If you have any plans to listen to an old Peter Cook album while eating Ramen Noodles, I can no longer recommend it. I don't know if any of you know what it feels like to have a bunch of salty noodle broth go through your nose, but I can testify that it's not exactly pleasant; I understand people sometimes swim in the Dead Sea, and I imagine if any of that slim demographic are reading this, they're saying, "Yeah, this guy gets it."
On the other hand, the Ramen-through-the-nose experience is preferable to what I'm feeling this morning. It's a typical morning for me in Trump's America. The paper reminds me of how fast things are moving, and how many things I should be processing, but they're just coming over the plate too fast for a guy who's built more for chess than for baseball. And that's not to suggest I'm good at chess; I'm not. But chess makes it possible for a player to sit staring at a bunch of plastic without moving or making a sound, and convey the impression he knows what he's doing. Hand me a bat and lead me to the plate, and even the most charitable among you will have trouble remaining optimistic about my prospects.
Thus, I approach the editorial page with the vain hope that nothing there will interest me. Others are apoplectically outraged by the day's events and their implications; I spent the Bush years in that state, and it took a toll on my health. (Lousy diet and sporadic exercise may have contributed, but it sounds better to cast myself as a victim of the GOP.)
Taking the long view about the health of my country in addition t9 my own, as we buckle up for an era that feels potentially far worse than the Bush misadventure, I look for an alternate route that avoids the traffic clog of outrage. This has put me at odds with friends who are rightly angry and fearful, while I look for a hidden narrative that I'm convinced is flowing unimpeded beneath the ice.
When I've chatted with Republicans online recently (and I'll confess I've mostly avoided this of late), I've tried to identify their logical fallacies, prodding them toward stronger arguments and prodding myself toward common ground. Climate change is a particularly difficult area in which to try out this kind of rhetoric; it reminds me of the many attempts my son and I made years ago to fly a kite in our suburban front yard, with about twelve feet of ground available for running, and power lines everywhere for the damn kite to get tangled up in.
Talking with an internet friend who accused Obama of bobbling an Iraq war that was more or less in the bag until a liberal came along and shamefully lost it felt like an echo of Vietnam, but I was pleased to discover that a discussion about climate change where I kept calm and swatted away at his logical fallacies while respectfully clicking on the links he provided led to an interesting result.
I was willing to accept his evidence of a tiny amount of bad faith science, as well as part of his claim that Al Gore and his evil henchmen had cherry picked and spun the words and ideas of at least a few scientists to make it look as if climate change consensus was a sort of monolith.
Before some of you start gnashing your teeth (I suspect I'm catching a few people now in mid-gnash), I want to clarify that I'm very much on board with the liberal take on climate change, or global warming if you prefer. But I don't see any harm in reading things a conservative wants me to read, and trying to find some reasonable skepticism about at least some of the left's claims. In the end, my conclusion was that none of the things I read and could accept from the right represented any kind of real refutation of the basic idea that climate change is at least in part caused by man. In fact, my impression was that Forbes magazine wasn't even really trying to refute that. But I didn't have any problem accepting some of what I was reading, and my friendly acceptance of pieces of the argument, combined with my avoidance of statements that pilloried the other guy for being on the wrong side, ended up with him fuzzily acknowledging that climate change is not a wholly invented fantasy of the left. At least I think he acknowledged that. As far as I could tell, his real reaction was not to the science, or to the possibility that global warming might be our fault, but rather to the liberals that frame the discussion as an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you're completely with us, or you're a scoundrel or rube.
This is what happens when liberals wade into any public issue involving tolerance. The message is so hectoring, so belittling, that the natural conservative instinct is to point out the left's hypocrisy and pile up various other logical fallacies, rather than experimenting with even a perfunctory self-examination. The most popular fallacious gambit, the ad hominem argument, provides apparently satisfying cover when responding to any and all criticism of Trump. The two Clintons and Al Gore came up constantly in our conversation, larding my attempt at substantive political discussion as thoroughly as calories do to carbonara.
Liberal public utterances proceed from the premise that everyone in the other side is a racist, or or in bed with racists, or a total climate change denier. This kind of tarring is neither completely unfair nor surprising, but it's at best a Pyrrhic victory, at worst unreasonable. Today's Post has a column suggesting that Republicans in the House and Senate are in a ruthless bind, as the super-rich fossil fuel industry is spending immense piles of cash to keep GOP climate change acceptors out of office. It's easy enough to find a way to not feel sorry for the party about this, and no one needs me to spell it out for them, but this intriguing perspective does provide a new way to look at the thing. The Citizens United ruling has forced the right to double down on an ignorant, rigid, and unsustainable position, and I'm beginning to suspect that they don't all buy into it.
Side note to Martin Lynds-- I imagine it won't surprise you to hear that it was an E.L. Wisty monologue that caused me to snort Ramen broth.
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