Two emails arrived this morning from friends in big trouble.
One was allegedly held at gun-point in Azerbaijan and the other mugged in Chechnya
and robbed of all cash and means to get home. Send bank information, they
pleaded.
I might have swung into action even with my Batman cape in
the dry cleaner and Batmobile in for maintenance. I could be on a red-eye to Dagestan with a
connecting flight to Grozny to right the wrong and still be back by Saturday to
umpire a softball game.
It’s a good thing none of this was real. …except for the now
famous email hoax. It makes it tough on those of us who may actually get mugged
in faraway places. Truth and make-believe are drifting closer.
But not that close. Not nearly the way real glaciers, six
times larger than Manhattan, are drifting away from Antarctica causing oceans
to rise more than four feet, over time. This is not the only reason I’ve
decided not to buy that 87 million dollar house on the south shore of Long
Island. There is a large hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole and ozone-depleting photo-chemicals
have exacerbated the situation.
In spite of the compelling weight of evidence the Senator
from what was once-Florida, Marco Rubio, choose make-believe over reality as he
gurgled his latest idiocy denying made-made climate change. As the late Senator Daniel Moynihan put it, You
can have your own opinion but you can’t make up your own facts
Of course these folks are not all that stupid; just
self-serving demagogues pandering for dollars. President Eisenhower's Sec. of Defense, Charles Wilson once remarked, What’s good for General Motors is good
for the country. This has never necessarily been the case and surely isn’t
now. Not when corporate America prospers overseas with cheap labor and tucks their profits away in Caribbean banks. What lifts the poor and middle class is good for the country and that has
to be more than a trickle of crumbs.
Deniers of climate change are funded by polluters, coal and
oil companies and their network of corporations reliant on petroleum products
as well as investment firms, mutual funds, etc… The list is long and their
pockets deep. Rubio and other presidential hopefuls, must park their brains
outside and supplicate before entering the vaults.
The sycophants have a difficult task to perform. They have
to persuade the electorate that their interests align with the Koch Bros. This
is exactly what they are good at. Witness the make-up of Congress or the Reagan
and Bush presidencies. The so-called grass-root Tea Partiers are a congregation
of the greedy and gullible loudly proclaiming God on their side. They have
designated Science and Government as the anti-Christ. Voters who return the
Deniers back to office must be the same folks who turn over their bank numbers
and credit cards to the e-mailers requesting emergency funds for friends
stranded in the murky corners of the planet.
To be sure not all corporations contribute to global
warming. There are many who function with a social consciousness. However the
lopsided distribution of wealth attests to the muscle of corporations who write
the laws and stack the courts heedless of environmental damage.
Now if I get an email from a friend who went
to photograph the penguins and is adrift off Tierra del Fuego I just might
believe it.
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