Category Archives: The Contrarian

For Whom the Toll Bells

http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/mary-hilliard/ Image result for heat waves in 2018

I’ve spent about half my career counting corpses.

In Detroit, D.C. and Atlanta, murder meccas all, I was a police reporter. In Arkansas, we rotated “tornado watch” weekends. At USA Today, I covered five mass school shootings and innumerable “regular” ones at workplaces, malls, etc. I grew so tired of preying on the grieving I applied for a transfer to the most lace curtain beat in journalism: film and TV. I haven’t regretted a moment.

Alas, it’s time for another body count.

I realized this while reading a story yesterday about a new study in Science Advances that forecasts  that, in the near future, global warming could turn serial killer. “If the global average temperature rises 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels,” the  study said, “a major heat wave could kill almost 6,000 people in New York City. Similar events could kill more than 2,500 in Los Angeles and more than 2,300 in Miami.

The story was accompanied by a headline that read “Without swift action on climate change, heat waves could kill thousands in U.S. cities.”

There was nothing questionable in the article, which cited all the typical peer-reviewed data. The problem was in the headline and tone, an issue that afflicts most coverage of global warming. I call it Chicken Little Syndrome.

The syndrome posits this: Any news story that casts global warming as a looming problem is failing its readers. Looking forward is not the answer. Any story that says “by 2030,” or “in a decade,” or, god forbid, “by the year 2100” has already told its readers “Don’t bother reading this story, it won’t happen for years.” But in truth, the sky isn’t falling; it’s felled.Image result for chicken little

Yet we continue to view global warming as something down the road. Harbingers don’t work in America. We barely finish our taxes every year. If our computer takes more than 15 seconds to buffer, we haul ass to the Genius Bar. This is the era of Now. And we’re supposed to expect the nation and its leaders to be proactive years in advance?

Fuck that. The only way to treat a problem is to recognize when you have one. Global warming is well underway; let’s get a death toll started and monetary damages bill going now. What, exactly, are we waiting for? God to write it in clouds? Trump to concede we’re not getting punked by the Chinese?Image result for trump folded arms

No, this requires a death toll. One need look back only a year to get the figures rolling. Last year, the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science issued a report that said “2018’s hemispheric heat wave wasn’t possible without climate change.” In that heat wave, in Japan alone, at least 138 people died from heat-related causes and 71,266 required hospitalization for heat stroke. Another 42 people died in South Korea. Quebec reported 70. That’s 250 deaths in that microcosm of Earth alone.

Meanwhile, today marked the 137th day the Mississippi River has been at flood stage, stopping barge traffic in Baton Rouge entirely. The last time the Mississippi was this high, the federal government built a federal barge system. There’s a start for your financial estimates, and you don’t even need to look overseas.Image result for mississippi flooding

Why are so afraid to start the toll? That it will be lost in political grifting? That it won’t get ample clicks on news sites? That the numbers will be inaccurate? While the first two concerns are legitimate, they pale in comparison to the benefit of the third. Because body counts work.

Cities use fatality rates to determine police department sizes. Consider: without a body count of 57,939 soldiers, do you think we would have left Vietnam when we did, or instead trusted the reassurances of the Trumps of this world? Would the Holocaust have been so burned into our consciousness without the number 6 million? I hate corpse-counting, but sometimes it’s the only true measure of loss.Image result for holocaust

Certainly, a global warming death toll would be controversial (which is why an international organization like the United Nations needs to launch it). Political ambition, religious conviction, and simple scientific disagreement will make the figure a hot potato issue. And a very rough estimate.

But getting an absolute number is not the point. The point is to change mindsets. We did it with smoking. We did it with seat belts. Those annual  fatalities are also nebulous and perennially disputed. But the most important shift has already occurred. We may not know exactly how many people die from smoking or not wearing seat belts every year. But we know the behavior is stupid. And since the realization, annual fatalities have fallen.

Sometimes, the digits of a number are less important than the knowledge of their existence.

The I.I. Word

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There were three epiphanies in last week’s testimony from Special Counsel Robert Mueller regarding his investigation of the president:

  1.  Journalistically is the clearest way to write, hands down.
  2.  Robert Mueller is not a good writer.
  3. Congress has a workaround the “I word,” as Donnie has begun calling it, and it’s pretty simple.

First, the hearing validated journalistic writing. Take your legal, medical, academic and technical literacy jargon and stick ’em in a book somewhere to sell em to your students. Why do you think Mueller’s press conference grabbed so much more attention than his two years’ of research? Because he had to speak succinctly, plainly and clearly, which is isn’t the first rule of journalism; it’s the only rule. There’s a reason America’s greatest writers — Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Salinger, Vonnegut — employed  the style.Image result for Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Salinger, Vonnegut

Second, Bob could have really used a good copy editor. There’s no arguing the investigation was an opus of thorough legalese: 2 years’ investigation, three dozen indictments, hundreds of witnesses and not one leak. It’s 448 pages of legal prowess. Yet what’s the one line you remember from the entire affair? “If there was evidence exonerating the president, we would have said so.” Again, it came from the press conference. But more importantly, why not write that in the report, first page? In fact, go a step further: The first page of the tome should have been a journalistically-penned synopsis, summarizing the Russian hacking, the 5 specific incidents of obstruction and that Trump was not out of the woods; far from it.

Mueller also could have used a memorable conclusion, essential in solid writing. Here’s where a journalistic final page would have come in handy, when Mueller could explain that he’s not prosecuting Trump, but simply gathering facts for a grand jury. And Congress is the grand jury. Write that! Again, a bulleted, numbered list parenthetically enclosing the gist of the case would have dictated the narrative, instead of relying on two impromptu press conferences to clarify findings that Trump’s lackeys intentionally muddied.Image result for bob barr funny

And finally, the talk that’s dominated the post-Mueller conference has been impeachment. Rightfully, it’s a sticky wicket for the 237 presidential candidates. Trump seems to want one (it would provide his base the red meat of a new “witch hunt”), and Pelosi (who saw Bill Clinton’s post-impeachment surge in popularity polls) knows the gesture would die in the Senate before it passed even one of the flaps of Mitch McConnell’s neck.Image result for pelosi

But there’s a clear third option: impeachment inquiry. In that outdated relic we call the U.S. Constitution is a little loophole that allows the House of Representatives to launch an impeachment inquiry against any president. According to federal law, the House Judiciary Committee first can hold hearings to investigate whether impeachment is warranted. This can include calling witnesses, collecting documents and debating whether the behavior in question constitutes an impeachable offense, which the Constitution only ambiguously defines. The inquiry would culminate in the panel either voting to recommend that the full House approve one or more articles of impeachment, or deciding not to make any such recommendation. It’s been launched twice, against Nixon and Clinton, and is precisely the tool to use on Trump.

What a gift horse Dems seemed determined to look in the mouth. This middle ground would allow Dems on the fence to stay perched there while aggressive Dems subpoena the shit out of the president and his cronies. And there’s no timetable for when the Judiciary Committee has to take a vote. So take your time. If the GOP can string along Merrick Garland for a year without a Supreme Court vote, surely the Dems can take two on a matter exponentially more important. Strategically, it could be politically astute: You couldn’t buy as much negative advertisement as you’d get from seeing Trump’s slackwits sweat it out in a courtroom. PLUS: You get to dismiss any Trump assertion by simply pointing out ‘This from the guy under investigation for impeachment,” a tag that could stick well into 2020 Sure it’s vague. But it’s accurate.

So why the hesitancy to move for inquiry? In short, guts. It died with John McCain.  But I find these questions best addressed in reverse order. If this doesn’t qualify for an impeachment inquiry, what would? Buck up, wingers. You may have expected Mueller to trot Trump out of the White House in handcuffs. But he’s done something nearly as effective: He’s deputized you.