In his Climate Progress blog, from which I usually gain valuable insight, Joe Romm just succumbed to liberal "Charlie Brown Syndrome." In the headline to his most recent article, he speaks of Obama "going climate hawk," thereby making the demonstrably false assumption that most of what Obama says has the remotest connection to desirable policy action. Just as Charlie Brown believed--despite innumerable past examples to the contrary--that this time Lucy would really let him kick that football.
Camden CSG drill rig, June 2011 (JB) 02 by lockthegate
Camden CSG drill rig, June 2011 (JB) 02 by lockthegate
Even if Romm was merely intending to report the
substance of Obama's words, his article is sadly wanting. Granted, "going climate
hawk" might be a viable description of the statements of principle or ideals in
Obama's speech, but Obama's usually saying
the right, principled thing is a well-documented matter of public record. Notably,
it's also a well-documented feature of the speech of psychopaths. But when it
comes to the programmatic side of things--what he actually intends to do-- Obama has mastered a sketchiness on
which your garden-variety psychopath would do well to take elaborate notes. And
what's probably even more effective, he has a unique, brazen ability--and brazenness
is certainly an integral part of the psychopath's repertoire--to cite actual
policies that CONTRADICT his stated ideals as if they were those ideals'
perfect logical embodiment.
Nowhere in Obama's speech is this ability to
enshrine noble ideals in contradictory or dubious policies than in his
vaporings over "clean natural gas"--what the less euphemistically minded among
us generally label "fracking." And this is precisely where supposed "climate-hawk" Obama unveils the hidden talons of an environmentally lethal bird of
prey.
Now, we could get into quibbles about whether the
name "fracking" is a proper one for the entire process of unconventional gas
drilling involving long horizontals, or just for the brief part of the process
where controlled explosions are used to cause actual rock fracturing. The gas
industry loves to exploit such lawyers' quibbles to claim that fracking doesn't
contaminate water. But it's simply a normal feature of human speech to let the
central or most essential part of a process or entity stand for the whole
process or entity--as, for example (in more religious times) saying a village
contained so many "souls," or when we nowadays speak of a "head count." "Fracking"
is simply far shorter than saying "unconventional gas drilling" or even longer,
more technically detailed descriptions of the process.
Besides, "fracking" has a type of human precision
that's very important here, being a very ugly name for a very ugly process. And
the word has the additional value of its Battlestar
Galactica TV-show usage, where it subs for a notorious f-word denoting
sexual intercourse. This too is appropriate, for wherever fracking takes place--even
if only through industrial blight and lost property values--many innocent
bystanders inevitably get lovelessly screwed. So for purposes of brevity and
emotional precision, I'll unapologetically use "fracking" to signify the whole
process. I'll simply call a frack a frack.
Now, I think there's something fascinatingly
suggestive about bringing up the emotional significance of a word like "fracking"--and
the topic of psychopaths--in connection with Obama. For it's characteristic of
psychopaths to be unable to feel human emotion in any but the most superficial
way, and hence be unable to truly empathize with people and in any significant
sense feel their pain. This in fact makes them the perfect human predators, for
they feel no shame or remorse about thoughts and actions that would make the
rest of us painfully wince. Now, besides Obama's continual shameless public
lying, his blithe acceptance of such harmful pain-causing activities as drone
strikes and widespread fracking has me seriously wondering whether "psychopath"
is the category under which we should file Obama.
See, we already know that a certain affective cool--indeed
a certain robotic, technocratic emotionlessness--is associated with Obama. This
would be utterly consistent with a real indifference to the harm caused by his
policies. Now, anyone with any real experience of fracking (I personally once
lived in the "sacrifice zone" of rural northeastern Pennsylvania) intimately
knows the destruction of rural charm and the unconsenting--indeed, unconsulted--inconvenience
and loss of property values fracking brings to a region. Sure, many rural
landowners in desperate financial straits readily sign leases (and many later
regret it), but embracing widespread use of the process means automatically
trampling--without compensation--the rights of many people who treasure the
beauty and quiet of rural landscapes and the democratic right of citizens to
have a say in what happens to their communities. It goes without saying that no
emotionally challenged technocrat would get this.
If I brought up the neglect of quality of life and
individual rights INEVITABLY involved in fracking, that's largely because it's
a seldom-mentioned part of the story. But also because a deep, instinctive love
for our natural treasures and individual rights--the two clearly go together, as
beautifully reflected in writers like Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey--is sorely,
idiotically lacking in today's America. Indeed it's a lack of love for mere nature and the mere human being--a type of collective psychopathy--that has us
headed far down the road to fascism. If people won't protect their intimate surroundings
and won't protect their individual rights, I'm not sure what they'll protect.
Certainly nothing of any great value.
Technocrats are not
really intelligent, at least not deeply, humanly so; at best they're
idiot-savants. Or psychopaths--people genetically deprived of grasping
meaningful human experience. One of humanity's great geniuses, Blaise Pascal--who
could certainly "do the math" far better than most technocrats--made a
distinction between the "spirit of finesse" and the "spirit of geometry." And
Pascal, despite being a preeminent mathematician, came down--especially where
politics was concerned--on the side of "finesse," the human instinct and
intuition for what's valid and valuable. Pascal would NEVER leave politics in
the hands of emotionally deprived psychopaths and idiot-savants.
So when we debate an issue like fracking, the
science data is really a fail-safe mechanism--a court to be resorted to because
healthy human instinct and intuition (the "spirit of finesse") has failed. And
even merely scientifically, there is VAST empirical evidence (which Obama and
his minions seek to conceal) that fracking contaminates water AND--through large,
generally unmeasured methane leaks--accelerates civilization-destroying climate
change. If proper human instincts were in charge--as opposed to the emotionally
challenged impulses of technocrats and psychopaths--fracking would be in severe
disrepute, perhaps even banned. But speaking even in terms of pure science, the
scientific burden of proof should be on those--impassive birds of prey like
Obama--who risk destroying civilization.
To join those who stand up for real human values--the
spirit of finesse--in politics, consider joining the discussion at the following
two Facebook pages: www.facebook.com/TrueBlueDemocratsAProgressiveRevolt
and http://www.facebook.com/WhoseVoiceOurVoice?fref =ts.
