Idiot Wind

 "Idiot wind

Blowing through the buttons of our coats

Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves"

--Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's lyrics have a haunting way of coming back in new contexts that give them whole new shades of meaning. When he wrote this scorching ballad back in 1975, around the time of his heart-wrenching divorce from Sara, the love of his life, it was little more than an inspired scream of rage from a man who had just lost his wife. And--as always with Dylan--the lyrics touched on the broader cultural implications of this painful marital breakup--including (then and now) the general spread of idiocy throughout our culture--"Idiot Wind...blowing like a circle around my skull/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol..." 

But today it has yet another, rather grim meaning for us all, here in the Northwest. My wife and I spent the past long weekend--and had intended to spend the rest of the week, at our time share on the Oregon Coast.  The first three days and two nights had been, as usual, spectacular, with crystalline blue skies over the Pacific Ocean right outside our window, with distant white caps, a fog bank along the horizon, pelicans and other sea birds soaring gracefully here and there, and--if we were lucky--the occasional spout of a migrating whale.

But then, in the middle of the night, the wind changed, and a fierce, hot easterly wind swept from the high desert across the Cascades, the Valley, and the Coastal Range, meeting up with other coastal winds from the north, all fanning the flames of wildfires into raging infernos and bringing a pall of reddish smoke and cinders over our whole region. We awoke in darkness, the power knocked out by falling trees and woody debris everywhere--but then, despite the sunrise, the darkness got even darker, as the sky turned to a lurid red. Our coastal Heaven-on-Earth had turned hellish overnight, and so we packed up and left, heading south since our normal northern route through Lincoln City had already been blocked by downed trees and another wildfire. When we turned East at Newport on Highway 20, we saw that the smoky reddish-yellow sky cast a pall over the entire Willamette Valley, due to wildfires raging out of control and sending panicking residents fleeing from their homes, farms, and villages up through the Santiam Canyon. Right now, I sit in my suburban home at the south end of Salem, hoping that the fires surging from the mountains to the valley stop short of our city.

Idiot wind, indeed.  This easterly wind, bringing desert heat and blowing wildfires up into conflagrations, has been called a "once in a century" weather event.  But in this age of accelerating climate chaos worldwide, "once in a century" has come to mean "every few years." So it is also for "record" floods throughout the midwest, for untimely and destructive monsoon rains in India and South Asia, for European and Alaskan heat waves, and of course for unprecedented wildfires not only here, but in Australia, California, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, the Amazon, and elsewhere...not to mention hurricanes in the Caribbean, breaking new records annually for their frequency and ferocity. Indeed, "it's a wonder that we still know how to breathe..."

Probing a little deeper, it is interesting to note that the word "idiot" in ancient Greek did not simply mean "a stupid person" as we use it today, but specifically, it referred to a private person (idios)--one who was interested only in himself, and did not engage with, nor care about, anyone else. For the Greeks, whose definition of man as a "political animal" was intended as a compliment, not an insult, there was nothing worse than withdrawing from engagement with the polis, the (democratic) community, and becoming entirely self-absorbed and self-interested.  Such a person was, indeed, stupid, as far as they were concerned.

Yet today, we have created a culture of idiots, each watching their own TV news channel (with Fox being by far the most idiotic of the group) and reading their own online news, specifically filtered by algorithms to reflect their own particular interests and biases.  And so people of different political affiliations often inhabit different universes altogether, each of which is equally "real" to them--because they don't even talk, much less listen, to anyone other than people like themselves.

One of the worst consequences of this general spread of idiocy--of self-absorption and susceptibility to partisan propaganda and media manipulation--is the politicization of science. This has been most recently evident in the (thoroughly idiotic) refusal of many people to wear masks or respect social distancing, on the grounds that it "violates their constitutional rights" even though it is nothing but a sensible public safety measure, universally prescribed by epidemiologists worldwide who know the potential consequences of a new and deadly virus which spreads rapidly, asymptomatically, and exponentially through aerosols we breathe. This means that all of us are potential carriers of the virus, whether we know it or not.

But getting back to the wildfires that have turned our sky a pale, sickly yellow, with fine cinders floating down in all directions and an acrid, smoky odor--this "idiot wind" has been blowing across our country, fanned by Republicans with the lazy complicity of Democrats, ever since 1988, when our foremost climatologist, NASA space scientist James Hansen,  testified before Congress about the imminent dangers of fossil fuel-based carbon emissions accumulating in our atmosphere. Since then, the Oil industry (ExxonMobil in particular, but all the others as well) has funded a widespread misinformation campaign, sowing public doubts about the reality and/or the implications of CO2-based climate change, while Republicans undertook a ferocious campaign of denial, even smearing senior climate scientists like Michael Mann. As a direct result, a total of 32 years have elapsed since Hansen's dire warning to Congress, and despite a vast array of confirming evidence from all over the world, our nation has done next to nothing to reduce our carbon emissions, and we still have a pig-headed climate denier in the White House who has withdrawn the US from the hard-won Paris Agreement--the first of many such attempts to actually result in an international treaty to cut global emissions--and he has given the oil, gas, and coal industries everything they ever wanted.

Meanwhile, glaciers worldwide continue to recede at faster and faster rates, both poles are melting rapidly, sea level is rising, wildfires are sweeping the world, coral reefs are vanishing due to warmer ocean waters, permafrosts many thousands of years old are melting and releasing huge reserves of methane (a greenhouse gas 72 to 100 times more potent in trapping infrared heat than CO2), and catastrophic weather events, from devastating hurricanes and tornadoes to record-breaking floods to long-lasting droughts and ferocious wildfires on every continent (except Antarctica)--all grow worse year by year.

And so, the Idiot Wind continues to howl and blow around the world and inside our skulls...or to quote another dark Dylan song, "Something is burning, baby, are you aware?"