The Windup Girl

Florida governor Rick Scott probably won't read Paolo Bacigalupi's novel. But he should.

I let this fragment of a review linger incomplete, while Marrianne lent out our copy of the book (with my consent). I find that the notes I pencilled in the margins to be the basis for whatever else I might write about The Windup Girl are gone for now, perhaps for always. Is a piece half-done worth the trouble of reading it?

Probably. After all, it's probably less than 400 words. Who's going to pretend that they haven't ever before wasted the time it would take to read 400 words?

So Florida, the state likeliest to suffer most from rising sea levels caused by climate change, has, under the dubious leadership of Republican governor Rick Scott, developed a de facto policy that scrubs the use of terms like "climate change" and "global warming" from documents produced by state employees and contractors. Such a policy moves Scott to the very front rank of climate-change deniers and, given Florida's particular vulnerability, would likely make Scott a candidate for some kind of Darwin award if he wasn't also past his peak period of reproductive activity.

Scott probably isn't planning to read Paolo Bacigalupi's book, The Windup Girl, but it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of difference if he did. After all, one arrives at the end of the book considering the possibility that a variety of factors, including climate change, have already narrowed the global path to the point that we can stop worrying about Florida, which is bound to become swamp, and start worrying about our own skins, which are likely to sweat copiously and fry quickly for extended periods on both sides of high noon.

In Bacigalupi's dystopic world, most of us in the West are pretty much in the same boat as Floridians. The exceptions are likely to be chemists and geneticists and engineers working for global corporations that own seed copyrights, possess the firepower to enforce and exploit those copyrights, and do not let ethical considerations weasel their way into strategic plans. But the catastrophes that The Windup Girl imagines, predictions of a world less than, say, 50 years away, do not seem (with a few exceptions) like events from which we will run screaming, but more like moments we will watch like frogs in a hot tub, unaware that the temperature of the water is rising toward the boiling point.

Of course, some of us already recognize that the temperature is rising and some of us do what we can to address that developing problem. But Bacigalupi's point seems to be that whatever it is we are doing, it's not enough. And though some few of us will survive, sign on with one of those global corporations with the reach and power of government, or find a remote, little tub where the water is cooler, those survivors will find that the regret that they did not do enough is a crushing weight on what life they have left. The difference between their regrets, however, and the regrets of humans who are simply aging out and passing on, will be the difference between dying in the full knowledge that one has failed a most important moral challenge and dying ignorant of one's failure.

We all can see the future...

though the details may be fuzzy

The 2012 film Men in Black 3 has many virtues. These include Will Smith, Emma Thompson and Tommie Lee Jones. Josh Brolin, playing his best role yet--a young Tommie Lee Jones--is in it, too.

The story is simple: Alien arch-villain Boris the Animal ("It's just Boris," he says with repeated exasperation) travels back in time to kill Agent K (Jones) before the MiB agent can capture Boris and thwart his plan for an invasion of the earth. Only Agent J (Smith) realizes that the new version of the future he is inhabiting, the one in which K has been killed and the path to an invasion has been cleared, is the result of a temporal disturbance. J goes back in time to save K and, in the process, save the earth.

As the story unfolds, J and the young K navigate the late '60s, meet Andy Warhol (who it turns out is also an MiB agent) and thwart Boris. All of this happens in the company of Griffin, the sole survivor of another alien race whose planet has already been destroyed by Boris' predatory species.

Griffin has a well developed ability to see alternative futures as they arise out of current events and to compute the relative probability of each one he can see. The details sometimes elude Griffin, but often he can describe, with some precision, key events which will increase or decrease the probability of a specific bend in the timeline.

"Agent J: How's it going?

Griffin: How's it going? Well, that depends. For me personally, it's good. Things are good. Unless, of course, we're in the possible future where the muscle boy near the door gets into an argument with his girlfriend, which causes her to storm away and bump into the guy carrying the stuffed mushroom, who then dumps the tray onto those sailors on leave and a shoving match breaks out and they crash into the coffee table here. In which case, I gotta move my plate like right now. 
[as he speaks, the events he narrates occur]"

For Griffin clarity about the details of future events seems to accompany alternatives that are most imminent, though he can see some disasters, like the destruction of the earth, coming from further away in time. In that respect, Griffen seems uncommonly human, able to look at what is happening in the present and project outcomes into the future, both near and far.

Of course, for most earthlings, this ability is not generally nurtured or formally guided. So our predictions frequently go wrong; e.g., we have been predicting the end of the world frequently and for thousands of years, yet it staggers ahead. But there are also many better examples of comprehensive predictions of the future that stand up decently well. John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar is one.

In 1968, when the book was published, 3.5 billion people lived on the earth. In 2010, the era in which Stand on Zanzibar unfolds, 7 billion people live on the planet. Brunner's dystopic vision was largely focused on the destructive consequences of urban overcrowding and, to a lesser extent, endless war. Environmental destruction was also a subtext. Though our future may not have evolved exactly as Brunner predicted, Stand on Zanzibar, is a good argument that we humans have a capacity for predicting the future that compares favorably to Griffen's abilities.

So, let's use that capacity. Let's stand with the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is the major cause of global warming and that the damage from climate change is already devastating and will get worse. Let's stand against climate change denial and against the Keystone pipeline. Let's show up in DC on Sunday, February 16, to stand in solidarity with thousands of others to demonstrate in favor of federal action to mitigate and reverse global warming.

Conscience and Community, III

Who Is Torturing Whom?

The controversy over the use of torture continues. Interested parties should read the "torture memos," classified documents affirming the use of frightening and painful techniques in the interrogation of individuals captured by US security agencies or military personnel. These memos, written by high-ranking staff in the Bush administration, outline procedures that sound like torture to me. I haven't yet read all the memos, but I have read one written by Jay S. Bybee, in his capacity as an assistant attorney general. Bybee is now a judge on the US Court of Appeal for the Ninth District.

Reading Bybee's memo doesn't bring me much clarity, though I'm pretty sure he shouldn't be sitting as a judge anywhere. I understand from other coverage that Bybee felt uncomfortable about writing the memo. But he didn't refuse to write it, and his protestations clearly come after the fact. Perhaps, he's simply disturbed that he has been publicly associated with systematic torture.

For me, the lack of clarity lies in my own discomfort with the discussion. I draw lots of lines between good and bad, good and evil, in my own life, but those lines do not always guide my own attitudes, or my behavior.

I want my family, my friends, my community, my country to be safe. If there is someone out there who wants to attack the United States, to attack Washington, DC, the city I live in, I want somebody to know about those plans. I do not want to see a recurrence of 9-11.

But the fact remains that there were far more Iraqi deaths in the First Gulf War, which began in 1990, than American deaths from Sept. 11 events. Perhaps, 20 to 40 times as many.

And as many as 1,000,000 more Iraqis may have died as a result of sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first war. "Some researchers say that over a million Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of the sanctions, [13] although other estimates have ranged as low as 170,000 children."

Estimates of Iraqi deaths since the beginning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq have been as high as one million or more. The number of Iraqis displaced by the war and the ensuing occupation has been estimated at more than four million.

There may be as many as 30 million people currently living in Iraq. All told, sanctions, bombings, invasion and occupation may have killed or displaced as much as one-quarter of that number. To have the same effect on the United States, terrorists would have to kill, wound or displace somewhere between 80 million and 90 million people.

No level of terrorist activity, indeed, no hostile action of any type, short of alien invasion, will ever have such an effect on the United States. In fact, climate change is the only earth-based event likely to have that kind of an effect on the US. Perhaps, we should be torturing "climate-change deniers," like George Will, to find out more about possible plots against America.

Nancy Pelosi wants a Truth Commission to identify those responsible for sanctioning the use of torture. But it's obvious, we have all sanctioned torture in some way. That blanket of guilt does not fall on each of us just because we failed to speak out against torture. It falls on us for, among other things, the torture we have visited on Iraq and Iraqis these last 20 years or more.

My idea for an investigation into who did what to whom would be more along the lines of a national self-investigation. Abu Zubaydah may wish that he could deliver the same sort of mayhem to Americans that we have visited upon others, but that's only a dream. Compared to Americans, Zubaydah is a piker.