Eugene Linden
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Latest Musing

THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA

Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...

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Books


Fire & Flood
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Deep Past
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Articles by Category
endangered animals
rapid climate change
global deforestation
fragging

Books
The Ragged Edge of the World



Winds of Change
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Afterword to the softbound edition.


The Octopus and the Orangutan
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The Future In Plain Sight
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The Parrot's Lament
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Silent Partners
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Affluence and Discontent
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The Alms Race
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Apes, Men, & Language
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PRESIDENTS OBAMA AND PALMER


Saturday November 08, 2008

By EUGENE LINDEN If ever there was a year for a Democratic president to be elected, this was it - a war without end, imploding economy, the most unpopular incumbent in living memory, etc. --but a black Democrat? Even given the revulsion over the mess the GOP has created, it's still hard to imagine any other prominent black politician winning the Democratic nomination, much less the presidency. Jesse Jackson? Charles Rangel? Maxine Waters? Obama has more in common with someone like Colin Powell than he does with Al Sharpton. Like Powell, he came up through the establishment, not the inner city. Obama never had to have a photo-op with Tawana Brawley or pay lip service to the notion of reparations for slavery, or do any of the things that might pander to resentments in the black community, but at the price of completely alienating white and Hispanic voters. Yes, he attended a church where the reverend Wright on occasion inveighed against America, but the association never stuck, possibly because the contrast between Wright's demagoguery and Obama's thoughtful style only underscored that Obama was not of that school of politics. Rather, he's a charismatic, eloquent, and highly intelligent politician who happens to have a dark skin. Still, that probably wouldn't have been sufficient to get him elected in 2000 or even 2004 (had he been old enough). Americans needed a narrative that would help prepare the public for a different skin color in the White House. There have been articles in the press about the parallels between Obama's campaign and the story line of the last season of "The West Wing" where a Hispanic candidate played by Jimmy Smits ascends to the White House. The real narrative that made the prospect of a black president plausible, however, came not from the left, but more likely from the right, from the pro-torture, militaristic, and wildly popular television series "24." In President Palmer, Americans got to see Dennis Haysbert play the role of a strong, competent, intelligent, even inspiring leader, dealing with the most dire crises that the show's paranoid, right-wing creators could dream up. President Palmer did not deal with these crises as a black president, but as a president. His advisors didn't deal with him as a black politician, but as a president. Palmer's skin color was all but irrelevant to the high-tension story line. The show took for granted that a black man could function in the land's highest office, and I suspect that this low-key, almost subliminal message was far more effective than the preachy, self-conscious stereotypes that the entertainment industry seems to prefer when dealing with racial themes for mass culture. "24" offered a template for what we might want in any president, black or white, and Barack Obama fit that template perfectly. So for millions of "24" fans, Barack Obama's candidacy had a familiar reassuring aura. It's unknowable how much that helped, but it sure didn't hurt.

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Short Take

An Excerpt from Fire and Flood Explaining a Universal Climate Tariff

An Excerpt from Fire and Flood Explaining a Universal Climate Tariff

The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.

Fire and Flood.

"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.

Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.

Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy

Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/27/climate-change-russia-us-are-uncomfortably-alike/
Library Journal Review:
https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/fire-and-flood-a-peoples-history-of-climate-change-from-1979-to-the-present-2135202
Publishers Weekly:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-98488-224-0  



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