The Gene and its Discontents

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Notwithstanding its beautifully-rendered history of how scientists finally, after 2500 years of speculation, finally discovered and named the “gene” as the mechanism of heredity (Darwin had no idea of this mechanism, speculating about tiny things he called “gemmules”) for me, the most fascinating parts of The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukerjee (Scribner: 2016), are the materials on Eugenics. Originated by Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) in the late 19^th century, “eugenics” refers to the idea that humans should try to select the “best” genes from among human populations and selectively advance those “good” genes and eliminate the “bad” ones to produce a race of “perfect” humans. In a lecture at the London School of Economics in 1904, Galton proposed that Eugenics “had to be introduced to the national consciousness like a new religion.” Arguing that it was always better to be healthy than sick, and ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’ specimens of their kind, he proposed that mankind should be engaged in selectively breeding the best, the good, the strong. As Mukerjee quotes him: “If unsuitable marriages from the eugenic point of view were banned socially…very few would be made” (p. 73), the mechanism to promote ‘suitable marriages’ being a kind of golden studbook from which the “best” men and women could be chosen to breed their optimal offspring. No less a figure than H.G. Wells agreed with Galton, as did many others in England who even then were expressing fear about the inferior working classes out-breeding the better classes. Galton founded the Eugenics Review in 1909 to further advance his ideas, but died the next year before he could really get eugenics going in England. But other countries like Germany and the United States were already taking steps to follow Galton’s lead. Indeed, at the first International Conference on Eugenics that was held in London in 1912, one of the main presenters was an American named Bleecker Van Wagenen. Van Wagenen spoke enthusiastically about efforts already underway in the United States to eliminate “defective strains” (of humans) in America, one of which involved confinement centers—called “colonies”—for the genetically unfit. These were the target of committees formed to consider the sterilization of ‘unfit’ humans such as epileptics, criminals, deaf-mutes, and those with various ‘defects’ of the eyes, bones, and mind (schizophrenics, manic depressives, the generally insane.) As Van Wagenen suggested, 

Nearly ten percent of the total population…are of inferior blood, and they are totally unfitted to become the parents of useful citizens…In eight of the states of the Union, there are laws, authorizing or requiring sterilization (77).

            Van Wagenen was not kidding. The United States continued its misreading of Darwin and its enthusiasm for sterilizing the  ‘unfit’ well into the 20^th century, and it was not just the lunatic fringe that was involved. Mukerjee cites a famous case that came before the Supreme Court in 1927, Buck v. Bell. This case concerned one Carrie Buck, a Charlottesville, Virginia woman whose mother, Emma Buck, had been placed in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded after she was accused of immorality, prostitution and having syphilis. In fact, Emma Buck was simply a poor white woman with three children who had been abandoned by her husband. No matter; she was judged ‘unfit’ and, with her mother confined, little Carrie was placed in a foster home, was removed from school by her foster parents to work, and at age 17 became pregnant. Her foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs, then had her committed to the same State Colony for the Feebleminded on the grounds of feeblemindedness and promiscuity, where Carrie gave birth in March 1924 to a daughter, Vivian. But having been declared mentally incompetent, Carrie was unable to stop the Dobbs from adopting her baby. (One reason the Dobbs may have wanted the baby was that it later turned out that Carrie’s pregnancy was the result of a rape by the Dobbs’s  nephew). Carrie was quickly scheduled to be sterilized, and the Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell was brought to test the sterilization law—the 1924 Virginia Sterilization Act—to which Carrie Buck was subject, being already in a state institution for the feebleminded. Astonishingly, with the ‘great’ Oliver Wendell Holmes presiding, the Supreme Court voted 8 to 1 that the Sterilization Act did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s due process provisions—since Carrie Buck had been given a hearing, and since she was already confined to a state institution. Mukerjee cites some of the now-infamous ruling by Holmes:

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes…Three generations of imbeciles is enough (83-4).

In accordance with the Supreme Court’s ruling, on October 19, 1927, Carrie Buck was sterilized by tubal ligation. The fact that her daughter Vivian—the ‘third generation imbecile’ Holmes referred to—had performed adequately in the school she attended, being of decidedly average intelligence, did not save her; nor, for that matter, did it save Carrie’s sister Doris, who was also sterilized, without her knowledge, when she had her appendix removed. After this, sterilization was free to spread in the United States; in 1927, for instance, the great state of Indiana revised an earlier sterilization law to cover “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists,” with other states following suit. Pre-marital genetic fitness tests became widespread, as did Better Babies contests at State Fairs. With the help of practical ‘genetics,’ America was out to produce a race of perfect humans fitted to its already ‘perfect’ political system and ‘perfect’ society.

            The logical next step in the Eugenics movement came, of course, in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Mukerjee tells us, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, aka the Sterilization Law. Its premises were borrowed directly from America’s own program: “Anyone suffering from a hereditary disease can be sterilized by a surgical operation,” the diseases to include mental deficiency, schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, blindness, deafness, and other serious deformities (121). Any cases in dispute were referred to a Eugenics Court, whose rulings allowed for no appeal. With films like Das Erbe (the Inheritance, 1935) propagandizing in its favor, the law became a grim model of  efficiency, with 5,000 adults being sterilized each month by 1934. And as with its other better-known programs, the Nazis moved smoothly and efficiently to the next step—euthanasia. A Scientific Registry of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses was set up, devoted to euthanizing (i.e. killing) defectives permanently to ‘purify’ the gene pool. The Nazis coined a macabre euphemism to justify all this, by perverting Socrates’ famous dictum about “the unexamined life not being worth living” into its macabre opposite: the euthanized were characterized as having lebesunwertes Leben, ‘lives unworthy of living.’ Though at first the targets were limited to children under three, soon the net was extended to adolescents, then juvenile delinquents, and finally in October 1939 to adults, with Jews at first conveniently labeled “genetically sick.” Typically, the Nazis set aside a villa, No. 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin, as the official HQ of their euthanasia program, a place eventually known as Aktion T4, for its street address. Mukerjee at this point gives us one of his trademark elegant sentences: 

But it is impossible to separate this apprenticeship in savagery from its fully mature incarnation; it was in this kindergarten of eugenic barbarism that the Nazis learned the alphabets of their trade….The dehumanization of the mentally ill and physically disabled (“they cannot think or act like us”) was a warm-up act to the dehumanization of Jews (“they do not think or act like us.”) 125.  (my emphasis).

            There is other fascinating material in this altogether fascinating book, but I will leave most of that to other readers to discover. What I should like to stress is what Mukerjee himself stresses about genes, the genetic code, and eugenics. First, that genes, contrary to common perceptions, are not blueprints that form every element of an organism. Rather, they are like recipes—in that, just as recipes provide instructions about the process of cooking something, similarly, genes provide instructions about the process of building an organism. And as with a recipe, lots of chance or even intentional events can produce all sorts of variants. And, of course, the chance event par excellence, is the mutation. The problem is that humans, and especially humans who get seduced by the prospect of either eliminating “bad” mutations, or selecting for the “best” ones, misinterpret what mutations are and how they function in evolution. Citing the realization of Dr. Victor McKusick, Mukerjee makes the critical distinction that he wants everyone to grasp—that a mutation is a “statistical entity, not a pathological or moral one.” A mutation doesn’t imply something bad, like disease, nor even a gain or loss of function:

In a formal sense, a mutation is defined only by its deviation from the norm (the opposite of “mutant” is not “normal” but “wild type”—i.e. the type or variant found more commonly in the wild). A mutation is thus a statistical, rather than normative, concept. A tall man parachuted into a nation of dwarfs is a mutant, as is a blond child born in a country of brunettes—and both are “mutants” in precisely the same sense that a boy with Marfan syndrome is a mutant among non-Marfan, i.e., “normal,” children (264).

This distinction is critical, especially as regards the benighted attempts to create perfect humans or a race of normal humans. What we call “normal” is merely that which seems to be fitted to a given time, place, and conditions. To try to select for this “normalcy” is to completely misunderstand what genetics and evolution tell us. The “fittest” are not those who have won some sort of evolutionary or genetic race that is good for all time. They are simply those who may have turned out to be well-adapted to a given set of environmental and social circumstances. The worst conclusion one could draw from such “fitness” would be a) to decide to select only for those adaptations and exclude all others; or b) to try to interfere in genomes and eliminate all genetic variants in the vain hope that humans could be bred free of all illness or ‘unfitness.’ Conditions inevitably change. We have no idea what conditions might eventuate that might require some of the variants that we would like to prune out of existence—and prune is the accurate word here, leading us, as it does, to our modern mania to favor certain varieties of, say, apples or corn or wheat, while completely obviating the thousands of varieties that have evolved over centuries. This is a kind of ‘vegetable eugenics’ that many botanists have warned could leave the world without staple crops in the event of a pathogen that wipes out the now-dominant varieties. In short, a diverse gene pool is an absolute necessity for evolution to proceed.

            Yet despite the disfavor that eugenics has encountered in our time, the kind of thinking that fosters it is far from dead. Mukerjee cites a case from 1969, where a woman named Hetty Park gave birth to a daughter with polycystic kidney disease, leading to the child’s rapid death. Park’s obstetrician thereupon assured her that the disease was not genetic, and that there was no reason she should not have another healthy child. Park conceived again, but sadly the same result ensued; whereupon Park sued her obstetrician, for bad advice, and won. The court ruled that “the right of a child to be born free of [genetic] anomalies is a fundamental right.” Mukerjee points out that “this was eugenics reincarnated.” In other words, the court had ratified an expectation that the particular genetic mutation that caused harm to the Park family violated their rights—in effect, that that mutation should not exist. In the coming world of gene manipulation, we can expect that many mutations that now are classed as “abnormal” will be similarly classified and excised from existence. But as Mukerjee reminds us again and again, if we can expect anything, we can expect that conditions will certainly change. What appears “normal” now may one day be considered to have had only temporary value, suited to a very specific time and place. As Mukerjee notes at the end of his book, “Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution” (481). That is, though we have come to distrust and despise “mutations” that compromise what we consider ‘normal,’ evolution absolutely requires them, requires a gene pool that is as varied and diverse as it can be. Mutations are the lifeblood of such diversity, the bank on which evolution relies to adapt to always new circumstances. And equally important, evolution does not proceed according to human wants or needs or the wants or needs of any organism. Evolution proceeds according to what works, what is adaptable to a given circumstance at a given point in time. There is no good or bad adaptation. There is no good or bad mutation. There is no “normal” much less “best” genome or genetic code. No one can ever know what might be needed. So before humans go about eliminating that which appears negative or useless in any given era, they should think twice about eliminating precisely that which might one day prove salvational. Here is how Mukerjee puts it towards the end of his book:

“Gene editing,” the stem cell biologist George Daley noted, “raises the most fundamental issues about how we are going to view our humanity in the future and whether we are going to take the dramatic step of modifying our own germ line and in a sense take control of our genetic destiny, which raises enormous perils for humanity” (479).

Siddartha Mukerjee employs the perils of eugenics to serve as an object lesson that those ‘enormous perils’ of humans ‘modifying our own germ line’ are perils not just for humans, but for all the life on this planet.

Lawrence DiStasi

Nature's Trust

University of Oregon law professor Mary Christina Wood’s recent book—Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age (Cambridge U Press: 2014)—may be the most important book of our time. I say “may” because I’m not sure how many people can wade through its details about the law itself, the perversion of environmental laws that were supposed to protect us, the court cases and related strategies that offer some hope, and the critical ecological problems we all face. But the more people who can, the more people who realize that natural law really does vest power in we the people who are supposed to be its beneficiaries, the more chance we as a species may have of fending off the environmental catastrophes about to overtake us.

            In fact, though, Wood’s thesis is fairly simple to state. All law, and all environmental law in particular, depends on and stems from the legal principle known as the public trust doctrine. Here is how Wood puts it early in her book:

With roots extending back to early Roman law, the [public trust] doctrine rests on a civic and judicial understanding that some natural resources remain so vital to the public welfare and human survival that they should not fall exclusively to private property ownership and control. Under public trust doctrine, natural resources such as waters, wildlife, and presumably air, remain common property belonging to the people as a whole. Such assets take the form of a perpetual trust for future generations. The public’s lasting ownership interest in this trust vests in both present and future generations as legal beneficiaries.

            Public trust law demands that government act as a trustee in controlling and managing crucial natural assets (14). (emphases added)

What this means, again, seems simple, and, once expressed, self-evident. The government is, in effect, a trustee of the natural resources comprising the public trust. It has strict fiduciary obligations (like a regular trustee) to promote the interest and welfare of the beneficiaries—in this case, you and me and all the citizens of the state or nation in question. And if government or its agents do not act in accord with their obligations to preserve and protect the citizenry and its resources, then it and they can be sued to do so, forced by the judicial branch of government—the judges—to do their primary job. If government permits corporations to pollute the waters, then it has to take measures to stop the pollution and clean the waters. If it permits corporations to use and sell fossil fuels that promise to bring on the environmental disaster of climate change or global warming, then it can be forced to institute measures to stop the pollution and reduce the CO₂ level.

            Ok, you may say. So why doesn’t the government do this? After all, we have a whole bevy of environmental laws that were passed in the 1970s: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the National Forest Management Act, and a host of others. We have the EPA and the FDA and more government agencies than we know what to do with. And yet, the pollution continues apace, the EPA has proposed but still not finalized rules to cut greenhouse gases, and corporations continue to get permission to use pesticides and GMOs and fossil fuels and explosives to blow up mountains to get coal, and dangerous methods for fracking or drilling for oil in complete disregard of the waters, both coastal and in aquifers, that they foul. How can this be? The answer—and Wood cites chapter and verse about this—can be found in one or two little loopholes in those wonderful environmental laws. The first is something that has become increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention in recent years: the lawmakers and bureaucrats who implement the laws in government agencies are pretty much in the pockets of major corporate donors. These big donors, most notably in the polluting industries like oil and coal and chemistry, lavish their wealth on the politicians and agency heads who are supposed to protect the natural trust—the environment. And they are enabled by the other big toxic loophole, agency discretion. Discretion means that agencies like the EPA are given the responsibility to implement the laws passed by Congress, and this generally means ruling on requests by big corporations for permits to pollute—to violate, to whatever degree they rule is permissible, the air or the water or the soil that the agencies are supposedly protecting from such violation. Agencies have this discretion, and they use it most often to favor the polluters rather than the general public. Why? Because the polluters lobby them, wine and dine them, and often hire them (the bureaucrats ruling on their requests) for big salaries when they leave government service. In this way, as one writer puts it, “our most promising environmental bills were deformed and crippled by toxic loopholes.” Or, as Mary Wood summarizes it: “the very system intended to restore Nature actually kills Nature, while delivering a heavy dose of death and despair to innocent citizens” (67). 

            In practice, this often takes the form of manipulating or delaying regulations. As an example, Wood cites the delay involved in regulating lead in gasoline: “It took sixty years for EPA to ban this known neurotoxin from gasoline. For industry, every year of delay buys another year of profit from unregulated activity” (69). Another example comes from the notorious Bush II Administration (the all-time champions at interfering with environmental science to please their corporate cronies). This one involved the “fill rule”, which moved mining waste from one regulatory program to another by characterizing the waste as ‘fill’—a ploy that allowed it to switch from the prohibitive section 402, to the more permissive section 404. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called this change “the most significant weakening of the Clean Water Act in its entire history.” It not only permitted the Coeur Alaska Mining Company to dump 4.5 million tons of toxic metal tailings into a 23-acre subalpine lake in the Tongass National Forest, raising the lake bottom 50 feet (originally only 51 feet deep); but it also allowed the rush of mountaintop removal to proceed, with the “fill” from over 500 blasted mountaintops obliterating Appalachian valleys and fouling 2000 miles of rivers and streams. And why? So coal companies could get to their precious CO₂-spewing fossil fuel. And why again? Because the coal industry was the largest single contributor to Bush’s presidential campaign; and because, as payback, Bush appointed Stephen Griles (formerly a VP for a Virginia-based coal company) as number two official in the Department of the Interior, who then pushed through the still-operating ‘fill’ rule. A final note on Griles: charged with ethical violations, he resigned, and was then imprisoned for illegalities in yet another scam.

            That brings us to the Nature’s Trust framework as the solution. Current politics and law thinks of Nature as something amorphous, something that “corporations can lawfully plunder with government’s blessing,” by means of permits. By contrast, a trust framework “characterizes natural assets as the public’s inherited natural wealth that, with decisive justice, should pass down through the generations of citizens.” Government has a fiduciary obligation to protect this common wealth, regardless of politics or even normal property rights, for no one has the right to destroy or pollute or otherwise damage this natural wealth. And if the trustees—the agencies of government—do not abide by their fiduciary obligation to protect it, then they must be forced to do so by legal means. More than that, this obligation extends to conserving the natural trust for future generations, to restoring the trust where it has been damaged (recovering damages from third parties that have done the damage), and to “refraining from alienating (i.e. privatizing) the trust except in limited circumstances” (167). One more extension, and this is fundamental to our current situation regarding climate change: a trustee faces liability for damages if he “should have known of danger to the trust, could have protected the trust, but did not do so” (168). To not do so, to adopt a do-nothing policy regarding climate change as the U.S. government has been doing for decades, is to stand in breach of trust, in breach of its fiduciary duty to its citizens and to future generations.

            And here is where Wood adopts the key Nature’s Trust principle in her book. If, as she clearly believes, “the most urgent environmental imperative on the planet” is some form of atmospheric recovery from the greenhouse gases heating our planet, then the government—all governments—must immediately embark on a recovery program. Recovery, here, means “drawing down atmospheric greenhouse gas levels” in order to reach some form of climate equilibrium. Following the calculations of Dr. James Hansen, this means drawing out 100 gigatons of carbon already in the atmosphere, and at the same time, phasing out carbon emissions by getting to a “6% annual reduction in carbon emissions beginning in 2013.” That’s reducing CO₂ emissions by at least 6% each year! But Wood doesn’t just recommend that governments do this, and hope they will. She, as a lawyer, takes seriously the role of the courts in forcing the government to do this. This is why one of the major efforts proceeding from her work is the Atmospheric Trust Litigation that began in 2011. It is part of a larger-scale planetary movement to enlist all governments as co-tenant trustees of the atmospheric trust. And it enlists citizens to exert their rights as beneficiaries in “bringing suit against their governmental trustees” if they fail to protect their atmospheric trust. This has already happened, and it may be the most heartening development in the trust arena.

            Starting in May 2011, a 16-year-old named Alec Lootz sued the Obama Administration in federal court for not acting on global warming (he had formed Kids v. Global Warming at age 12). His complaint said in part: “Americans and the world as a whole face impending catastrophe.” Several others, both older and younger, brought similar lawsuits: Jaime Lynn Butler, a 10-year-old Navajo, sued the governor of Arizona. Akilah Sanders-Reed, a 16-year-old, sued the governor of New Mexico, citing vanishing water supplies that made farming impossible. Kelsey Juliana, 15, and Olivia Cherniak, 11, sued the governor of Oregon, listing things like the 50% loss in snowpack that threatens the region’s water supplies. Even beyond this, similarly courageous young people filed lawsuits in every U.S. state, in Ukraine, and elsewhere, eventually coordinating their campaign in the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust (see ourchildrenstrust.org), that “declared a sovereign trust duty to protect the atmosphere needed by the youth and future generations for their long-term survival.” They demanded that the courts enforce Climate Recovery Plans to reduce CO₂ emissions by at least 6% annually, starting in 2013. Of course their suits were denied, and the recovery start date has long since passed, but they have forged on, filing appeals in higher and higher courts and more and more jurisdictions. At last count they had more than forty pro bono lawyers working on their behalf, as well as affidavits from dozens of renowned scientists. James Hansen’s amicus brief said, in part: “Failure to act with all deliberate speed in the face of the clear scientific evidence of the danger functionally becomes a decision to eliminate the option of preserving a habitable climate system” (229). And most important of all, they leveraged the undeniable appeal of youth seriously concerned that their inheritance will be a ruined planet no longer habitable for their generation of humans. Their appeal is moral, emotional, and firmly situated in the trust doctrine.

            What is needed now, of course, is more support for these and the many other initiatives that Wood cites in her book. What is needed is a growing realization by every human on this planet that the climate threat, as scientists have repeatedly and urgently described it, is human-caused, is dire and growing rapidly towards an irreversible tipping point. And what is needed, as Wood again and again emphasizes, is direct action on the part of as many people as possible, not just in the courts, but in the streets, demanding that the government and its agencies do what they are clearly obliged to do: protect the natural trust that all life and all commerce depends on. This public action is needed to pressure not only the government, but the courts as well, which are keenly aware of the public mood. Courts have responded, as Wood points out again and again, in past cases, protecting the public trust in protecting Lake Michigan from the railroads’ attempt to block access to its shores; in Lake Champlain to prevent owners from selling a priceless shoreline to developers; in Manila Bay to force the government to clean up what had become a polluted, damaged public waterway; and in many other places and cases. And they have done it in the face of the usual arguments about the “rights” of property owners to do whatever they choose to ‘their’ lands. No, says Wood. And No, have said numerous jurists in cases where this was the issue. A statement Wood cites from Justice Christopher Weeramantry makes the point firmly: “Land is never the subject of human ownership, but is only held in trust, with all the connotations that follow of due care, wise management, and custody for future generations” (331). Which puts me in mind of a statement I once heard from the great Italian American writer, Angelo Pellegrini, when he described the attitude that was instilled in him by his father in Italy: “Always leave the land in better condition than it was when you got it.” That is exactly the point of Mary Christina Wood’s book: all land, no matter who owns it, is held in trust.  And if it is necessary, as it obviously is, to sue the government and its agencies to force them to live up to their duty to Nature’s Trust, then that must be done. If it is necessary, and it is, to besiege Congress and force them to enforce the rules already implemented, then it must be done. For it is crucial to remember that the statutes that are needed to enforce even the recovery of the atmosphere from CO₂ pollution already exist. Wood cites the instance during the Bush administration when the agency head of the EPA, Stephen Johnson, had actually proposed a finding of endangerment regarding CO₂ to the White House Office of Management and Budget, concluding that human carbon emissions caused global warming. Jason Burnett, Associate Deputy Administrator of EPA in fact sent this formal finding as an email attachment to the White House. But the White House, knowing that if it opened the email it would become part of the public record, simply let it lie unopened and instead called Administrator Johnson and “instructed him not to issue the finding,” an order with which he complied. (All of this came to light first, when Burnett resigned in protest in June 2008 and disclosed the details to Congress; and second, when Johnson in 2011 made public a confidential letter he’d sent the White House on January 31, 2008, urging EPA action on endangerment. Wood cites from that letter:

The Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision still requires a response. That case combined with the latest science of climate change requires the Agency to propose a positive endangerment finding…The state of the latest climate change science does not permit a negative finding, nor does it permit a credible finding that we need to wait for more research (43).  

There was no response from the White House then, nor has there been real, sufficient action to this day. Rather, the smokescreen concerning “doubt” about the science has continued. Such dishonesty, such chicanery, such a complete breach of the fiduciary obligation of the executive branch and its agencies, as well as the Congress, cannot be allowed to continue. The people must rise up, bring lawsuits against the bought-off politicians and administrators responsible, and keep suing them until the courts finally issue orders to force government agents and elected officials to comply with their duty. And perhaps send some of them, up to and including the president, to prison for failure to act. In the emergency that now confronts us, nothing else will do.

(To see Mary Christina Wood in action, you can consult several Youtube videos of her speeches, and, in particular, her appearance on Bill Moyers’ last program in January 2015, also on Youtube. Google ‘Mary Christina Wood, video.’)

Lawrence DiStasi

Blog 5-23

I’m not sure what I’m going to write about today, so I’ve titled this simply, “Blog 5-23.” Not that there aren’t ample things to write about. The news about the latest event where the Repugnant candidates for President were speaking, for example, gives us an accurate preview of what the dominant theme will be: Obama was the one who screwed up Iraq. Obama’s responsible for the latest ISIS triumph in Ramadi. Not George W. Bush, the president they hardly mention anymore. Oh no. Georgie had it all right, had Iraq conquered and pacified—until Barack Hussein came along and withdrew the troops. It’s amazing, really. Completely ignoring the fact that it was the illegal American invasion of Iraq that blew the place up, that destabilized the nation and incited the sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia populations that had always gotten along, that it was Bush himself who negotiated the timeline for American withdrawal, these yahoos appeal to the great American worship of weapons and say ‘we had ‘em beat until that wuss Obama came along and removed all our power. And then ISIS burst into the power vacuum Obama created and took over half the damn country we spent so much life and treasure liberating.’ But wait! Where did ISIS come from? Wasn’t it from the remnants of al Quaeda in Iraq? And isn’t it the case that al Quaeda never even existed in Iraq until the United States destroyed the damn country with its invasion? And isn’t it also the case that the reason ISIS (morphed from the al Quaeda that never before existed) has triumphed so easily is also due to the stupidity of the Bush adminisration’s strategy of canning Saddam’s existing army and bureaucracy, almost all Sunnis, to a man? Isn’t the area ISIS has rolled over almost fully Sunni territory, those Sunnis who were so completely destroyed by the American invasion that they have opted to cooperate with ISIS in order to get back at the Shia-dominated government America put in place? Duh. Facts. Just dull old facts. Who gives a damn about facts? Only eggheads and some democrats. The important thing in an election is emotion, so appeal to the emotional outrage over America’s great ‘handiwork’ being destroyed, over a band of ragtag barbarians overrunning one city after another in defiance of the greatest military power in the world, US, and blame it on the black wuss in the White House.

            But it’s not only that simpleminded diversion that outrages. Because no one can avoid feeling revulsion at the other side, too. At the group calling itself The Islamic State in Syria, or in the Levant, or whatever they’re calling themselves. Fanatics. The world seems increasingly to be falling into the hands of fundamentalist fanatics. It seems that a simple, fundamentalist religious stance is the only way masses of people can be galvanized these days. Yearning for certainty in a world that seems always on the brink of catastrophe, the masses of humans seem zombified except in response to a fanatic reversion to a simplistic worldview. Follow sharia law. Arm oneself to the teeth. Execute those who disagree. Roll over every departure from that simple certainty, slaughter coldly those who don’t conform, and count on bliss in a future life. And now, horror of horrors, these wackadoos have taken over one of the most ancient and precious World Heritage Sites on the planet, Palmyra. Take a look at the ancient ruins left from long centuries of occupation on the oldest of trade routes.

There are Aramaic ruins, Babylonian ruins, Mesopotamian ruins, Roman ruins—each one more precious than the last. This “Bride of the Desert” is like some fantasyland of antiquities in the desert. And now it is controlled by a gaggle of lunatics. Contemplating what these image-destroyers will do to these remnants of “infidel art” is enough to make one weep. And yet, there they are in force, already having taken control of the antiquities museum, posted guards outside, executed everyone they could find with any connection to the Syrian government, and impelled anyone with concern for his head and the means to do so, to flee.

            Whether there is anything to stop them now is an open question. But one thing that comes to mind is this: these Wahhabi warriors are supported, or were originally, by the Gulf monarchies, Sunnis all, despotisms all, that are our purported allies—chief among them Saudi Arabia. Couldn’t a little American pressure cause the Saudis to use their influence (if any is left) with their proxies? Because that’s what they are: proxies for the Sunni monarchies in their conflict with Iran (a Shia nation) and Syria (whose Alawite minority, also Shia, controls the last secular government in the Middle East). It’s a bit like the support the United States gave to the mujahideen in Afghanistan and for a similar proxy purpose: to defeat our Soviet enemies. And the Saudis will live to regret their machinations, just as the U.S. has lived to regret its build-up of the mujahideen into al Quaeda. But in the meantime, couldn’t the U.S. put pressure on our oil-wealthy allies and get them to at least spare the antiquities in Palmyra? But then, that might make too much sense, and the world lacks sense more than anything else these days.

            As we see in yet another outrage that occurred recently. Competely different, but similar in its possible effects. I’m referring to the move by the allegedly environment-friendly Obama Administration to approve Shell Oil’s petition to drill in the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic. Talk about an outrage. Talk about ignoring the plea of every sane climate scientist to forego any more drilling of the world’s most dangerously-sited oil. Talk about ignoring the history of accidents in Alaska, in Santa Barbara, in the Gulf of Mexico, all of which tell us that sea-floor drilling is a recipe for disaster. Especially in this fierce sea, miles off the coast, with perilous conditions that would make an oil spill a disaster beyond anything we’ve ever seen—and we’ve seen a lot. Especially since, after the initial approval in 2012, Shell’s Kulluk oil rig ran aground and had to be towed to safety. And yet. President (I love the environment) Obama has just given his second presidential approval to Shell to drill in this (so far) pristine ocean. It is baffling. It is heartbreaking. It is mystifying. It is enough to make one want to vaporize these fools.

            But after all, it’s not that much different from Palmyra, is it? The ocean. There’s so much of it. The desert. So much of it, too, and most just a wasteland. Antiquities. So many of them, and so old and in such bad condition they can’t be occupied by living humans in any case. What good are they? What good is the ocean? What good are all the creatures that live there? We’ll soon be able to synthesize all of the nutrients and vitamins and elements they contain. Just as we’ll soon be able to clone any missing species. What’s the big deal?

            Ah humanity. Shiva the destroyer of worlds must be exulting about now.

Lawrence DiStasi