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“The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (“Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media breakthrough that made producer David Simon an authority on how and why old media failed. It was the series that retired in glory after five years, but in DVD release is still challenging all our mythologies of drugs, race, schools, work, want of work, and police work.

First Middlebury, then Duke, now Harvard are teaching courses around The Wire, because as the esteemed Harvard Sociologist William J. Wilson put it, the show goes deeper into the challenges and inequality of urban life than social science ever has. This is television that changed also the people who made it. Our conversation is with two of the key contributors who are part of teaching the Wire are also still dealing with what it stirred up in their own lives. First, the real Donnie Andrews, a “ghetto famous” free-lance killer of drug dealers in Baltimore who fired up the idea of The Wire and inspired “Omar,” a main character in it. Ed Burns, later a co-producer of The Wire, was Donnie’s arresting officer. David Simon covered the story for The Baltimore Sun:

It was during a time when I think I was at my lowest point, because I had just lost a very dear friend of mine, who died in my arms… As he was dying, he asked me who he was, who was I? And I told him: Donnie. He said “Donnie, I can’t see you.” At that point I realized, I couldn’t see myself either. That was the turning point for me. It was like we had a war going on, a drug war, in Lexington Terrace. We were always assigned to take somebody out. And the guy I took out, I already put like 4 bullets in him, and I stood over top of him, and he looked up and asked me: why? I stood there for what seemed like an eternity trying to figure out that question, why am I doing this? He’s black just like me, got a mother, brother, sister, family, just like me, and I just took everything from him. And I don’t even know why. And at that point it began to turn my life around. So I went home and I read the Bible. Paul. I read Paul. I didn’t come out of the house for like 2 days, and I just kept reading Paul over and over. Finally I realized that if Paul, who did basically same thing that I did, God forgave him. And converted him, so maybe he can do the same for me. So I got on my knees and I prayed.

Donnie Andrews with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009.

And the actress Sonja Sohn, who played the often anguished narcotics cop, Kima Greggs:

My first year on The Wire was absolute torture. For some reason, and I didn’t know at the time, I would get on the set, and many times I couldn’t remember my lines, I would go into a little bit of a panic, and it just – it was something I just couldn’t figure out. And I thought, gosh, am I really this bad of an actor? I later started learning about complex PTSD, and realized that a part of my brain was just shutting down, the entire year I was shooting The Wire. I’ll give you an example: my mother was battered by my father on a somewhat regular basis. And in the neighborhood, you don’t ever call the police, ever. You don’t snitch and you don’t call the police. But there were a number of times when I thought my mother was going to be killed by my father, and I would go upstairs and call the police, hoping that my mother was going to be alive when they came. And the police would come – and I thought “wow, thank god, they’re going to take him away.” And they would talk a little bit, and they would leave my father there. I would go, “why aren’t they taking him away?” and then after a course of time, third, fourth time, they would come and just sort of smirk and snicker, just kind of pooh-pooh this thing away. And I started to hate the cops, because I thought “you guys are supposed to help me, you’re supposed to save my mother, and it’s not happening, and as a matter of fact, you’re now laughing at my family.” So I realized, one reason I couldn’t step into the character of a cop is because I had such deep resentment for the cops, and a lot of pain, that eventually I had to unravel.

Sonya Sohn with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009.

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Presidential reading: Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln

Fred Kaplan‘s new biography of Abraham Lincoln, the writer, the “Mark Twain of our politics,” leaves no doubt that the log-cabin president who freed the slaves and saved the Union would stand in any event with the literary giants of his time: Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, the immortals of the American Renaissance. The Lincoln difference remains: that his words and great deeds cannot be disentangled. Lincoln’s glory was to have mastered language that transformed public life, as no other president before or since, though surely Barack Obama is studying and striving after the Lincoln model.

A lot of Lincoln’s masterstrokes are new to me, like this narrative reflection on seeing slaves on a steamboat in Kentucky in 1841. Lincoln was 32, an Illinois stranger in slave country, a storyteller-in-facts in his letter to Mary Speed:

We got on board the Steam Boat Lebanon, in the locks of the Canal about 12 o’clock M. of the day we left, and reached St. Louis the next Monday at 8:00 P.M. Nothing of interest happened during the passage, except the vexatious delays occasioned by the sand bars be thought interesting. By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition, they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” or in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.

Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Mary Speed, August, 1841, quoted in Kaplan’s Lincoln, pp.130-131.

Young Lincoln: Burns and Byron in America

Fred Kaplan’s literary life story of Lincoln is conceived as a mystery, not unlike the riddle of Shakespeare: how did the child of illiterates in a farm culture become an obsessive student and master of language in every form, from his tavern tales to the Second Inaugural? The King James Bible and Shakespeare were Lincoln’s private school. The Scotsman Robert Burns who made high art of ordinary language was a formative, kindred spirit in Lincoln’s twenties. Burns’ touch with common songs “stirred Lincoln because it cohered with his own belief in literacy, upward mobility, respect for the common man, and democratic governance, and because it affirmed the connection between language and moral vision,” Fred Kaplan writes. The other suprise to me was Lincoln’s attachment and debt to Lord Byron, the “Romantic republican” poet of resistance, even revolution, against tyranny and Caesarism in Europe. Byron was a spark of Lincoln’s dread of demagogues, mobs and militarists, and he stood in the background of Lincoln’s anti-imperial passion that opposed the war with Mexico and brooded about autocratic values in his own society.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

Lincoln’s letter to Joshua Speed, August 1855, quoted in Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln, p. 263.

It’s the republican and anti-imperial theme, the Byronic Lincoln, that comes through loud and clear in this conversation — that makes Lincoln a resource for this time, and that puts Fred Kaplan’s book so comfortably in Barack Obama’s hand.

Fred Kaplan: “words mattered immensely”

In 1848 as a one-term Congressman, Lincoln made a speech to the House of Representatives in which he brilliantly opposed the Mexican-American war. He believed it was an unjust war in which the United States, without sufficient provocation and with manufactured reasons, invaded another country and another culture for our own ideological and material reasons. He brilliantly went through the historical pattern and the events and made use of all his devices — anecdotes, funny stories, logical precision, humor, elevated passages of poetry and rhetoric — to oppose a war that was already underway and was extremely popular in the United States. It contributed to his being a one-term congressman and to what seemed to be the end of his political career. What Lincoln was very much against was the transformation of the American Republic, created by the Founding Fathers and given to us as a precious legacy, into an empire. “Westward Ho!” — the use of force to obtain influence and dominance over others and the acquisition of new territory. That of course cannot help but suggest to us now the problems we have been facing for some time in regard to American expansionism, the creation of empire…right down to the invasion of Iraq under what turn out to be false pretenses. One could read Lincoln’s speech in 1848 to Congress in and almost point-for-point in the last six years say that he must have been thinking how the United States in the Bush administration would invade Iraq with excuses similar to those that were made for the invasion of Mexico.

Fred Kaplan, with Chris Lydon, Boothbay, ME. February 9, 2009

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Nicholson Baker: history by hyperlink

A wing commander in the [British] Royal Air Force [in Iraq], J. A. Chamier, published his views on how best to deal with tribal rebellions.

The commanding officer must choose the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe, said Chamier, and attack it with all available aircraft. “The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle,” Chamier wrote. “This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt.” It was 1921.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 8.

Frederick Birchall, Berlin correspondent for The New York Times, published an article about Germany’s preparations for war. It was October 8, 1933.

Birchell quoted from a recent book by Ewald Banse, a teacher at the Technical High School in Brunswick, Germany. The book was called Wehrwissenschaft — “Military Science.” War was no longer a matter of marches and medals, Banse observed: “It is gas and plague. It is tank and aircraft horror. It is baseness and falsehood. It is hunger and poverty.” And because war is so horrible, Banse said, it must be incorporated into the school curriculum and taught as a new and comprehensive science: “The methods and aims of the new science are to create an unshakable belief in the high ethical value of war and to produce in the individual the psychological readiness for sacrifice in the cause of nation and state.”

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 44.

Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that England was officially at war with Germany… It was September 3, 1939.

Churchill’s mood, as he listened, wasn’t sad at all. He felt, he wrote later, a sense of uplifted serenity and a detachment from human affairs. “The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation,” he said.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 138.

Dorothy Day, the editor of the Catholic Worker, wrote an editorial called “Our Stand.” “As in the Ethiopian war, the Spanish war, the Japanese and Chinese war, the Russian-Finnish war — so in the present war we stand unalterably opposed to the use of war as a means of saving ‘Christianity,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘democracy.’” She urged a nonviolent opposition to injustice and servitude: She called it the Folly of the Cross.

“We are bidden to love God and to love one another,” she wrote. “It is the whole law, it is all of life. Nothing else matters.” It was June 1940.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.

“This ordeal by fire has, in a certain sense, even exhilarated the manhood and the womanhood of Britain,” [Churchill] said [in a radio speech, seven months into the German Blitz.] It had lifted them above material facts “into that joyous serenity we think belongs to a better world than this.”

“There are less than seventy million malignant Huns — some of whom are curable and others killable,” Churchill said. The population of the British empire and the United States together amounded to some two hundred million. The Allies had more people and made more steel, he said. The Allies would win. It was April 27, 1941.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.

Some people want to make an issue of method and form around Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, subtitled The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. But the real problem is, of course, his message. In an afterword on almost 500 pages of vignettes, Nick Baker offers his own judgment that the pacifists and other resisters had the right strategic answer to the war-madness of the 20th Century — people like Gandhi, the Quakers, ex-President Herbert Hoover who wanted to break the British food blockade on starving Europe in October, 1941 (“Can you point to one benefit that has been gained from this holocaust?” Hoover asked in a radio speech) and the diarist Howard Schoenfeld, who went to prison in Danbury, CT for standing against the draft and “against war, which I believe to be the greatest evil known to man.”

Human Smoke reads like a wall of Post-It notes — pointilistic dots on a 40-year canvas — which Louis Menand in the New Yorker, for example, says should not be confused with responsible history. I felt it, on the contrary, as a very familiar, virtually cinematic, quick-cutting, frame-shifting, angular and episodic style of story telling. It’s not so unlike the method of Ken Burns’ PBS epic on The War, which took its perspective from GI letters home and family memories today in just four American cities, like Waterbury, Connecticut and Mobile, Alabama.

The difference is that the Burns TV film summoned up and revarnished a lot of old feelings. Baker tears into every bit of received sentiment about the war, and about its heroes — Churchill most especially — in the book and our conversation:

He’s fascinating. He’s brilliant. He had a mind well stocked with poetry… So one doesn’t want to dismantle Churchill in the sense of saying he was not a great man. He has hugeness of personality, but he was a man of many phases… In this period that I’m looking at him, he was really a maniac. He was absolutely intent on widening the war and on getting as many people — his own citizens and other countries — involved as possible. I don’t think I’m being unfair to him. It’s just that if you quote him properly you realize he was just hell bent on this confrontation. As the prime minister of Australia [Robert Menzies] said on first meeting Churchill: “This man is a great hater.” It was so fascinating to watch Menzies’ visit. He first reaction was: “humorless… a great hater.” A few nights later: “he’s a great hater, but he does know an awful lot.” And then, late night, 2:30 or 3 in the morning, he’s up again listening to war stories from Churchill, and he writes, “the man has greatness.” Finally, he’s saying, “the Hun must be taught through his hide!” Menzies is now speaking the language of Churchill. So obviously this man Churchill has an incredible power over other human beings.

Nicholson Baker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, April 16, 2008

Human Smoke is a departure for Nicholson Baker, the high-stylist of The Mezzanine and of Vox, the phone-sex novel that Monica Lewinsky gave to Bill Clinton. He says, “I’ve always liked writing about the things that I hope make life worth living — the reflections on the edge of moving objects, or the little theories you develop when you shoelace breaks… So I tried to use my same approach, my method, in writing about probably the worst 5-year period in human history.”

And yes, Iraq was at the root of it all. Baker conceived the project, he says, “in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Second World War was repeatedly invoked as the one necessary war. I’ve never really understood the Second World War. It never made sense to me that we had to demolish cities in order to bring a regime down, but I always chalked it up to my own ignorance of history. But if this war is going to be invoked over and over again, then let’s actually look at it. How does it begin? What happened in what order?” And more pointedly: whence came the disastrous doctrines of exemplary war, strategic starvation, bombing and indiscriminate abuse of civilians, that persist in our own long war on Iraq? Baker’s format invites you to put Human Smoke down, annotate it, and keep picking it up. I for one cannot get its arguments out of my head.

Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is up there with Yo-Yo Ma among my heroic models of global citizenship. His brainchild, Global Voices Online, is my model of journalism transforming itself.

Global Voices Online (GVO) is an edited aggregation of blogs in roughly 200 countries. It’s a brilliant early stab at the notion of the world reporting on itself. I think of it as Ethan’s answer to the famous prayer of the great Scot, Robert Burns (1759 – 1796): “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursel’s as others see us!” … and, in the meantime, to see Chinese, Colombians, Nigerians and others in something like the variety of ways they see themselves.

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The conversation here is a master class with Ethan and the new managing editor of GVO, Solana Larsen, from our Monday-night new-media seminar with a score of Brown students.

The old cartoonish model of parachute journalism was a reporter from New York or London, with a crisis mentality and a short list of questions. The new model is hundreds, or thousands, of homegrown bloggers piecing together many perspectives — counting on a hidden hand of links to sort out differences and shape a “lede” on the story. Kenya and China present the most striking examples of how the new model is pushing back on the old one.

Solana Larsen

Solana Larsen: In the post-election violence in Kenya in January, we had a team of Kenyans who read the Kenyan blogosphere. Local media was shut down. No live reporing was allowed. Where did you go for information? Who was taking pictures? Who was taking cellphones and cameras out to where the violence was happening. Bloggers. So by collecting many different voices of bloggers we provided a feed, with round-the-clock updates on blogs, linking to the contributions people were making in the country, and working together with mainstream media to connect to bloggers they could talk to, with email addresses and phone numbers…

Ethan Zuckerman: What happened in Kenya was very interesting. The read on Kenya from global media at first was: Oh, here’s another Rwanda, right?. Everybody saw the violence in and said: Oh, were’ gonna see this nation go up like a torch. And the bloggers came back and said: no, no, no, you don’t get it. This is political violence. This is not ethnic and racial violence. This was a thrown election and people are furious about it, but we also see evidence all over the place of people in communities looking for ways to make ethnic and racial peace. Concerned Kenyan writers put on a concerted campaign to contradict certain narratives: that all African violence is tribal; that Africa is always on the edge of falling to pieces; that Kenya was coming apart. And at the same time they wanted to talk about a genuine electoral injustice. At ushahidi.com, for example, fires on the map of Kenya were the icons locating violence, and doves for locating peace efforts. Kenyans told their own story…

Solana Larsen and Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices Online at Brown University, March 10, 2008

The best-read story on Global Voices Online last year was about an otherwise invisible scam in China. It makes Ethan’s point that the next step for the citizen journalism is rewriting the mainstream agenda:

Ethan Zuckerman: If you are a New York Times reporter and you’re looking for news in China you are probaby looking for economic stories: how is the US slowdown affecting the Chinese economy? You’re always looking for democracy and repression stories, because there’s an endless appetite for it. And you’re probably looking for and Olympic stories: will they be reay? What will we see? How will it change them?

The story you probably would have missed unless you were reading the blogs was about ant farming. This is a story that didn’t get a ton of attention in the US, but should have.

It’s very difficult to invest in China today. If you’re an average Chinese citizen, the interest you get from your bank isn’t worth very much. It’s difficult to buy shares on the open market.

So what you have is basically the Albanian economy immediately after the fall of the Berlin wall. You have people investing in Ponzi schemes, and pyramid schemes. And one of the most popular ones has been ant-farming. Companies come to you and give you a cardboard box filled with of ants. You pay $100, $200, maybe $500 for the ant farm and the company agrees to buy ants from you as the ants grow up.

Before you conclude this is completely insane, we should mention that ants are used in a great deal of traditional Chinese medicine. There are these companies that look like formal, well run establishments that claim that they’re going to make herbal viagra out of ants.

What ended up happening was, in Shenyang, a rust-belt village, people were defrauded out of, literally, more than $100-million through these ant farm scams. In many cases people lost their life savings.

We started covering this story not because we’d decided to follow the Chinese economy, but because the Chinese blogosphere exploded. Lots of Chinese bloggers knew a friend or a family member who had lost money in ant-farming and wanted to tell the story. The Chinese government predictably reacted by shutting down a lot of these sites. In lots of cases we had the only videotapes of the evidence.

We got blocked for the first time in China. We’d reported on the arrest and detention of our own Chinese editor, and we started a human-rights campaign to get him released. That didn’t get us blocked. Ant farms were a different story, because people were taking to the streets

In the end the Chinese government stepped in, and offered to compensate people for their money lost. At then they executed the guy that was running the scheme. Consumer protection isn’t always our job, but it’s a really interesting function for telling you what stories to watch. What’s interesting in China is the economics that puts people out on the street. We wouldn’t have known that had we not been listening to Chinese citizens writing in Chinese and letting it filter up from the blogs and set our news agenda.

Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices Online at Brown University, March 10, 2008

William James: the mind of Pragmatism

…modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us. [Emphasis added]

History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war for war’s sake, all the citizen’s being warriors. It is horrible reading — because of the irrationality of it all — save for the purpose of making “history” — and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen.

William James, The Moral Equivalent of War, a speech at Stanford University, 1906,

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There’s something wrong with you if you’re not transfixed by Ken Burns’ version of World War II — the gallantry of the “melting pot” in combat, the industrial genius and shared sacrifice at home. But there’s something wrong with you if you’re not troubled by this telling, too. Why — as I ask Ken Burns in this conversation — after 60 years and the movie Saving Private Ryan, plus Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation and Studs Terkel’s The Good War among the best-selling books… why do we still hunger to hear again how good we are, or were? Why the mind-numbing stress on the American effort and American victory when our casualties were less than four percent of the allied losses? Why is the ratio of Russian to American dead in the war against Hitler such an obscure statistic? (Cold War historian John Gaddis of Yale put the imbalance at 90 to 1.) Furthermore, if our nostalgia watching Burns’ World War II is not just rose-colored swing-jazz sentiment but real longing for republican virtue, why aren’t we forced to ask ourselves: where did we lose it, and how might we get it back? Rest assured that the hugely gifted and mindful Ken Burns is equal to all my questions. In his anti-ironic earnestness, the exemplary filmmaker felt many of my misgivings long before I did. And he was ready, before we finished, to answer William James’ point straightforwardly.

Ken Burns: the mind of PBS’s The War

We do acknowledge this paradox of war. It is, you know, absolutely frustrating in that [war] is compelling as well as horrific, but we can arm ourselves with the danger. Would you give up and not paint Guernica? Would you not show what it is like because it wouldn’t work? …So let us not stop bearing witness to what takes place. Let us not stop organizing that material into some coherent narrative that suggests the possibility that we might mitigate or check that seemingly natural inclination toward the bellicose, toward the pugnacious. And that’s — I’m sorry to say, in some ways — the best we can hope for.

Ken Burns, documentarian of The War, in conversation with Chris Lydon at the First Parish Church, Cambridge. October 23,2007,

From Paros, among the Cyclades, in the deep blue of Odysseus’ Aegean Sea

On a Greek island that would do for paradise, we’re contemplating the near impossibility of rescuing the human habitat from earthly ruin.

The conference here is a sort of poor-man’s Davos. The 10th annual “Symi Symposium” is George Papandreou’s personal in-gathering of old and new friends among American and Euro progressives. Bill Clinton (absent this summer) is one of the old ones; I’m one of the new ones, invited because George Papandreou listens with pleasure, he says, to the podcast of Open Source.

George Papandreou may be the most comfortable professional pol I’ve ever watched. Born in Minnesota of an American mother who is here coaching him, he is the dynastic heir on his father’s side of the liberal tradition in Greek politics, and chief of the Socialist party that will be contesting parliamentary elections as soon as this Fall. George is a bridge-builder with Turks, a listener among intellectuals, a remarkably calm and confident practitioner in a political culture of shouters.

The main Symi conversation this summer centers on global warming, with guests prepared to take it in many directions. Among them: Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel economist from Columbia; Misha Glenny, British journalist and historian of Yugoslavia’s fall, now finishing a book on global organized crime; Gerd Leipold of Greenpeace International; Ronald Heifetz, the clinical analyst and coach of “leadership,” and his Kennedy School colleague at Harvard, Richard Parker, biographer of J. K. Galbraith; sprightly Anthony Barnett, the British founder of a great global website, a sort of HuffPo for grown-ups called Open Democracy; and Kemal Dervis , a Turkish progressive and Princeton-trained economist who’s now the head of the UN development program. At an informal session on Turkey’s admission to the EU, I volunteered because nobody else would that until Turkey fesses up to the Armenian genocide, one of the signal national crimes of the modern era, perhaps it shouldn’t be admitted to much of anything. Kemal Dervis was the first of a rather stunned table to come and give me a hug.

So the mood is comfy, not least because many guests have brought spouses, teenagers and tots who make all the grand survival issues cheerfully personal. But the most amazing relief for an American wanderer is to be sitting among self-styled Social Democrats whose reflex is to think and speak first and last of civil society and “the commons,” the general interest, “the republic,” as our Founders, or Plato, might have said.

Dismay and grief are the near background of our gab on global warming.

Greece’s tiny remnant of forest is ablaze not far from Athens. The fires seem to represent a culmination of well-tracked climatic and environmental trends, on one hand, and official fecklessness in confronting them, on the other. A Greek version of our Katrina has cast the country into shocked mourning: our band concert here on Paros was cancelled Thursday night because the usual music and dancing for visitors would have ill fit the Greek mood of loss and bitterness.

It’s an old story, like everything else in Greece. Henry Miller, in his book of Greek marvels, The Colossus of Maroussi, experienced and written just before World War 2, writes in a perfect anticipation of our idyll in a disaster zone:

Trees, more trees, that is the cry. The tree brings water, fodder, cattle, produce; the tree brings shade, leisure, song, brings poets, painters, legislators, visionaries. Greece is now, bare and lean as a wolf though she be, the only Paradise in Europe. What a place it will be when it is restored to its pristine verdure exceeds the imagination of man today. Anything may happen when this focal spot blazes forth with new life. A revivified Greece can very conceivably alter the whole destiny of Europe. Greece does not need archaeologists — she needs arboriculturists. A verdant Greece may give hope to a world now eaten away by white-heart rot.

Henry Miller, in my gift edition (from intern Colin Baker) of The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), page 48 in the New Directions paperback.

The context is very strange actually, as fraught as the whole numbing climate crisis. An early onset of the strong northern “Meltemi” wind nearly blew me off the pier in Athens, but there is not a windmill to be seen on the fantasy island of Paros where we talk of renewable energy. As on Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts, the local powers do not want to compromise their postcard scenery with scarecrows in the wind. Here in Greece, the brightest sun I’ve ever seen burns like a roaring furnace, but I haven’t glimpsed a solar panel anywhere.

Greece’s per capita carbon emissions are the worst in the European Union. At a break in our symposium with local politicians and citizens on Paros, George Papandreou commited himself and presumably his PaSoc party, to lightening Greece’s carbon footprint by getting it’s dirtiest coal — lignite — out of the power generating system. He didn’t say exactly when or how this would happen. There are more than 100,000 Greek jobs in lignite production.

So who is to say whether George Papandreou’s lignite line was a brave start or an empty gesture? Was it a trial baloon or the wisp of an illusion, in the spirit of Henry Miller’s pre-war dream of a “verdant Greece.” “I can see the whole human race straining through the neck of the bottle here,” Miller wrote in The Colossus of Maroussi, “searching for egress into the world of light and beauty. May they come, may they disembark, may they stay and rest awhile in peace…”

Good luck to all of us.

In sum, the catastrophe, the cure, and the conversation.

The sense of a week’s gab on global warming is that while the vision of cataclysmic climate change is unforgivingly sharp-edged, this cross-section of constructive minds has barely a clue — and not much confidence — about averting it. The consensus goal is to contain the rise of the globe’s temperature at 2 degrees centigrade in the 21st Century. A “50-50″ solution might just do it: meaning a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by the year 2050. But that 50 percent reduction for the world at large turns on an almost unthinkable 80 percent (!) reduction by the industrialized elite of today’s big-time carbon emitters, led by the US, which has had a hard time officially acknowledging the problem.

Nick Mabey, a congenitally buoyant “change agent” from London, threw up his hands at the conversions required in domestic and global alliances, in public and private investments, in universal definitions of justice — all unprecedented in human history. “Money and technology are not the real constraints,” Mabey observed. “We do not have the politics.” Kemal Dervis, another born problem solver, remarked darkly: “there’s a chance the world will be four times richer in 2050, and a chance that the world will be disappearing by then.”

And finally, there’s the public conversation. It leaps out of my deep media file on the climate crisis that the man who has captured the journalistic flag of the “green transformation” is much closer to being the problem than the solution. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has mapped a path of green politics to serve explicitly as a recovery road for politicians and pundits like himself who can’t yet explain how they got the Iraq war so wrong.

In an epic Times Magazine piece last April 15, “green” was Friedman’s word for the way America will “get its groove back.” The world may hate us a long time for Iraq, Friedman concurred with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it will love us for saving the environment. We will save the environment, it turns out, by a “more muscular green ideology” that embraces capitalism, patriotism, our car culture and an impatient rage to even the score with some Arab regimes we don’t like anymore, especially Saudi Arabia. It reads much more like the road into Iraq than the road past Iraq. And the final promise sounds like the nonsensical George Bush: “… green is not about cutting back,” Friedman writes. “It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a new industry.”

Friedman — of flat-earth fame — is now looking for a hill to charge, a “green” Iwo Jima, and a Green Generation to pair with the Greatest Generation. Block those military metaphors, Tom! More typical of the very few heroes of the climate fight so far are the women that got incandescent bulbs banned in Australia and plastic shopping bags banned in Ireland, the Mayor of London who is clamping down on autos, the scientists and the loony left activists like Greenpeace who have stuck to their guns on the problem itself. What the world would love from America — 5 percent of the world population producing 25 percent of the problem carbon — might be less talk of muscles and techno-magic, more modesty and an air of responsibility for the rising waters that have begun to drown Bangladesh.

Global warming, as Kemal Dervis wrapped it up here on Paros, “is an inherently multilateral problem. It may just be the topic that could bring us all together — and we badly need something like that.”

So let us Open Sorcerers make our own metaphors and find our own fresh grounds for talking about it.

Chris recorded a handful of the participants. The following is Chris’s interview with Gerd Leipold of Greenpeace International. Stay tuned for more conversations.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

[This show records at 4:00pm Eastern to accommodate our guests' schedules.]

America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many — This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he is going.

Ralph Ellison: Invisible’s Epilogue in Invisible Man.

Ralph Ellison [Photo Courtesy of Knopf Books]

Arnold Rampersad’s prickly, irresistibly absorbing reassessment of Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) — the writer, the man, the vision — reopens some fascinating gaps in the legend of the canonical African-American novelist, plausibly dubbed the Jackie Robinson of American high culture.

For the Open Source conversation, Rampersad implies key questions about us: how does the author of Invisible Man (his lonely masterpiece, which won the National Book Award in 1953, over his hero Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea) help us see the complexities of black-and-white America in 2007? What remains of the Ellisonian “tapestry” idea of our country and especially of its culture? This is the vision sustained and extended by Ellison disciples like Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis, or by Ken Burns‘ PBS series on the blues-and-jazz tradition as the foundation of American classicism.

Might the ghost of Ralph Ellison be noting today that the last two US Secretaries of State have been African-American — the incumbent a minister’s daughter in earshot of Birmingham, Alabama’s infamous church bombing in 1963; might he remark on the Kansan-Kenyan ancestry of the Democratic darling, Barack Obama; might he observe the irreversible advance of gumbo flavors in sports, idiomatic language, dance, humor, fashion, music and all the rest… and shout: “I told you so!”

Or might the mordant voice in Ellison himself be leading the hindsight argument that Invisible Man turned out to be the swan song of folk blues culture? … that the folk-art-to-fine-art alchemy of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington hasn’t worked that way for ages… that hip-hop represents a triumphant commodification of subversive messages coming not from authentic artists or considered experience but strictly from commercial media?

Might Ellison’s blacker-than-he critics still be peppering him, and all the high-tone culture buffs, with an angry listen-here? Stop confusing cultural eminence with political power, Ralph Ellison! Come back to Harlem from the Century Club in midtown Manhattan. Come back from (of all things) the board of Colonial Williamsburg! Pay less attention to art for art’s sake, and more to the real suffering, exclusion, poverty and despair among brothers and sisters you were happy to rise above!

The glaringest Ellisonian irony in Rampersad’s story is that Ellison, the fount of a profoundly enthusiastic, optimistic and inclusive affirmation of American possibility, was also one of the great naysayers of his turbulent times. No to black power. No to Black Arts, as championed by Leroi Jones, who became Amiri Baraka. (Jones’ sociology of black music, Ellison said in a review, “is enough to give even the blues the blues.”) No to black-studies departments on campus. No to anything that smacked even momentarily, even tactically, of black nationalism, much less black separatism.

A surpassingly brilliant writer on jazz — himself a music major at Tuskeegee and almost professional trumpet player — Ellison can be selectively quoted to suggest he became a supreme old fogey who rejected bebop in the ’40s, slashed Charlie Parker and mocked Miles Davis in the ’50s, and virtually despaired of black music’s future after the Beatles and other had pillaged it in the ’60s. It could seem that the grandest, most sophisticated theorist of American inclusion had come to stand for something else. Ellison did not endorse Toni Morrison for membership in the Century Club, and when she was finally inducted, he did not greet her there.

There is a drift toward nastiness in Ellison’s later life. Readers of Rampersad’s book have noted their suspicions that the deeper he got into Ellison’s story, the less he liked the man. The critic and biographer Phyllis Rose says why in the new American Scholar:

His impulse to exclude is the most unattractive thing about Ellison, and it is at the heart of Rampersad’s understanding of his character. He had a way of describing people whose values and talents were different from his own as ‘mediocre’ and seeing himself as objectively better. He had earned what he had gotten by effort and merit. Others wanted to be given what they didn’t deserve. The beneficiary of incredible luck and historical political momentum, he acted as though he was uniquely qualified for all the honors showered upon him. His scorn for ordinary black culture and black people may have served him well as a younger man, energizing his achievements, but it didn’t serve him well in later life, making him harsh and judgmental, leading him to exhibit an unbecoming absence of sympathy, and perhaps crippling his own imagination.

Phyllis Rose, The Impulse to Exclude, in The American Scholar, Spring 2007.

To my taste there’s nothing quite as compelling in the personal history here (including the agonized, unanswered questions about 40 years of wheel-spinning on the second novel he never completed) as the dense beauty and truth of what Ellison wrote. Do not the stubborn, sometimes cranky but entirely trustworthy wit, integrity and style of Ralph Ellison still ring true? On, for example, the voice of the immortal blues singer Jimmy Rushing, with whom Ellison grew up in Oklahoma City.

Steel-bright in its upper range and, at its best, silky smooth, it was possessed of a purity somehow impervious to both the stress of singing above a twelve-piece band and the urgency of Rushing’s own blazing fervor. On dance nights, when you stood on the rise of the school grounds two blocks to the east, you could hear it jetting from the dance hall like a blue flame in the dark, now skimming the froth of reeds and rhythm as it called some woman’s anguished name — or demanded in a high, thin, passionately lyrical line, ‘Baaaaay-bay, Bay-aaaay-bay! Tell me what’s the matter now!’ — above the shouting of the swinging band. Nor was there need for the by now famous signature line: ‘If anybody asks you who sang this song / Tell ‘em / it was little Jimmy Rushing / he’s been here and gone,’ for every one on Oklahoma City’s ‘East Side’ knew that sweet, high-floating sound…

For Jimmy Rushing was not simply a local entertainer; he expressed a value, an attitude about the world for which our lives afforded no other definition. We had a Negro church and a segregated school, a few lodges and fraternal organizations, and beyond these there was all the great white world. We were pushed off to what seemed to be the least desirable side of the city (but which some years later was found to contain one of the state’s richest pools of oil), and our system of justice was based upon Texas law; yet there was an optimism within the Negro community and a sense of possibility which, despite our awareness of limitation (dramatized so brutally in Tulsa riot of 1921), transcended all of this, and it was this rock-bottom sense of reality, coupled with our sense of the possibility of rising above it, which sounded in Rushing’s voice.

Ralph Ellison, “Remembering Jimmy,” (1958) in Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Random House, 2001.

Isn’t there yet much resonance and reality, much comfort and guidance in Ellison’s view of American life?

Arnold Rampersad

Professor of English, Stanford University
Author, Ralph Ellison: A Biography

Robert O’Meally

Professor of English and Jazz Studies, Columbia University
Author, The Craft of Ralph Ellison, and Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings

Adam Bradley

Assistant Professor of English Literature, Claremont McKenna College
Co-editor, Modern Library edition of Ellison’s posthumous novel, Juneteenth

Extra Credit Reading

Ralph Ellison, Ellison’s 1953 National Book Award Acceptance Speech: “If I were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.”

The Masticator, Jeff Wall and Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man, The Masticator, March 16, 2007: “Is staging elaborate photographs of scenes from great literature an art historical mis-step equivalent to filming and refilming great literature? Is rehashing stories that exist only in our minds a mere cheap trick that gets our approval only because we’re proud of ourselves for recognizing something we’ve read about?”

Saul Bellow, Man Underground, originally published in Commentary, June, 1952: “I think that in reading the Horizon excerpt I may have underestimated Mr. Ellison’s ambition and power for the following very good reason, that one is accustomed to expect excellent novels about boys, but a modern novel about men is exceedingly rare. For this enormously complex and difficult American experience of ours, very few people are willing to make themselves morally and intellectually responsible. Consequently, maturity is hard to find.”

Adam Kirsch, The Visible Ellison, The New York Sun, April 18, 2007: ” No charge is brought more often in Mr. Rampersad’s book than Ellison’s repeated failure to do anything to help younger black writers, even those who greatly admired him. Mr. Rampersad seems to have spoken to everyone who ever tried, and failed, to get Ellison to give them a blurb or a letter of recommendation.”

Jon Trott, Lower (for Ralph Ellison) – Black Writers, part 4, Blue Christian on a Red Background, February 9, 2007: “Exactly why Ellison flips my tumblers is hard to explain. But I think it has a lot to do with his being able to write a “racial” novel that nonetheless takes us past race into the heart of ourselves.”

Tom, A Life Made Visible: Questions for Arnold Rampersad, Review This Online, April 26, 2007: “I’m not sure if I like Ellison more after reading his life story–he was a difficult, flawed character in many ways–but seeing his single book placed in the center of a life filled with ambition and struggle makes it all the more impressive an achievement.”

Lindsay, Chaos and Imagination, we are such stuff as dreams are made on, April 11, 2007: “While the narrator at the end of the book might not know what his next step will be, Ellison’s next step is writing this novel… It seems to me that Ellison is trying to be a bridge between chaos and imagination, using one to understand the other.”

thomas, in a comment to Open Source, April 30, 2007: “If David Halberstam’s legacy is that we’ll always need journalists thrusting images of truth into our consciousness in the face of falsehood, Ellison’s is that we’ll always need novelists “thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization” and offering us alternative realities to our otherwise sad and brutal lot.”

VeritasRox, in a comment to Open Source, April 30, 2007: “The Invisible Man struggled similarly, as he failed to assume an identity compatible with Northern, Southern, Black, White, Socialist, or Capitalist expectations. As with his protagonist, it’s hard to label Ellision unless we’re willing to buck these easy identities and, without necessarily offering a satisfying explanation, crawl down into the sewers with him.”

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

Thanks to Charlotte Fleetwood for pitching this show.

One French guitarist. One hour. One century of American Jazz.

Ceci n’est pas une guitare
[jkibe / Flickr]

Alain Pacowski gives us the pleasure of hearing ourselves, at our best, as others hear us. He grew up in France — first Paris, then Biarritz — listening to jazz as the sound of America. His father played clarinet and saxophone in a band (and a period) inspired by Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, the Basie band. Alain mastered the jazz guitar, and embraced the music as his idea “le gai savoir,” a Nietzsche title meaning “Joy of Knowledge.” Alain Pacowski defines “le gai savoir” as the celebratory way, as he says, “to live, to be in life. It is the embrace of life through the quest for knowledge. It encompasses both art and foie gras. Jazz is a central and greatly underrated part of my idea of ‘gai savoir.’”

In America, Alain presides over a school, French in Boston, that teaches language, literature and culture. Out of school he talks about us. Alain’s distillation of jazz history — with a very personal selection of CD tracks — does not pretend (as Ken Burns’ did) to be definitive, but it’s a great deal more than a party trick. He will make anybody want to revalue American culture upward.

Conversation with Alain gives me the ecstatic lift I felt one mid-day in the Paris Metro, with my daughters in the ’80′s, when all of a sudden a tall young Frenchman in a long coat presented himself with an alto saxophone and announced: “Mesdames and messieurs, une chanson de Duke Ellington,” and broke into Prelude to a Kiss, unaccompanied. It was the most flattering of distant mirrors of home. I will ask Alain to play some Duke. Requests, anyone?

Alain Pacowski

Jazz guitarist
Founder, French in Boston

Alain’s Playlist

“Gut Bucket Blues” from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five Hot Fives & Sevens Vol. 1

“Petite Fleur” from Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur

“How Deep Is The Ocean?” from Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young’s Classic Tenors, Vol. 1

“Polka Dots And Moonbeams” from Count Basie’s Count Basie At Newport

“Shiny Stockings” from Ella Fitzgerald & Count Basie’s Ella And Basie!

“Sophisticated Lady” from Duke Ellington’s The Popular Duke Ellington

“Out of Nowhere (Take A)” from Charlie Parker’s Charlie Parker On Dial, Vol. 4

“Ruby, My Dear” from Thelonious Monk’s Best Of The Blue Note Years

“Red Top (Live)” from Erroll Garner’s Concert By The Sea

“Lament” from Miles Davis’s Miles Ahead

And we’ll try to find, for Charlotte Fleetwood, who in fact first suggested Alain: “Django” from Joe Pass’s For Django

Extra Credit Reading

Marc Sabatella, A Jazz Improvisation Primer, Outside Shore Music, 1992: “While listening to a piece, try to sing the theme to yourself behind the solos. You may notice that some soloists, particularly Thelonious Monk and Wayne Shorter, often base their solos on the melodic theme as much as on the chord progression. You will also notice that liberties are often taken with the theme itself; players such as Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane were especially adept at making personal statements even while just playing the head.”

Mr. Monkeysuit, Gypsy Jazz Sundays, Relaxin’ at Camarillo, February 25, 2007: “[Douce Ambiance is] the only recorded solo I’ve ever bothered to learn all the way through, and I did because playing anything other than Django lines over Hotclub tunes sounds rubbish unless you happen to be a genius bebop innovator or possess the wanker chops of Joe Pass. It’s an exemplary study in making melodic improvisations out of simple triads.

Mr. Monkeysuit, How to Be Achingly Hip, Relaxin’ at Camarillo, June 30, 2006: “How do you get those hip-sounding ‘outside’ tones that make jazz sound like jazz? If you’ll allow me to be egregiously reductive for a moment, modern jazz has educated us in a vocabulary of improvised melodies that begin diatonically, move briefly away from the key, and then resolve back in, producing a very familiar ‘in-in-in-in / out-out-out-out / in-in-in-in’ sort of sound.”

William A. Smith, I wish i spoke jazz, Thoughts & Musing O’Mine, September 16, 2006: “The beauty of jazz to me is the fact that I could spend hour upon hours trying to communicate the different stories of my life, good and bad, or I could play Count Basie’s ‘lil Darlin’ as performed by the Ray Brown Trio and those stories would unfold just like it they do each time to me. Jazz KNOWS me and that is perhaps why I love it so.”

robby, great jazz writing, robby’s myspace, January 19, 2007: “Jazz is insulated by such snobbery that too many people who haven’t heard it think you have to know about it to like it, i.e. that you have to know ‘how’ to listen to jazz. that’s a heap. to listen to jazz: use your ears. if you like what you hear, then you listened ‘right’ and you’re a jazz fan. if you don’t like what you hear, then you also listened ‘right’ but you’re not a jazz fan.”

via nother: Siddhartha Mitter, In search of jazz with ‘maximum creative risk’, The Boston Globe, March 22, 2006: “Something important is missing — a sense of risk, the idea that the musical product results from struggle, challenge, and resolution….Now that the scene is defined by music-school graduates, I feel nostalgic for the days when musical expertise was a hard-won trait,’ he writes. ‘When I hear mastery without risk, I feel ripped off.’

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

Will they survive? [the pink sip / Flickr]

Drowning polar bears and balmy Christmases are just the tip of the (melting?) global warming iceberg — and one of the best places to watch the full systemic effects of climate change is in the oceans, which are transforming in dramatic ways:

Acidification: It turns out that the sea, through gas exchange, soaks up over 40% of our annual CO₂ emissions. (Without the oceans, we’d already be living the global-warming disaster scenarios currently predicted for the second half of the century.) Dissolved CO₂ creates carbonic acid (H₂CO₃) — think teeth dissolving in Coca Cola. More carbonic acid means fewer free carbonate ions, which are a necessary building block of the calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) in shells and coral. The bigger significance of this? Coral reefs harbor some of the world’s richest biodiversity; and 25% of all marine life has some part of its life cycle associated with coral. As far as shelled organisms go, it spells potential catastrophe for everything from minuscule zooplankton to lobsters.

Hot water: Warmer water will alter habitat for many species, which will have to adapt or migrate to survive. It will also affect the stratification and upwelling of ocean water, which are critical for phytoplankton. Phytoplankton form the base of marine food chains. They live in surface water, where there’s enough light for photosynthesis, but they also need certain nutrients (iron, nitrogen, phosphate) that are inconveniently located near the ocean floor. So without upwelling, those nutrients don’t reach the surface, and phytoplankton die off. As it happens, warmer surface water can make upwelling much more difficult.

Winds: Climate change will alter weather and winds. And winds in turn affect ocean currents and upwelling. Update 31 Jan 07: There’s also the question of whether warmer ocean surface waters increase the intensity of hurricanes and typhoons.

Sea level: Island nations and low-lying coastal regions will be submerged because warmer water expands; and because melting glaciers and sea ice add more water to the tub.

Thermohaline circulation: This is the very slow global ocean current (with a fun name!) that, among other things, warms the northeast Atlantic and western Europe. There’s debate about how global warming will affect it; popular wisdom points to western Europe freezing.

Some of these disruptions are already directly observable, but many are still in the realm of complex modeling. The bottom line is that no one really knows what will happen to the oceans and the life they sustain; what’s clear is that change has already begun and that there’s no reversing it now, no matter what we do.

Scott Doney

Senior scientist, Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Michael Behrenfeld

Professor of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University

Nancy Knowlton

Professor of Marine Biology and Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity & Conservation, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD

Extra Credit Reading

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Darkening Sea, The New Yorker, November 20, 2006: “Humans have, in this way, set in motion change on a geologic scale. The question that remains is how marine life will respond. Though oceanographers are just beginning to address the question, their discoveries, at this early stage, are disturbing.”

Press Release, WBGU: German Advisory Council on Global Change: “To keep the adverse effects on human society and ecosystems within manageable limits, it will be essential to adopt new coastal protection approaches, designate marine protected areas and agree on ways to deal with refugees from endangered coastal areas. All such measures, however, can only succeed if global warming and ocean acidification are combated vigorously.”

James Randerson, Tropical seas are threatened by famine as warming quickens, satellite survey shows, The Guardian, December 7, 2006: “Global warming is creating an ocean famine in swaths of tropical and sub-tropical seas, according to research using nearly a decade of satellite data.”

Past global warming suggests massive temperature shift in our future, Mongabay.com, December 7, 2006: “During the PETM, ocean acidification likely caused a mass extinction of phytoplankton by reducing the availability of carbonate ions necessary for marine organisms to build calcium carbonate shells and exoskeletons. Many scientists are concerned that history could repeat itself, especially with current studies showing a steady increase in ocean acidity.”

Kenneth R. Weiss, A Primeval Tide of Toxins, Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2006: “Organisms such as the fireweed that torments the fishermen of Moreton Bay have been around for eons. They emerged from the primordial ooze and came to dominate ancient oceans that were mostly lifeless. Over time, higher forms of life gained supremacy. Now they are under siege.”

5:20

When we burn fossil fuels — when we get in our car and we turn it on and we burn gasoline, or we flick an electrical switch and a coal-burning power plant burns a little more coal — not all of the carbon dioxide that we release stays in the atmosphere. About a third of it actually goes into the ocean. And part of the way it goes into the ocean is it gets sucked up into this polar circulation, where you have this deep water sinking at high latitudes. So we’re actually going to be making the problem of the buildup of CO2 and global warming worse if the circulation of the ocean starts to slow down. We basically don’t get the ocean acting as a trap for all of those pollutants, because it’s just not mixing and moving around as fast.

Scott Doney

10:30

We’re already committed to a certain amount of climate change no matter what we do. We’ve emitted a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere already. Most of that, on thousand-year timescales, is going to end up in the ocean. It would be very hard to stop that. Similarly with warming, even if we were to cut off all carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere today, there would be some continued warming, and also some continued sea level rise into the future.

Scott Doney

14:55

And so we plugged all of the incubation data and our understanding of chemistry and our understanding of ocean circulation into some numerical simulations, ran them through a giant computer, and started to look at what the future might look like thirty years from now or fifty years from now. And what we found, at least for some of the coral species and some of the mollusk species, is that for large parts of the ocean, we could expect that those organisms would go extinct by the end of the century.

Scott Doney

29:15

One of things we have a very interesting record of is the changes in the number of anchovettes and sardines that are caught in the Pacific Ocean. And we have a record of these catches over a long period of time, like a hundred years, and we find that the abundance of the anchovies and the sardies fluctuates on cycles of around twenty-five years, and that those are very closely related to warming and cooling events. The warming events are favorable for a sardine regime, and the cooling more for an anchovette regime. So it’s a clear historical record showing the very tight correspondence between climate, productivity, and fisheries.

Michael Behrenfeld

36:10

The diversity of reefs is so high, it’s really hard to keep track of everything that lives with them. People estimate there are somewhere between one million and ten million species that live on coral reefs, but those estimates are crazily vague. They’re based on estimates of how many beetles there are in rainforest trees, on a partial count of things that were living in a tropical aquarium in Baltimore, so we actually don’t have a handle at all even on the basic numbers of species that live on reefs.

Nancy Knowlton

39:35

You can think of corals as the canaries in the environmental coal mine in terms of the health of marine ecosystems, and it is something that people who have gone to warm waters on their vacations to snorkel can relate to. And it’s not just that they’re bone-white, but actually that there’s no living coral at all, and anyone who’s been traveling to Florida or Jamaica or anywhere in the Carribean over the last thirty years has noticed this catastrophic change in these ecosystems.

Nacy Knowlton

47:20

We interact with the oceans a tremendous amount. A large fraction of the world’s population lives near the coast. We depend upon the ocean for fisheries, for transportation, for recreation, and it’s going to be a very different world thirty years, fifty years, a hundred years from now, from what we’re used to.

Scott Doney

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

Hello Capitol [dospaz / Flickr]

Ohio’s 15th congressional district presents one of the top opportunities for Democrats this year. The Columbus-area electorate is thinking about sending its long-term and influential Representative to the sidelines, and filling her position with a relative rookie. With a month to go, polls show first-term county commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy in an even heat with seven-term incumbent Deborah Pryce. If Pryce gets the boot it may not be because she played the game poorly but because she’s on the wrong team.

Republican Pryce, Chair of the Congressional Republican Conference, has been a shoo-in since she took office in 1993; in 2004 she garnered more than 60% of the vote. But now she’s fighting for her political life as Ney’s high crimes, Foley’s indiscretions and Bush’s plummeting approval ratings have turned her Grand Old Party into the elephant in the room. Even the Taft name, once a 24-karat commodity in Ohio, has turned to dross. Pryce is now billing herself as “an independent voice” in an effort to unhitch her wagon from the GOP star before she crashes and burns.

The 15th congressional district may have caught our eye, but it’s a stand-in for the Buckeye State. For generations a Republican stronghold, Ohio has been under single-party control for 16 years, and in 2004 it nailed the lid on Kerry’s presidential coffin. But this year democrats are making inroads in several districts.

What’s happening to a state where putting an “R” next to your name once guaranteed a win? Is a floundering GOP unique to 2006 or does this mark the end of a three-century-old tradition? Are stronger democratic candidates emerging or are they just lucking out?

Joe Hallett

Journalist, Columbia Dispatch

Paul Miller

Journalist and Blogger, Northwestohio.net

Russell Hughlock

Blogger, Buckeye State Blog

Matt Dole

Blogger, Lincoln Logs

Marie

Blogger, Ohio 15th District

Extra Credit Reading

David Rogers, Ohio House Race Is Brutal Test, The Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2006: “This district doesn’t offer a homogenous landscape, but rather is home to African refugees, a growing Latino community, university students and urban gays, all thrown together with corporate Columbus, upscale suburbs and century-old farmhouses, including one in London where President McKinley once spoke from the front porch.”

James Nash, Battle for Pryce’s seat heats up over link to Foley, The Columbus Dispatch, October 7, 2006: “The race for a central Ohio congressional seat, once fought mainly by surrogates, descended into furious hand-to-hand combat yesterday as challenger Mary Jo Kilroy took to the airwaves to accuse Rep. Deborah Pryce of coddling a former Republican congressman accused of exploiting male pages.”

Dan Horn, Ohio GOP ‘tired out’, The Cincinnati Enquirer, October 8, 2006: “The president was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book as calling GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell “a nut.” And a new poll showed [Ohio] voters trusted Democrats more than Republicans, not just on the usual stuff – education and the environment – but even taxes.”

Jim VandeHei and Chris Cilizza, GOP Scandals Dog Ohio Candidate, The Washington Post, September 27, 2006: “Gov. Bob Taft? He was convicted of illegally accepting gifts. GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell? He is getting trounced in the polls. Bob Ney, the current congressman? He admitted taking bribes and then checked himself in for alcohol rehabilitation.”

Ari Berman, The Ney Scandal Grows, The Nation, December 15, 2006: “It was the first of many favors Ney would perform on Scanlon’s and Abramoff’s behalf.”

Steve Eder and James Drew, Taft’s ethics inquiry will go to prosecutors, The Toledo Blade, August 12, 2005: “In response to public records requests, the governor’s office last week released documents showing Mr. Taft had accepted about 25 invitations to play golf since taking office in 1999.”

For more, check out the 2006 Election Wiki.