A New York Times article currently entitled “The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky” (modern NYT headlines tend to shift with the winds of likes and comments) discusses the innovative corporations and world governments looking to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for profit. On its surface, this is a potentially radical net-positive accelerant for humanity driven by its financial upside, in the same tradition as asteroid mining, child tax credits, and electric vehicle subsidies.
The comment section gives us a valuable insight into how the online progressive retiree set (many of them early architects and evangelists of the modern Left) see this news within the context of their worldview… and here it’s particularly interesting. I want to highlight one comment that’s emblematic of the general tenor there:
People want this to work because they don’t want to do the hard work of changing. That’s a mistake. Aside from the elusiveness of the technology itself, the current fossil fuels system is literally destroying our planet. We have to have the willpower to stop doing that.
Here we see plainly spoken a bedrock concept underlying many political ideologies that rarely breaches the surface: apocalyptic socio-political shibboleths cannot be resolved without the perceived antichrist(s) paying the cost. The motte: “There is a crisis all humanity should unite in resolving…” The bailey: “… only insofar as it upsets people I dislike.”
This response also seems to chalk up another point in favor of the “modern-politics-as-religion” thesis, with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation. Those who circumvent this process are perceived with the equivalent spite of their ancestors imagining a sinner who never feels the fires of hell (or Salem, as it were). As a great Mottizen (@CrispyFriedBarnacles - thanks @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola) once reminded us, “Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban.”
Finished playwright Neil Simon’s two-part autobiography earlier this week (Rewrites and The Play Goes On). I knew he had been prolific and successful, but the scale of his success from 1965-1995 was quite surprising to read about in detail; the reader comes away with the perception that Simon was perhaps the most influential figure in playwriting since Shakespeare… as a cultural icon, at least. Equally surprising is the observation that Simon’s work and influence has almost completely disappeared from the modern zeitgeist, both in the theatre and the culture at large. Contemporary satires with ethnic supporting characters that lampoon the male-female divide were once the default in plot writing (and perhaps made so by Simon’s early work), but now seem so dated that they feel more archaic and emblematic of a bygone age than the comedies that long preceded them (The Importance of Being Earnest, Blithe Spirit, Arsenic and Old Lace, etc.).
Now on to The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II, an intimate personal glimpse into a time when a Republican could be the most beloved figure in the theatre industry. I have a tendency to map my own life progression onto the people I read about (I imagine this is a common habit, foolish as it is), and it’s encouraging that OH2 made his greatest work in his late 40s and early 50s (granted, he’d written about 30 Broadway shows by then, but in this case, ”it was a different time” is the understatement of the century).
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