by Usha Alexander

[This is the eighth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

In the late fifteenth century, European seafarers began searching for what they called the “Northwest Passage,” a fabled route across the Arctic Ocean, which would allow them to sail northward from Europe directly into the Pacific in search of fortune. But the Arctic of their time, during the so-called Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, was covered by thick, impenetrable sheets of ice and densely packed icebergs. Nor had they any reasonable expectation that the great mass of ice would soon melt away. That they imagined finding a reliably navigable route through a polar sea seems to me a case of wishful thinking, a folly upon which scores of lives and fortunes were staked and lost, as so many adventurers attempted crossings, only to flounder and often die upon the ice.

But now that the Arctic sea ice is melting away, the Northwest Passage has become real in a way the adventurers of old could not have dreamed. Today, nations encircling the Arctic Ocean jockey for control of its waters and territorial rights to newly exposed northern continental shelves, which promise to be full of oil and gas. What had been a deadly fantasy is now a luxury cruise destination flaunting an experience of rare wonder, including opportunities to watch polar bears on the hunt. “A journey north of the Arctic Circle is incomplete without observing these powerful beasts in the wild,” entices the Silversea cruises website, with nary a note about the bears’ existence being threatened by the very disintegration of their icy habitat that makes this wondrous cruise possible. Meanwhile, in China, the emergent northern sea routes have been dubbed the Polar Silk Road, projecting a powerful symbol of their past wealth and influence onto an unprecedented reality.

By now, we’re all aware that the planet is profoundly changing around us: angrier weather, retreating glaciers, flaming forests, bleaching coral reefs, starving polar bears, disappearing bees. Yet how blithely we go on making plans, as though the future will follow as neatly and predictably from today, as today did from yesterday. From buying a new beachside home to booking a cabin in the redwoods a year in advance, the ongoing planetary changes apparently figure little in the plans so many people make. It seems I regularly read articles in which mainstream economists make predictions that entirely disregard the changing climate and collapsing biodiversity, as though these concerns lie beyond our economies. Even governments and corporations who seek to profit from changes like the opening of the Arctic Ocean often presume themselves the drivers of “disruption,” creating new market opportunities in an otherwise stable or predictable world. They don’t seem to recognize that the true nature of what’s upon us might just be greater than they imagine and far more consequential. Read more »

Luchita Hurtado. Untitled, 1971.

More here, here, and here.

by Rafaël Newman

In the summer of 1977 my father invited me to tea at the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. I had turned 13 that spring, and instead of a bar mitzvah, prohibited by matrilineal descent and an antipathy to organized religion, my father and I were en route to Israel, to visit the kibbutz where he had worked in the mid-1950s. We had flown from Vancouver to Amsterdam, proceeded by train to Rome, and continued by rail across Italy to Brindisi, by ferry to Patras, and by coach to Athens. From there we would eventually embark, at Piraeus, on the crossing to Haifa; for the moment we were enjoying some sightseeing in the Greek capital.

We were by now already several days into a three-week trip and I was slowly adjusting to the oddness of being alone with my father in unfamiliar territory. At our first stop the exciting absurdity of the canals in Amsterdam had made up somewhat for nine hours of jetlag; my New World teenage composure, however, was tested by the shared bathroom on the corridor of our Dutch hotel. It was the first of several jarring encounters. On the train bound south from Holland we were interrogated at the German border by a customs guard, who had entered our sleeping compartment and, at the sight of a youth with an older man, their journey having originated in Amsterdam, had me roll up my sleeve so he could check for tracks. Later, in the dormitory of the youth hostel in Rome in which my father’s salary as an assistant professor had billeted us, I awoke in my bunkbed to see a fellow guest naked in the middle of the room, gingerly applying salve to his posterior. Read more »

by R. Passov

I had hand-written a simple essay: My father is in prison, my mother works, welfare helps and I got a 1310 on my SATs. The letter of acceptance from UCLA was short  – we’re happy to let you know….

The hill leading to the main quad of the UCLA campus is terraced into three landings by flat, wide brick stairs built in the late 1920’s, depression-era stimulus. By the time I got there, Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and Westwood surrounded that hill.

An old Daily Bruin lay on the ground. Past the comings and goings of Bruin Life, blond and blue, basketball, tennis and good teeth, I found a classified ad: Wanted, cook for a professor’s family, free room and board, walking distance to campus.  

I can cook, I thought. Walking distance was a plus. I found a payphone, heard age in the voice that answered along with an English that came from afar and was invited to interview.

I found the house a few blocks into the hills above Sunset Blvd. Dr. Mommarts was tall, slender, newly old, easy. His white-blond hair fell uncombed. His soft brown eyes, protected by wild eyebrows. He spoke with an accent, in proper English, yet his words lacked edge, one ending after the next began.

He assumed I would not have responded to the ad without having knowledge of cooking. I got a brief tour of a modern one-story home anchored by a single hallway whose wall was a long stretch of glass, rimming a flat yard. “Here’s the kitchen,” he said. There were two rooms, one with a sink, counter space, stove, oven. And a second with cabinets, a second sink and a wide wooden table. “And the preparation room.”

From the kitchen we walked down the hallway, past the end of the windows, to a small room with a single bed and a dresser, located near to a bathroom. “Here’s where you’ll stay,” he said and that was it. I was a cook. Read more »

by Philip Graham

I’ve long been partial to Portuguese culture, so when Portugal transferred its last colonial holding, Macau, back to Chinese rule in 1999 , a friend surprised me with his marveling reaction: “Portugal had an empire? Who knew?”

Perhaps his reaction shouldn’t have surprised me. In the United States, steeped as we are in the history of the United Kingdom’s “empire on which the sun never sets,” few are aware that the Portuguese accomplished the first European globe-spanning empire, beginning in the 15th century.

When I lived in Lisbon for a year, I noticed that my Portuguese friends wrestled with the legacy of their country’s history. They felt pride at the achievements of their intrepid ancestors’ global reach. But they also felt shame, because while all empires break too much before they reshape the chaos they created, Portugal’s empire was especially bad.

The Portuguese initiated the transatlantic slave trade in 1444, which has bedeviled and tormented much of the world ever since. Sixty years later, the Viceroy Alfonso Albuquerque expanded Portuguese power not only as exploration for economic reasons, but as a brutal crusade against Islam. By 1580, the empire extended from Brazil to Africa, from India to Malaysia and on to the Indonesian island of Timor.

So what happened to this Portuguese empire, which now no longer exists? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric J. Weiner

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now. —James Baldwin

Before the pomp and circumstance of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inauguration officially framed the white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 an outlier of U.S. history, an affront to American Exceptionalism, and a brief pause in the Nation’s moral progress, there was a lot of talk about the “big lie” that precipitated it. I expect, with the impeachment trial scheduled to begin next week, that we will again hear quite a bit about the “big lie” and its power to change water into wine. Historically, the big lie, lobbed in concert with many smaller lies, is the one that tips the scale of reason, fuels delusional thinking, and provides the foundation for all kinds of violence and hate. Hitler knew it when he perpetuated the big lie about Jews running a global cabal. And Trump knew it when he repeatedly told the big lie about a rigged and stolen election. Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and author of On Tyranny (2017) says, “There are lies that, if you believe in them, rearrange everything…a big lie is a lie which is big enough that it tears the fabric of reality.” When enough people believe in the big lie, and their beliefs have time to ferment and spread, the big lie becomes a spectacle.

“The spectacle,” as Guy Deborg explained, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images… It is a world vision which has become objectified.” Right-wing corporate media and social media platforms, during the past five years, have helped to construct and disseminate the spectacle of the big lie, turning facts into a matter of perspective and words/images into weapons of mass delusion. From the ashes of “the real” arise the rational irrationality of relativistic thinking. The Trumpist cult of mass delusion, aided and abetted by corporate and social media, is unified by the spectacle of the big lie while becoming an integral part of it. But however dangerous the spectacle of the big lie is to democracy, it is not the most pernicious and dangerous lie in America. In fact, Trump’s big lie could not have become the spectacle it did had a bigger lie not preceded it. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Politics as the family business works out better for some than for others. Last year Turkish President Erdogan had to fire his son-in-law Finance Minister. And the Trumps, well … you know. But things are working out pretty well for the Rajapaksas of Sri Lanka.

The President is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, nickname “the terminator.” The Prime Minister is Mahinda Rajapaksa, his older brother. Basil Rajapaksa, “Mr. Ten Percent,” their younger brother, is a former MP. Their other brother Chamal, a former speaker of Parliament, is a cabinet minister, and Namal Rajapaksa, Mahindra’s son, is an MP and Minister of Sports, representing the next Rajapaksa generation.

When we left our story (Read part 1 here) it was six o’clock in the morning, election day 1999 in Nuwara Eliya, a highland tea-picking town south of Kandy, Sri Lanka. Two loudspeakers played the call to prayer, mounted atop a glass-enclosed Buddha statue just by the traffic circle. The sun hadn’t cleared the hills but it was set to be a glorious morning, birds and dew run riot.

At this hour, Nuwara Eliya served mostly as a regional bus station. People queued for rides and a few stores pushed open their doors. At a milk bar (that’s a name for convenience stores, here to New Zealand) I bought toothpaste and remarked how it would be a nice day. Dazzling smile: “It is election day, sir!” Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Elizabeth from Knoxville

We haven’t yet settled on a name for the event. I do see “1/6” being used here and there, a formation parallel to “9/11.” However reference to 9/11 is common, well understood, and routine, while the use “1/6” is sporadic. But then the bombing of the World Trade Center is almost two decades old while the certification riots happened only yesterday. We’ve not had time to understand and assimilate them.

We don’t even know what to call them. I just used the word “riot”, but is that what they were? What does that word imply? What about “protest”, “insurrection”, “putsch”, or as Elizabeth from Knoxville said (see the video clip above), “revolution”? One might answer, “semantics, mere semantics, we all know what you’re referring to.” Well, yes, we’ve got the reference. But figuring out just what those events were, that’s not a matter of mere semantics. The legal and institutional implications of those words are quite different. Riots happen all the time, as do protests, insurrection is quite different, no?

Nor do we know just what happened. We’ve seen the videos, we recognize some of the people – how could we forget the Q-Shaman, with his skins, buffalo horns, and face paint? – and we know that five people died. But all those people and events have connections. How far do those connections reach? Who planned to storm the Capitol ahead of time with specific objectives in view and who just went along with the flow? Who talked with whom? Do any of those communication chains reach into Congress or the White House? What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? What did he intend?

We have a nation divided against itself. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Do you have a right to own a microwave oven? To be clear, ideally in a free society, absent a clear showing of harm to others, there’s a presumption that you can do whatever you want and own whatever you can make or buy. So, you do have a basic right to own things – to acquire property, as political philosophers like to say. But it’s consistent with that right for there to be a lot of rules and regulations around what you can own – and even prohibitions on owning certain kinds of things.

Microwave ovens are complicated physical objects, tools or machines, that require pretty advanced technology and technical know-how to make and that almost no one can make all on their own. It would be odd to think of a microwave as the sort of thing you could have a right to. Before they were invented did people have a fundamental, but unexercisable right to own them? They also contain dangerous chemicals and heavy metals and are not entirely safe to discard or recycle. If new information revealed them to be even less safe than we think now, or if changing standards raised the safety bar on all appliances, microwaves could be banned. It’s hard to picture anyone arguing that microwaves couldn’t be banned because we have a fundamental right to own them.

What about cars? They kill a lot of people. But in many places, they are essential, or nearly essential, to mobility and mobility is essential to equality of fair opportunity – and some part of mobility should probably even be counted as a fundamental liberty. Still, we don’t have a fundamental right to own or drive a car – must less an unregulated, unlicensed right to own or drive one. Microwave ovens and cars and guns are just metaphysically the wrong kinds of things to be the object of basic rights, liberties, or political freedoms.

Let’s talk about guns. Read more »

Sughra Raza. After The Last Trees. January, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Varun Gauri

An autocratic president, whom the opposition blames for thousands of deaths, faces a referendum on his rule. The majority rejects him in the election, but around 45% vote for him to remain in office. The would-be permanent dictator begrudgingly departs, yet he retains a fanatically loyal following, especially among the religious right, some business leaders, the security establishment, and voters scared of socialism. Conservative politicians and radical rightists fear his influence, permitting him and his acolytes to remain powerful voices in national politics for many years. That hold on the political right, alongside structural impediments in the national constitution, the opinions of the judges he appointed, and the continuity in office of his regime functionaries make it is impossible for the country to address social and economic inequality and consolidate democratic reform.

A forecast of the United States post-Trump? Perhaps.

A description of Chile post-Pinochet? Definitely.

This year, thirty-one years after Pinochet left office, fifteen years after he died, Chile will hold elections for a constitutional convention to replace the military Constitution of 1980, even though the government is led by a president whose rightist party once supported Pinochet. Following the latest in a series of student-led protests, the country may at last have moved on from “moving on,” now aiming to redress inequality and entrench democracy more deeply in its political institutions.

What took so long? Read more »