Strange bedfellows

Love it.

Sometimes I forget I live in Northern Idaho

This afternoon:

Doorbell rings. I answer. There's a woman with a three-ring binder standing there.

Woman: I'm not selling anything -- I live in the neighborhood and I just wanted to encourage you to vote in the primary on May 22.

Me with a quizzical look: But...Idaho held a caucus in February.

Woman, with even more quizzical look for just a second: Oh yeah. But that was the Democrats.

Me, finally understanding: Yep. I'm a Democrat.

Woman, looking as if she's just discovered a new and interesting species of insect: Ohhhh, okay.

Me: Probably the only one in the neighborhood, eh?

Woman: No, there's one other guy. He lives over there. [Points behind her.]


Great.

Politics Thursday

I suppose it only makes sense to share what's been very much on my mind the last couple of days.

If you haven't watched this speech, and you have a spare half hour, sit down with a cup of something good and watch a politician actually take a risk. It's a thing to behold.



And yes, I'm totally in the tank for Obama. But let's not argue about it. It's depressing watching former allies on the liberal blogs rip each other to shreds over this issue. If you're for Clinton, great. We can agree to disagree.

Politics Wednesday

I used to live in this district. I miss it today.

Welcome to America. Or not.

I have a long-held theory that governments staff their passport control counters with the surliest assholes in the country as a form of grassroots foreign policy posturing. It's a way to remind visitors that they are at the mercy of a foreign government that views them as an insignificant speck, so they'd better behave.

And I think the U.S. has probably become one of the worst. I can say without reservation that getting through passport control in mainland China was easier than getting through on the way back home. And that was in Portland, arguably the world's happy-go-luckiest city. Can you imagine how unpleasant it must be for visitors?

Which is perhaps why foreign travel to the U.S. has dropped 17% since 9/11, costing us a cool 94 billion dollars for our paranoid assholery.

I suppose that is why I find this hilarious, albeit in a God-can-we please-be-reasonable-again kind of way.

Wherein Trailhead meets her political hero, issues queries about habeas corpus and plays groupie

So we arrived in Montana at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning after -- get this -- ten stops on the road from Portland. The first was to fix a wire running from our vehicle to our trailer. The second was a dramatic and unexpected halt in order to secure my kayak, which was about to skitter off the top of Tony's van and into oncoming traffic. The rest were an assortment of pee breaks, meal breaks, and a brief interlude in Spokane to buy a toilet and some zero-VOC paint.

At length, we drove the half-mile up the gravel road to the house. That we arrived in the middle of the night was of no importance to the children, who thought it was an excellent time to play an entire game of pool until the road-weary adults herded them downstairs to bed. I rose at about ten, stuck my hair into a clip and drove into town to get some breakfast food. At the checkout counter, my fatigue-narrowed eyes lit upon a small entry in the upper left hand corner of the local newspaper:

"Senator Jon Tester will be in Libby Saturday, where he will host an afternoon 'meet and greet' for residents. The gathering, at the pavillion at River Front Park pavillion, is free and open to the public...."

Oh my.

Even though this isn't really a political blog, I'm a total political junkie. I don't write much about politics because, let's face it, that's kind of gilding the lily in light of the vibrant political blogosphere that's churned along for some time without the slightest contribution from me. I assume readers will be unsurprised to learn that I'm somewhat of a leftist, and those who know me understand the effect that little blurb would have had on me.

I've been a huge fan of Jon Tester since the Montana Senate primary last year. He's an organic farmer and environmentalist. In spite of meeting a fook of a lot of politicians in my life, Tester was the first one who impressed me enough to induce me to make a campaign contribution. (Jim Webb was the second.) I followed his campaign religiously. There was simply no way I was going to pass up this opportunity.

He didn't disappoint me in the slightest.

I've met three senators, three or four governors, a former United States attorney general, mayors of cities large and small, a bunch of federal and state judges and politicos of all stripes, and until I met Tester, I'd never met one without a certain veneer of artificiality. Despite being a fervent consumer of all things political, I generally dislike the practitioners of it. The fledgling, baby politicians at my old law firm were an interpersonal irritant. I found them insufferable, with their canned smiles and the pablum that passed for conversation because, oh my God, we can't possibly say anything that would piss off someone, somewhere, at some time.

These are not really my kind of folk. I have no use for them, and they had little use for me. Compared to them, see, I'm a loose cannon.

So on some level I was prepared for disillusionment. But it never arrived. Tester and his trademark flattop swept briskly out of his car and into the pavilion and immediately began talking about renewable energy. Then he took all manner of questions from the group, including some obviously repetitive queries that he simply answered again. He issued blunt, straightforward opinions and rattled off obscure statistics about this or that. There was no equivocation. He fielded questions about trade, immigration, veterans' benefits and eminent domain.

I raised my hand. He smiled and nodded at me.

"Habeas corpus," I said. It wasn't a question so much as a statement.

"I can tell you right now I support the restoration of habeas corpus and I'll vote for that."

This was right after being grilled by a Vietnam vet with whom I'd just engaged in some light disagreements about the wisdom of the Geneva Convention, of all things. No equivocation, no preface about winning the War on Terra, just "I support that."

So afterward I waited to shake his hand with a few other people. Tester lost a few fingers as a kid in a confrontation with a meat grinder, and I noticed up close that's on his left hand, not his right. When my turn arrived, I told him I was a supporter, and that while a lot of Democrats seemed to have replaced their spines with silly string in recent times, he hadn't disappointed me once since November and I hoped he continued on his current trajectory.

He gave me a huge smile and we exchanged a few further pleasantries. You can tell it's early enough in the game that he still genuinely enjoys hearing from an ardent supporter. The overall impression I got was that the same guy I was talking to would be pretty much the same guy who chatted with his family later that week. He was refreshingly real. And his intelligence and the depth of his knowledge was obvious.

In short, I felt I'd just met a guy who will shape up to be one of the great public servants of my time. It was a pleasure.

And no, I didn't get a picture. This is because Mr. T was headed back to the truck to get my camera battery, which we'd inadvertently left in the car. He was supposed to run to the car, grab my camera, put the battery back in and discreetly take a picture while I was meeting the good Senator.

But nooooooo. He had to stop and gab with some folks on the way back, and completely missed the window of opportunity. Ordinarily he would have spent some time in the doghouse for such a thing, but I was pretty stoked from meeting the latest in a long line of great public figures to hail from the American West.

Fear fatigue, the maternal anxiety level and the climate crisis

My son is four years and eight or so months old. He's a platinum blonde blur, dashing here and there to see this or that, and always dragging the dog along with him. He has my strong, stubborn will and his dad's sense of action. He has a talent for drawing and painting that took me completely by surprise, and a facility with language that didn't.

Although really, he's been surprising me all along, starting with the discovery of his existence in the first place. As I've stumbled along in the last five years, screwing up regularly alongside getting a few things right, one thing has become clear: the result of attaching so fiercely to another human being has come to animate everything I do. He is the axis on which so much of me turns. He has strengthened parts of my worldview, and totally retrenched others.

I've never been remotely comfortable with vulnerability, and the realization that a significant part of my emotional fate was in hands other than my own introduced me to an anxiety that never completely leaves. It's always there, lurking just close enough to the surface that I must constantly ask myself whether any action or inaction is an attempt to protect myself, at his expense, from the possibility of pain. (And sometimes, I'm pretty sure I either forget to ask the question or I don't answer it honestly.) I wrote a little bit about that here.

This isn't all bad, of course. While certain things terrify me more now, this probably makes me a better citizen. Before him, my environmental concerns were mostly about wilderness and open space -- the issues that bore directly on me and my next backpacking trip.* Now they revolve more intensely around climate change, which will directly affect his future and thus looms large in my thoughts. This is why I write about the issue, attend rallies, participate in an environmental reading group, and badger friends and family to watch An Inconvenient Truth.

But you know, sometimes I just need to get the hell away from that godawful drumbeat of doom. And yet sometimes it seems there's no end to it. We have ten years till we're irrevocably screwed. Meanwhile, the United States has rejected the overarching emissions goals of the European Union, saying that we prefer to focus on "specific sectors." Mmm-hmm. Then there's the University of Alaska economist who estimates that global warming damage could cost Alaska up to ten billion dollars over the next few decades.

And on and on and on.

It's a perilous line to walk, between sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "la la la la la!" and knowing what the score is and just needing an occasional break from the worry. But for the near future, here's my line: If we don't change dramatically in the next ten or so years, the next generation is going to live in a very different world, and it'll probably be pretty grim. Period. But for awhile, I'm going to try and talk about the good news instead of offering up a relentless parade of horrors about which Antarctic ice shelf cracked up and which species is on the verge of extinction. My mental health requires it just now.

But, uh, if you haven't seen it, you really should watch An Inconvenient Truth.





*One non-commenting reader of this blog may remember a discussion over burritos one day, six or seven years ago, in which I casually dismissed the issue of fuel economy. I hope she's kind enough not to abuse me for such a silly position -- she has been so far.

Facts? We don't need no stinkin' facts

Good grief, but this is annoying. Apparently the new fad is to excoriate Al Gore for how much power his Nashville residence uses. So, you see, we should not listen to anything Gore says because he's a hypocrite. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!!

Except, not. Think Progress summarizes the Vice President's response:

Gore’s family has taken numerous steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their private residence, including signing up for 100 percent green power through Green Power Switch, installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology.

Having thus reduced his footprint, Gore also purchases carbon offsets to reduce that footprint to zero. Here is my favorite explanation of the concept of carbon offsets, from Real Climate. In relevant part:

The idea behind carbon offsets is built upon the foundation of carbon emissions trading established by the Kyoto Protocol, a scheme called cap and trade. Carbon emissions for industries are capped at some level by regulatory permits to emit CO₂. If a company is able to cut its emissions below that level, it can sell its emission permits to another company. The cuts in emissions are thereby steered, by the invisible hand of the market, to the cheapest and most efficient means. Cap-and-trade has worked well for reduction of sulfur emissions in the U.S., that are responsible for acid rain. CO₂ emission is intrinsically even better suited for cap-and-trade, because it is a truly global pollutant, so it matters not where the CO₂ is emitted.

The carbon emissions market requires a certification process to verify any reduction in carbon emissions. Carbonfund.org and the other similar operations take donations from people like me and use the money to pay for renewable energy sources like solar cells or wind farms, that would not have been built otherwise. For these efforts, they receive credits for reduction in carbon emissions that are certified as valid, and therefore eligible for trade in the emissions market. Instead of trading that emission credit, carbonfund.org “retires” it, so that it isn’t used to balance higher carbon emission from another source. The certification process from the emissions market has an unintended benefit of providing an independent way to verify the carbon impact from sending money to organizations like carbonfund.org. It's a nifty idea.

I can think of little else that better exemplifies the intellectual bankruptcy of this sort of gotcha! bullshittery than this manufactured controversy. It could not be clearer that these howler monkeys have made no effort to understand carbon offsets.

And the traditional media is falling for it, of course. Jake Tapper's article covers three pages online, buries Gore's response several paragraphs in and contains no explanation of carbon offsets and little acknowledgment that Gore's actual carbon footprint is zero.

And I don't expect much from Fox News, but this is Grade A idiocy:

Al Gore's posh home in the Nashville suburbs might be "carbon neutral," but it still uses a lot of power.

Yeah. In other words, Al Gore's household contributes less to global warming than any one of his detractors, but so what?

Why let the facts get in the way of a good smear?

Not too shabby

For his work bringing attention to the climate crisis, Al Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. It's not a secret that I think global warming is the most critical issue the world faces, and I don't think I've concealed my admiration for Mr. Gore. I'm delighted with this nomination.

And I enthusiastically concur with this sentiment from Shakespeare's Sister:

Cool. And now think about how he was supposed to be our president and try not to collapse into a wailing heap with a great gnashing of teeth and dramatic fist-clenching.

I grieve that, deeply. But I haven't given up yet.

That's a topic for a whole other post, of course.

Mr. Tester goes to Washington. Poor thing.

As much as I wanted Jon Tester to be elected to represent Montana in the United States Senate, I feel a little sorry for him now that his election has come to pass.

Because now he has to leave Montana and go spend most of his time in Washington, D.C.

Bleh.

I'm a person for whom urban life loses more allure with every passing year. At first I thought this was evidence of a growing introversion chipping away at my longstanding need to be in the thick of human interaction. But that's not really the case. The reality for me is that, paradoxically, I often feel more isolated in the city where I live most of the time than at my place in Teenytown, Montana.

Here, our neighbors are fifteen feet away and we speak rarely. There, our only neighbors on the mountain are about a quarter mile down the gravel road, and we have dinner together regularly when we're there. Once every couple of days, their year-old Newfoundland will trot up the road and up the stairs to our kitchen for a visit, an ear scratch, and a doggie biscuit. Despite the reputation of rural folk as close-minded and insular, my experience in Montana is that the openness of the land seems to parallel an openness of its residents to other people.

My sympathy for Senator-elect Tester is, I acknowledge, an act of rank projection. For all I know, Jon Tester can't wait to hightail his flattop to D.C. and start frequenting the cocktail party circuit. (Though somehow I doubt it.) But I hope the good Senator, who after 8 years in politics still "does some of his best thinking" on his tractor, can find enough time -- for his own sake -- to spend on his organic farm during the next six years.