The Global Warming Fistacuffs

The right wing is apparently still on the rise, with its xenophobia, its nationalism, its ignorance and fear. This, like el Niño weather patterns, happens periodically. What makes complacency impossible this time is the planetary threat that looms in the setting with an urgency never understood before. That the alt-right can surprise no one. That its periodic recurrence of high-pitched rage has been given a boost by propagandist media and social networks means that its strength at this moment is particularly ominous. But in the normal course of things, it would subside. It would lead, again, to some catastrophic equivalent of the holocaust or Hiroshima and more compassionate alternatives would afterwards emerge. History does not repeat itself in the same way ever, but there are patterns of closing in and opening up just as there are patterns of boom and bust in a capitalist economy. But just as those economic patterns cannot persist forever, and that at some point that economy will fall of its own accumulated weight, and just as the universe cannot expand forever, these destructive patterns of right-wing fear and liberal recovery cannot endlessly repeat. At a certain point the squeezebox breaks. The threat this time, however, is not structural, it’s not the wearing out of the parts. It comes from the outside. Everything the right wing supports leads it to ignore the heating of the earth. It wants to hurry to accomplish as much as it can while it has the stage. Chaos is its friend. That liberal cause of species survival, which would seem to be a nuisance, even that can—by attacking it with the empty derision of made-up terms like "P.C."—even that can become an asset in the right-wing assault on compassion, decency, basic humanity. Global warming is now the mis-en-scene where our ultimately meaningless political battles take place. A sword fight in a burning building. And nothing will be done to put out the fire, and not because both sides are so intent on defeating the other that neither will call the fire department, but because one side won’t let the other call, blocks every move toward the phone, laughs “you can’t call until you defeat me, and by then it will be too late.”