And That's The Way It is...
The current book WIP starts off with a rapidly unfolding climate crisis then devolves into a world collapsing in disinformation. Sadly, the story seems to write itself. All I need to do is look at what masquerades as news. I just need to fill in the words, and hopefully make it a story worth reading.
Just this past week, once in Mexico and once in Texas, people were out in the streets with snow shovels to clear massive hailstorms, something like a foot of hail fell in a few minutes in both places. A record-breaking heat wave is coming in the west next week. It was a hundred and eighteen degrees up near the Canadian border a couple of years ago. The entire Northeast, where I live, spent last summer enveloped in deep, heavy smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires
I’m a hypocrite, I admit that I love my old Detroit muscle, but I’ve also said for years make my 93 octane $10 or $15 a gallon and give the excess profit to green initiatives. I drive my ten mile per gallon, gas guzzling Mustang about two thousand miles per year. I don’t think it’s a huge environmental threat. This would make me quite happy and would be a good thing for the environment. I think that would more than offset the carbon footprint of my greaser indulgence.
I’d happily drive a solid, reliable electric car. My buddy Mark and I drove some a few weeks ago. The tech is astounding. When they get that tech dialed in I’ll jump on that bandwagon. I do worry about the stress this all electric everything is going to put on the world-wide power grid. The American system has been woefully under maintained and neglected for decades. Look no further than Texas a few years ago in that cold snap where the grid failed—hard. But this is all part of what I’m talking about and what the new book is about. Maybe buy the book when it comes out! Then I can say, “Oh, you’re the one!” I do that whenever someone tells me they read one of my books. I’m easily amused. But anyway…
If we are going to survive we need solid, reliable information, and that is something we can no longer count on.
I saw a guy talking on TV the other day, on an entertainment channel selling itself as news and he actually said, “We don’t have Walter Cronkite sitting there every night telling us simply what happened anymore…” and he was right. Now we have carnival barkers and con-men and salesmen. You can pay attention to one TV channel or YouTube channel, or podcast or website and they will show you that foot of hail and tell you global collapse is just a few short years away. Look at another set of disinformation channels and they will tell you the hailstorms were good for the long and hard suffering snow shovel business. EVERYTHING is spin. It doesn’t matter if you’re a news junkie like me, or someone who is just passively paying attention, we don’t know what to believe because we are never told the truth, we are told stories.
In the next book this disinformation is taken to an extreme, I think, maybe, right? Who knows? Really who knows. We need unbiased unfiltered information to make informed decisions. This lack of information is as dangerous as the storms that are coming.
I think this whole world of lies and spin has infiltrated us and permeated us—all of us—more than we realize. After my second round of Covid I developed pretty severe tinnitus. It’s much better now, but when it was bad my doctor told me to cut back on the supplement Ginkgo Biloba. I started taking it after googling for solutions. The doctor told me too much Ginkgo could lead to internal hemorrhaging and that could be deadly. A younger smarter me would have listened to his doc, and immediately changed his behavior. The first quarter-twenty-first century iteration of me went to my car and tried to verify what the medical professional said with a little more Google.
My all time favorite SNL routine is Keenan Thompson and the “Silver Alexia,” look for it. It is hilarious! Thompson’s character, no matter what he was told, even the weather forecast would reply, “Well, I don’t know about that…” but sadly, that guy is me, and I think most of us. We don’t believe anything fully because everything is spin!
In another life, I truly think had we been told of a pending threat to our very survival and our kids’ survival, we would have all quickly galvanized behind the problem and worked for a solution. Today, if we ponder at all, we sit back and think to ourselves, “Who is selling that message. Is it Greenpeace and the leftist socialists or is it Exxon Mobil and the ultra-right-wing fascists?” Jesus, I can look at one source and walk away thinking Trump is the devil incarnate and another and be told he’s just a poor misunderstood old man.
When did politicians become pop stars and when did their actions no longer become inexcusable. I was a fan of Eric Clapton all my life, I still may think Derek and the Dominos Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs may be the greatest album ever recorded, but Eric made some truly stupid anti-reality and racist comments and that was it for me and old Slowhand. How is there absolutely no bottom, no bridge too far with this mess of political shitheads we are handed today?
Even though I know what I feel in my bones about Trump, or the climate crises or the federal budget deficit, or any actor in this political theatre that presents itself to us daily, the sad fact is I only know what I’m told by entertainers pretending to be experts and newscasters.
I know a guy, he’s an estimator at a client. This guy has the most hideous nonsense on his four computer screens all day every day—I mean crap about Presidential pedophile rings, deep states and government conspiracies about aliens from space. I even asked his boss one time how and why he can allow this stuff to be on work systems, and his answer was, “Bob is one of the best estimators in the business…” so, that is how he allows it…
That’s part of my point here. We allow this. My dad didn’t like JFK. My uncle didn’t like Nixon. They’d argue about the merits and vices of the two, over Schaefer beers on the back porch on summer days. They didn’t call the other guys candidate pedophiles and deep state operatives or any of that horseshit. They discussed why they supported and opposed these men based on the actual information they got through the news. Somehow, some way, we have got to get back to that. Sadly, I don’t think we ever will.