NOTE: Before this post went live the headlines severely outran my draft and changed the landscape of news around Oathkeepers and J6. I am honestly hitting the ceiling of my personal competence just holding together my personal life, which is low and barely in evidence respectively, so I can’t offer any meaningful commentary or analysis until I’ve had some time and space to catch up on all the credible reporting. What I can say is this: Perhaps out of childhood programming to see vast shadowy conspiracies as competent and threatening, I may have vastly overestimated the ability of the J6 coup plotters to keep their operations compartmentalized and their tracks covered. Especially now that we are seeing state prosecutors and Jack Smith bringing charges that I severely doubted would ever be brought, I would put money on a future round of indictments for the kinetic actions on the day of J6 and the violent end of the coup as investigators continue to tug at threads like Oathkeepers correspondence with the Secret Service.
In particular, mom has a feeling about the Fake Elector scheme architect seemingly directing Alex Jones as a tactical hype man to keep the mob moving. This to me shows a clear lack of dividing lines between the different prongs of the attempt to overturn the election, and given past failures to adequately clean up SMS and other electronic communications that spell out Federal crimes I think she’s right. Whether they were betting it all on winning or just became more and more cavalier about discussing treason over insecure comms in the day to day of wrangling seditious egomaniacs in the same direction, this may prove to be a critical point that connects a lot of actors in a single evident scheme. Time will tell.
People in every single place think that their weather is uniquely unpredictable, and will brag about it as some sign of their rugged state character. “Don’t like it, wait five minutes and it’ll change!” Yes buddy, the weather tends to do that. Similarly, everyone seems to think that their home turf is uniquely crazy and lots of people will brag about their area’s weirdos and criminality in a really cringe attempt at establishing some kind of street cred. Somewhere between Florida Man, a creation of Florida violating the privacy of its citizens by publishing mugshots on the open internet for the world to mock, and Portland, which deserved to be gentrified after the fuss it made out of having just the quirkiest coffee shops and whitest pole dancing studios, lies the distorting lens that people see their homes through to attach something interesting to their own identity.
With that in mind, I don’t think today’s topic is particularly special to my home. The circumstances are local, but humanity and the climate are universal. Unfortunately.
Welcome to Weekly Wednesday, the optimistically titled irregular roundup of things I want to talk about and happenings in the lives of the Adams family as a whole. Before I get into the weather, a paragraph to promote my mom’s recent writing and interviews: First up, a great blog post on Stewart’s hoarder mindset that I have not read all of because of content warnings and never will, second a fascinating podcast interview with Robin Stern that would be very valuable to survivors of high control relationships and environments. Finally, a recording of my recent Twitter Spaces discussion on Oathkeepers with National Security Media.
There is more behind the scenes, but those grand reveals will have to be saved for a later date and you must all live in suspense.
That state of suspense may last for a while, a near miss with a wildfire that threatened to cut the power to my end of the county for days to weeks has been followed by sudden onset apartment hunting, so I’ll do my level best to make my secret projects impactful.
Given the recent round of evacuation orders and prospect of spending a nostalgic week caffeine sick and chasing smoke in dead, dry forests, I keep thinking of how we got to this point. Forest management is certainly part of the puzzle, the full suppression doctrine is a proven failure as the consequences of attempting to stop a natural process in the ecosystem become more obvious, but it’s a part of the puzzle in the same way that mental health is part of the mass shooting problem: Undeniably a factor, but one that Republicans break out of storage only to deflect from considering any other dimension of the issue and then also refuse to do anything about.
Part of that is simple greed, fundamentally changing our forest management to restore a natural environment would cut into existing logging profits and severely curtail monocrop tree farming by necessity. The bigger part of it is that taking any one step to remedy an apocalyptic fire season, season after season, would be one step closer to admitting that global warming exists.
Under no circumstances can culturally conservative rural America admit that anthropogenic, human-caused, climate change is real.
Decades of propaganda to protect the American fuel oligarchs and the all-powerful car lobby, which effectively dictates our city planning as if people were an accessory to cars and not the other way around, have welded hostility to any environmentalism or acknowledgement of global warming into conservative identity politics. You can see it when a Republican who is otherwise all for clearing overgrown forests and strongly in favor of independent homesteading types mocks a man for installing a solar power setup on his log home to power an electric car, since cutting down trees is bad for the environment. Those weird 180 degree opinion switches from subject to subject are clear giveaways for when a belief has been installed by mass media and enforced by community.
Nevermind that the area I live in used to have multiple weeks of -20 F cold each winter, knee-deep snow in early November, and snowpack on the mountains that lasted year round. Nevermind that we are now instead having longer and longer stretches of 100 degree days, five episodes of dreary early spring thaw distributed through each winter, and lakes that are recovering less and less of their water level each summer. Acknowledging global warming would be ceding ground in the culture war, and the central tenet of that is to never give the Radical Left an inch or you’ll start questioning a mile of dogma.
It’s hard whether it made a real difference, but in retrospect I was starting to wonder about this whole global warming thing because of my experience in wildfire while I still had other bits of right wing ideology stuck to me like cobwebs. The evidence of my eyes contradicted what I’d been told my entire life about the way the world worked, and I trusted myself even if it lead to uncomfortable questions.
That’s the phrase that comes to mind, discomfort. It was the best word to describe the vibe at a volunteer firefighter convention here in Montana, on the opening day before everyone was going through the motions and nursing a hangover. The day had started with an unexpectedly tense board election for the state association in which I found myself the voting representative for my fire department, by virtue of being the only member in attendance, and utterly ignorant of the candidates and background issues, aside from who seemed most hostile to a Reservation fire chief who only knew about the convention because a nephew had seen a post online and wanted to know why the indigenous agencies were being left out in the cold. Cooling down from expending all of my social anxiety budget for the month in one go in a strange High School auditorium, I wandered the hallways and came on a conversation about grazing land by the coffee table.
Like most rural areas of the US, the overlap between volunteer fire, ranching, farming, and forestry is very nearly a circle here. One of the officers in town for the drama and drinking was talking about the number of ranches in his home valley that had needed to start feeding their herds on stowed hay in late summer because the pasture had dried out and died before it grew to its potential, starting an impromptu sharing circle of heat and drought related woes.
When I chimed in with the “Maybe it’s time to take another look at that Global Warming thing,” the vibes in the hallway died, the crash as instantaneous and pinpoint specific as the moment in any of my attempts at online dating when a match asks a question about my life or childhood.
Just like anyone reading this who nodded in sympathy at that last line, I have a handy science fiction reference to illustrate what I think is happening.
Paolo Bacigalupi is very likely one of the greatest authors alive, with an unmatched talent for creating plausible dystopian futures inhabited by some of the most multidimensional and human flawed characters I have ever seen in fiction. I really can’t think of another author aside from George R.R. Martin at his best who can paint such a vivid picture of a complete person in their flaws and triumphs and rich internal life, especially in a dense novel like The Windup Girl with a staggering number of characters competing for limited spotlight. The work that has stuck with me above all else, however, is not a biopunk post-apocalypse in an almost unrecognizable changed world. Out of all of the visions of a doomed Earth inhabited by ordinary people struggling to get by as best they can, the one that haunts me when I try to sleep at night is his short story The Tamarisk Hunter.
This is a choice that probably illuminates more about me than about Bacigalupi’s writing, being a very near future tale of society buckling under the strain of climate change. There’s a lot to unpack that real reviewers can manage better, internal conflict within the United States over the Colorado river, corporate analysts planning the cutoff of major cities to minimize unrest, the specter of mercenaries operating under the banner of the national guard flying helicopter missions against missile-armed insurgents over water rights, but for me the most dystopic element is the euphemism that sticks throughout the story: “Big Papa Drought.” The heat and dry that takes hold year by year and never lets up is never addressed by its proper name, even as cities are abandoned and characters laugh at the prospect of the ‘drought emergency’ ending. At no point in a landscape utterly changed by it does any character ever say “Climate Change.”
Big Papa Drought might just break, any year now, even if the people who hold to this hope know it’s a lie. Climate Change is here to stay, permanent, and given any excuse people will find something else to blame.
The only part of the story unlikely to pan out in reality is the job of the titular Tamarisk Hunter, a bounty weed-puller scamming the Feds on heads of Tamarisk trees growing along the banks of the rivers of the Colorado basin to maximize the water flowing to increasingly dominant California. The Tamarisk tree has so far been losing the climate change adaptation race, losing ground to wildfires faster than it can spread year by year.
When the last tree burns before a real life Water Tick can pull it for a cash bounty, remaining locals will carefully talk around any mention of Global Warming.
I feel like we live in the same place. I am an organic farmer and and so travel in ag circles. Drought, patchy rain, fires, etc etc are all just 'weird weather' that we have 'every year' because climate change is fake don't you know. And don't even THINK about allowing those two words come out of your mouth if you don'twant to be labelled a leftist weirdo who is pro Trudeau. Because obviously those things just go hand in hand here.... pft. 🙄