OK, it has met all the qualifications; it has passed all the tests: Winter 2012 is now officially ridiculous. I mean, fashionably late is one thing, but if you were invited to an office wine-and-cheese TGIF that started at 6 would you still be home dithering over what to wear next February?
Of course we must allow for a certain amount of variation in the seasons but this one has abused the privilege.
And it’s not just us, it’s 90 percent of the country; they’re wearing short sleeves in Manhattan and flying kites in Chicago. The whole Southeast is having a heat wave. What is going on?
First thought, of course: global warming. Here we go over the cliff – more heat makes the polar ice caps melt which reduces the reflectivity of the earth’s surface which allows more absorption of sunlight which further heats the planet which melts more ice … and before you know it you’ve got a disaster movie with special effects not even James Cameron can match. Beginning of the end, yes?
But even I, inconvenient-truther though I may be, have a hard time believing greenhouse gases are having this dramatic an effect quite so quickly, like suddenly in 2012 winters simply ceased to occur. No, I’m inclined to attribute the untimely meteorological condition to something more unique to this year and to a different type of gas.
I believe the lovely winter we should be having here in our temperate clime, providing bears a reason to hibernate, plants a reason to go dormant and snowboarders a reason to stimulate the economy with hefty purchases of the latest in cool gear has been hijacked, reduced to a tepid puddle of slush, by continuous blasts of hot air emanating from the filibusterous GOP debates assaulting the atmosphere on a near-daily basis for agonizing months now with no end in sight or sound.
Have they no mercy? Why is there nothing in the Constitution that affords us our sacred right of freedom from speech?
As I recall, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas engaged in a total of seven debates during the 1860 presidential campaign, and they have come down to us as the gold standard in serious political debate on important questions of the day such as slavery and the authority of the Supreme Court to dictate states’ rights.
The combatants attacked each other’s positions but stuck to the issues and assiduously avoided character assassination.
In other words, pretty much the exact opposite of the current knife fight, which has already gone so many vicious venomous off-topic rounds that one pines for disasters of equal intensity but shorter duration such as the Black Death or the Wars of the Roses. What can possibly be left to debate, boxers versus briefs? Tastes great versus less filling?
But of course these are not debates in any rational sense of the term; they are the result of a macabre implicit agreement between two contestants to stand on an endless series of stages and lacerate each other as much as possible within the time allotted, with a generous dollop of collateral damage to civilized discourse as an acceptable consequence.
Can you imagine this happening in 1860 between two men both of whom were actually worthy of the office they sought?
DOUGLAS: “Before I speak on the important topic of whether or not each state can choose to secede from the Union, I would like to state that my opponent is a maniacal liar who cannot be trusted in anything he says as evidenced by his cleverly-crafted campaign image as a humble homespun man of the people when in fact he is a highly devious and sophisticated corporate lawyer whose clients include some of the largest companies in America. By his unprincipled machinations he has stolen the Republican nomination from candidates far more qualified, and if elected he will surely bring this country immediately to calamity and ruin, which is his diabolical plan as a puppet of the Abolitionist forces that own him.”
LINCOLN: “So run the ravings of a desperate man, a man who knows he is not electable due to his radical and despicably un-American views, a man who once courted the woman I married, who by the way tells me he was a complete fumbling nebbish at courtship. But what can one expect from a man so short he could sleep in my stovepipe hat, a man who steals from widows and children, a man who … ”
We’ve come a long, long way down.
