I was sitting in my car at the Seattle ferry terminal this summer, and it was going to be a long wait. Staffing shortages had reduced the Seattle-Bainbridge run to a one-boat service. I had barely missed the previous ferry, which was twenty minutes late so probably full anyway. It was an honestly hot day, and bad luck had parked me in the sun.
Radical acceptance kicked in. I shrugged and lowered my windows—we were on the water, after all, and the breeze was almost cool. I picked up my book and read.
After a short while, I realized that, full of regret and something else, I would have to visit one of the Port-A-Potties at the side of the line-up. As I walked in front of the long rows of cars, I noticed that a good number of the owners of those cars had rolled up their windows, started their engines, and were running their air conditioners. I stopped and stared at all of the cars.
I wanted to find a spare crate and step up on top of it and start shouting at their closed windows: “Are you fucking kidding me? We’re facing climate catastrophe, and you have to run your gasoline-powered engines to spit all kinds of evil stuff into the air? Just because you can’t stand a little heat? Which would you prefer? To be a little uncomfortable now or just broil to death later?”
But of course that gesture would have been useless. After all, they couldn’t hear in their glass-enclosed enclaves of cool. Anyway, wouldn’t one imagine that these people knew all about global warming? Knew full well what they were doing? But they refused to suffer a little, and I mean a little, heat. Also probably half owned guns and would be pleased to practice on me.
But look: We’re not asking them to put their careers aside and go fight in World War II. We’re not even asking them to skip lunch. Yet arguably the stakes—the fate of the world climate—are as high as losing World War II. But open your windows and perspire a little? No. They’d rather run their car engines and doom the Earth.
And these are the same people who vote based on their fury about how high gas prices are, which, Paul Krugman explained, aren’t really that high compared to earlier times. And the prices certainly aren’t Biden’s fault. But these entitled white people must run their engines to enable their air conditioning.
I chronicled in an earlier post (“A Contemporary Dilemma: Idling Cars”, February 15, 2020) the young father in a Lexus who also ran his air conditioning, though in this case the temperature outside was 66 degrees F. I should have suggested to him that the kid in the back seat may as well get used to the heat now because it’s not going to let up.
What is so hard about this when the climate is at stake?
“When prices go up, we have this feeling of oppression that we can’t do everything we want,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, which tracks real-time gas prices across the country. [Italics mine] And when prices are low: “You feel like you can go anywhere, you can see anything, you can do anything.” NYT, Oct. 27, 2022.
Wow, you can’t do everything you want all the time? No wonder white males are disgruntled. Listen, mate, I’ve never in my life thought I could do anything I wanted. So shut up, sit down, and turn off your engines.
When I was maybe five or six in 1960 or so, I remember that we three children must have been badgering our father too much for something, and he lost it, a fairly rare event, and yelled at us, “We’re not rich bitches who can have everything we want!” He came of age in the Depression, and I never lost his knack for frugality. Nancy’s parents’ and mine shared a sort of middle class social status in the 50’s, and they never stopped striving and worrying.
I’ve chronicled my dad’s life before (“A Father’s Day Message for Dad”, June 19, 2019). He was someone who could do a hard thing. Today I wouldn’t be able to meet his eyes after the life I’ve lived.
To think of him allowing his car to idle. If he was moving into a decline to a stop sign, and the car had a stick shift, he’d take the car out of gear and coast, certain that he was saving gas. An ex-girlfriend specifically asked me not to do that one day as she had a lot to do. He drafted trucks on highways. Idle the car just to stay cool? If there is an afterlife, I hope he doesn’t know anything about this. I can hear him lecture about leftovers, “We paid for that too!”
In some baseball playoff game this fall, Ryan Pressley, typically the fellow who comes in to pitch the last inning, instead was summoned into the game with two outs in the 8th inning to get the last out and then presumably pitch the ninth in his usual role as the “closer.” This hurled (pun haha) the announcers into a heavy sweat. “He’s not used to doing this!” they exclaimed. “He doesn’t come in till the ninth! They’re asking him to get four outs!”
OK, it is now time for an old man to shake his fist at a cloud.
When I was a kid (he predictably began), we didn’t have pitch counts, which are today regularly employed to prevent kids from throwing too much in youth league games. I regularly pitched all seven innings of our (abbreviated) games, which amounted to well over 100 pitches a game. Today’s major leaguers are seldom allowed to go over that. OK, my elbow hurt, but I lived. And today the only joints in my body that don’t hurt are my right elbow and shoulder.
Why can’t Ryan Pressley be expected to throw, say, 22 pitches instead of just 15? Yeah, that’s a night for him. And he’s seldom expected to do that more than two nights in a row. Geez, he even got to sit down before he came out to pitch the 9th.
Not only are today’s pitchers bigger and stronger, but their diet, workout routines, and everything else about their lives is scientifically measured and regulated. I simply went out and threw. But Ryan Pressley can’t be expected to throw 22 pitches.
Finally. John Cassidy wrote a column for The New Yorker (November 21, 2022—note that I have jettisoned the Chicago MLA Style Book, the legal world’s Blue Book, and every other style book. One of the blessings of growing old and DGAF.) In it, he posited that the Republicans would have a problem stopping Trump thanks to their primaries’ “first-by-the -post, winner-take-all” process because the non-Trump vote would be so variously split.
Instead, some of them would have to give up their individual ambitions and anoint one of them to take him on, so as not to split the never-Trump vote.
Let’s pause to imagine how that would happen: are we talking a smoke-filled room—where? In a centrally-located airport hotel? Someone’s vacation home in Jackson Hole or Nantucket (hmm, too many press types around at the latter)?
Oh, the list: Cassidy jotted down attendees at, apparently with no irony, the Jewish Republican Coalition, at the Venetian Resort back in mid-November. Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Tim Scott, and Chris Sununu. Trump spoke to the conference remotely, which must have been a relief.
And look at that list. It reminds me of Lloyd Bentsen’s disintegrating response to Dan Quayle during their debate in 1988: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” (Worth reliving all these years later.)
Those people are no Jack Kennedy, even the Jack Kennedy whom history has subsequently revealed. (Incidentally, my opinion of him has improved having read Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962 by Martin Sherwin, an excellent, well researched history of the period. When all of the military guys were demanding that he bomb Cuba, he said something to the effect like, well, the brass hats have it over us because none of us will be here for them to admit they were wrong.)
OK, I think we can confidently say that they all hate each other. You know the rest all hate that fucking johnny-come-lately DeSantis. (Now you know how Hilary must have felt about Barack.) So nothing’s getting done in any smoke-filled room, unless the smoke is cannabis-oriented.
The point is that there is no world in which any of us can imagine the aforementioned as a serious candidate. Note I didn’t mention Hawley, Romney, and three or four other right-wing nutbars, who would be laughable candidates for well-earned reasons. There will be no compromise or consensus here. These people are likely going to act like Democrats and split the party up.
None of these Republicans, pure walking ids, can do a hard thing: they can’t put their country ahead of their individual ambitions. Really, if people like Cruz and Christie and Sununu stare down at their chances objectively, they don’t have a chance, never have, and never will. We’re not asking them to give up their lives in battle. We’re only asking them to give up their nonexistent chances at the presidency for the good of the country. But instead, because they can’t, we may well end up with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president.
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