DeLillo’s ‘airborne toxic event’ is still unfolding

Posted on June 20, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit dropped by on Sunday to wish me a happy Father’s Day, but we ended up talking about that strange day earlier this month when the air smelled like burnt toast and the skyline looked like a blurry photo viewed through a sepia filter.

“I woke up with a hangover and smelled the smoke and figured the swamp was on fire, ” he said. “It wasn’t, so I went back to bed.”

I got up that day and investigated. A talking head on the Channel 6 news alerted me to the source of the smoke — wildfires in Canada — while I was ordering a slice of Sicilian at Vincenzo’s, near the swamp. A code red air quality alert has been issued for Philadelphia and the surrounding region. The pizza man sang “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” but he stopped joking when the talking head said there would be no Phillies game that night because of poor air quality.   

The pall lifted a few days later but not before the news media made clear that the air will only get worse as climate change caused by fossil fuel burning makes wildfires “more frequent and intense.” A Philadelphia Inquirer article offered suggestions on how to cope: Avoid driving. Stay indoors when you can. Close windows. Wear a high-quality mask.

“I’m surprised they didn’t just tell us to stop breathing,” Swamp Rabbit said.

Wildfires are only part of the pollution problem, I reminded him. In February, a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and local residents flipped out after receiving conflicting “expert” opinions on how dangerous the leaked chemicals were. This real-life incident and its aftermath were strikingly similar to the “airborne toxic event” in Don DeLillo’s bleakly funny novel White Noise (1985), which touches on our refusal to directly connect such toxic events to our ongoing assault on nature.

“Bleakly funny?” Swamp Rabbit said. “What you mean by that?”

“We fret about pollution all the time,” I replied. “The more we fret, the more we pollute. You don’t think that’s funny?”

Footnote: White Noise, like many great novels, is prophetic. One of its main characters says, “It’s no wonder they call this thing the airborne toxic event. It’s an event all right. It marks the end of uneventful things. This is just the beginning. Wait and see.”

The novel was made into a Netflix movie last year.

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Energy update: Clean vs. dirty in Texas showdown

Posted on June 17, 2023 by oddmanout215

“You and them other cynics were wrong,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Texas ain’t gonna cut back on wind and solar. That creepy little gov’ner and his oil cronies can’t win on account of there’s too much money to be made in renewables.”

He was dissing me for assuming last month that Gov. Greg Abbott and his fellow yahoos would succeed in their effort to block expansion of the renewable energy industry in Texas.

In the end, Republicans in the State Legislature who were itching to strike a blow against progress suffered a setback because, as one energy consultant put it, “a remarkable coalition of environmentalists, industry organizations and business groups — including more than 50 chambers of commerce, manufacturers, generators, oil and gas advocates and others” helped shoot down most of their proposals.

“They got together and took on the anti-woke, anti-wind-and-solar gang,” Swamp Rabbit said. “That ain’t no easy task in Texas.”

Some of the details are in a New York Times column by David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, who noted that “clean energy provided about 25 to 30 percent of Texas power last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2002,” and that “green-energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act are poised to create more than 100,000 jobs in Texas by 2030 — which would add more than $15 billion to the state economy over that time.”

“You’re too quick to think the worst,” Swamp Rabbit said. “When all’s said and done, the polluters are gonna go with the green, ’cause that’s where the biggest profits are.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” I replied. Texas is the No. 1 wind state, but progressives will have a hard time defeating the forces that keep green energy generation sites from linking up with the sort of far-reaching grid that’s essential for distribution. Most of the grid has yet to be built. And there’s the problem of the giant energy companies that benefit from incentives but continue to stall the actual transition to renewables.

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “They’re hedging their bets, but they’re gonna do the right thing when the time is right.”

I tossed one of his empty beer cans at him. “Sorry to bust your bubble, friend-o, but time is not on our side.”

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Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Donnie boy?

Posted on June 12, 2023 by oddmanout215

Donald Trump is much taller than Edward G. Robinson was and not as convincingly tough, but how could any movie fan not think of Robinson last week when the Department of Justice indicted Trump on 37 criminal counts?

I’m talking about Little Caesar (1931). In particular, the scene where mob boss Rico Bandello, played by Robinson, voices his last words: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

As if it were hard for him to believe he could no longer add to his tally of gruesome crimes.

“Trump ain’t Rico,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Rico was an old-fashioned gangster. He didn’t get elected president. He didn’t have an army of fans wearin’ silly red caps. And the cops caught up with him at the end of the movie.”

I noted that Trump’s movie won’t end well either, but he has clung to the top of the dung heap for a long time, thanks in part to early help from the New York and Philly crime families. When “Sammy the Bull” Gravano said “The country doesn’t need a bookworm as president, it needs a mob boss,” he was talking about Trump.

“Rico came from nothing and fought his way up during the Great Depression,” I said. “Trump was born rich and groomed for success in the real estate business, working with mobbed-up construction companies and crooked politicians. His mob connections helped him get into the casino industry. He was just as rotten as Rico but he remained a media darling, even when reporters like David Cay Johnston and Wayne Barrett were exposing him in print.”

Swamp Rabbit sipped a beer and shook his head. “I still say this Trump-Rico connection is a stretch. Trump is a sleazebag but he didn’t shoot nobody, not even on Fifth Avenue.”

“That would have been the least of his crimes,” I said. “Instead he stuck with white-collar crime and helped destroy democracy in America.”

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Centrism (mainstream media’s favorite myth)

Posted on June 11, 2023 by oddmanout215

“What you mean their ain’t no center?” Swamp Rabbit said. “There’s the left wing and the right wing and the center. You can’t have the one without the others.”

I was telling him that CNN chief Chris Licht had been fired by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav for doing a clumsy job of transforming CNN into the “centrist” news vehicle envisioned by John Malone, the Trump-friendly billionaire behind the merger of CNN and Discovery. I reminded him that Licht’s job had been in jeopardy at least since CNN, invoking centrism, aired Donald Trump’s May 10 town hall.

“Enough about them corporate sleazeballs at CNN,” Swamp Rabbit said after downing a double shot of Wild Turkey. “They propped up an election-denyin’ crook.”

“Malone said he wants CNN to be ‘more centrist,'” I replied.

“What does centrist mean?”

I told him that, in theory, centrism involves giving equal weight to both sides of a story, even if one side might be distorting the facts or lying outright. In practice, the notion of centrism — bothsidesism is a more accurate term — often provides a platform for outlandish liars like Donald Trump and the people who endorse his lies.

“I’m not just talking about rightwing greed hounds like Malone,” I added. “I think guys like A.G. Sulzberger at New York Times and Martin Baron, late of Washington Post, are afraid they’ll lose too many readers/viewers and advertisers if they state the truth too plainly. Their newspapers propped up Trump for years before they tore him down. Centrism is about the bottom line.”

Swamp Rabbit opened a can of beer. “But we’d be in bad shape if there wasn’t no center, don’t you think?”

“We’re in even worse shape if there’s a center with room for Trump and mini-Trumps,” I replied. “Don’t you think?”

Footnote: “There can be no center to American politics as long as most Republican voters support Trump and most Republican lawmakers follow Trump’s lead. There’s no “center” between democracy and authoritarianism.” — Robert Reich

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Supreme Court sullies Clean Water Act

Posted on June 2, 2023 by oddmanout215

I was lecturing Prayers, my favorite feral cat. The news is hardly ever new, I told him. At best, it’s a reminder that the people who run this country now might be even less enlightened than the idiots who, generations ago, fought efforts to clean up our ongoing environmental mess.

“I hope you ain’t talkin’ about me,” Swamp Rabbit said as he approached from Tinicum swamp. “I ain’t got nothin’ to do with that mess.”

Prayers bolted into the swamp. I told Swamp Rabbit that the U.S. Supreme Court recently dealt a blow to public health concerns by ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency can no longer regulate — i.e., guard against — pollution of wetlands unless the wetlands in question have “a continuous surface connection” with oceans, rivers, or other bodies of water.

“As if everything on the planet isn’t connected,” I said. ” As if pollutants everywhere don’t eventually empty into the same stream we all draw from.”

Most of the Supremes believe — or pretend to believe — that the Clean Water Act isn’t clear enough in its language to justify blanket federal protection of wetlands. The mainstream media isn’t really challenging their arguments. It’s up to Congress to better clarify the law, the Supremes said, but this isn’t likely to happen given the current makeup of the House and Senate.

The court ruling is, in the words of a National Wildlife Federation official, “the latest sign that many decision makers in Washington have lost touch with the increasingly fragile state of the natural systems that provide drinking water, flood protection and critical habitat for people and wildlife in every state.”

“The war is never over,” I said. “There are always new yahoos to replace the yahoos who were cool with pollution levels back in the ’60s, when rivers were catching fire.”

“What you talkin’ about now?” said Swamp Rabbit, who is much younger than I. “Ain’t no river ever caught fire.”

I told him about the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, one of the events that alerted environmentally conscious people to the fact that pollution caused by unregulated industries was poisoning the natural world. The fire was the subject of Randy Newman’s “Burn On,” a satiric song released in 1972.

“I ain’t never heard that song,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t heard of Randy Newman neither.”

“Here, I’ll play it for you,” I said after calling up the song on my phone. “And I’ll send it to Ed Sheeran. Maybe he’ll steal it and turn it into a big hit.”

Footnote: In case you’ve been in a long-term coma, here’s a recent piece about corruption on the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Somebody give me a ($700) cheeseburger!

Posted on May 28, 2023 by oddmanout215

“My birthday’s comin’ up,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Maybe I’ll go uptown and treat myself to one of them $700 burgers.”

He was referring to the beer garden in Philly whose menu reportedly includes “the most expensive burger in America.” Presumably, the owners hoped to create a buzz with the story, which appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Post and other venues.

“It was a good way to get publicity without having to run expensive ads,” I said. “They should win the award for Cleverest Food & Drink Gimmick.”

Swamp Rabbit narrowed his eyes. “What you mean by gimmick? You think there ain’t really no $700 cheeseburger topped with caviar, truffles, lobster flambeed with Louis XIII cognac, and a gold leaf on top? That there’s no shot of Louis XIII on the side?”

“Sure there is,” I replied. “But they’re not expecting you to actually buy that stuff. It’s just to draw you to the beer garden. Once you’re there, you’ll buy their regular-priced burgers and drinks. That’s the plan.”

“I don’t want them regular burgers,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I deserve the best.”

I told him he was crazy. He’s so poor, he has to shoplift hamburger patties at the Acme to get by some nights. Why obsess about a $700 burger?

He shook his head. “I ain’t no second-class citizen. If them bougies can buy a $700 burger, so can I.”

I told him he sounded like “Living in the U.S.A.,” the Steve Miller Band’s hippy-era critique/celebration of American culture. The lyrics are dumb but funny. Miller shouts “Somebody give me a cheeseburger!”

“There you go,” Swamp Rabbit said.”Ain’t nothin’ more American than a cheeseburger.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “Prices change, but people don’t.”

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Martin Amis (1949-2023) braved the moronic inferno

Posted on May 24, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was drinking beer on his porch when I told him that British author Martin Amis died last weekend.  

“Okay, but what’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” he said, referring to the fact that a dozen eggs at the Acme can still cost more than four dollars.

I told him that Amis at full throttle is reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson in his glory days. Some of his protagonists have the same manic energy, the same flair for brutally honest, comical self-criticism. I mentioned John Self, the first-person narrator of Amis’s novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984), whose self-destructive sorties in New York City recall those of Thompson’s alter-ego in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Now the way I figured it I had six realistic options. I could sack out right away, with some scotch and a few Serafim. I could go back to the Happy Isles and see what little Moby was up to. I could call Doris Arthur. I could catch a live sex show around the corner, in bleeding Seventh Avenue. I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk. In the end I stayed in and got drunk. The trouble was, I did all the other things first.

I noted that Self, a director of TV commercials, uses his confessions to exalt his many addictions. He’s a media whore, an amusing monster, a device created by Amis to lampoon the excesses of our sick, money-driven culture, which is even sicker now than it was in the pre-Internet ’80s.

“Blah blah,” my mangy friend said. “I live in a shotgun shack with a leaky roof. So do you. Why should I care what that bad boy wrote?”

I tried again: In some of his best fiction, Amis captured the giddy hedonism of the 1980s and early ’90s as the world was slipping into a downward spiral triggered by climate change, wealth inequality and pervasive cynicism. Writ large, the story of John Self’s ongoing self-abuse – I was lying face down under some hedge or bush or some blighted shrub in a soaked allotment full of nettles, crushed cigarette packs, used condoms and empty beer cans – is the story of humankind’s ongoing abuse of the planet.

Amis keeps us laughing – Refreshed by a brief blackout, I got to my feet and went next door – as Self, seeking more money, more everything, staggers toward his inevitable crash. His ignoble odyssey begs the big question:  Do we still have time to clean up our act, or is the crash a foregone conclusion?

“The crash is already here,” Swamp Rabbit said as he flung an empty can into the weeds in front of his shack. “It’s breakfast time but I can’t even afford to have eggs with my beer.”

Footnote: Amis wrote a lot of first-rate fiction and nonfiction. Arguably, the novels Money, London Fields and The Information, all written prior to the millennium, are his best works.

Another: The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America is the title of Amis’s 1986 book of essays. He borrowed the phrase from Saul Bellow, who took it from the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis.

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Walking blues (my search for dress shoes)

Posted on May 20, 2023 by oddmanout215

I was checking my email and noticed that images of shoes were appearing every time I opened a new file. Dress shoes, so-called. Tassel loafers, oxford bluchers, brogues. Shiny and super-square. The sort of shoes I stopped wearing around the same time I quit working at cube farms.

“Where they all comin’ from? ” Swamp Rabbit said, looking over my shoulder at the shoe advertisements on my laptop screen.

“I did this to myself,” I replied. “I did an online search for local shoe stores this week and now every company in the world that makes shoes has my address and wants me for a customer.”

I explained that my search was in preparation for a formal occasion where my running shoes wouldn’t be appropriate. And that an online search for any commodity creates a plague of related ads that infects the sites you subscribe to. (Algorithms in action.) The capitalist monster finds out where you are, then it eats you.

Why’d you do an online search?” he said. “There must be shoe stores all over Philly.”

“You’re thinking of sneaker stores, rabbit. Running shoes, if you will. The neighborhood stores that sold dress shoes are mostly out of business now. The only places that come up when you do a search are those high-end shoe stores in Center City. There are a half-dozen of them, tops.”

“What you mean by high-end?”

“Shoes that are wildly overpriced because of their brand names. Wolf & Shepherd, Allen Edmonds and so on. Some poor-schmuck salesman at some high-end store on Sansom Street showed me a pair of loafers with a $395 price tag. That’s probably close to his take-home pay for a 40-hour week.”

“Why don’t you shop at a department store, or one of them consumer dumps like Walmart or Target?” Swamp Rabbit said.

“The shoes at those places cost less, but they’re much more cheaply made, so they wear out fast. Relatively speaking, they’re overpriced, too. Inflation is a bitch. The media isn’t telling half the story.”

He scowled. “Dress shoes are a lot cheaper at Target. You just don’t want to spend any money, Odd Man.”

“You’ve got no room to talk,” I said, looking down at his shoes. “You’ve been wearing those Chuck Taylor All Star high-tops since Obama was president.”

He asked me what I would wear to the formal occasion if I couldn’t find any dress shoes that suited me. I told him I’d dug up a pair of old black running shoes to wear with my suit.

“Great plan,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t forget to polish ’em.”

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Breaking: Cooper is a mouthpiece, not a newsman

Posted on May 15, 2023 by oddmanout215

“Get a load of this pompous jerk. He ain’t even embarrassed.”

Swamp Rabbit was reacting to video of Anderson Cooper mouthing off about CNN’s May 10 town hall with Donald Trump, an event that served as a free ad for the ex-president and damaged what little is left of the network’s credibility. Cooper, a prime-time talking head, should have issued a mea culpa, but instead he defended CNN and scolded viewers who have criticized the network for helping to legitimize Trump’s current campaign for the presidency:

You have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again. But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?

Cooper was being disingenuous, or just stupid. Everyone knew in advance that Trump, if given the opportunity, would use this free hour of network TV time to continue lying about the 2020 election results, abortion rights groups, immigration policy, his recent sexual abuse and defamation trial, and any other issues that came up. And that the event’s so-called moderator, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, would have little or no chance to refute Trump’s lies in a live setting, in front of an audience of Trump supporters.

“Cooper’s the one who’s in the silo,” Swamp Rabbit said. “He gets paid millions to be a mouthpiece for rich right-wingers who want to steal Fox News’s audience. He gets to pretend he’s a great guy for defending his boss’s bad decisions. Nice work if you can get it.”

“You got that right,” I replied, referring him to a recent piece by Robert Reich, who mapped the money trail that leads from Cooper to Chris Licht, the right-wing CEO at CNN; to David Zaslav, Licht’s boss at Warner Bros. Discovery; to John Malone, the right-wing multibillionaire and leading shareholder at Warner Brothers Discovery who helped make possible the merger of CNN and Discovery.

“Stop, you’re giving me a headache,” Swamp Rabbit said after skimming the article.

“The whole country has a headache,” I told him, “and yes men like Anderson Cooper are helping their masters make sure the headache is permanent.”

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Deep in the heart of Texas, yahoos still rule

Posted on May 12, 2023 by oddmanout215

Just when it looked like Texas might be prioritizing clean energy over dirty, this happens:

The Texas Legislature is moving to erect barriers to clean energy development while providing incentives for fossil fuel production. This would make the task of reducing emissions much harder. And it comes even though oil and gas production has continued to grow, though not at the pace of the market’s embrace of wind and solar…

I showed Swamp Rabbit the NY Times op/ed and he said, “I don’t get it. Ain’t you the one told me Texas was a red state that was trending blue by encouraging companies to build wind and solar? Didn’t you say them varmints bowed to market pressure and made laws that allowed renewables to catch on in a big way? And that investors in wind and solar created thousands of new jobs and raised tax money to help dirt-poor counties get by?”

“They did,” I replied. “And some of the giant dirty energy companies are cashing in on the renewables trend. But a core group of rich fossil fuel hustlers and the Republican office holders who do their bidding want to hit the brakes on renewables. The yahoos down there are still in charge.”

My mangy friend looked puzzled. “”What you mean by yahoos? That’s one of them search engines, right?”

I explained to him that, in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift invented Houyhnhnms, a race of highly civilized talking horses who guard against the incursion of ignorant, disgusting humans called yahoos. “The real-world modern equivalent of yahoos are humans who reject life-saving vaccines and ban books and love AR-15s and laugh at rape victims and cheer for Donald Trump and ignore global warming and –“

“Alright, I get it,” Swamp Rabbit said. “But what do the rich peeps got to do with it? Ain’t you confusing them with the rubes who prop up the rich by voting for little monsters like Governor Greg Abbott? It sounds like the peeps with no money are the real yahoos.”

“They’re all yahoos, you dope. Being rich doesn’t make you more humane or thoughtful or environmentally conscious. The opposite is usually true.”

I reminded him that Abbott, after a cold snap in 2021 that knocked out electric power for ten million people, tried to blame the power failure on wind turbines, when in fact it was largely the result of outages at gas and coal power plants.

“Abbott is a poster boy for yahoos all over the country,” I said. “He’s helping the rich by making sure the world is wrecked by climate change.”

Swamp Rabbit shrugged and snapped open a can of beer. “I guess he’s doing a good job of it. Seems like they love him in Texas.”

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