Monthly Archives: August 2018

The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.

Chris Hedges, writing for Truthdig

Climate change is not a problem we have to make go away, in a sense that you don’t make adolescence go away,” Frank said. “It is a dangerous transition that you have to navigate. … The question is are we smart enough to deal with the effects of our own power? Climate change is not a pollution problem. It’s not like any environmental problem we’ve faced before. In some sense, it’s not an environmental problem but a planetary transition. We’ve already pushed the earth into it. We’re going to have to evolve a new way of being a civilization, fundamentally.

Adam Frank, quoted by Chris Hedges on Truthdig.

“Historic Downtown.”

One of my favorite of my own photos. Why?

First: the expensive, elegant, digital, city-built street furniture that is meant to announce “Historic Downtown” as a destination – but serves no other purpose than advertising. (It’s not a bus shelter; it’s not a phone-charging kiosk; it’s not a bathroom or pissoir or drinking fountain or map of the neighborhood; it’s not a bike-rack; it’s not a bench. It’s just a publicly-funded one-sheet for “Captain Underpants,” which by the way dwarfs the lettering proudly announcing “Historic Downtown.”) Bring your family to Historic Downtown to read the ads for kiddie entertainment you can no longer find here, because they’ve torn the theaters down.

Second: how the cheery, family-friendly ad for Captain Underpants contrasts with the inhuman tragedy of the blighted street-scape, urban destruction and waste and abuse and failure seen all around.

Third: how “Historic Downtown” apparently has to be obliterated down to the rubble, to be preserved. Doubtless the gentrifying developers must strip whole blocks bare like this, so they can sow the soil with salt and insure nothing wholesome ever grows on this land again.

If we don’t laugh we must cry.