some squishy, oily mud on your fingers and vow to hang in. No other real options.
Churchill made one of his heroic World War II speeches, knowing that the British Army basically didn’t have enough rifles for each soldier to have one. He had to kneel down on the beach and sound brave. “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the hills” and so forth.
Then he put his hand over the mike and muttered, “We will hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we have left to work with”.
He didn’t have to reach a mile down to the ocean bottom in order to do it. (Roosevelt found a couple of million World War I rifles and rushed them to England.) Obama’s got a tougher problem to deal with. No one’s got a beer bottle with a long enough neck for an undersea oil spill.
As I say, everybody should pause a moment to feel sorry for a president, Democrat or Republican. You come to Washington trailing clouds of campaign glory. You are going to reform education, reform health care, end war, put the economy back on track—and the war goes on; people too selfish to join a pool to pay for universal health care prove intractable, and the economic problems are absolutely terrifying in their complexity.
Maybe he made the right calls, maybe he didn’t—but the fact is they are still shooting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the consequences to us of a European collapse are unthinkable. Nothing is truly cured. Our biggest curse—total dependence on Arab enemies for our fuel—seems unsolvable. So he tries to drill for more (just like Bush) … .
Pop goes the whole rig, pipe and oil deposit. A whole mile down. One more disaster to solve—with beer bottles; it’s all he’s got to work with.

Is Washington Reading The RIGHT Books?

Well, it’s official. What we are blowing off in the Gulf is now the biggest oil spill in American history. We see it beginning to clog up the fisheries and wild life preserves along the Louisiana coast, it is threatening to take a ride on the Gulf Stream and wreck a few beaches on the Atlantic side. Nobody seems to have a handle on how to stop it.
Obama has just ordered a halt to all deep sea drilling—and without it our dependence on our Arab friends (in places terrorists come from) is increasingly total. It would be like finding, in the throes of World War II, that we were dependent on the Axis for our ammunition.
Oh, goodness gracious, would we work to find a substitute! (We got caught in such a bind during the Civil War when none-too-friendly England was in a position to cut off our munitions and threatened to do so. The South would have won instantly.)
You would think being at the mercy of a few mercurial Arab states would inspire us to start serious work at finding a substitute for petroleum. (No! I don’t necessarily think building more windmills or growing more corn is going to do it. Got a windmill that will propel your car?)
I mean finding a substitute for petroleum itself. Something that burns in an eight cylinder engine just as effectively as gasoline. After all, the Germans came up with a recipe for synthetic oil during the Second World War. They had very little fuel.
So they came up with something that would fly an airplane engine that burned 100 octane gas with great efficiency. Where is that recipe? As I’ve written before, it was brought to Washington after the war—but never translated. I don’t think anyone in Washington even remembers that such a thing exists. Or perhaps “existED is the more apt word.
It seems our schools aren’t the only place where no one reads. They don’t seem to do a whole lot of it at the Pentagon, the White House or Congress. I’ve written before how, during Vietnam, no one in charge seemed to have ever read the official evaluation of strategic bombing during WWII. (If they had, they never would have imagined they could lick North Vietnam with bombs.)
They bombed—more tons that we dropped on Europe or Japan throughout the big war. They accomplished nothing beyond killing a few people. Nobody read the report on what bombing could actually accomplish—and what it could not do.
No one in the State Department ever read DeGaulle’s “Memoirs” after they were translated. If they had, they never would have been surprised—shocked, I mean, SHOCKED—when De Gaulle threw us and NATO out of Paris in the 1960s.
I hear about each president that he busies himself reading about what past presidents wrote and thought about life. Interesting and sometimes useful. But how much time do you think either Bush or Obama spent poring over intelligence reports on the backgrounds of people running the training camps in Yemen or Pakistan?
Has anybody got any kind of a fix on the nuclear armed, saber rattling North Koreans? I’d be reading intensely on what it would take for us to stop them if they pulled another 1950 on us. That time they pinned us into a tiny little corner of southeastern Korea.
Who’s reading up on the Chinese military? What are its real capabilities. What kind of weapon systems are they building? Stuff aimed at Tibet and the western wastes—or stuff that could carry them all the way to Hawaii. In how many years?
What’s our backup plan if we ever lost our bases in Britain? What do we plan to do if Canada splits into warring factions? Does it spill over into Vermont and New York? Do we live without the St. Lawrence Seaway? Whom do we back? What’s the price of neutrality?
Again, what can we use as an alternative to petroleum that can actually run my Buick or my wife’s Dodge Caravan? Those are the matters we should be reading about—and trying to figure out.
It’s not just Johnny who doesn’t read.

Trinity Sunday--And the Price of Oil

Today is Trinity Sunday. That’s not a Protestant term and most conventional Catholics don’t pay a great deal of attention to it either. But it opens the longest season in the ancient liturgical year. Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and runs about four weeks. Christmas Season runs twelve days. Epiphany goes approximately six or seven weeks until Lent which lasts 40 days. Easter Season runs for seven weeks until somewhere around June 1st.
Trinity lasts about six months—from now until next November 26, this year. It is a far more significant liturgical moment than it is recognized as being. It commemorates the day, described in the second chapter of The Acts of The Apostles when the entire Trinity was revealed.
We meet God The Father in the Old Testament (Jewish Bible). This is the person of the Trinity who delivers the Ten Commandments, parts the Red Sea, punishes Israel by allowing the destruction of the Temple and takes vengeance on those who destroyed it.
We meet God The Son at Bethlehem. He is the Jesus who walks around Judea and Galilee (and makes a single foray into Lebanon), healing, teaching and generally annoying conventional religious leaders. He is crucified on Good Friday, raised on Easter—and promises to send a “comforter who will guide the church into all truth”.
Forty days after Easter (or Passover as it was then celebrated), Jesus leaves the Earth and tells his followers to wait in Jerusalem until “The Holy Spirit” comes upon them. Ten days later, on the Jewish Feast of Shavout—which celebrates harvest and the fiftieth day after the Exodus when, Jews believe, God The Father gave the Ten Commandments, the Holy Spirit arrives. Here, on this day, the Church is to get its spiritual and, even, physical power.
Thus we are introduced to the Holy Spirit (or Ghost) and the Christian Trinity is complete. The Trinity is, of course, the foundation upon which orthodox Christianity rests. Christians who did NOT accept the notion of a Triune God became Muslims in the Eighth Century; Trinitarians remained Christians—and that quarrel goes on to this day. That alone makes this a significant day, if only because it affects oil supplies for both believers and non-believers.
The very notion of a Holy Spirit who gives the church both power and authority has proven bitterly divisive—far beyond the quarrels between Christians and Muslims. During the Reformation (beginning 1517), Protestants objected so strenuously to certain church practices—like selling the powers and gifts of the Spirit for cash—that they overreacted.
Out with the bathwater went the baby—to this day conventional Protestants are very, very uncomfortable talking about the Third Person of the Trinity. They don’t call the day “Trinity Sunday”; they prefer the term “Pentecost”, which is safely more Jewish—since the Jewish feast comes 50 days after Passover (in the Christian—solar—calendar, after Easter).
I’ve actually been told by a Protestant Sunday School teacher that, after the people present in Jerusalem on Shavout in approximately AD 30 died off, the Holy Spirit went back up to Heaven and no longer bothers us.
So, most Protestants will make a quick mention of the fact that some strange things happened nearly two thousand years ago, and move on. Catholics, legitimately embarrassed by some of the corruption associated with Holy Spirit power, don’t dwell on the matter.
The phenomenon known as Pentecostalism (or as the Charismatic movement) attempts to bring back the wonders and the powers of the Spirit. But Pentecostals often get lost in the confusion over the meaning and manifestation of the charisms, the powers, the gifts--and often sinks back into standard, no-nonsense Protestantism.
So Trinity Sunday passes and Christians move on. For many of them, the only significance of the day is reflected in the price they pay at the gas pump. But Trinity Sunday should be so, so, so much more—for those who call themselves Christians.

Reading Skills--Where Have They Gone?

Yesterday I substituted for a series of high school AP English classes. These are the advanced classes for upper classmen that supposedly earn the student college credit. I can tell you from personal observation they are more difficult than regular English classes.
I was in the same classroom exactly one week previous to yesterday. What I observed, comparing both days, stunned me. The class was reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. It’s a short book—just over 200 pages in a small page format.
A week ago the classes were reading a chapter that ended at approximately page 40. In a week’s time, these advanced students had gotten all the way to page 95. I repeat, these were advanced students, receiving college credit for their work.
This is typical of all the AP classes I have watched over the past few years.
When I was in high school, they would have handed me a book this size on a Friday, told me to have it finished within the week—and expected I would have a three to five page report ready within the same week. Those weren’t AP classes (they didn’t exist where I was in high school); they were just standard college prep courses.
Every day I substitute I am surprised by some way in which the same courses I took in the 1950s have been “dumbed down”. Can you imagine giving a present day high school student a seven to eight hundred page book to read and report on—as just one additional assignment, on top of the chapters in the text book?
The kid would probably require the services of a defibrillator. I wrote several reports like that in high school—it just came with the territory. But today, the high school classes at the highest degree of difficulty require forty or fifty pages a week. Easy pages—“Fahrenheit 451” is not a hard book to read. It’s short and the vocabulary really should be in reach of a college bound senior.
But this isn’t the most troubling thing. In class after class, the kids finish the assignments I’ve been instructed to give them and, then, many of them tell me they have nothing else to do. So I suggest that they read a book (I always carried one when I was in school).
Some of you might be amazed at how many high school students (smart ones, suburban schools) tell me they never read. They hate reading. They never carry a book with them. I’ll catch them trying to text on their Ipods or sneak a call on their phones. Read, never?
It is a trial for them to wade through 50 whole pages in a week. A two hundred page book that is essentially an “easy read” is a violation of the “cruel and unusual” clause in the Constitution. The reading situation is not getting better; it isn’t even stabilizing. I just read a report that indicates reading ability has dropped substantially SINCE the passage of “No Child Left Behind” legislation.
Something we’re doing isn’t working—in fact it seems to be working backward. When I was a kid and we had some free time, I remember that even the poorer students grabbed a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and paged through it. Such a scene would be unimaginable today.
I snicker at the thought. A room full of teenagers peering through volumes of an encyclopedia when they have nothing else to read. Forget it!
But if you don’t read, school becomes pretty meaningless to you—no matter how large or small the budget or how good or bad the teaching skills. I stumbled on a book the other day that gave me some real insights into what has happened to reading in America.
It’s called “Readacide”. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow.

Times Square Bomber--Ineptitude vs Luck

Over and over again I’ve been hearing how lucky we were that the “Times Square bomber” didn’t know how to build a bomb. Just lots of smoke and a big scare. And some credit to the former GIs who run concessions in the area and watch out for the rest of us.
Yes, we were lucky. There’s a reason for that luck—and it won’t last forever. I remember very vividly sitting at a sidewalk café in Beirut in the late ‘60s, watching two men in Bedouin robes trying to run an air hammer during some street repairs.
They seemed so clumsy. I concentrated on their hands. They were the hands of men with desert and riding skills—generations of them. They were not the hands of people raised to run modern machinery, be it a dishwasher or an electric drill. They had no feeling for it.
Holding the jackhammer put them in an alien world. In their own element they wouldn’t have looked a bit clumsy—but in my world, they were completely out of sync (yeah, as a kid I ran an air hammer on a summer job. Picking it up was instinctive and natural.)
The generation of Arabs I watched that day would never, every master the machinery of a modern, industrialized society. I thought of the great warrior king, Charlemagne (c.a. AD 800). He could carve an empire in central Europe. You wouldn’t have wanted to face him, sword in hand.
He learned to appreciate education. He created the first “university” in Europe after the fall of Rome. He mastered the art of reading—rare for a Dark Ages warrior; it was even considered unmanly. But he never learned how to hold a pen and write.
His sword hardened hands just wouldn’t grip the thing. It wasn’t his milieu. He was like the Arabs I was watching. They would have understood Charlemagne’s frustration at trying to master a pen; he would have seen their problem trying to direct the jackhammer.
I thought of World War II—where one of the “secret weapons” we had against the Germans was the fact that a lot of GIs came from rural or suburban settings where they learned early how to fix the engines of their cars and tractors.
When their army trucks broke down in the desert, a lot of these drivers just got out and, using bailing wire and bobby pins, got the thing running again. German drivers were, by and large, raised on farms that depended on horse drawn conveyances.
The whole German army simply was not mechanized. (In a speech, Churchill reminded the world that the German troops invading Russia were walking the thousand miles—they had so few vehicles.) If a German truck broke down, the driver had to send back to a motor pool to get a trained mechanic to the front and fix things, no matter how simple. He had no idea how himself.
The Germans have learned how to drive and maintain cars and trucks. In a war between us now, I doubt if there’d be a material difference in capabilities. My jackhammer friends will learn how to use their equipment, too. They may already have.
Right now, some people in the Arab world seem inept at bomb making. Again, it involves a sort of technology many of them are not comfortable with. They too will learn.
They too will finally learn how to build bombs that go BOOM effectively. Then we won’t be so lucky any more.
Then the last thing a concession stand operator ever sees may be a bright flash. Eventually people in Charlemagne’s court learned how to write. Making a bomb is probably simpler.

Earth--Fixing The Unfixable?

We live on a planet that acts more like a mortally wounded creature than a home for living beings. Its waters, its winds and the violent movement of its tectonic plates, and the sudden up thrusts of its volcanoes are more like death throes than natural phenomena.
They are all dangerous to human and animal life; they all kill. Coming out of the Christian tradition, I am struck by the fact that Christian prophecy makes no pretense that this earth will long endure. Biblical prophecy predicts that it will be destroyed.
Many traditions and myths talk about a destructive past in Earth’s ancient history—battle and war between gods and Titans, angels and demons, aliens and terrestrial life forms. Genesis states that after these battles the planet is reduced to a formless void with no habitable surfaces left at all.
Many religious traditions hold that man can look forward to leaving this planet—most notably our Muslim friends who hold that believers will enjoy an extra-terrestrial Heavenly Paradise. Jewish tradition has held that man leaves earth and goes to a place called Sheol.
Hindu tradition holds that man reincarnates until he has finally reached a level of goodness that takes him out of the reality entirely. In any case, off the planet. Buddhism basically denies the existence of person hood entirely and sees salvation as a form of non-being, again, off the planet.
Christianity is unique in that it holds not merely to the concept of resurrected beings—but of a completely resurrected planet (the “new Earth” of the Apocalypse of John—that descends from a renewed Heaven.
The entire cosmos is remade (Revelation 21). There is a new Heaven and a new Earth. None of the world’s religions hold that the Earth is salvageable. Only Christianity suggests that it will be completely renewed.
That it needs to be completely renewed suggests strongly that it could not be put back together—the damage that was done in the eon’s before man appeared on Earth finally proves fatal.
Totally non-scientific, I grant you—but does science offer a better explanation for all the things that go wrong on this planet. Above all, does science offer ANY sort of solution to earth quakes, shifting plates, ice ages, violent storms, weather shifts that result in drought and destruction?
The only thing scientists seem able to suggest is that driving cars and generating electricity causes all the woes on this planet.
Let’s admit: we do a wonderful job of making bad situations worse. We built shoddy buildings on fault lines, we drill for highly pressurized oil deposits so far under the oceans we cannot easily get at them to correct mistakes or fix accidents.
We use poisons to increase the yield of our farm fields—without reminding ourselves that what kills boll weevils and corn borers may not be healthy for us either. We log off forests and over cultivate fertile plains and valleys—and wonder why they erode and become arid.
But, fundamentally, what’s dangerously wrong with this planet is not a result of any human activity. It so far has shown no sign of being fixable by human actions.
That’s like looking up at the stars—on the one hand it is humbling; on the other—when you realize one of those lights may be an asteroid racing toward us—it is scary. Looking at the Earth—and all the things we cannot fix—is also humbling and scary.
Walter Hoving, when he ran Tiffany’s, may have had a point—even in the area of global warming and natural catastrophes. Remember the little pins he created and sold? What was it they said? “Try God.”
Likely to be more effective than another round of Kyoto Protocols.

Earth--Unfixable?

Science gives us our first clues to what may have reduced this planet to the chaos described in the first few verses of Genesis. Something wiped out the dinosaurs all at once—we suspect it may have been a direct hit by an asteroid or something else extraterrestrial.
Something that wiped out so many life forms must have done horrendous damage to the entire planet—possibly to its magnetic field, the positioning of its continents, its gravitational field. If an individual took that big a hit, it might well prove fatal.
Earth has suffered ice age after ice age. At points air was so super chilled that it could descend on a tranquil field and freeze the mastodons grazing their quickly enough that, thousands of years later, their steaks can be eaten today. The mastodons at the outskirts of these freeze zones are shredded the way only a super tornado could possible manage.
We find the remains of cities underneath sea floors. Afghanistan, for one, contains a gigantic urban complex that was abandoned millennia ago—due to … lack of water? We don’t even know what its name was. We know the Sahara was once verdant.
There were living things on Antarctica. Could a Kyoto Protocol have saved them? Had a group met in Copenhagen back then, could it have saved the dinosaurs? Or kept the water flowing to the Pueblos in the American desert? Or to the abandoned cities in Yemen?
At Genesis 1:2, we have a description of a very badly damaged planet. In anthropomorphic terms, a very possibly fatally wounded planet. “Formless and void.” There was no life left. Mist had been blasted into the atmosphere so thickly that you could not distinguish light from dark.
The first thing that had to be done—for anything to grow or live—was to let some light in. So the mist thinned out enough that you could detect light in the day and darkness at night. This is a perfect picture of what would need to happened after a very destructive bombardment of the planet.
Next the watery chaos is separated into seas below and clouds above.. But verse 7 makes it clear an awful lot of water was still up in the air, but there is finally a living space between them.. On what Genesis calls “the Third Day” the water below the clouds is separated into seas and dry land.
Now we have light, land and watery mist—and seeds begin to grow, very possibly left over from before the cataclysm that created the chaos. The land part of the planet is now covered with vegetation—as befits a greenhouse environment.
More mist continues to fall. On the “Fourth Day” you can finally distinguish individual lights from somewhere above the atmosphere. Visible now is a bright light by day and a lesser light by night. You can even see some of the brighter stars and planets.
At the beginning of a “Fifth Day”, the seas begin to teem with animal life. Next come winged creatures that can fly in the ever more air-like atmosphere. With a “Sixth Day” comes animal life on land and, finally, a protected garden is created in which mankind can be placed—safely.
He needed the protection—Genesis 3:14 makes it clear human beings were not the only people on earth—and humans had reason to fear the “others”. When man got himself thrown out of the garden, he became a killer and a destroyer—and had to live in fear of others who might kill him.
So, after chaos, the earth is—according to the Biblical account--recreated. Human beings are then introduced to the planet—at first to “dress, till and keep it”. But then to fight for every grain and morsel of food, killing and eroding as he went.
But did human beings somehow make the planet so unstable, so prone to violent storms and quakes that nothing can stand before them? Neither science, nor Biblical writ nor any other creation myth known throughout human history suggests such a thing.
That, if we think about it, probably happened before we ever got here—before the first humanoid ever walked the Rift Valley. If you look at the scientific record of the history of this planet, our hopes of staving off catastrophe with Kyoto Protocols or any other accords are minimal. We live on a wounded planet, one knocked permanently off kilter. This we probably cannot change. This lies at the core of our problem with living on Earth.
More later.