thenation--2020-10-06--Trump Is Getting Away With Much More Than Murder

Yes , when he was running for president , he did indeed say : “ I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody , and I wouldn ’ t lose any voters , OK ?
It ’ s , like , incredible.
” Then he won — and this November 3rd ( or thereafter ) , whether he wins or loses , we ’ re likely to find out that , when it comes to his base , he was right .
He may not have lost a vote .
Yes , Donald Trump is indeed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where his prediction fell desperately short : as president , he ’ s proven to be anything but a smalltime killer .
It wasn ’ t as if he went out one day , on New York City ’ s Fifth Avenue or even in Kenosha , Wisconsin , and shot a couple of people .
Nothing so minimalist for The Donald !
Nor is it as if , say , he had ploughed “ the Beast ” ( as his presidential Cadillac is known ) into a crowd of Black Lives Matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have done this year .
Let ’ s face it : that ’ s for his apprentices , not the showman himself .
After all , Donald J. Trump has proven to be America ’ s twenty-first-century maestro of death and destruction , the P.T .
Barnum of , as he put it predictively enough in his Inaugural Address , “ American carnage.
” In fact , he ’ s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined .
Back in 2016 , he was way off @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what he could accomplish .
As it happens , the killing hasn ’ t just taken place on Fifth Avenue , or even in his ( now hated ) former hometown , but on avenues , streets , lanes , and country roads across America .
He was , however , right about one thing : he could kill at will and no one who mattered ( to him at least ) would hold him responsible , including the attorney general of the United States who has been one of his many handymen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be a murderous regime , but in quite a different form than even he might have anticipated .
Still , a carnage-creator he ’ s been ( and , for god knows how long to come , will be ) and here ’ s the remarkable thing : he ’ s daily been on “ Fifth Avenue ” killing passersby in a variety of ways .
In fact , it ’ s worth going through his methods of murder , starting ( where else ? )
with the pandemic that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this country .
We know from Bob Woodward ’ s new book that , in his own strange way , in February Donald Trump evidently grasped the seriousness of Covid-19 and made a conscious decision to “ play it down.
” There have been all sorts of calculations since then , but by one modest early estimate , beginning to shut down and social distance in this country even a week earlier in March would have saved 36,000 lives ( the equivalent of twelve 9/11s ) ; two weeks earlier and it would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country now speeding toward something like 300,000 dead by year ’ s end .
If the president had moved quickly and reasonably , instead of worrying about his reelection or how he looked with a mask on ; if he had followed the advice of actual experts ; if he had championed masking and social distancing as he ’ s championed the Confederate flag , military bases named after Confederate generals , and the Proud Boys , we would have been living in a different and less wounded country — and that ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Avenue behavior .
After all , no matter what the scientific experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and elsewhere were then saying about the dangers of gathering in mask-less crowds indoors , it was clear that the president just couldn ’ t bear a world without fans , without crowds cheering his every convoluted word .
That would have been like going on the diet from hell .
As a result , he conducted his first major rally in June at the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa .
Admittedly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ near as big as he and his advisers had expected .
Still , perhaps 6,000 fans , largely unmasked and many in close proximity , cheered on their commander-in-chief there .
It was visibly a potential pandemic super-spreader of an event , but the commander-in-chief , mask-less himself , couldn ’ t have cared less .
About three weeks later , when Tulsa experienced a striking rise in coronavirus cases ( likely linked to that rally ) and former presidential candidate and Trump supporter Herman Cain who had attended unmasked died of Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the slightest .
He kept right on holding rallies and giving his patented , wildly cheered rambles in the brambles .
As Rolling Stone correspondent Andy Kroll put it after attending one of his outdoor rallies in North Carolina , the president ’ s “ remarks ” that day ( which ran to 37 pages and 18,000 words ) were “ practically a novella , albeit a novella that makes Finnegan ’ s Wake look like See Spot Run !
” Nothing , certainly not a pandemic , was going to stop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adoration of his base .
Though in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden , he claimed that he ’ s only been holding his rallies outdoors , in September in Nevada , a state whose governor had banned indoor gatherings of more than 50 people , he held a typically boisterous , adoring indoor rally of 5,000 largely unmasked , jammed-together Trumpsters .
When questioned on the obvious dangers of such a gathering , he classically responded , “ I ’ m on a stage and it ’ s very far away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at all concerned ” — i.e .
not at all concerned about ( or for ) them .
If that isn ’ t the Covid-19 equivalent of a bazooka on Fifth Avenue , what is ?
And it summed up perfectly Trump ’ s response to the choice of pursuing his own reelection in the way he loves ( and seems so desperately to need ) or keeping Americans healthy .
During these unending pandemic months , he regularly downplayed every danger and most reasonable responses to them , while at one point @ @ @ @ @ @ @ LIBERATE ” ( possibly in an armed fashion ) states that had imposed stay-at-home orders .
He needed what he ’ s long called the “ greatest economy in the history of America ” back and reopening everything was naturally the way to go .
Mimicking his boss ’ s style , Attorney General William Barr would even essentially compare lockdowns to slavery .
As he put it , “ A national lockdown .
Stay-at-home orders .
It ’ s like house arrest .
Other than slavery , which is a different kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intrusion on civil liberties in American history.
” Clearly at the president ’ s behest , “ top White House officials ” would , according to the New York Times , pressure “ the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school , a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic.
” ( As the president would tweet in a similar spirit : “ The Dems think it would be bad for them politically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Election , but it is important for the children and families .
May cut off funding if not open !
” ) In other words , it didn ’ t matter who might be endangered — his best fans or the nation ’ s school children — when his reelection , his future wellbeing , was at stake .
Murder on Fifth Avenue ?
A nothing by comparison .
And his response to the pandemic only launches us on what should qualify as an all-American killing spree from hell .
In the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the most modest part of it .
For the rest of that death toll , you might start with health care .
It ’ s already estimated that at least 2.3 million Americans have lost their health insurance in the Trump years ( and that figure , according to the U.S. Census Bureau , includes 726,000 children , some of whom may now be headed back to school under pandemic conditions ) .
That , in turn , could prove just a drop in the bucket if his administration ’ s ongoing assault @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Act ( ACA ) finally succeeds .
And after November 3rd , it indeed might if Mitch McConnell is successful in hustling Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court in place of the dead Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( who twice upheld the constitutionality of that act ) .
A supposedly “ pro-life ” Trump version of the Supreme Court — unless the pandemic were to sweep through it — would undoubtedly turn out to be murderous in its own fashion .
Think of them as potential Supreme Assassins .
Barrett , in particular @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the ACA and the Court will hear the Trump administration ’ s case for abolishing that act within a week of Election Day , so you do the math .
Wiping it out reportedly means that at least 23 million more Americans would simply lose their health insurance and it could , in the end , leave tens of millions of Americans with “ pre-existing medical conditions ” in an uninsured hell on earth .
Death ?
I guarantee it , on and off Fifth Avenue — and it will have been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the above should be considered nothing more than warm-up exercises for the real deal when it comes to future presidential slaughter .
All of it precedes the truly long-term issue of death and destruction that goes by the name of climate change .
It ’ s hardly news that Donald Trump long ago rejected global warming as a Chinese “ hoax.
” And as he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord and , like the child of the fossil-fuelized 1950s that he is , proclaimed a new policy of “ American Energy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of American energy is now underway ” ) , he ’ s never stopped rejecting it .
He did so again recently on a brief visit to burning California amid a historic wildfire season , where he predicted that it would soon get “ cooler.
” The only exception : when he suddenly feels in the mood to criticize the Chinese for their release of greenhouse gases .
As he said in a September 22nd speech to the U.N. General Assembly , “ China ’ s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rising fast .
By contrast , after I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord , last year America reduced its carbon emissions by more than any country in the agreement.
” He and those he ’ s put in place at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in his administration have spent his presidency in a remarkably determined fashion trying to destroy the American and global environment .
So far , they have rolled back ( or are trying to roll back ) 100 environmental protections that were in place when he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most recently limits on a pesticide that reportedly can stunt brain development in children .
Air pollution alone was , according to one study , responsible for 9,700 more deaths in this country in 2018 than in 2016 .
Above all , at the service of a still expanding American fossil-fuel industry , he and his crew have done their damnedest to open the way for oil , gas , and coal development in just about any imaginable form .
In a season in which the West coast has burned in a previously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of smoke in its wake , while fierce storms have flooded the Gulf Coast , he ’ s continued , for instance , to focus on opening the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling .
In short , he and his administration have , in a rather literal fashon , proven to be pyromaniacs of the first order .
They ’ ve been remarkably intent on ensuring that , in the future , the world will continue to heat in ways certain to unsettle humanity , creating almost unimaginable forms of death and destruction @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called him a “ climate arsonist ” as the West coast burned , somehow the potentially murderous nature of his environmental policies has barely sunk in this election season .
If the legend was true , the Roman emperor Nero fiddled — actually , he was probably playing the cithara — while the capital of his empire , Rome , burned for six days .
He didn ’ t personally set the fire , however .
Trump and his crew are , it seems , intent on setting fire not just to Rome @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , D.C. , but to the Alaskan wilderness , the Brazilian rain forest , and that giant previously iced in landmass he couldn ’ t figure out how to purchase , Greenland .
He ’ s helping to ensure that even the oceans will , in their own fashion , be on fire ; that storms will grow ever more intense and destructive ; that the temperature will rise ever higher ; and that the planet will become ever less habitable .
Meanwhile , intently maskless and socially undistanced , even he ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contracted the coronavirus , officially becoming part of his own American carnage .
The White House , Air Force One , and the president and his aides became the equivalent of Covid-19 superspreaders , as senators and reporters , among others , also began to come down with the disease .
It ’ s now proving a visible all-American nightmare of the first order .
Donald Trump has , of course , hardly been alone when it comes to burning the planet , but it ’ s certainly eerie that , at this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any chance at all , if he recovers successfully , of being reelected president of the United States .
His urge is visibly not just to be an autocrat , but to commit mass murder nationwide and on a planetary scale deep into the future .
Murder , he said , and murder it was , and Fifth Avenue was the least of it .

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Yes, when he was running for president, he did indeed say: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Then he won — and this November 3rd (or thereafter), whether he wins or loses, we’re likely to find out that, when it comes to his base, he was right. He may not have lost a vote. Yes, Donald Trump is indeed a murderer, but here’s where his prediction fell desperately short: as president, he’s proven to be anything but a smalltime killer. It wasn’t as if he went out one day, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue or even in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot a couple of people.
Nothing so minimalist for The Donald! Nor is it as if, say, he had ploughed “the Beast” (as his presidential Cadillac is known) into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, as so many other drivers have done this year. Let’s face it: that’s for his apprentices, not the showman himself. After all, Donald J. Trump has proven to be America’s twenty-first-century maestro of death and destruction, the P.T. Barnum of, as he put it predictively enough in his Inaugural Address, “American carnage.” In fact, he’s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined.
Back in 2016, he was way off when it came to the scale of what he could accomplish. As it happens, the killing hasn’t just taken place on Fifth Avenue, or even in his (now hated) former hometown, but on avenues, streets, lanes, and country roads across America. He was, however, right about one thing: he could kill at will and no one who mattered (to him at least) would hold him responsible, including the attorney general of the United States who has been one of his many handymen of mayhem. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
His is indeed proving to be a murderous regime, but in quite a different form than even he might have anticipated. Still, a carnage-creator he’s been (and, for god knows how long to come, will be) and here’s the remarkable thing: he’s daily been on “Fifth Avenue” killing passersby in a variety of ways. In fact, it’s worth going through his methods of murder, starting (where else?) with the pandemic that’s still ripping a path from hell across this country.
Death by Disease
We know from Bob Woodward’s new book that, in his own strange way, in February Donald Trump evidently grasped the seriousness of Covid-19 and made a conscious decision to “play it down.” There have been all sorts of calculations since then, but by one modest early estimate, beginning to shut down and social distance in this country even a week earlier in March would have saved 36,000 lives (the equivalent of twelve 9/11s); two weeks earlier and it would have been a striking 54,000 in a country now speeding toward something like 300,000 dead by year’s end. If the president had moved quickly and reasonably, instead of worrying about his reelection or how he looked with a mask on; if he had followed the advice of actual experts; if he had championed masking and social distancing as he’s championed the Confederate flag, military bases named after Confederate generals, and the Proud Boys, we would have been living in a different and less wounded country — and that’s only the beginning of his Fifth Avenue behavior.
After all, no matter what the scientific experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and elsewhere were then saying about the dangers of gathering in mask-less crowds indoors, it was clear that the president just couldn’t bear a world without fans, without crowds cheering his every convoluted word. That would have been like going on the diet from hell. As a result, he conducted his first major rally in June at the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa. Current Issue View our current issue
Admittedly, that particular crowd would be nowhere near as big as he and his advisers had expected. Still, perhaps 6,000 fans, largely unmasked and many in close proximity, cheered on their commander-in-chief there. It was visibly a potential pandemic super-spreader of an event, but the commander-in-chief, mask-less himself, couldn’t have cared less. About three weeks later, when Tulsa experienced a striking rise in coronavirus cases (likely linked to that rally) and former presidential candidate and Trump supporter Herman Cain who had attended unmasked died of Covid-19, it didn’t faze him in the slightest.
He kept right on holding rallies and giving his patented, wildly cheered rambles in the brambles. As Rolling Stone correspondent Andy Kroll put it after attending one of his outdoor rallies in North Carolina, the president’s “remarks” that day (which ran to 37 pages and 18,000 words) were “practically a novella, albeit a novella that makes Finnegan’s Wake look like See Spot Run!”
Nothing, certainly not a pandemic, was going to stop Donald J. Trump from sucking up the adoration of his base. Though in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, he claimed that he’s only been holding his rallies outdoors, in September in Nevada, a state whose governor had banned indoor gatherings of more than 50 people, he held a typically boisterous, adoring indoor rally of 5,000 largely unmasked, jammed-together Trumpsters. When questioned on the obvious dangers of such a gathering, he classically responded, “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away. And so I’m not at all concerned” — i.e. not at all concerned about (or for) them.
If that isn’t the Covid-19 equivalent of a bazooka on Fifth Avenue, what is? And it summed up perfectly Trump’s response to the choice of pursuing his own reelection in the way he loves (and seems so desperately to need) or keeping Americans healthy. During these unending pandemic months, he regularly downplayed every danger and most reasonable responses to them, while at one point even tweeting to his followers to “LIBERATE” (possibly in an armed fashion) states that had imposed stay-at-home orders. He needed what he’s long called the “greatest economy in the history of America” back and reopening everything was naturally the way to go.
Mimicking his boss’s style, Attorney General William Barr would even essentially compare lockdowns to slavery. As he put it, “A national lockdown. Stay-at-home orders. It’s like house arrest. Other than slavery, which is a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”
Clearly at the president’s behest, “top White House officials” would, according to the New York Times, pressure “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic.” (As the president would tweet in a similar spirit: “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but it is important for the children and families. May cut off funding if not open!”)
In other words, it didn’t matter who might be endangered — his best fans or the nation’s school children — when his reelection, his future wellbeing, was at stake. Murder on Fifth Avenue? A nothing by comparison.
Supreme Assassins?
And his response to the pandemic only launches us on what should qualify as an all-American killing spree from hell. In the end, it could even prove to be the most modest part of it.
For the rest of that death toll, you might start with health care. It’s already estimated that at least 2.3 million Americans have lost their health insurance in the Trump years (and that figure, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, includes 726,000 children, some of whom may now be headed back to school under pandemic conditions). That, in turn, could prove just a drop in the bucket if his administration’s ongoing assault on Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) finally succeeds. And after November 3rd, it indeed might if Mitch McConnell is successful in hustling Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court in place of the dead Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who twice upheld the constitutionality of that act). A supposedly “pro-life” Trump version of the Supreme Court — unless the pandemic were to sweep through it — would undoubtedly turn out to be murderous in its own fashion. Think of them as potential Supreme Assassins.
Barrett, in particular, is known to hold negative views of the ACA and the Court will hear the Trump administration’s case for abolishing that act within a week of Election Day, so you do the math. Wiping it out reportedly means that at least 23 million more Americans would simply lose their health insurance and it could, in the end, leave tens of millions of Americans with “pre-existing medical conditions” in an uninsured hell on earth.
Death? I guarantee it, on and off Fifth Avenue — and it will have been the Donald’s doing.
A Murderous Future
All of the above should be considered nothing more than warm-up exercises for the real deal when it comes to future presidential slaughter. All of it precedes the truly long-term issue of death and destruction that goes by the name of climate change.
It’s hardly news that Donald Trump long ago rejected global warming as a Chinese “hoax.” And as he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord and, like the child of the fossil-fuelized 1950s that he is, proclaimed a new policy of “American Energy Dominance” (“the golden era of American energy is now underway”), he’s never stopped rejecting it. He did so again recently on a brief visit to burning California amid a historic wildfire season, where he predicted that it would soon get “cooler.” The only exception: when he suddenly feels in the mood to criticize the Chinese for their release of greenhouse gases. As he said in a September 22nd speech to the U.N. General Assembly, “China’s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the U.S. has, and it’s rising fast. By contrast, after I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, last year America reduced its carbon emissions by more than any country in the agreement.”
He and those he’s put in place at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in his administration have spent his presidency in a remarkably determined fashion trying to destroy the American and global environment. So far, they have rolled back (or are trying to roll back) 100 environmental protections that were in place when he arrived in the Oval Office, including most recently limits on a pesticide that reportedly can stunt brain development in children. Air pollution alone was, according to one study, responsible for 9,700 more deaths in this country in 2018 than in 2016. Above all, at the service of a still expanding American fossil-fuel industry, he and his crew have done their damnedest to open the way for oil, gas, and coal development in just about any imaginable form.
In a season in which the West coast has burned in a previously inconceivable fashion, leaving a historic cloud of smoke in its wake, while fierce storms have flooded the Gulf Coast, he’s continued, for instance, to focus on opening the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling. In short, he and his administration have, in a rather literal fashon, proven to be pyromaniacs of the first order. They’ve been remarkably intent on ensuring that, in the future, the world will continue to heat in ways certain to unsettle humanity, creating almost unimaginable forms of death and destruction. Despite the fact that Joe Biden called him a “climate arsonist” as the West coast burned, somehow the potentially murderous nature of his environmental policies has barely sunk in this election season.
If the legend was true, the Roman emperor Nero fiddled — actually, he was probably playing the cithara — while the capital of his empire, Rome, burned for six days. He didn’t personally set the fire, however. Trump and his crew are, it seems, intent on setting fire not just to Rome, or New York, or Washington, D.C., but to the Alaskan wilderness, the Brazilian rain forest, and that giant previously iced in landmass he couldn’t figure out how to purchase, Greenland. He’s helping to ensure that even the oceans will, in their own fashion, be on fire; that storms will grow ever more intense and destructive; that the temperature will rise ever higher; and that the planet will become ever less habitable.
Meanwhile, intently maskless and socially undistanced, even he (and his wife Melania) have now contracted the coronavirus, officially becoming part of his own American carnage. The White House, Air Force One, and the president and his aides became the equivalent of Covid-19 superspreaders, as senators and reporters, among others, also began to come down with the disease. It’s now proving a visible all-American nightmare of the first order.
Donald Trump has, of course, hardly been alone when it comes to burning the planet, but it’s certainly eerie that, at this moment, such an arsonist would stand any chance at all, if he recovers successfully, of being reelected president of the United States. His urge is visibly not just to be an autocrat, but to commit mass murder nationwide and on a planetary scale deep into the future.
Murder, he said, and murder it was, and Fifth Avenue was the least of it.


After Abolition

Prisons and cops survive only in tales for the young like twin Atlantises or two drowned boogeymen .
A cop @ @ @ @ @ Halloween getup as any monster , while a prisoner costume ’ s as taboo as @ @ @ @ @ schools teach what makes them kin .
A prison is the far-off past of a @ @ @ @ @ each cell wall knocked to sandcastle ruin , halls reshaped and re-dyed in green paints @ @ @ @ @ out like shores into spacious homes , laundry and A/C a given in each .
@ @ @ @ @ ’ t be found anywhere , our youths still learn of them , and they @ @ @ @ @ how they look , how they function , what it will take to stop them @ @ @ @ @ names .

This article appears in the October 19/26, 2020 issue.
Prisons and cops survive only in tales for the young
like twin Atlantises or two drowned boogeymen.
A cop’s as harmless a Halloween getup as any
monster, while a prisoner costume’s as taboo as a slave one
now that schools teach what makes them kin.
A prison is the far-off past of a structure
turned free housing, each cell wall knocked to sandcastle
ruin, halls reshaped and re-dyed in green paints,
former floor plans carved out like shores
into spacious homes, laundry and A/C a given in each.
Though prisons and cops won’t be found anywhere,
our youths still learn of them, and they know what they mean,
how they look, how they function, what it will take to stop them
if they return with new names.


thenation--2020-10-07--John Luther Adams’s Songs for a Vanished World

Isolation has long been understood as an essential part of artistic creation—hence all those tweets about how we should spend our quarantine writing King Lear .
That ’ s a high bar for most of us to meet , but there is something to the mythic ideal of the artist in solitude , like Georgia O ’ Keeffe in the desert .
In his new memoir , Silences So Deep , the composer John Luther Adams writes of the long period he spent in Alaska , illuminating the effect of his solitude in that place on his life and his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1953 .
He doesn ’ t spend much energy on the story of his upbringing besides noting , “ Both my parents were alcoholics.
” His adolescence dovetailed with a fevered political climate ; an interest in rock ’ n ’ roll took him from Frank Zappa to Edgar Varèse , and exposure to Martin Luther King Jr. led him to Thoreau .
“ Throughout my life I ’ ve steered an uneasy course between the Scylla of solitude and the Charybdis of politics , between my desire to help change the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he writes .
These twin contradictory impulses took him to Alaska in 1975 , two years after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts ( CalArts ) .
Adams worked there for the Fairbanks Environmental Center and at the time lived apart from his wife , Cindy ( to whom he is still married ) .
“ My cabin was deep in the black spruce bog , ” he writes , fondly remembering the ancient trees , stunted because they grow from permafrost , and the lack of direct sunlight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an elegiac work .
It ’ s a remembrance of two great friends and their influence on Adams ’ s life and work : Gordon Wright , music director of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra , and John Haines , a poet .
It ’ s also a eulogy for Alaska itself , a place forever altered by money ( think oil ) as well as global climate change ( think oil again ) .
There are glimpses of Adams ’ s working process , though you sense the artist ’ s reluctance to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s just , as the cliché has it , like dancing about architecture .
Adams ’ s compositions seem to endeavor to turn the natural world into musical language , whether he is interrogating birdsong or conjuring a winter landscape .
But this is a reductive way of thinking about the composer ’ s work , and anyway , he gives this information away in titles like songbirdsongs and Dream in White on White .
Adams ’ s music can ’ t be understood as a simple act of translation .
The work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s work moves from a register of beautiful awe toward something else altogether .
The critic Alex Ross called Adams ’ s 2013 Become Ocean “ the loveliest apocalypse in musical history.
” There is indeed a creeping sense of unease in Adams ’ s mature work , a menace in percussion that ’ s almost unbearably loud .
There is , correspondingly , an increasing interest in beauty—the music is rich and layered and lovely .
It is disarming and disorienting all at once .
In Silences , the composer recounts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his compositions “ might one day come to be a kind of archeological artifact of the Alaska that we knew and loved.
” It ’ s possible that we have reached that day ; so much of Adams ’ s oeuvre now sounds to me like a requiem .
John and Cindy Adams ultimately left Alaska a few years ago , a decision recounted in this book , and settled for a time in Manhattan .
The year 2020 finds them having moved again .
Adams ’ s income is derived from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has hobbled performances of live music , and as the composer wryly noted when we spoke , “ We live in a world now where recorded music apparently has no monetary value.
” If Covid-19 has made traditional orchestral performance impossible , Adams ’ s Sila : the Breath of the World and Inuksuit may herald the future of the way music is experienced .
These works are closer to installation than anything else : Musicians stand apart in a landscape , and rather than sit , audiences are invited to stroll among @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ve been composing for the last decade or more now are getting some performances , ” Adams said .
“ People are finding them useful , which is exactly what I hope for .
I want the art to be useful.
” “ At this stage in my creative life , I wrestle every day with this question , ” he told me : “ What is the best thing that I can do ?
” Then Adams disclosed that he ’ s not only writing a new book ; he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new pieces of music .
We spoke by satellite phone , the only way to reach the remote part of southern New Mexico where he and Cindy have settled for now .
Perhaps that ’ s what this particular artist needs—to find the world ’ s silent places .
He clearly hears so much in them .
umaan lam : Whom do you consider your most important or most abiding aesthetic influences ?
ohn uther dams : Musically , I came of age in a time when there was this ongoing war between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of the things that I discovered was that it ’ s a false dichotomy .
Music can be intellectually airtight and still sock you in the belly or grab you by the ears or seduce you , ravish you .
So it brought me back to this idea that music is all about sound .
And the mysterious power of sound to touch us and move us and make us more fully human in ways that perhaps nothing else can .
I certainly got that intense love for the physicality and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my principal mentor and teacher at CalArts .
And in a very different way from [ the composer ] Lou Harrison , who was , for 30 years , a dear friend and mentor .
I got it from the music of Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier and other largely American composers , who seemed to form this loose extended family of people who had started from scratch and reinvented—or rediscovered—something in music , going back , really , to Charles Ives and Ruth Crawford Seeger .
This tradition—which is a funny word @ @ @ @ @ @ @ composers , none of whom sounded anything like the others , and who , in a way , couldn ’ t be imitated and who didn ’ t create schools was the element that united certain artists who shared this sense of devotion to the sound itself , and this declaration of musical independence from the European classical tradition .
RA : This is your third book , and in it you write a great deal about the influence on you of other writers .
Not necessarily on your writing , but on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ practice .
JLA : Years ago , Richard Serra observed in an interview that an artist reaches a point in their creative life when all the influences have been deeply assimilated and the artist finds themselves working from out of the work itself .
I ’ ve been in that place for about a decade now .
The most important literary influences in my life have been Barry Lopez and John Haines .
Because , in an almost 30-year friendship with John [ who died in 2011 ] —and Barry and I are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was grounded in a feeling that we ’ re doing the same work in different disciplines .
I have a number of close friendships with other composers whose work I admire , and I want to hear , and I want to know how they made it , and we talk shop .
But on the deepest level , I get more out of talking with Barry , as I did with John Haines , because there ’ s just a little bit of a remove from the core of my work .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of recognition : Oh , yeah , you ’ re thinking about that too .
But you ’ re thinking about it in words and I ’ m thinking in tones .
RA : The book feels like its project is to memorialize two men—John Haines , the poet you just mentioned , and Gordon Wright , another composer .
What you sought in Alaska was solitude , but you write that it was the companionship of these men that helped you create .
JLA : Friendship , community , fellowship , family—however @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with other human beings , whatever you want to call it , to have that is a great gift .
Solitude , as I ’ ve learned since leaving Alaska , is increasingly difficult to find , and such a rare and precious and fragile thing in this world with however many billion of us human animals there are .
To have both at the same time , in the same place—and the love of this long-suffering woman who ’ s been my partner for 40-some-odd years now—these are the great blessings of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it is a contradiction .
It ’ s not what I went to Alaska to find .
I was running away from everything , but the trick was on me .
RA : You write about your move to Alaska as a political act , and once you had arrived there , about making a choice between a commitment to activism or a commitment to art .
When you look at your career , do you see an overlap there ?
JLA : I ’ m two men .
There ’ s the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the streets , and there ’ s the guy who lived in his own private Walden in Alaska for a decade .
And the two regard each other with a kind of bemusement .
Yet they have a lot to say to each other .
Ultimately , they ’ re obviously the same guy .
They ’ re both getting at the same thing .
Nevertheless , this contradiction between solitude and community hit me right between the ears .
In 2008 or ’ 09 when we were still living in Alaska , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Inuksuit , the first of my outdoor pieces .
A big percussion piece .
I had composed that in my splendid solitude , in my one-room cabin studio with the wood stove .
The central metaphor of that piece was , of course , the Inuksuits themselves , the stone structures that Inuit people have constructed since time immemorial across the Arctic coastal plain .
I thought that I was composing a piece about solitude .
I imagined each performing musician and each individual listener as a solitary figure in a vast , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until I experienced the first performance that I understood that , no , this is a piece about shared solitude , which ultimately is where community comes from .
I ’ m hoping—in all the madness now with quarantines and masks and social distancing—that somehow we may rediscover , out of our shared solitude , a new and deeper sense of community .
The Become Trilogy by John Luther Adams RA : Are you aiming for art that almost touches the sacred ?
JLA : Well , we live in a culture that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s a challenging moment because we don ’ t have traditions .
There ’ s no larger cultural fabric of which we feel a part .
At least that ’ s the way I experience life now .
I am profoundly skeptical of any individual ’ s presumption to try and create ritual or myth .
That ’ s just not how that happens .
And yet , I ’ m after something .
RA : In Silences you write , “ Before CalArts , I unconsciously subscribed to the notion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ music had to be complicated.
” Do you think of the work produced when you were first in Alaska , as straightforward ?
Were you attempting to get back to basics , and do you think that is where your interest still is as a composer ?
JLA : I ’ m after something that sounds and feels elemental .
Like walking up a mountain : the idea that this feels absolutely solid and elemental and ultimately in some way mysterious and unknowable .
Even when I was trying to get at those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the music , no matter how superficially pretty or beautiful or simple the music might sound , I wanted it to be airtight .
To me , one hallmark of a work of art is that it stands the test of time in its construction .
The construction of the music , the intellectual care , the mathematical rigor , the algorithmic detail—all that is essential , even if you don ’ t hear it or you choose not to listen to it .
I ’ m not interested in showing you how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I am .
The music is not about me , or even about my making it .
But I still think that if it ’ s well made , and if it has a formal coherence , like this mountain does or like the seasons do , it gives the music that elemental quality that I ’ m after .
There are moments in Become Ocean or Become Desert when all these different tempos and sonic layers begin to converge , or diverge for that matter , and I believe when a listener @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t hear it consciously , it creates a gravitational pull or a magnetic field in the music .
RA : Your later work has embraced an interest in more complex strategies—of composed silence or almost unbearable percussion .
You ’ ve used technology to accomplish sound , even to transcribe the earth ’ s sound , in The Place Where You Go to Listen [ a site-specific installation that renders seismic vibration as music ] .
It seems to push beyond the idea of music as a honed artifact and toward a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the right language to use ?
JLA : It ’ s ultimately about experience , for me .
An unmediated experience .
Authentic , direct , personal experience .
I like to have an encounter with an animal or a landscape or a person or a work of art and think , “ What the hell was that ?
” I want a little mystery , a little darkness , maybe a little fear .
RA : I wouldn ’ t want to overstate it , as I do think that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because it is using beauty .
And because there ’ s an intellectual clarity in the way that you name the pieces , or the way that you talk about the pieces , that helps people to connect .
JLA : Yes , you ’ re right .
And actually , I ’ m a liar .
You ’ re absolutely right .
I ’ m talking out of both sides of my mouth .
But I ’ m hoping that I may seduce you just enough—invite you in , and then you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : There ’ s an aura of elegy to this book , not only because you ’ re writing about Wright and Haines , but you ’ re writing about Alaska , an Alaska that in many ways really doesn ’ t exist anymore .
JLA : Yes , there is an elegiac quality , and even more so in the work that I ’ m doing now .
I ’ m working on a huge piece that I suspect will be my last orchestral piece , because I think orchestras are going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ especially in the United States , where we think the arts are a luxury commodity and not a common good .
It is a lamentation .
It ’ s the most grief-filled music I ’ ve ever written .
Thomas Wolfe was right—you can ’ t go home again .
And in this case , because home ain ’ t there .
So all I can do is reflect on what there was .
Maybe help build a cultural , an archaeological record of what that world was and how it felt to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to look forward rather than back .
Even at this moment when it ’ s very difficult to imagine a future that any of us even want to look at : It ’ s terrifying , but I am trying to figure out now how I move beyond that world that I knew and imagine a world that I will never live to inhabit , a culture that may somehow be informed by the things we did experience and by the things we may have learned from that vanished world .
RA : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idea , but you ’ re returning to a reverence for beauty , harmony , or something that is pleasing to the human as animal , right ?
JLA : There is a Canadian poet , Robert Bringhurst , who wrote an essay that allowed me to loosen up called “ Singing With Frogs.
” It ’ s an ecological take on polyphony .
The many voices of the world around us create a kind of diversity that makes the world better .
The culture of diversity among humans and among all plants @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of all these different voices singing , being heard together .
When I stumbled across that , I thought , “ Okay , I can do polyphony .
I can sing with the frogs .
”

Isolation has long been understood as an essential part of artistic creation—hence all those tweets about how we should spend our quarantine writing King Lear. That’s a high bar for most of us to meet, but there is something to the mythic ideal of the artist in solitude, like Georgia O’Keeffe in the desert. In his new memoir, Silences So Deep, the composer John Luther Adams writes of the long period he spent in Alaska, illuminating the effect of his solitude in that place on his life and his body of work.
Adams was born in 1953. He doesn’t spend much energy on the story of his upbringing besides noting, “Both my parents were alcoholics.” His adolescence dovetailed with a fevered political climate; an interest in rock ’n’ roll took him from Frank Zappa to Edgar Varèse, and exposure to Martin Luther King Jr. led him to Thoreau. “Throughout my life I’ve steered an uneasy course between the Scylla of solitude and the Charybdis of politics, between my desire to help change the world and my impulse to escape it,” he writes.
These twin contradictory impulses took him to Alaska in 1975, two years after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Adams worked there for the Fairbanks Environmental Center and at the time lived apart from his wife, Cindy (to whom he is still married). “My cabin was deep in the black spruce bog,” he writes, fondly remembering the ancient trees, stunted because they grow from permafrost, and the lack of direct sunlight during the winter months.
Silences is an elegiac work. It’s a remembrance of two great friends and their influence on Adams’s life and work: Gordon Wright, music director of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, and John Haines, a poet. It’s also a eulogy for Alaska itself, a place forever altered by money (think oil) as well as global climate change (think oil again).
There are glimpses of Adams’s working process, though you sense the artist’s reluctance to talk shop, perhaps because that’s just, as the cliché has it, like dancing about architecture. Adams’s compositions seem to endeavor to turn the natural world into musical language, whether he is interrogating birdsong or conjuring a winter landscape. But this is a reductive way of thinking about the composer’s work, and anyway, he gives this information away in titles like songbirdsongs and Dream in White on White. Adams’s music can’t be understood as a simple act of translation.
The work of every artist evolves, and Adams’s work moves from a register of beautiful awe toward something else altogether. The critic Alex Ross called Adams’s 2013 Become Ocean “the loveliest apocalypse in musical history.” There is indeed a creeping sense of unease in Adams’s mature work, a menace in percussion that’s almost unbearably loud. There is, correspondingly, an increasing interest in beauty—the music is rich and layered and lovely. It is disarming and disorienting all at once. In Silences, the composer recounts a friend’s observation that some of his compositions “might one day come to be a kind of archeological artifact of the Alaska that we knew and loved.” It’s possible that we have reached that day; so much of Adams’s oeuvre now sounds to me like a requiem. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
John and Cindy Adams ultimately left Alaska a few years ago, a decision recounted in this book, and settled for a time in Manhattan. The year 2020 finds them having moved again. Adams’s income is derived from performance royalty and commissions, but Covid-19 has hobbled performances of live music, and as the composer wryly noted when we spoke, “We live in a world now where recorded music apparently has no monetary value.”
If Covid-19 has made traditional orchestral performance impossible, Adams’s Sila: the Breath of the World and Inuksuit may herald the future of the way music is experienced. These works are closer to installation than anything else: Musicians stand apart in a landscape, and rather than sit, audiences are invited to stroll among them. “These outdoor pieces that I’ve been composing for the last decade or more now are getting some performances,” Adams said. “People are finding them useful, which is exactly what I hope for. I want the art to be useful.”
“At this stage in my creative life, I wrestle every day with this question,” he told me: “What is the best thing that I can do?” Then Adams disclosed that he’s not only writing a new book; he’s also at work on seven new pieces of music. We spoke by satellite phone, the only way to reach the remote part of southern New Mexico where he and Cindy have settled for now. Perhaps that’s what this particular artist needs—to find the world’s silent places. He clearly hears so much in them.
—Rumaan Alam
R umaan A lam: Whom do you consider your most important or most abiding aesthetic influences?
J ohn L uther A dams: Musically, I came of age in a time when there was this ongoing war between smart music and pretty music. And one of the things that I discovered was that it’s a false dichotomy. Music can be intellectually airtight and still sock you in the belly or grab you by the ears or seduce you, ravish you. So it brought me back to this idea that music is all about sound. And the mysterious power of sound to touch us and move us and make us more fully human in ways that perhaps nothing else can.
I certainly got that intense love for the physicality and the magic of sound from James Tenney, my principal mentor and teacher at CalArts. And in a very different way from [the composer] Lou Harrison, who was, for 30 years, a dear friend and mentor. I got it from the music of Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier and other largely American composers, who seemed to form this loose extended family of people who had started from scratch and reinvented—or rediscovered—something in music, going back, really, to Charles Ives and Ruth Crawford Seeger. This tradition—which is a funny word to use in relation to these people—of composers, none of whom sounded anything like the others, and who, in a way, couldn’t be imitated and who didn’t create schools was the element that united certain artists who shared this sense of devotion to the sound itself, and this declaration of musical independence from the European classical tradition.
RA: This is your third book, and in it you write a great deal about the influence on you of other writers. Not necessarily on your writing, but on your life, on your general artistic practice.
JLA: Years ago, Richard Serra observed in an interview that an artist reaches a point in their creative life when all the influences have been deeply assimilated and the artist finds themselves working from out of the work itself. I’ve been in that place for about a decade now. The most important literary influences in my life have been Barry Lopez and John Haines. Because, in an almost 30-year friendship with John [who died in 2011]—and Barry and I are well into our fourth decade now—the friendship was grounded in a feeling that we’re doing the same work in different disciplines. I have a number of close friendships with other composers whose work I admire, and I want to hear, and I want to know how they made it, and we talk shop. But on the deepest level, I get more out of talking with Barry, as I did with John Haines, because there’s just a little bit of a remove from the core of my work. And there’s this lovely sense of recognition: Oh, yeah, you’re thinking about that too. But you’re thinking about it in words and I’m thinking in tones.
RA: The book feels like its project is to memorialize two men—John Haines, the poet you just mentioned, and Gordon Wright, another composer. What you sought in Alaska was solitude, but you write that it was the companionship of these men that helped you create.
JLA: Friendship, community, fellowship, family—however we think of our most intimate relationships with other human beings, whatever you want to call it, to have that is a great gift. Solitude, as I’ve learned since leaving Alaska, is increasingly difficult to find, and such a rare and precious and fragile thing in this world with however many billion of us human animals there are. To have both at the same time, in the same place—and the love of this long-suffering woman who’s been my partner for 40-some-odd years now—these are the great blessings of my life. As you say, it is a contradiction. It’s not what I went to Alaska to find. I was running away from everything, but the trick was on me.
RA: You write about your move to Alaska as a political act, and once you had arrived there, about making a choice between a commitment to activism or a commitment to art. When you look at your career, do you see an overlap there?
JLA: I’m two men. There’s the guy who came of age marching in the streets, and there’s the guy who lived in his own private Walden in Alaska for a decade. And the two regard each other with a kind of bemusement. Yet they have a lot to say to each other. Ultimately, they’re obviously the same guy. They’re both getting at the same thing. Nevertheless, this contradiction between solitude and community hit me right between the ears.
In 2008 or ’09 when we were still living in Alaska, and I heard the first performance of Inuksuit, the first of my outdoor pieces. A big percussion piece. I had composed that in my splendid solitude, in my one-room cabin studio with the wood stove. The central metaphor of that piece was, of course, the Inuksuits themselves, the stone structures that Inuit people have constructed since time immemorial across the Arctic coastal plain. I thought that I was composing a piece about solitude. I imagined each performing musician and each individual listener as a solitary figure in a vast, empty landscape. It wasn’t until I experienced the first performance that I understood that, no, this is a piece about shared solitude, which ultimately is where community comes from. I’m hoping—in all the madness now with quarantines and masks and social distancing—that somehow we may rediscover, out of our shared solitude, a new and deeper sense of community.
The Become Trilogy by John Luther Adams
RA: Are you aiming for art that almost touches the sacred?
JLA: Well, we live in a culture that’s in steep decline. And it’s a challenging moment because we don’t have traditions. There’s no larger cultural fabric of which we feel a part. At least that’s the way I experience life now. I am profoundly skeptical of any individual’s presumption to try and create ritual or myth. That’s just not how that happens. And yet, I’m after something.
RA: In Silences you write, “Before CalArts, I unconsciously subscribed to the notion that to be truly new and interesting music had to be complicated.” Do you think of the work produced when you were first in Alaska, as straightforward? Were you attempting to get back to basics, and do you think that is where your interest still is as a composer?
JLA: I’m after something that sounds and feels elemental. Like walking up a mountain: the idea that this feels absolutely solid and elemental and ultimately in some way mysterious and unknowable. Even when I was trying to get at those more essential, more elemental things in the music, no matter how superficially pretty or beautiful or simple the music might sound, I wanted it to be airtight. To me, one hallmark of a work of art is that it stands the test of time in its construction.
The construction of the music, the intellectual care, the mathematical rigor, the algorithmic detail—all that is essential, even if you don’t hear it or you choose not to listen to it. I’m not interested in showing you how much technique I have, how smart I am. The music is not about me, or even about my making it.
But I still think that if it’s well made, and if it has a formal coherence, like this mountain does or like the seasons do, it gives the music that elemental quality that I’m after. There are moments in Become Ocean or Become Desert when all these different tempos and sonic layers begin to converge, or diverge for that matter, and I believe when a listener hears that, even if she doesn’t hear it consciously, it creates a gravitational pull or a magnetic field in the music.
RA: Your later work has embraced an interest in more complex strategies—of composed silence or almost unbearable percussion. You’ve used technology to accomplish sound, even to transcribe the earth’s sound, in The Place Where You Go to Listen [a site-specific installation that renders seismic vibration as music]. It seems to push beyond the idea of music as a honed artifact and toward a music of soundscape or immersion. Is that the right language to use?
JLA: It’s ultimately about experience, for me. An unmediated experience. Authentic, direct, personal experience. I like to have an encounter with an animal or a landscape or a person or a work of art and think, “What the hell was that?” I want a little mystery, a little darkness, maybe a little fear.
RA: I wouldn’t want to overstate it, as I do think that the work extends a hand to its audience because it is using beauty. And because there’s an intellectual clarity in the way that you name the pieces, or the way that you talk about the pieces, that helps people to connect.
JLA: Yes, you’re right. And actually, I’m a liar. You’re absolutely right. I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth. But I’m hoping that I may seduce you just enough—invite you in, and then you’re on your own.
RA: There’s an aura of elegy to this book, not only because you’re writing about Wright and Haines, but you’re writing about Alaska, an Alaska that in many ways really doesn’t exist anymore.
JLA: Yes, there is an elegiac quality, and even more so in the work that I’m doing now. I’m working on a huge piece that I suspect will be my last orchestral piece, because I think orchestras are going to really have a hard time, especially in the United States, where we think the arts are a luxury commodity and not a common good. It is a lamentation. It’s the most grief-filled music I’ve ever written.
Thomas Wolfe was right—you can’t go home again. And in this case, because home ain’t there. So all I can do is reflect on what there was. Maybe help build a cultural, an archaeological record of what that world was and how it felt to live there, but always calling myself to look forward rather than back. Even at this moment when it’s very difficult to imagine a future that any of us even want to look at: It’s terrifying, but I am trying to figure out now how I move beyond that world that I knew and imagine a world that I will never live to inhabit, a culture that may somehow be informed by the things we did experience and by the things we may have learned from that vanished world.
RA: You’re working out an intellectual idea, but you’re returning to a reverence for beauty, harmony, or something that is pleasing to the human as animal, right?
JLA: There is a Canadian poet, Robert Bringhurst, who wrote an essay that allowed me to loosen up called “Singing With Frogs.” It’s an ecological take on polyphony. The many voices of the world around us create a kind of diversity that makes the world better. The culture of diversity among humans and among all plants and animals. Polyphony is the sound of all these different voices singing, being heard together. When I stumbled across that, I thought, “Okay, I can do polyphony. I can sing with the frogs.”


thenation--2020-10-07--‘60 Minutes,’ ‘The Guardian,’ and Game-Changing New Climate Science

On Sunday night , America met Michael Mann on 60 Minutes , one of the country ’ s most watched and influential television news programs for nearly 50 years now .
A professor at Penn State University , Mann is one of the world ’ s most eminent climate scientists , and also one of the most outspoken .
The 60 Minutes segment , titled “ Cause and Effect , ” focused on climate change and California ’ s ongoing record wildfires , which have burned more than 4 million acres to date .
After showing the viral clip of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will “ start getting cooler , ” correspondent Scott Pelley asked Mann about the president ’ s additional assertion that “ science doesn ’ t know.
” “ The president doesn ’ t know , ” Mann retorted .
“ And he should know better.
” The geophysicist explained to the roughly 10 million viewers of 60 Minutes that all the world ’ s leading scientific institutions , including the US National Academy of Sciences , have reached a consensus .
In a sound bite that journalists across the United States should quote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kept it simple enough for an 8-year-old to understand : “ There ’ s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.
” In most other countries , such an elementary statement would be unnecessary in a major news outlet .
But in the US , where only one person in five understands how overwhelming the scientific consensus about climate change is , it makes sense to spell it out .
Can Kentucky Slip the Industry Ties That Prevent Change ?
These Races Will Shape What the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in this series Covering Climate Now was happy to work with our partners at CBS News in developing this 60 Minutes story .
CBS broadcast it two days after The Guardian , Covering Climate Now ’ s lead media partner , published a companion interview with Mann , in which he delivered a rarity : pathbreaking climate news that isn ’ t depressing .
There has been “ a dramatic change in [ scientists ’ ] understanding ” of the climate system in recent years , Mann said .
It ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he added , noting that the scientific community hasn ’ t done a great job of explaining it .
Humanity , it turns out , may have a bit more time to prevent climate breakdown than previously believed .
Mann is well positioned to explain this shift in scientific understanding .
He directs the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers , none more famous than 1999 ’ s “ hockey stick ” study that showed , as 60 Minutes put it , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ began with the Industrial Revolution.
” Until recently , Mann explained in The Guardian , scientists believed the climate system—a catch-all term for the interaction among Earth ’ s atmosphere , oceans , and other parts of the biosphere—carried a long lag effect .
This lag effect was mainly a function of carbon dioxide ’ s remaining in the atmosphere and trapping heat for many decades after being emitted .
So , even if humanity halted all CO emissions overnight , average global temperatures would continue to rise for 25 to 30 years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waves , droughts , and other climate impacts .
Halting emissions will take at least 20 years , under the best of circumstances , and so humanity was likely locked in to at least 50 more years of rising temperatures and impacts .
Research over the past 10 years , however , has revised this vision of the climate system .
Scientists used to “ treat carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as if it was a simple control knob that you turn up ” and temperatures climb accordingly , “ but in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s not what happens , ” Mann said .
Instead , if humans “ stop emitting carbon right now…the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly.
” The actual lag effect between halting CO emissions and halting temperature rise , then , is not 25 to 30 years but , per Mann , “ more like three to five years.
” In short , this game-changing new scientific understanding suggests that humanity can turn down the heat almost immediately by slashing heat-trapping emissions .
“ Our destiny is determined by our behavior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that information “ empowering.
” Of course , this glimmer of hope is empowering only if humans—especially those with governmental and policy-making positions—actually act .
Mann has said before , and he reiterated in the Guardian interview , that a second presidential term for Trump would be “ game over ” for the climate .
That ’ s not Mann ’ s partisan judgement , he insisted .
It ’ s straightforward math .
To prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature , humanity must cut emissions in half by 2030 , Mann @ @ @ @ @ @ @ report by the UN ’ s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
That will require a rate of change “ unprecedented ” in human history , according to the IPCC scientists : emissions had to fall by 5 percent year after year .
But if a reelected Trump spent an additional four years pushing the world ’ s biggest economy in the opposite direction , hitting the 2030 target would become “ essentially impossible , ” Mann said .
If emissions don ’ t begin falling until 2025 , they would have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over the following five years .
“ That may be , although not physically impossible , societally impossible , ” Mann said .
“ It just may not be economically possible or socially viable to do it that [ quickly ] .
” These Races Will Shape What the US Elections Mean for Climate Progress Just as The Guardian has long been the gold standard for print coverage of climate change , so 60 Minutes is now setting an example of how broadcast journalists can cover what Mann calls “ the greatest crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In fact , this was the second consecutive Sunday that 60 Minutes ran a segment covering climate change ; last week , Sir David Attenborough , the legendary naturalist and BBC filmmaker , described how human activity over the past 60 years has not only overheated the planet but driven many plant and animal species to the brink of extinction , in turn threatening humanity ’ s own future .
( Attenborough ’ s new autobiographical documentary , A Life On Our Planet , premiered on Netflix on October 3 . )
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States this election year .
Between now and Election Day , November 3 , newsrooms should make abundantly clear not only what ’ s at stake but what voters can do about it .
As Mann said in the Guardian story ’ s kicker , “ The future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens .
”

This article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.
On Sunday night, America met Michael Mann on 60 Minutes, one of the country’s most watched and influential television news programs for nearly 50 years now. A professor at Penn State University, Mann is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, and also one of the most outspoken. The 60 Minutes segment, titled “Cause and Effect,” focused on climate change and California’s ongoing record wildfires, which have burned more than 4 million acres to date. After showing the viral clip of Donald Trump telling state officials that Earth will “start getting cooler,” correspondent Scott Pelley asked Mann about the president’s additional assertion that “science doesn’t know.”
“The president doesn’t know,” Mann retorted. “And he should know better.”
The geophysicist explained to the roughly 10 million viewers of 60 Minutes that all the world’s leading scientific institutions, including the US National Academy of Sciences, have reached a consensus. In a sound bite that journalists across the United States should quote in their own climate reporting, Mann kept it simple enough for an 8-year-old to understand: “There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.” Covering Climate Now How to Stop the Spread of Climate Disinformation Erika Seiber and Michael Khoo A Soundtrack for the Climate Emergency Mark Hertsgaard Can Gen Z Save the Midterms for Democrats? Mark Hertsgaard
In most other countries, such an elementary statement would be unnecessary in a major news outlet. But in the US, where only one person in five understands how overwhelming the scientific consensus about climate change is, it makes sense to spell it out.
Covering Climate Now was happy to work with our partners at CBS News in developing this 60 Minutes story. CBS broadcast it two days after The Guardian, Covering Climate Now’s lead media partner, published a companion interview with Mann, in which he delivered a rarity: pathbreaking climate news that isn’t depressing.
There has been “a dramatic change in [scientists’] understanding” of the climate system in recent years, Mann said. It’s a change many journalists may be unaware of, he added, noting that the scientific community hasn’t done a great job of explaining it. Humanity, it turns out, may have a bit more time to prevent climate breakdown than previously believed. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Current Issue View our current issue
Mann is well positioned to explain this shift in scientific understanding. He directs the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, none more famous than 1999’s “hockey stick” study that showed, as 60 Minutes put it, that “today’s rate of warming began with the Industrial Revolution.”
Until recently, Mann explained in The Guardian, scientists believed the climate system—a catch-all term for the interaction among Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and other parts of the biosphere—carried a long lag effect. This lag effect was mainly a function of carbon dioxide’s remaining in the atmosphere and trapping heat for many decades after being emitted. So, even if humanity halted all CO 2 emissions overnight, average global temperatures would continue to rise for 25 to 30 years, while also driving more intense heat waves, droughts, and other climate impacts. Halting emissions will take at least 20 years, under the best of circumstances, and so humanity was likely locked in to at least 50 more years of rising temperatures and impacts.
Research over the past 10 years, however, has revised this vision of the climate system. Scientists used to “treat carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as if it was a simple control knob that you turn up” and temperatures climb accordingly, “but in the real world we now know that’s not what happens,” Mann said. Instead, if humans “stop emitting carbon right now…the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly.” The actual lag effect between halting CO 2 emissions and halting temperature rise, then, is not 25 to 30 years but, per Mann, “more like three to five years.”
In short, this game-changing new scientific understanding suggests that humanity can turn down the heat almost immediately by slashing heat-trapping emissions. “Our destiny is determined by our behavior,” said Mann, who finds that information “empowering.”
Of course, this glimmer of hope is empowering only if humans—especially those with governmental and policy-making positions—actually act. Mann has said before, and he reiterated in the Guardian interview, that a second presidential term for Trump would be “game over” for the climate. That’s not Mann’s partisan judgment, he insisted. It’s straightforward math. Climate Election These Races Will Shape What the US Elections Mean for Climate Progress Mark Hertsgaard
To prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature, humanity must cut emissions in half by 2030, Mann said, citing 2018’s landmark report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That will require a rate of change “unprecedented” in human history, according to the IPCC scientists: emissions had to fall by 5 percent year after year. But if a reelected Trump spent an additional four years pushing the world’s biggest economy in the opposite direction, hitting the 2030 target would become “essentially impossible,” Mann said. If emissions don’t begin falling until 2025, they would have to decline by roughly 15 percent every year over the following five years. “That may be, although not physically impossible, societally impossible,” Mann said. “It just may not be economically possible or socially viable to do it that [quickly].”
Just as The Guardian has long been the gold standard for print coverage of climate change, so 60 Minutes is now setting an example of how broadcast journalists can cover what Mann calls “the greatest crisis that we face as a civilization.” In fact, this was the second consecutive Sunday that 60 Minutes ran a segment covering climate change; last week, Sir David Attenborough, the legendary naturalist and BBC filmmaker, described how human activity over the past 60 years has not only overheated the planet but driven many plant and animal species to the brink of extinction, in turn threatening humanity’s own future. (Attenborough’s new autobiographical documentary, A Life On Our Planet, premiered on Netflix on October 3.)
That future is on the ballot in the United States this election year. Between now and Election Day, November 3, newsrooms should make abundantly clear not only what’s at stake but what voters can do about it. As Mann said in the Guardian story’s kicker, “The future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens.”