BirthedGonzoVille
...(U)nlike most of the others in the press box, we didn't give a hoot in hell what was happening on the track. We had come there to watch the real beasts perform...
...The face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is...
...(Ralph Steadman) had done a few good sketches, but so far we hadn't seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for a lead drawing. It was a face I'd seen a thousand times at every Derby I'd ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry--a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis...
...(Two days later)...with an hour or so to kill before (Steadman) had to catch the plane (home to England), we spread his drawings out on the table and pondered them for a while, wondering if he’d caught the proper spirit of the thing … but we couldn’t make up our minds. His hands were shaking so badly that he had trouble holding the paper, and my vision was so blurred that I could barely see what he’s drawn. “Shit,” I said. “We both look worse than anything you’ve drawn here.”
He smiled. “You know — I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that … and now, you know what? It’s us … ”
What if this week’s series of record-shattering high temperatures turned out to be tomorrow’s record low, the benchmark against which future years and decades of global warming will be measured?That’s the chilling, provocative, entirely reasonable question that author and ArcTern Ventures co-founder Tom Rand raised on July 6, after July 3, 4, and 5 set new records for the highest average global temperature in more than 100,000 years.“Instead of thinking about this year as the hottest so far, think of it as the coolest and calmest moment of what is to come,” Rand wrote. “A very different psychology kicks in, one our brains would normally discount/reject. But one that is much more useful, if alarming.”...
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Norm Farrell, working with a combination of dogged determination, style and elan that I'm pretty sure even an atavistic swine herder like the long departed Docktor Thompson would admire, has most recently been focused on explaining how, precisely, the greedheads and their public relation minions (speaking of swine that need herding, preferably over cliffs) are doing their darndest to convince us that burning stuff made of carbon can still be a good thing for everyone concerned.
So.
Who's really to blame for this state of affairs?
Well, as I was riding in to the lab this morning, tires crunching their way through all the brown leaves that have already fallen from the chestnut trees in lower Kitsilano (in mid-July!), I was suddenly struck dumb by the realization that the blame...
...It is us.
OK?
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Subheader?...This!
Previous HST Fridays can be found...Here.
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3 comments:
Yes. “We” put men on the moon, defeated Hitler, invented computers, and discovered antibiotics. “They” are continuously exploiting species to extinction, polluting the planet, developing and utilizing weapons of mass destruction and driving climate change to the point of no return.
No amount of pronoun camouflage will keep the planet within the Goldilocks range. The realization that all the pronouns in the whole wide world add up to one big “us” might be a start.
Lew--
Yes, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to be easy make politically expedient hay out denigrating folks for being concerned about heat domes and rampant wildfires...Not that PR folks of a certain bent won't be happy to give it a try - for a price.
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Yes, it is us! This past week the city of Vancouver was discussing lowering the size of single fzamily homes by 400 sq. ft. However, if they built (I think 4 homes) the sq. footage would be increased. then the hew and cry of all the "impacted", loved the one about having children living at home as young adults, multi generational families so they simply couldn't downsize. Mega houses have not done much to reduce the price of housing nor provided more housing for more people. Mega houses do nothing for the enviornment. You have a couple of people living in them with one or two others. Most of the aging baby boomers grew up in 1200 sq. ft. homes with one bathroom--usually with 3 or 4 kids. These homes did not require the tearing down of mountains for marble and granite or cutting down forests.
We do need to look at housing in the lower mainland as just not a way to house more people but to make the building of homes have less of a negative impact on the enviornment. We build houses, 20 to 30 years later, they tear them down and build new ones, thenn they're torn down and town houses are built. There are areas in Vancouver and Richmond I have seen property go into its third "phase" of being torn down and rebuilt. Did it improve anything? Not so much. The houses got more and more expensive and fewer people could afford them. all the previous homes were sent to the garbage dump. Not that enviornmental. Yes, it is us!
We have heard a lot of complaints regarding ferry back ups, air ports clogged and people acting as if its their right to get on their transport on their time schedule. Have any of them thought about the amount of fuel which is wasted? A number of years ago, a volcano errupted and flights in and out of Europe had to be stopped. What was interesting was the sky was a lot bluer.
Its about time we looked at how we use fuel. Perhaps the time of the train has come, France has started with insisting people take the train instead of a plane for trips within country.
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