Perspective

My Canadian pen pal Peggy e-mailed me after last Tuesday’s elections to ask if Lynn and I soon would be seeking asylum in her country. Although Peggy and I haven’t see each other in person since we met for the first and only time in Edmonton, Alberta, sometime in the late 1990s when I was there on a work assignment, she knows my politics well—from correspondence and this blog. She’d assumed correctly that I’d be displeased—to put it mildly—by the Republican romp that will give the GOP control of the US Senate come January, and its biggest majority in the House since 1930.

What I told her, however, was that she needn’t worry about our showing up at her and husband Bob’s door in Victoria, British Columbia, seeking refuge from at least two years of foxes guarding the henhouses of everything I hold dear (environmental protection, the social-safety network, etc). Rather, I remarked, when you feel certain, as I do, that we’re already on an inexorable path to the end of the world as we know it (see my September 5 post, “Sing a Song of Armageddon”), it’s hard to feel as if an electoral debacle is even the figurative end of the world.

Indeed, just a couple of days before Election Day, an article ran in the Washington Post that began on this gallows note, “The Earth is locked on an ‘irreversible’ course of climatic disruption from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the impacts will only worsen unless nations agree to dramatic cuts in pollution, an international panel of climate scientists warn.” The article’s gist, if you’ll forgive my paraphrasing, if that we’re already completely screwed, but, should the governments of the world unite in ebony-and-ivory harmony, in such a way that even a made-up optimist I'll call Stoner Pollyanna couldn’t conceive, our beleaguered planet might swirl down the drain to widespread drought, horrific flooding, and devastation on an unimaginable scale just a tad less rapidly.

I mean, sure, it’s maddening and depressing to me when Republicans Win Big at the polls on promises that they'll unfetter business to pollute more and will see to it that the national wealth is spread even more inequitably than it is now. But those polar ice caps were melting before November 4, and the sea levels continue to rise. We all have bigger fish to fry—pun inadvertent but apt, as one of this morning’s newspaper headlines was “Larger Ocean ‘Dead Zones’—Oxygen-Depleted Water—Likely Because of Global Warming.”

Which is not to say that I’m happy about last week’s results at the polls, or that I’m feeling particularly conciliatory toward the two-thirds of eligible Americans who didn’t bother to vote, leaving a passive nation to the government it arguably deserves. Even here in Maryland, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a two-to-one margin, we’ve now got a Republican governor-elect because too few Democrats bothered to turn out. (I also fault the camp of Democratic Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, which ran such a safe and uninspired gubernatorial campaign that its spokesperson should’ve been Mad magazine’s Alfred E “What, Me Worry” Neuman.)

I’ve already read, by the way, that my governor-to-be, an Annapolis businessman named Larry Hogan, thinks the Washington Redskins, whose home games are played in Maryland, should proudly keep their odiously insensitive name. This stance struck me as a dog-bites-man bit of “news.”

So, anyway, would I like to live in a land where, in the short run, I could avoid the news media regularly uttering such obscenities as “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,” and where, in the long run, I perhaps could enjoy four well-defined climatic seasons for a few decades yet? Sure. But not enough to move to Canada. It seems like a lot of upheaval for some temporary gains.

Besides, there’s still the occasional pitcher of lemonade to be made out of the (oxygen-depleted) ocean of lemons that our future promises. I’m already savoring in anticipation a cool, refreshing glass of electoral turnabout in 2016, when the Republican Party will have to defend both its Senate-majority record and many more up-for-grabs seats than will the Democrats. And when Hillary Clinton just may become the nation’s first female president, to the GOP's apoplexy.

Two "Bangs" for the Buck

Two posts in one day! What’s that about?!

Well, I’ll tell you. But first, I must call attention to something I just did. And, in the process, give a shout-out to my awesome friend Karen.

Over the course of an illuminating happy hour that she and I shared last week, she schooled me on the tantalizing yet sadly marginalized existence of the interrobang. Which, per Wikipedia, is “a nonstandard punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark and exclamation point.”

Conceptualized in 1962 by American advertising agency head Martin K Speckter—a true “Mad Man”—it is a punctuation hybrid that looks something like a capital “P” (a modified question mark) with an open space on its stem (forming an exclamation mark). It’s entirely awesome, and I so wish my computer keyboard included it. But alas, the interrobang never quite caught on. Decades ago it was featured on some keyboards, domestic and foreign. But no longer. Which is a crying shame, if you ask me. Why, I could’ve saved an entire keystroke at the start of this post, had the interrobang been available. Multiply such savings a zillionfold worldwide, and cancer may well have been cured by now, and planet-saving energy sources discovered, in the resulting pool of otherwise-unused time.

Anyway, back to “two posts in one day.” Back on January 6, 2012, I posted a tribute of sorts in this space to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking on the occasion of his 70th birthday. I saluted his achievements, and cataloged the conjectured medical reasons for his longevity, despite the fact that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis popularly is known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and Lou Gehrig didn’t live to be 40. I began the post by noting, in full disclosure, however, that I’d found the audiobook of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to be so incomprehensibly boring that I nearly fell asleep at the wheel on I-95 about 20 years ago while attempting to be edified by it.

In the intervening years, Hawking, who I believe already had consensually appeared in animated form on The Simpsons by 2012, has continued to display an impish good humor that is stratospherically beyond what I imagine I’d be able to muster as an undoubtedly whining, self-pitying invalid. Last year he was a complicit, I assume, part of the storyline on an episode of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory. I again was reminded of just how delightful Hawking can be when I was reading an article this morning about The Theory of Everything, a new movie that traces Hawking’s life from age 21—when he was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live—to age 45. The film itself is getting middling notices for a formulaic approach to its material, but the actor portraying Hawking, Eddie Redmayne, already is attracting Oscar buzz for his ability to wring pathos, dignity, drama and humor out of a character who’s mute and all but immobile for most of his screen time.

The article in today’s paper actually wasn’t so much about the film itself as it was an interview with Redmayne about what it was like to meet and portray the still-living scientist. The 32-year-old British actor came off in the interview as self-effacingly likable. His first quote, in fact, was, “I tried to educate myself on the science, which was complicated for someone who is pretty inept.” But the passage that really endeared me to Redmayne, and made me like Hawking more than ever, was this one:

“Hawking, now 72, uses his cheek muscles to communicate with a sensor on his glasses that prompts a computer screen with an alphabet and a cursor. “It takes a long time for him to communicate, and one’s instinct is to start a conversation,” said Redmayne. “Maybe Stephen said eight or nine sentences. So I spilled forth about Stephen Hawking to Stephen Hawking for 40 minutes.”

He shook his head at the absurdity. Hawking had just published his memoir, “My Brief History,” in which he mentioned being born on Jan. 8, 1942, three centuries to the day after Galileo’s death.

“And I told him my birthday was Jan. 6 so we’re both Capricorns,” Redmayne said, “and as I said that I thought, ‘What am I saying?’

“There was this excruciating pause,” he recalled. Hawking, a man of few words but considerable wit, replied, “I’m an astronomer, not an astrologer.”

In response to which, Redmayne said, “I died a hundred deaths.”

God, how much do I love that anecdote?! And, yes, of course, the interrobang that I again was denied the opportunity to employ just now?

I try not to be too oppressively grim in this blog. I really do. So, granted, Armageddon is nigh. And today’s Veterans Day ceremonies, while properly saluting our soldiers past and present, remind us that war is endless. Still, I must add that life’s pleasures are boundless. (For whatever time we have left!) All one need do is look around. You’ll find joy in the darndest places, ranging from physics labs to barstools.