This blog has been dormant for awhile as I’ve been taking the spa treatment. Nothing too serious but I’ve been sick in the head. Diseased and withered. A wicked bug settled in to my soul called the Trump Mumps, an evil illness for which the only known cure is a vote, lots of long hikes in nature, and cannabis-infused sessions in the sauna, chanting Enya lyrics at top volume. Doctor’s orders, but for many months I’ve been slumped with the feverish jitters in the healing waters, I’ve inhaled the merciful sulfuric fizz and sighed the great heaving, weeping sigh of Hillary Clinton acceptance and have also come to accept, as one accepts the inevitability of death, that it’s possible that some unthinkable lurch in the polls could lead to a Trump presidency.
Gulp, another sip of the tonic under cover of coastal turmeric visions in the fog of Marin County. Another desperate spin through fivethirtyeight.com to check the dreadful Ohio numbers. Can this really be happening? The anti-inflammatory-rhetoric pill has been prescribed and dutifully downed, yet again, and still the unrestrained coarseness of our times beckons at every gruesome plop of a policy position that emanates from Trump’s repulsive anus-face. Who among us can resist the occasional plunge into the Trump morass of vengeful orangutan politics, where hiring a wife-beating anti-Semite to run a campaign comes with no price in the Q-Pac poll, but where Clinton’s hacking cough is a disqualifying sign of weakness that must be analyzed from every sinister and bad-faith angle imaginable, but especially from the perspective of Rudy Giuliani’s badly yellowed teeth? Weird. Where anything that is complex must by its Clintonian nature be assumed to be corrupt—i.e., the Clinton Foundation—but where Trump won’t release his two-mile-high pile of tax returns and declares that nobody cares whether he releases them or not, and nobody cares enough to ask whether people care enough to care about asking him to release them because Trump just Tweeted something outrageous about Mika and Joe? Very weird.
My head hurts and it hope this is not a sign of a Trump Mumps relapse. But I feel the insistent tickle in my throat as the polls tighten and the Clinton-haters throw their hands aloft and say “What am I supposed to do? She’s an establishment crook and he tells it like it is,” even when Trump is characteristically telling it like it is by telling it like it isn’t—as in, Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and global warming is a hoax cooked up by the Chinese.
Which brings us to the Sierra Club. The nation’s oldest environmental organization is trying to save the world from disastrous climate change impacts—but in its own way is equally as “establishment” as the Clintons and has similarly faced criticism over the various alliances it’s gotten itself mixed up with.
Earlier this week I spoke with Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, in advance of his arrival in Santa Rosa on the 16th for a talk on climate change. He’ll be at the Glaser Center, 547 Mendocino Avenue, at 7 pm, and there’s a suggested $10 donation but that’s only a suggestion—as is Sierra’s suggestion, by way of their endorsement of her, that you vote for Hillary. Jill Stein: not viable.
We’ll post the interview with Brune in the Bohemian next week. But briefly and for now, Brune has done a lot of heavy lifting to restore a sense of integrity and accountability to Sierra after it was revealed—around 2010 and before his time there—that the organization had accepted money from a corporate titan who’d been engaged in the ungodly practice of fracking. Old-guard Sierra Club members were, to say the least, not happy at the flim-frackery and Sierra subsequently turned back some $26 million in pledged moolah from the oil-and-gas sector. Nowadays it is more likely to break corporate bread with the likes of Google and Facebook, and I’ll have more on that in the upcoming story.
I got up to speed on the frack-money controversy and other issues before I spoke with Brune—spent a couple of hours scouring around online and reading up on the recent history of Sierra. The organization has its detractors and they basically fall into two main categories, which swing to far ends of the political spectrum. On the one hand, call it the left one, the critique runs thusly: You Betrayed John Muir While I Sat In A Redwood Tree Getting Arrested, So Screw You. On the other side of the spectrum lie the false-flag pouncers of a climate-denial bent: You Are Jaguar-Driving Climate Hoax Eco-Hypocrites Who Should Be Shot Because Oil is God.
Well, you can’t make everyone happy. And as the debate rages over whether the Sierra Club is a safe-haven for eco-terrorists or a bastion of eco-fraud corporate sellouts, on shrill websites that almost nobody cares about or takes seriously except for Sean Hannity and Larry the Chemtrail Guy—Sierra Club is moving forward with its climate-change agenda and Brune is coming here to talk it.
Brune’s visit comes as Barack Obama told the New York Times this week that the climate-change trend-lines are “terrifying.” Given the tenor of our lying and venomous times, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump accuses Muslim weathermen of cheering for Hurricane Sandy from Jersey rooftops in October 2012. In fact I think I just read that on Superstormfront, or maybe Trump tweeted something to that effect, I don’t know—the Trump Mumps fever is back and I may be hallucinating this whole awful spectacle.
