The Undertow of Minutiae

There’s the visible and the invisible and so it is with those lovely scenes of ocean waves crashing to the shore and washing up the beach to tickle our toes. It goes someplace, that water, and where it goes can do far more than tickle your toes.

I’m reminded of that when I consider Kanye West and the prospect of our failed human species

Ye (which he apparently prefers to be called) is a rapper. He’s all over the news these days as the public speculates on whether he will survive his rampant antisemitism or tickle our toes one last time before permanently disappearing from the public consciousness.

He’s a proper metaphor for much of what currently conspires against the survival of our species. While Ye’s waves seem mighty to many, his disruption is without much meaning. The waves break and the water slips out again, but fingerprints remain.

All well and good, but we happen to live in meaningful times

I read today that Taylor Swift locked up all top ten rated songs of the music business, the first time it’s ever been done. That’s interesting and I wish her well, I like her music and like her equally well as a person, but it’s not meaningful.

I find that when I’m a bit down and the burden of what’s going on in the world today gets a bit too heavy, I watch American football, old Johnny Carson shows and interviews of those who are important to me. Parkinson had Richard Burton on the other day and Burton fascinates me, but it’s not meaningful even though it leaves fingerprints.

I write less when I’m in that mode and friends ask me if everything is okay. They notice, which is nice.

What is meaningful is that Cop27 is going on at great fanfare in Egypt at the moment

The meaningful part is not that it’s reaching (or even cares to reach) the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, but that presidents, premiers, prime ministers and the environmental glitterati actually celebrate their great doings of great nothings by leaving fingerprints.

This is the 27th time they have done nothing and, like anniversary gifts, there ought to be a gift. King Charles of Britain has chosen not to come, as has Prime Minister Sunak, but I’m told Boris will be there—bleached-blond hair flying and mugging up his best personal brand of muggery. If the meals are free and the booze flows, Boris is never a no-show.

We should have known better than to leave the climate to politicians, but we did it anyway

197 nations agreed to leave it to their politicians and developed nations promised $100 billion to fund poorer nations in a climate that demands tens of trillions. So far, not a penny has moved. Ah well, as architect Mies Van Der Rohe once claimed, “Less is more.” Taken to Mies’s conclusion, nothing is everything.

It’s possible that if we hadn’t agreed to wine and dine the planet’s most useless individuals for 27 COPs in a row—and counting—something useful might have been achieved. Funding research instead of aperitifs and paying for what we already knew instead of arguing whether or not to make it in China, progress could conceivably have been made.

The fingerprints of 27 COPs in a row remind me of Paul Simon

Paul wrote a song called The Myth of Fingerprints that you may want to give a listen.

Over the mountain
Down in the valley
Lives a former talk-show host
Everybody knows his name

He says there's no doubt about it
It was the myth of fingerprints
I've seen them all and man
They're all the same

My fingerprints are all over my life, as yours are likely to be, but it takes a lot of strength sometimes to bear the unbearable and time is not on our side.  

William Shatner rode on Jeff Bezos’ rocket to the edge of space and our faithful Captain Kirk of Star Trek said it made him unbearably sad. “There’s nothing up there,” he said. "Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong. I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound."

My hope is that we can, as a species, resist the undertow of trivia long enough to change our consumerist lives before all chances are foreclosed. While COP27 entertains itself in Egypt, it is already too late to ever experience the world I grew up in as a kid in Evanston.

That world is already gone and the concrete poured cannot be unpoured. The farmlands I knew a block west of my home are now suburban mini-malls stretching for sixty five miles. When I was twenty, world population was two billion and in my lifetime it now approaches eight.

I’ve seen the fingerprints and felt the undertow of a planet in distress.