Lost in Transliteration » Friggin’ Politics

A clean, well-lighted past

Mike — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:52:13 +0000

You must read this fabulous essay by Gabriel Winant at Salon:

The true, central catalyst of the war, which lent it its moral meaning — that is, slavery — was pushed out of mind. Even Northerners came to believe in the myth of the South’s noble, doomed “Lost Cause.” Human bondage, wrote former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was “in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Northerners proved willing enough to go along, and to transmute their past into an ennobling myth; there’s a reason that people in both regions, even now, try to deny what the war was about, or to say that slavery was going out on its own anyway, or that the Confederacy had black soldiers. “Gone With the Wind” and “Birth of a Nation,” which in one way or another dramatize this argument, were enormous national hits for just this reason as well. Reconciling white people meant writing out black people. White Americans looked at their black countrymen and said, in effect, “This is our story now, not yours.”
This is what’s just happened at the Mall. Nobody was in the wrong during the civil rights years; King was a happy saint in the American tradition, not a dangerous radical.

Winant goes on to connect this kind of historical revisionism to 9/11 and the manufactured controversy over the Park51 project. It’s a really interesting perspective — not something that would have immediately occurred to me independently. And I’m not entirely sure that he’s right (I am not informed enough about the history of the reconstruction and the social dynamics involved to be able to speak authoritatively on the subject). But in its broad strokes, his argument feels right, if only observationally: We don’t like to talk about the very real history of everyday discrimination and oppression that was a fact of life in that era — and we certainly don’t like to talk about the complicity of ordinary individuals in this whole sorry tale. What we will talk about are the most visible: those who had acts, and names, and deeds — like Bull Connor and James Earl Ray — that inexorably mark them as villains in the civil rights struggle, but we ignore the people who never got their names in the newspapers. They’re the approved bad guys. Everyone else just sort of fades away, and we can pretend — as Winant says — that the past was a time when everyone got along, and what we think of as the civil rights movement was simply an inevitability.

There’s a very interesting discussion about the way that 9/11 is being stripped of its significance, too: “The real meaning of the disaster on September 11 — the way violence begets violence and fanaticism begets fanaticism, the way geopolitical maneuvering makes victims of ordinary people — is all gone. In its place is the vacuous sanctimony that it the place is “hallowed,” but all that seems to mean is that it is not open to Muslims.” You would think that to properly venerate the victims of 9/11 (disclaimer: I am not one of them, nor do I have any real connection to the event beyond being shit-scared for a couple of weeks that year, which I don’t consider victimization at all, though apparently I’m coming to understand this may be a minority view), you might want to talk about these things — understand how geopolitics is played, how decisions made 20, 30, 40 years ago come back to haunt you, how the cycle of violence continues, unbroken to this day, and how this is a really shitty problem that isn’t going to get better anytime soon, unless we start making different choices for ourselves. The moral you’d think you’d want is that the people who were killed that day died so that we’d all have a better understanding of what this world is like, and so that we’d think hard about what we were doing, and thus choose to do something different.

But the morals we are actually taking away from 9/11 seem to be: that it’s important to blow up as many places in the Middle East as possible, that nothing bad ever happens from doing this sort of thing, that considering potential consequences when pondering an action is a sign of weakness, and that under no circumstances should anyone ever think that possibly there might have been a point to the whole thing. In short, we’re using 9/11 to reinforce ideas and beliefs that we held before the damned thing happened in the first place. It’s the whole epistemic closure thing all over again, just writ large. Based on this sort of logic, maybe what we need at Ground Zero is not a mosque, or a church, or anything else of the sort. We need a military base, preferably one with serious offensive power projection capabilities. Is Montana looking to get out of the missile silo business?

To be fair, everybody does this. It’s rare to encounter anyone who is willing to change their minds based on events or data, and thank goodness for those who are. If you thought that US foreign policy was too aggressive before 9/11, you probably saw the attacks as vindication for your views. If you thought the problem was that the Middle East hadn’t been turned into radioactive slag, well, the conclusions there are obvious too. But we aren’t even having this debate anymore — 9/11 Just Happened, and about the only thing that’s worth talking about anymore were the goddamned Muslims that carried it off. (Note, too, that we’re not even talking about the specific Muslims that did it! Everyone’s complicit!) And even that point got the volume turned down until a few months ago. So maybe it’s not surprising that we’re suddenly having this huge argument about the “mosque” “at” “Ground Zero”: we never finished having the argument we should have been having in the first place, and it feels kind of silly to pick it up now that there’s no point anymore. (The “blow shit up” side won the argument, we blew shit up, and uh, well, how’s that working out this week?)

We’ve just decided to not talk about it anymore. There’s an accepted narrative about what happened, and we’ve airbrushed out the gory details. Unfortunately, in doing so, we stripped the event of its power. This is understandable — nobody really wants to have to relive the emotions of that day — but it does mean we’ve lost something important about what went on back in September of 2001.

Hiroshima represents a great example of this in action. The museum there will work very hard to convince you that the nuclear bombing of the city was something that Just Happened, and I suppose to the victims it did. Although you’ll find some interesting discussion about how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were basically excuses to scare the Russians, you will not find any discussion at all about the savagery the Empire inflicted on its neighbors, the brutality of the War in the Pacific, and the very cold, very calculating decisions Truman and his advisers made in dropping the bomb. But any examination of the use of nuclear weapons needs to include that component; you simply can’t view their use in isolation. The point, however, is not to judge, to place blame, or to justify or defend the decision. Fred Clark, writing earlier this month, noted: “The least evil is still evil. The least monstrous is still monstrous. When, as will happen, you are yourself forced to choose between two bad things, then choose the lesser of the evils and choose it boldly. That will be the right choice and, if circumstances are truly as circumscribed as you believe them to be, that will be the right thing to do in that situation. But it still won’t be a good thing. It isn’t a good thing and cannot be made good.” You can’t score points off it, and shouldn’t try to. You just need to understand — so that maybe, just maybe, you can work towards a future where people don’t have to make the choice in the first place.

(I want to note two things, one relevant and one not: First, I’ve been reading a lot of Slacktivist and think everyone else should, too, because Mr. Clark has a brilliant writing style and a shockingly sharp mind. Second, Hiroshima might be an instructive example for 9/11, but for an entirely different reason — the idea of normality in the face of unspeakable horror and tragedy. Put another way, if — 50-some years later — teenagers can make out across from the Industrial Promotion Hall, in the face of something so symbolic, shouldn’t we be able to get past this other thing, too?)

Of course, the applicability of Hiroshima’s example to 9/11 isn’t perfect: there is actually an evil here, perpetrated by very specific people who had other options. The existence of that evil, however, should not blind us to the need to have the discussion about its origins in the first place. This wasn’t an ancient evil that some unsuspecting scientist let loose by accident — this was a man-made evil, and if we’re going to deal with it we need to understand it. I get this is not a popular sentiment, and I realize that The Talk is not going to happen anytime soon, if at all, and by mutual consent.

Here, too, Winant is perceptive. He ends his essay with a point that I suspect will be controversial, but isn’t really: “In the temples of Americana being built, the parts of our national past that don’t belong to the white, conservative population are being sacrificed.” He’s almost right; I’d say the correct construction is more along the lines of “in the temples of Americana being built today, the parts of the national past that don’t belong to the comfortable majority are being sacrificed.” It’s not exactly about race (except when it is); it’s more generalizable to the need of the comfortable to stay comfortable, and to never be challenged in their beliefs or confronted with unpleasant truths. You believe what you believe, and you’re never invited to consider the alternatives.

But then, as he says, this is nothing new.

So it’s come to this, part III

Mike — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:37:22 +0000

Target Corp. defends Minn. political donation:

Target Corp. on Tuesday defended the use of its new freedom to spend money on political campaigns as employees and gay organizations criticized a $150,000 donation that will help a Minnesota GOP gubernatorial candidate who opposes gay marriage.
Chief Executive Officer Gregg Steinhafel assured employees at the company’s Minneapolis headquarters in an e-mail that the discount retailer’s support of the gay community is “unwavering.” He said employees, some gay, raised concerns that the money is helping state Rep. Tom Emmer, a fiery conservative who is his party’s likely nominee for governor.
Target’s headache illustrates the potential risks for businesses that seek to take advantage of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that threw out parts of a 63-year-old law that prohibited campaign donations from company funds. The ruling changed regulations in about half the states, but the Target donation in Minnesota is among the first major new corporate moves to come to light.

But hey! Don’t worry about this, because Target doesn’t have a social agenda here beyond making money:

From the beginning, Steinhafel has tried to make the point that the decision to contribution to MN Forward/Emmer was “a jobs creation” decision, not an attack on gay rights.
In an open letter to Target employees last week, Steinhafel wrote: “As you know, Target has a history of supporting organizations and candidates, on both sides of the aisle, who seek to advance policies aligned with our business objectives, such as job creation and economic growth. MN Forward is focused specifically on those issues and is committed to supporting candidates from any party who will work to improve the state’s job climate. However, it is also important to note that we rarely endorse all advocated positions of the organizations or candidates we support, and we do not have a political or social agenda.”

So making money is more important than treating human beings like, uh, human beings. Got it.

Update, 5 August 2010: Target says they’re sorry.

Pleading the Second

Mike — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:42:09 +0000

I’m not sure I understand the issues at work here:

“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.
Say what?
Yes, if you are on the terrorist watch list, the authorities can keep you from getting on a plane but not from purchasing an AK-47. This makes sense to Congress because, as Graham accurately pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”
The subject of guns turns Congress into a twilight zone. People who are perfectly happy to let the government wiretap phones go nuts when the government wants to keep track of weapons permits. A guy who stands up in the House and defends the torture of terror suspects will nearly faint with horror at the prospect of depriving someone on the watch list of the right to purchase a pistol.

I give Graham partial credit for at least claiming that the enumerated rights in the Constitution (and relevant at the time of drafting) are the only ones worth defending, but I don’t suppose you’d have to work too hard to find other examples of sacred rights beloved by the GOP that aren’t specifically listed. That credit, however, does not go very far: of all the rights you want to defend, in relation to terrorists or terror suspects or people whom the government think might be possibly considering becoming terrorists, this is the right you choose to defend?

In my universe there’s a lot of political hay to be made over this. I do not live in the same universe as the Republican party, apparently.

(Note I have no specific opinion on Lautenberg’s bill itself; that’s not the point here.)

Bigotry: Not so bad

Mike — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:09:47 +0000

San Francisco Appeal: SF Chronicle Columnist: Bigotry Not So Bad.

The Chron startled the Appeal today when their columnist Chip Johnson defended a bigot in Oakland. The situation is this: Lorenzo Hoopes, a Mormon, donated $26,000 in support of Prop 8, more than any individual in Oakland, a city with one of the country’s largest lesbian populations. (Really!) Hoopes faces re-appointment to the Board of Directors of the Paramount theater; but now that he’s shown himself to be an anti-gay supremacist, some community leaders are opposed to his continued presence.
After all, as we’ve seen during this week’s Prop 8 trial, discrimination against gays has real consequences — to society, to individuals, and to families.
But Chronicle writer and Oakland resident Chip Johnson is outraged! In an piece that might as well have been titled, “Aw, Give the Old Bigot a Break, He’s Probably Real Nice,” he lamented that anyone would actually dare hold Hoopes accountable for his actions.
Unlike many of our respected friends in the San Francisco news space, The San Francisco Appeal does not practice advocacy journalism. We have no dogs in fights, and do our best to report as objectively as we can without being totally boring and cheesy. However, we are, indeed “anti Prop-8 cheerleaders.” This is because we are not fucking bigots! Therefore, we called on Oakland resident Jip Chonson to provide us with a rebuttal to the Chronicle’s piece.

And then “Chonson” goes and re-writes the Chronicle‘s piece by doing a s/gay/Jew/ on it. Go ahead, feel uncomfortable. You’re supposed to.

I stole this link from jwz’s LJ. A commenter there writes, “Isn’t it interesting what happens to all of these initiatives and talking points when you take the word, “homosexual” and replace it with, “negro” or “Jew”? Why, you get the very bigotted language we used to hear back a century ago! Who’d have ever thought?”

Bigotry is bigotry. It is not an unfortunate social habit, nor is it in bad taste — it’s just wrong. This isn’t really complicated, yet the ability of a great many people to fully miss the point is sad.

Raw, unfiltered joy

Mike — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:37:00 +0000

The defining moment of Campaign 2008, for me: standing in the lobby of the Rio in Las Vegas, having just gotten out from Penn and Teller, watching mobs of people surge through the hallways, some of them crying, some of them laughing, some of them hugging, all of them chanting, in one voice, with the force and joy and certainty of the vindicated: “Yes we did.”

20-odd hours later, it still rings in my ears. “Yes we did.”

I could be cynical about this. I’m cynical by nature. But I can’t be cynical about this.

Now it can be told.

Mike — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:34:00 +0000

With Mike Huckabee’s win in the Iowa caucuses tonight, I thought it might be nice to congratulate the former Arkansas governor with a trip down memory lane…

Way to go, Mike! Yeah!

Some kinda wonderful

Mike — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:42:00 +0000

Here’s a little flashback for fans of humorous Canadian music from the early 1990s:

Often on the weekend I’ll jump in my car
I won’t fill up the tank although I’m going far
And if somebody asks me if I’m going to a bar
I’ll say I’m shopping ‘cross the border in the USA
I don’t go down there to buy my groceries
I respect our farmers and our factories
I don’t believe that “local” means it’s poor in quality
It’s just our goddamn prices are too high
If he stays away for just two days
I’ll get one hundred dollars duty-free
If it adds to more I won’t claim it for
(He won’t declare the products if they’re in his trunk)
Although it is Canada that I call home
I don’t cheer for the Yankees when I’m in the Dome
I didn’t swell with pride during the Desert Storm
It’s just that I don’t want to pay the tax
(It’s just that he’s too cheap to pay the tax)
Yes, it’s just like this, he’s a loyalist
I’ll only shop at malls that fly our flag
(And he’ll tell Bob Rae that he just won’t pay)
Unless I need my unemployment benefits
(Get a job, get a job, get a job)
Now everyone is doing the same thing as me
They’re doing what they can to beat the GST
They’re lining up for miles at the Duty-Free
So I bought a JC Penny’s store in Buffalo
(So everybody come on down to Buffalo)
(Cause if you stay away for just two days)
You’ll get one hundred dollars duty-free
Though it’s not at par it’ll still go far
And it ends up in the pockets of a country man
(It ends up in the pockets of a country man)

Oh, Canada!
–The Arrogant Worms, “The Canadian Crisis Song”

We should, as a nation, celebrate today.

Live rates at 2007.05.30 23:38:16 UTC
1.00 CAD = 0.931553 USD

I drew out $200 USD from the ATM this afternoon and was shocked to discover the exchange rate was this favorable for Canadians. Like, truly, completely shocked. I knew it was good — I don’t live in a cave, after all– but “flabbergast” might be one way to put it when confronted with the receipt in your hand. K. and I worked it out on the way home from the bank: If you live in BC and are visiting Washington this weekend, for instance, you “premium” for buying and spending US dollars is essentially $1 for every $100 you spend. The sales tax difference between here and Washington almost, but not quite, cancels out the cost of changing money. Which is still a whole heap better than paying the friggin’ prices in this province/country. (He cackled, planning on buying cheap gas, booze, and cigars while away this weekend.)

Still, as a keen student of Canadian history, I can’t help but wonder how long it’s going to take before the politicians begin once again to freak out over the high value of the Canadian dollar again, how long it will take Canadians who live in border communities to begin buying basic things across the border again, and how long it will be before someone (most likely Carol Skelton) begins to mutter darkly about cutting down on the ol’ shop n’ smuggle. Again, as though that needed saying.

I’m also eagerly awaiting the first major media complaint about the high dollar affecting our export industry — you know, because a weak dollar actually helps by allowing us to slut away our natural resources more efficiently…

Update: Whoops, too late.
“We’re devastated by their monetary policy, their tax policy and their terrible trade negotiations,” said Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, which organized the demonstration.
While Georgetti’s words were met with cheers, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion was booed loudly when he addressed the workers, many of whom take issue with the Liberals’ opposition to anti-scab legislation.
As protesters rallied outside, members of Parliament from all three opposition parties attacked the Conservative government in the House of Commons for not taking a more active role in saving jobs.
“The fact is we’re losing 150 jobs in the manufacturing sector every single day,” Layton said, his voice rising as he pointed his finger at Conservatives in the House.
“And yet we have no action on foreign takeovers, no action on the high dollar, no action on fair trade that would protect Canadian jobs … We’ve got no policy at all.”

Um. Yeah. “Protect Canadian jobs.” I guess that “lowest unemployment levels in 40 years” isn’t really protecting Canadian jobs, is it? (I’m hardly a friend of PC fiscal policy — I took a serious bath last fall on the income trust thing and am disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on this stuff — but let’s be real: We do not suck.)

Updating the list

Mike — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:10:00 +0000

I note, in the wake of Monday’s carnage, that there are a number of things the Blogosphere has magically become an expert on:

Wound ballistics
Weapon performance
Urban/close-quarters battle tactics
Unarmed self-defense against armed maniacs

Will wonders never cease? I have this image in my head of Dick Cheney having another jammer and the merits of the various treatment options suddenly becoming politicized and everyone having an opinion on whether primary PCI is better than facilitated PCI is better than a thrombolytic strategy alone, with certain blogs who shall remain unidentified talking about the economics of each and..

Oh, screw it. This makes my head hurt.

On related notes:

Anyone who says that a .22 is a nothing gun –

And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren’t bad.

– is a total idiot and knows absolutely nothing about wound ballistics. I know that the .22 LR is not anything near a sexy round, nor does it possess anything close to the ideal amount of that mythical thing called stopping power, but unless you’ve had to chase one of those projectiles around the body, you don’t get to say that “your chances aren’t bad.” A .22 that gets into the body is in there for the grand tour, unlike a 9mm that’s likely to mushroom and expand, or a rifle round that’s going to go flying through leaving a nice, clean wound track. Projectiles are projectiles — throw it fast enough and it’s dangerous. Guess what, kids? .22 is plenty dangerous. (I should hope that the fact that a .22 needs to find something important to do damage crossed with the fact that the round is in there for the grand tour is not something you would take solace in, but that’s just me.)
I’m going to totally ignore the rest of that masturbatory post. The crack about the .22 is enough.
The comments from Old Jarhead need to be tattooed on everyone’s eyelids. I like guns. I’ve owned guns. I’ve fired a lot of rounds in my life. I feel very comfortable around firearms. I do not want a concealed carry permit and I do not want a firearm for defensive purposes in my house because of this fundamental truth: I am not 100% convinced I could drop the hammer. That makes me a liability, not an asset, when it comes to dealing with armed maniacs. It’s not manly of me, but it is who I am, and I’m not willing to lie to myself to say otherwise. What’s the point? We all want to be Rambo; almost none of us are. There’s no shame in this.
I think the whole gun issue would be a lot saner and less idiotic if the people who were seriously trying to argue one position or the other had been to the Lethal Force Institute, or at least read about Massad Ayoob. Chris Wright wrote a fantastic article about LFI and Ayoob for the Boston Phoenix a few years back, and some of Ayoob’s ideas about guns and self defense seem far too rational to come from this world:

The 51-year-old Ayoob is something of a celebrity in the gun community. In 1980, he published In the Gravest Extreme, a book that quickly came to be known as the definitive study on the tactical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding the use of lethal force by civilians. Twenty years after its publication, the book has sold about 300,000 copies.
In all, Ayoob has written a dozen books — The Truth About Self-Protection, Stressfire, Hit the White Part — plus countless articles for gun periodicals. He has been an expert witness in about 70 criminal trials. He has taught in Switzerland and South America, England and Africa. He has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the National Enquirer. He has appeared on Frontline, 20/20, and the Today show.
“He’s a celebrity among thinking gun owners,” says Miami criminal-defense lawyer Jeffrey Weiner, former president of the National Association of Criminal Lawyers and an LFI grad. “He’s not a celebrity among macho types.” …
Following another burst of laughter, Ayoob’s deadly serious again. “There are no first-place winners in a shooting situation,” he warns us. “When it’s over, believe me, you haven’t won. Deterrence is the only victory.”
In many ways, LFI isn’t a class in killing people. It’s a class in not killing them. Ayoob finds himself in the curious position of believing the best way to prevent gun violence is to teach people how to commit it. His entire lethal-force philosophy hinges on a single principle: the more prepared you are to kill an assailant, the less likely you are to have to.
This may sound a bit nutty at first, but perhaps the only way to get to the heart of a matter as complex as gun ownership is through paradox. In an issue that many people view in black-and-white terms, Ayoob’s pacifism-through-violence philosophy has made him as many enemies as it has friends.
“I’ve found myself caught in the middle of a very polarized debate,” he says. “On one side I’ve got the hard-core anti-gunners. To them I’m a crypto-fascist because I tell women that if a rapist attacks you, killing the son of a bitch is absolutely one of your options — legally and morally. On the other side there’s the hard-core right-wing ultra-gunnies, who consider me a crypto-commie because I tell them, ‘No, as a matter of fact, you don’t have a God-given right to carry a loaded gun in shopping malls where there are kids walking around. It’s a privilege, and you need to be able show society that you know how to use it and when to use it. That you’re not going to shoot at a perpetrator and hit a kid by mistake.’ I think that’s a reasonable request.
“In the history of polarized debates,” he adds, “anybody in the middle find himself in a very lonely place.” …
“Civilians chasing criminals are like dogs chasing cars: they have no idea what to do with them when they catch them.” That is: if they run, let them go. If it’s a robbery, give them the money. If you’re armed and someone comes up and spits in your face, walk away. If you hear a noise in your house, hide yourself in a safe room and call the police — never go looking for intruders.
When in doubt, don’t shoot.
“I can’t believe I spent $600 for that ugly little Ay-rab to tell me I can’t shoot anyone,” says Ayoob.

It’s weird and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and yet it makes all kinds of sense. Help me out here.

Cripple fight!

Mike — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 08:43:00 +0000

This has been linked more or less all over the place, but it’s friggin’ priceless. I kept getting these weird flashbacks to Scanners. Next time, I want exploding heads.

The War for Terra

Mike — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:36:00 +0000

There has got to be something wrong with me.

For the past year or so, I’ve been finding that I’ve been paying a lot more attention to stories about climate change — and then trying to act on the ideas in them. I bought a much more fuel efficient car, for instance. I don’t drive nearly as much as I used to. I turn down the heat (not that this matters much, since I have electric heating, and electricity in BC is essentially carbon-neutral). Elizabeth Kolbert’s magnificent reporting for the New Yorker has been a powerful tool for influencing me, but I think the real credit belongs to Terri Schiavo.

L’affaire Schiavo demonstrated many things, among them the depths of depravity some politicians will sink, but the one that really stuck in my craw was the absolute certainty of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. It was galling — truly, madly, infuriatingly galling — to watch non-physicians, non-neurologists, and people who’d never once cared for a PVS patient (or anyone else that was comatose, for that matter) explain how Terri was clearly not brain dead, and how she could wake up under some circumstances. I think this exchange captures it quite nicely; I’m not going to re-hash it again, because it will just make me very very sad.

You saw a lot of this with the Schiavo case, but you see it everywhere else science comes into conflict with articles of faith: Parents who think thiomersal (or the MMR vaccine, or anything else) gave their kids autism will never, ever listen to the evidence that said it doesn’t cause problems; anti-vaccination activists will kick and scream and cry bloody murder before they ever admit that maybe vaccines are useful. Creationists will shout to the heavens that something created the universe and that evolutionary biology is bunk, despite not knowing the first thing about evolutionary biology. It goes on and on and on, and every single time, I end up siding with the people who have the data to support their position, and not just random accusations of conspiracies. Laypeople (a polite word, really, for “idiots”) arguing with experts over expert subject matter makes me want to tear my hair out; we’ve reached a point where the fact that you know a lot about something no longer grants you special status in discussions about that thing; you are now subject to argument from people whose knowledge may range from zero to near-parity, and you are expected to take them all seriously. (See my comment in the above-linked Schiavo journalism story about Buzz Aldrin arguing with moon-landing skeptics.)

Which brings us to climate change.

For many years, I was in deep denial about climate change. I didn’t think it was real, didn’t find the evidence persuasive. I argued that it was too early to suggest that human behavior was causing all these weird things. I pointed at solar output variation, at the fear of global cooling as recently as 30 years ago (the causes of and cures for which were essentially the same as today’s proposed causes and solutions), at the dramatic effects Earth itself has on its own atmosphere. Part of this was a reaction to the hippies that dominated the environmental movement in the later 1980s and early 1990s, but part of it was my own healthy skepticism of certainty — or so I told myself.

And then, one day, about a year and a half ago, I found myself staring at a joint position statement from the national academies and societies of the G8 that explicitly endorsed the idea that anthropogenic climate change was occurring, and that we needed to do something about it. I started to argue in my head, and then I stopped. “Wait a minute. I am arguing with the Royal Society of Canada, among others. These are supposed to be the best and brightest scientific minds of our era. They know more about this subject than I do. Who the hell am I to argue with them?” Just as I would be annoyed with a climatologist who decided he knew what the best management strategy is for STEMI patients, I was getting annoyed with myself for arguing in opposition to people who, quite simply, know more than I do. There is, in other words, such a thing as expert opinion. It has spoken, and who am I to argue with it? I don’t have standing to argue.

With that realization I turned 180 degrees and started worrying about it. And today I took another small step: I bought myself and my 5.1L/100km Acura a TerraPass, I bought enough credits to cover all the flying I’ve done in the last twelve months, and I’ve vowed that I’m going to make sure I buy credits to offset the future air travel I do. (I’d buy one for the house but virtually all of the heating is electric and, as I said, electricity in BC is almost entirely hydro-generated, so it’s not making the climate problem worse.) I’m not fooling myself: This by itself is not going to save the planet.

But it’s a step in the right direction.

And for me, personally, it’s a kind of penance.