Monday
Senator Joe Manchin, from the coal state of West Virginia, made sure that America got a lump in its stocking this year. With his announcement that he will be deep-sixing the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan, he will—among other things—set back the battle against climate change. Depressed when I should be feeling the Christmas spirit, I turn to some of my father’s environmental Christmas poems. He too is fatalistic but at least finds some cheer through his light verse fantasies.
But first the news before I turn to them. Here’s what the Washington Post reported on Manchin:
President Biden’s climate agenda suffered a massive setback Sunday after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) pulled his support from Democrats’ spending bill, potentially dooming the legislation amid warnings from scientists that the world is running out of time to prevent climate change’s most catastrophic effects.
Manchin’s comments on “Fox News Sunday” put at risk a $555 billion package of tax credits, grants and other policies aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions that would rank as the largest clean-energy investment in U.S. history. The legislation’s passage would have helped Biden meet his goal of cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions in half compared with 2005 levels by 2030.
Without a reduction of that speed and scale, the United States would fall short of the targets it committed to under the 2015 Paris agreement, potentially locking in a future of increasingly destructive forest fires, deadly floods and droughts. Already, record-breaking hurricanes and fires are testing the federal government’s ability to respond to overlapping disasters.
Of course, Manchin doesn’t bear all the responsibility. The fact that no Republican member of Congress is willing to lift a finger to save the planet is a scandal. Do they just not care about their grandchildren?
Anyway, in his last year (2012) my father put together (and my son Darien published) a chapbook of poetry supposedly written by Aurora Borealis (a.k.a. Ms. Santa Claus). In the form of annual Christmas letters, she reports on life at a North Pole experiencing catastrophic warming. My father loved Christmas and, as you will see, he loved children’s books, which he read to me and my brothers until we were in middle school. Both the holiday and the books kept alive his own childhood sensibility in a world that he saw going steadily downhill.
Letter from the North Pole
By Scott Bates
Dear Friends,
I was only last year, on Christmas morng,
That my husband, Nick, got a global warning
That our factory’s foundations were getting shaky—
So this year, when our basement turned into a lake, he
Went down to the station of the Polar Express
To buy us all tickets for a change of address
To a possible nice little, tight little island
Like maybe Never-Land? Or some high and dry land
Where we’d be all together and still get around….
But most of the islands were taken, he found,
“So how about Vegas? Or even L.A.?…”
Well, thanks…Anyway,
With pontoons on the sleigh
And the reindeer in rain gear, were were ready to go
–As Blitzen said, “with the flow:–
To all those developing, damp neighborhoods…
And we went! En bateau!
Over the slush and the urban sprawl
It was splash away! splash away! splash away, all!
But this time next year,
If we’re lucky and dry, you’ll undoubtedly hear
From us at Floating Island or the Land of Oz…
Yours, Aurora Borealis
(Mrs. Santa Claus).
In the next letter, Aurora describes a future which is becoming ever more our own and which Manchin’s decision will accelerate. As New Yorker’s John Cassady puts it,
For the country as a whole, the issue is: How will the nation ever address the enduring market failures, glaring inequality, and big social-safety-net gaps that the Build Back Better plan was designed to tackle?
Cassidy quotes a veteran budget analyst, who says the plan was “probably the most far-reaching in the area of social provision, in improving the lives of tens of millions of people, of any since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the nineteen-sixties.” Cassidy concludes,
Climate change isn’t going away; it’s intensifying. Neither are child-care needs or exorbitant health-care costs. Most immediately, the expanded child tax credit, which currently aids thirty-five million families, will end this month. “Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone,” [White House press secretary Jen] Psaki said, in her statement on Sunday. “We cannot.”
Most of the allusions in “Letter from Oz” are to Wizard of Oz, but the gnome king, a miserly hoarder of wealth, first makes his appearance in Ozma of Oz, the third book in the series. The “born again witch” is Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the socially conservative and anti-feminist organization Eagle Forum. (Schlafly is also the inspiration for Serena Joy in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.) This “death of the American Dream” poem ends with an echo of Yeats’s apocalyptic rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem in “The Second Coming”:
Letter from Oz
Well, we made it to here
To the Land of OZ!
But we find to our sorrow
It’s not what it was…
The Wizard is running almost everything now,
But he’s changed from an ally into a wealthy cynic
(His brokerage firm is called The Golden Cow);
Uncle Henry’s closing the Planned Parenthood Clinic.
Glinda the Good is doing her best
To teach her students about terror and decorum
As the born-again witch rides in from the West
Leading the great dark host of the Eagle Forum.
The Lollipop Kids are running the Missile Defense
And directing the Munchkin Rifle Association;
The Haunted Forest has been cleared for developments;
Auntie Em is packing a Magnum .41.
The Wizard explains that money comes from God.
Dorothy’s drinking with the Winkie Fraternity.
The cowardly Lion commands the Poppy Squad;
While the Scarecrow, in his brand-new SUV
Tours his extensive and lucrative golf estates.
The Tin Woodman chairs the Old-Growth-Lumber Committee
Winged Monkeys with assault guns guard the gates
As the Nome King moves into the Emerald City.
Grim stuff, but the poet’s light touch helps me bear our present moment a little better.