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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   bronze monument of villainy
Tuesday, July 14 2009
I had a large check to put in my account and it had been written by a company with dubious economic prospects, so I went in town mostly to get that taken care of. I went out to the headquarters of my credit union near 9W, allowing me to get various bits of hardware and a couple slices of vegetarian (though not vegan) pizza at Terra Nova Pizzeria. I ate outside so I could watch a couple guys with large machines tearing apart a nearby building. On the edge of that same parking lot (along 9W) is a Citgo gas station that was undergoing massive renovation back in the Fall. The old tanks had been ripped out and huge pits had been dug, and there were piles of rebar I pillaged and used to reinforce the walls of my greenhouse. But then the work on the Citgo station had stopped and the site went dormant, like so many others frozen by the state of the economy. Today, though, I saw guys in fluorescent green vests walking around in the Citgo site. It seems like a good site for a gas station, so every day it lies dormant, somebody is losing money.
As I was preparing to gather over 30 gallons of topsoil from the Esopus levee near the Hurley Mountain Inn, I saw that Wildlife Encounters (the new taxidermy shop in the high-turnover metal building originally constructed as a State Trooper barracks) had a disembodied bear skin on a stretcher leaning against an outdoor wall, and there was a guy standing in the open doorway cleaning the skin of some other animal. (A lot of taxidermy work ends up being on beloved household pets, so it might have been a dog's skin he was cleaning.) Not wanting the dogs to wander over to the taxidermy shop and cause trouble (I could imagine Sally trying to drag that bear skin away), I took them for a walk to the cornfield and back and then put them in the car while I gathered the soil. At some point some meathead in a pickup truck drove down to the dusty area nearby, turned around, and then pealed out with a massive spinning of tires, sending up a massive cloud of dust. I took a little satisfaction in the fact that the driver had decided I needed to be impressed.

Today I was thinking about the problem of global warming and how to deal with it within the confines of existing political reality. Like most environmental problems, it's a hard one to solve through the democratic political process. Politicians appeal to constituencies in hopes of getting votes, and neither the environment nor the humans of the future are given votes. Consequently, politicians tend to pander to the short-term needs of constituents, passing laws to deal with sensational news items, taking actions to stimulate the economy when it fails, or rallying for war in response to insults from foreigners. How, then, do we make the politicians of today accountable to the future, and, furthermore, to demonstrate today that they are indeed being held accountable? It's been too easy for politicians to dismiss the judgment of history by claiming "we'll all be dead" or that "historians are still debating Washington's legacy." But what if there was a way to conclusively tell the future that here in our time we knew that certain people were short-sighted opportunists, and that we didn't want their short-sightness forgotten? It occurred to me that perhaps a monument could be built out of some durable material like bronze (which can theoretically hold its shape for a million years) and this could be used to forever freeze this moment in time, drawing attention to those most responsible for the bleakness of our future. Statues are routine erected to commemorate heroes, even those our modern sensibility now finds repugnant, but they could just as easily be used to showcase our villains. When Sarah Palin signs off on a ghost-written opinion piece trivializing global warming and it's published in the Washington Post, she needs to know that the future will take note.
In my mind I'm picturing a bronze statue with a base surfaced with a relief map of North America featuring the shorlines expected to result from a complete melting of the polar ice caps (perhaps with the old pre-melt shoreline lightly embossed on the otherwise-smooth ocean surface). On this shrunken North America would be large bronze figures of those contributing the most to the politics of global warming inaction: Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tom Coburn. I tried to imagine what these figures could be doing to symbolize their pathological focus on the short term, and the best I could think of was having them all be absorbed by tiny electronic gadgets in their hands. They could be Twittering on Blackberries while the stability of the Holocene dissolves around them.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?090714

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