Mother Nature and Other Problems

On the Canadian wildfires, Hurricane Katrina, CBS News, an idiocracy’s English, and more

From Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal 2013 (Wikimedia Commons)

The other day, I was writing about the Canadian wildfires and their effects on the United States—in my home state of Michigan, for example, and in New York City, where I’ve lived since the ’90s.

People have broken out their face masks for the first time since the pandemic!

Anyway, someone responded to me by saying, “Mother Nature, doing her thing.”

That kind of arrested me. We are so used to blaming someone—and I don’t mean Mother Nature. Usually, the blamees are our political enemies.

There is a song in American culture: “Blame Canada.” It’s a parody song. The reason it’s funny is that Canada is such a benign and blessed neighbor of ours.

Blaming Canada for the ills of the world is … well, parodic. Isn’t it?

The Trump administration has been doing its best to make a villain out of Canada. Here is a video of Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, laying into Canada once more. The country’s negotiators, he says, are “some of the most dishonest people I’ve ever met.” They “stab you in the back,” etc.

In any event, the wildfires, Mother Nature, and blame put me in mind of 2005 and Hurricane Katrina. In September of that year, I wrote a piece called “All the Uglier: What Katrina whipped up.”

Let me do a little quoting:

The first response of many to the destruction of New Orleans and other areas was to revile George Bush—and conservatism and Republicans and much else. Obviously, there are legitimate criticisms of the government, at all levels, to be made. In fact, a (conservative) friend of mine cracked, “We said we’d make Iraq look like the United States, and so we have.” But legitimate criticism has often been lost in spiteful lunacy. Katrina was an occasion to rehearse all of one’s fears and opinions and obsessions about the War on Terror, global warming, capitalism, the federal budget, race. Katrina was an invitation to bust a political gut.

One of the worst offenders was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom I quoted at some length. A man associated with the Left then, he had written an article for The Huffington Post. The villain for RFK Jr. was not a hurricane, or Mother Nature, but global warming, brought about by bad people.

What ever became of him, by the way?

As far as I can tell, Kennedy does not bang on about global warming anymore. It was his No. 1 concern. Today, he is a hero and fixture of the Republican Party. This is one of the strangest twists in a twisted political era.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, I was on the radio with another Katrina, Katrina vanden Heuvel, of The Nation. (Beautiful woman, incidentally.) She was banging on about Bush, the Republicans, etc.

At one point, all I could think to say was, “It was a hurricane.” Vanden Heuvel said, in a tone with a hint of concession in it, “I know.”

***

I have given you a memory of 2005. How about a memory of 1985? A little Googling led me to this report in the Los Angeles Times, published on 1/10/85 (shortly before President Reagan’s second inauguration, I might note):

Sen. Jesse Helms is preparing a letter campaign to 1 million conservatives urging them to buy stock in CBS to take control of the television network and “become Dan Rather’s boss.”

(Dan Rather was for many years the anchorman of CBS News.)

Reading about CBS and its transformation a few days ago, I thought, “Helms must be smiling somewhere.”

***

As long as I’m dredging up ancient history, let’s talk about character—as in “character in office” and “public virtue” and virtue at large. Character was a big, big deal where I lived, i.e., in the conservative and Republican world.

Young people may not believe it, but it’s true. I was there.

“Character is destiny,” we said. Peggy Noonan wrote a book called “When Character Was King.” It was about Reagan. William F. Buckley Jr. gave a speech titled “When Character Counted: The Importance of Ronald Reagan.” I could go on.

After 2016, everything was different. People who had spent years banging on about character now accused others of “moral preening” or “moral vanity.” People who had been the biggest scolds you ever saw now tagged others as “Trump scolds.”

They turned on a dime. I watched it happen, all around me.

I thought of this about-face when reading this article:

CNN reporter and anchor Kaitlan Collins has once again been targeted by President Donald Trump in a brutal jab about her appearance.

Trump compared Collins’s physical likeness to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney during his White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech on Friday night.

The president’s jibe did not end there, however, and on Sunday, he took to Truth Social to make the comparison between male-born Mulvaney and the CNN star again.

He shared an image of Collins’s face superimposed on Mulvaney’s body …

Conservatives were right the first time—about character and many, many other things. In fact, that would make a good title of a book: “Right the First Time.”

***

Wasn’t I mentioning George Shultz in my column on Tuesday? I believe I was. Anyway, he has come to mind again.

(For the uninitiated, Shultz was secretary of state in the Reagan administration. Under Nixon, he had been labor secretary, budget director, and Treasury secretary.)

An op-ed in the Washington Post began,

Yale University’s board of trustees could soon decide on a possible ‘deal’ with the Trump administration … But to assign responsibility to a ‘board of trustees’ is to assign it to no one. Yale’s board members will own—as individuals—whatever Yale does next.

One day, Secretary Shultz said something like this: “People tell me, ‘The White House’ is calling. I say, ‘Who at the White House? The White House is a building.’”

I loved that.

***

Care for a little language? A friend of mine shared with me a grotesquely ungrammatical sentence from an American newspaper. She said, “How could an editor have allowed that?”

I could only respond that the culture has declined.

Earlier this year, the secretary of homeland security said the following about Trump, to a television interviewer: “He’s the strongest leader of your and I’s time. Period.”

Period.

I mean, what can you do? Idiocracy is the state of the Union. If Bill Buckley were working today, he’d be denounced as an elitist and snob—which he was, by the kind of people who came to dominate the Right after he left.

I can’t end on so sour a note, can I? No, but I will. Bless you! Later.