Joe Romm has often claimed that most people don’t read past the headlines of news stories. I’m wondering if he thinks that rule doesn’t apply to blog posts, because this doosey from him clocks in at 3947 words.
But if you’re one of those headline-only news consumers, Romm does oblige by summarizing his bloated post with this snappy title:
The Road to Ruin: Extremist ‘Climate Pragmatism’ Report Pushes Right-Wing Myths and a Failed Strategy
In his write-up at Time Magazine, Bryan Walsh characterized the same report as being written by “a bipartisan range of thinkers on energy and climate issues.” I didn’t detect any hint of extremism by this bipartisan bunch in Walsh’s description of the paper. Nor in my own reading of the Climate Pragmatism report did it strike me as the work of radicals. (I’ll have a full post up on the report later in the week.)
No matter. I’m sure the irony of labeling the report as “extremist” eludes Romm.
One of the best self-mocking anthems to fame is this classic from Joe Walsh.
Now when this song came out in 1978, the free spirited, social change-minded Age of Aquarius was giving way to the self-absorbed, inwardly focused era of crystal healing and personal gurus. The New Age movement soon became a mainstream, commercial success, brilliantly marketed by the likes of Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson, among other charismatic types.
Today, these self-anointed spirit guides command hefty lecture fees and write best-selling guides on how to heal your emotional pain and tap into the universe’s cosmic harmony. They have legions of acolytes that eat this stuff up.
What I wonder is if these New Age rock stars have any awareness of the narcissistic path to enlightenment they have blazed for the next generation of huckster healers.
Take the case of Gabrielle Bernstein, a rising star in the New Age firmament. Here’s a fawning profile of her in the August issue of Elle, a women’s magazine that, like most women’s magazines, mostly recycles stories on sex, beauty and self-improvement. (Here’s a lament/plea from one female journalist who wishes that women’s magazines offered more than this standard fare.)
Now let me first say that the all-knowing universe has previously guided me to Bernstein. So when it happened again earlier today, I read with much amusement in Elle about Bernstein’s penchant for $15 coconut water, her ascendant career as a “life coach” and how she is “unencumbered by mini melodramas.” (Well, not always.)
I tend to think of these spiritual charlatans as harmless. It’s not like they’re pushing crack. People with disposable income seek them out to learn how to be happier and better adjusted individuals. What’s the harm? But then I came to this part in the profile, where Bernstein is dispensing advice at one of her “life coaching” sessions:
One evening, a girl named Stephanie says she fears falling into a depression because her job hunt is going nowhere. Bernstein locks eyes with Stephanie. “If your happiness is based on external experience, then, my darling, you are fucked.”
Pardon me, but that’s a fucked up thing to say to somebody who is understandably anxious about not being able to find a job. Going forward I hope Stephanie realizes that the universe sometimes has a way of playing sick jokes on us. And that she holds on to whatever money she has left to buy groceries and pay her rent, instead of forking it over to someone who spouts fortune cookie quotes and buys $15 coconut water.
What does the theory of punctuated equilibrium have to do with modern-day American politics? Dan Vergano of USA Today has an intriguing piece that makes the connection:
In the 1990′s, amid widespread complaints of “gridlock” in Washington, the notion of political punctuated equilibrium “was born from dissatisfaction with the idea of everything being fixed and unchanging in politics,” [University of Texas political scientist Bryan] Jones says. Political scientists who looked at our institutions broadly saw big changes coming relatively slowly from public pressure, which led to politicians finally voting for new laws.
But in reality at the time, big changes were arriving suddenly, without big changes in voter sentiment, after long periods of well, equilibrium. A good example is the welfare reform of the mid-90′s, says political scientist B. Guy Peters of the University of Pittsburgh. “The laws and ideas behind them were put in place decades earlier with only small changes and then suddenly you had a big one,” Peters says. “That’s a punctuation.”
A more recent example is the food safety reforms of last year, Jones says. Food safety laws had dated back to the 1930′s without big changes. The basic idea is that things often continue in government with only incremental changes until something — an idea catching fire or a scandal, the comet impact of politics — suddenly makes big things happen. In food safety, decades of recalls had only resulted in small fixes to rules. But the food safety reform bill giving more power to the Food and Drug Administrationpassed the Senate last year by a 73-25 vote, even though it hadn’t been an issue until a salmonella scare the previous year shook things up.
Similar examples can be found in seminal environmental legislation, such as 1964′s Wilderness Act, of which was the culmination of decades of groundwork by an influential group of advocates, writers, and interest groups (such as The Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society).
One piece of legislation that has transformed the science of archaeology, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), also seemed to come out of nowhere in 1990. But it sprang from a long-festering history and a series of smaller events in the early to mid-1970s.
With respect to climate change, the du jour environmental issue of the day, I suspect that something similarly momentous will happen in the near future, despite the increasingly polarized state of U.S. politics.
