Independence Day Blues

Though I am terribly overdue, I was too headstrong to compose my blog on a National Holiday; to write on the Fifth of July would evoke the play by Lanford Wilson (a very good one); and I was too lazy to write yesterday. Running out of reasons, here I am, to report on why this years's Independence Day was among the most depressing on record.

It's not because the Yankees lost 19-1, though I'm sure that humilated free-spending George Steinbrenner. It's not because my elderly Mom, whose birthday it also was, cut my conversation short so she could go off to a bridge game. And it's surely not because of the passing of Kenneth Lay, whose "heart attack" a few weeks before his jail sentencing set off alarums of skepticism ringing throughout the land. Nor was it that I discovered that, even with the finest high-def TV picture, fireworks still come off blandly on the screen.

I started reading the LA. Times' Op Ed page, and most columns, including the editorial, pointed out the disparity between the ideals established by the Founding Fathers and the way that they have been systematically undercut since the terrorist attacks of September 11 turned us into a fortress nation. What most disturbed me on that Awful Morning, even more than the horrific deaths of all those involved, was the likelihood that we would, from that point on, slowly regress into a police state, with Security becoming the dominant issue that would drive all other national policies. Certainly, with Guantanamo, the Iraq War and the largely sanctioned phone and wiretapping that has ensued, we are well on the way.

Equally depressing, in the comics section, no less, was a panel called "Mallard Fillmore", drawn by conservative cartoonist Bruce Tinsley. I certainly respect the right and need of contrary opinions in the Times, and will usually read the conservative columns as well. But this one struck me as particularly irresponsible because it made a caricature of Al Gore as a flaming alarmist whose campaign about Global Warming is another silly liberal plot to undermine our industrial complex.

I have seen the Gore movie, and now NBC is airing a two-hour special underscoring the same frightening statistics. For anyone, even a conservative, to try to undermine these valid points is not only stupid, it is dangerous and as unpatriotic as it gets, unless he enjoyed the drowning of New Orleans and looks forward to the same inundation in Florida, Calironia, Texas and New York.

There are apparently no established scientists who contest that CO2 levels are spiking like the Stock Market in 1999, and that historically, terrestrial temperatures have followed the same contours as the CO2 line. And the consequences of such temperature increases are already being witnessed, in the melting of large portions of Antarctica, the Arctic Ocean and Greenland; the severity and elongation of the hurricane season; the killer heat wave of Europe in 2003; the extended drought in our Southwest; even the bizarre series of storms that barraged the East Coast last week. A tree trunk fell in front of the White House. That was a warning, too.

Of course, Bush and his Merry Band of Idiots, while acknowledging that global warming is probably valid, don't seem to want to do anything about it, especially sign the Kyoto accords or mandate tougher emission standards for our automobiles (among the laxest standards in the world). Acoording to Bush, it's is not the government's role, and he hopes that private industry will voluntarily work to decrease the noxious emissions. Sure, and Ken Lay really did die of a heart attack.

It seems clear that human activity has grossly enhanced the carbon emissions, but even were that not the case, the levels are where they are, and if the governments of the world, in a coordinated effort, do nothing about it, there will be a catastrophe in the next couple of decades unlike anything since the Great Plague, and perhaps worse, because it will be irreversible. So I would suggest that a government machinery that was so avid to save the comatose Terri Schiavo and to deny gay people marital rights actually start addressing itself to the true issues of national security, and that goes way beyond nutso terrorists. Interestingly, in the last week the latest silly issue has been the proposed Constitutional Amendment to ban flag burning. Well, even if it passes, it will become moot in a few more years. The flags will all spontaneously combust.