[Peace-discuss] Toasting the new year/decades past

[C. G. Estabrook]

The concluding line ("What a grim and revealing irony that it was the Medieval
Warm Period – which Al Gore and the IPCC have sought to purge from natural
history – that gave birth to some of the most glorious chapters in human
intellectual and artistic achievement!") is quite accurate.

When I was majoring in Renaissance studies more than 40 years ago, the notion of 
the Medieval Warm Period was a commonplace. E.g., 10th-13th-century Britain was 
an important producer of wine (the Domesday Book [1086 CE] lists vineyards): 
it's only begun to do so again in our time.

The existence of the Medieval Warming Period (at least in Europe and the North
Atlantic) is not in doubt, and it clearly had great cultural effects, perhaps
chiefly through the expansion of population; but the medieval mode of production
collapsed in the general depression of the 14th century, concomitantly with the
end of the Medieval Warm Period.

The occurrence of such warming and cooling in the recent past may indicate that
modern global warming is not (entirely?) anthropogenic. "There are credible
arguments both for and against such a hypothesis. [See the Wikipedia article for
references.] A scientific study begun in 2009 aims to examine evidence both for
and against that hypothesis."

The same article notes the following: "Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins 
of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly," by Michael E. Mann, Zhihua 
Zhang, Scott Rutherford et al., Science Magazine 11/27/09; and "Past regional 
cold and warm periods linked to natural climate drivers" (Penn State University) 
Nov 27, 2009 <http://live.psu.edu/story/43214>.  --CGE

_______________________
PS - Cockburn's also right about the mid-1970s, from my experience.  Even in New 
England it was a time of political and cultural efflorescence (and I hadn't even 
started to hang around with actors). I got the news by buying foreign newspapers 
from newsstands and used to save my copies of the New York Review (much better 
then than its pallid present-day version -- e.g., they hadn't started to refuse 
to publish Chomsky) to read on the train between Providence and Boston, where I 
wouldn't be disturbed.

It's no accident that the hysterical book by the Trilateral Commission, the 
Crisis of Democracy, which warned of the dangers of "too much" democracy, 
appeared in 1975, launching the propaganda counter-attack of neoliberalism.  See 
David Harvey's important book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

America thirty-five years ago contrasts with today, in that the latter and not 
the former fits what Gramsci wrote about Europe ca. 1930: "The crisis consists 
precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this 
interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

The question is whether our politics have been completely overcome by morbidity. 
We are reminded of what John Randolph of Roanoke said of America's leading 
antebellum politician, Henry Clay: "A being so brilliant yet so corrupt, which, 
like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, shines and stinks."

Meanwhile, liberals long for Bush.  As the late Art Buchwald said of Richard 
Nixon, "I worship the quicksand he walks on!"  But it's worth noting that, as 
the name of a politics and an apparatus, Bush lives on...  Maybe he's the 
unconscious reason for the vampire vogue.  A stake through the heart at a
crossroads at midnight, perhaps?

"Brave souls soldier on, whether battling the military recruiters, defending 
Palestine, or advancing labor’s cause. Gaze out across the political landscape 
and there are many vigorous, dogged people at work ... The corporations run the 
show and the only vivid opposition comes from Christian populists, who’ve bought 
several million copies of Sara Palin’s memoir."

Our task is to combat that morbid symptom. As a correspondent recommends, 
"...deal with the mass discontent on the Left and Right with Obama."

Chomsky: "First of all, don't believe anything you hear from power systems. So 
if Obama or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing 
this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which 
it often is. You have to rely on yourself and your associates -- gifts don't 
come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you win 
by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options 
and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot. So take right now, for 
example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the 
left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at 
those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real 
grievances ... the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but 
rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones 
that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical 
analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome..."


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Here is the concluding paragraph of Cockburn's article, citing the '"Kookdom"
> of others:
> 
>> /But, as a vital, compelling, creative force in American political life,
>> the left is dead and gone, many of its erstwhile or potential members  lost
>> in the new Age of Superstition, fretful captives in the thickets of
>> kookdom, whether in the form of 9/11 conspiracism – au revoir Cindy
>> Sheehan! – or gazing aghast at Michael Mann’s bogus hockey-stick graph
>> instead of improving their minds and political potential by reading the
>> Eighteenth Brumaire. What a grim and revealing irony that it was the
>> Medieval Warm Period – which Al Gore and the IPCC have sought to purge from
>> natural history – that gave birth to some of the most glorious chapters in
>> human intellectual and artistic achievement!/
> 
> One would think that Cockburn fits well into the "kookdom" realm with his
> ignorance of science vis-a-vis global warming. Monbiot has addressed this
> lack of credibility of Cockburn previously.
> 
> As for the idiocy of 9/11 conspiracy seekers, I'm reading a book by Russ 
> Baker on the Bush dynasty (/Family of Secrets/)—fascinating and eye-opening.
> --mkb
> 
> On Dec 26, 2009, at 3:14 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> ["...as a vital, compelling, creative force in American political life, the
>> Left is dead and gone ... instead of improving their minds and political
>> potential by reading the Eighteenth Brumaire."  I'm thinking we should take
>> this recommendation literally.  How about a reading group in the spring
>> term, concerning one of the best attempts to think about real world
>> politics in the capitalist era, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
>> Napoleon"? It's the work that includes the best summary of the Bush/Obama
>> administration -- "Hegel remarks somewhere that history tends to repeat
>> itself. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as
>> farce." And it argues for the necessity to attending to both history and
>> economics: "People make their own history, but they do not make it as they
>> please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
>> circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The
>> tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of
>> the living." (And the poets do usually get there first, but this is from 70
>> years later: "History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying
>> to awake.") Let me know if you're interested in a history/politics reading
>> group.  --CGE]
>> 
>> 
>> December 25-27, 2009 Disappointments in Samarra By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
>>  ...