Time And Space - Looking at the Big Picture And Taking The Long Term View

As I said the other day (actually it was just yesterday) news stories fly by so fast and superficially, that there's hardly time to put all the pieces together.  We get random puzzle pieces, bits of news, then they either disappear or get thrown into a big messy pile.  So no wonder people don't understand much.  Any story that requires remembering sixteen other stories that whizzed past, won't have any more meaning than the headline or talking point used to frame it by whatever news outlet one attends to.


This LA Times opinion piece addresses Time Denial, Most of us are clueless about humanity’s place in the planet's long history. We need to learn 'timefulness'.  The author is Marcia Bjornerud, a professor of geosciences at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Antipathy toward time rooted in the very human combination of vanity and existential dread is perhaps the most forgivable type of chronophobia. But more dangerous forms of time denial pervade our society. Fiscal years and congressional terms enforce a blinkered view of the future. Short-term thinkers are rewarded with bonuses and reelection, while those who dare to take seriously our responsibility to future generations find themselves out of office. Even two years of forethought seem beyond the capacity of legislators these days, when stop-gap spending measures have become the norm. Institutions that do aspire to the long view — state and national parks, public libraries and universities — are increasingly seen as taxpayer burdens. . . 

. . . We lack a sense of temporal proportion — the durations of the great chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of climate instability, the intrinsic time-scales of “natural capital” like groundwater systems.
We are, in effect, time illiterate, and this ignorance of planetary time undermines any claims we may make to modernity. We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as the pre-Copernican view of the universe. We think we’re the center of it all, unable to see either the past or future in proper perspective.

Another LA Times story, by Susanne Rust, tries to be timeful, after this year of horrific California fires,  to look at the history of fires and other catastrophic events in California:

In 1860, a young botanist raised in New York and schooled in Connecticut found himself on the payroll of the newly formed California Division of Mines and Geology. His job: Roam the vast, new state, taking samples and observations of plants and animals.
Over four years journeying across California, William Brewer witnessed torrential rains that turned the Central Valley into a vast, white-capped lake; intolerable heat waves that made the “fats of our meats run away in spontaneous gravy;” violent earthquakes; and fires he described as “great sheets of flame, extending over acres.”
He, like explorers, journalists and settlers before him, wondered whether people could permanently settle in California, said David Igler, a professor of history at UC Irvine.
“People were flabbergasted by what was happening,” said Igler, referring to the droughts, floods and quakes of the mid-1800s. “They wondered whether this was a place where we could even really settle and where agriculture could be maintained.”

She writes about how the Indians who inhabited California lived in small groups that moved around and practiced controlled burns until the Spanish outlawed them.  The Spanish.  They were the landlords of California for a while before the US kicked them out through force and violence.  But that's another historical amnesia when we talk about immigration.   

And I began this morning working my way through another chapter of Seth Abramson's Proof of Collusion.  That's a book that tries to put all the pieces together in the Trump-Russia collusion story.  I've posted about that book already. It's an example of taking years of news stories and organizing them into sensible, in depth, cohesive organization of the facts.   In the chapter today he writes about how Michael Cohen was a school boy friend of Felix Sater, who immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union when he was eight.  

Abramson's book averages about five or six footnotes per page, so even Abramson is only telling us part of the story, but surely a lot more than most of us know despite the non-stop reports interspersed with click-bait and stories about the homeless, immigrants, murders, football players, weekly movie box-office earnings, and other relatively random bits of infotainment.  So I checked footnote 78 from that chapter - a September 2017 article in the Nation on Felix Sater, by Bob Dreyfuss.

"Of all the characters caught up in Russiagate, none come close to Sater for having a decades-long record as a larger-than-life, outside-the-law, spy agency-linked wheeler-dealer from the pages of a John le Carré novel. His past record includes a conviction for lacerating a man’s face with a broken margarita glass in a bar brawl and his involvement in a multimillion-dollar stock fraud and money-laundering scheme. Despite that record, which came before he worked with Trump, Sater spent nearly a decade working with the Trump Organization in search of deals in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But on August 28, Sater made the front pages of the Times and The Washington Post, thanks to leaked copies of e-mails that he sent in late 2015 and early 2016 to Cohen, concerning Sater’s efforts to work with a group of Russian investors to set up a flagship Trump property in the Russian capital.
In language that Cohen himself described to the Times as “colorful,” Sater seemed nearly beside himself as he reported on his work in Moscow on behalf of Trump:

“'Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” wrote Sater. “I will get all of [Vladimir] Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.… I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” Echoing a line that would later become Trump’s own description of why he and Putin might get along, Sater wrote that the Russian leader “only wants to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to deal.'”

Netflix and Prime and HBO should be doing these stories now, when they can make a difference.  These characters and their misbehavior are as colorful and bizarre as anything they have up now.  And learning about who all these people are now would help Congress members and voters understand how outrageous the Republic Congress' lack of integrity is.

All the President's Men - the Watergate tale - came out in June 1974 - not quite two months before Nixon resigned.  The movie didn't come out until 1976.

Proof of Collusion came out November 13, 2018.  But the Trump story is much less focused than the Watergate burglary.  Trump's tentacles go out long into the past.  His crimes and corruptions are myriad.  His ties to Russia, Ukraine, and other nations - through his obsessions with putting up giant phallic buildings with with his name on them - require much more patience and attention from readers and viewers.  And Bernstein and Woodward were better known as the two reporters who had been keeping the story alive.

But you can read Proof of Collusion online. There's an audio book.  Simon and Schuster is offering a free book if you sign up for their email list.  (The link takes you to the Proof of Collusion page.  I didn't follow the link to see if PoC is one of the books available free.)

Yes, long term, comprehensive knowledge packaged so that United States consumers of news can make sense of what is happening - in detail - is severely lacking.  Instead of presenting the United States viewers with the picture of the completed puzzle (like on the box of jigsaw puzzles), or even sections of the puzzle as the pieces get pieced together, we get shown on piece at a time and little or none of how it fits into the larger picture.

The optimistic view of all this would be that technology has been changing so fast we haven't yet figured out how to slow down and get decent journalism for most people.  Newspapers, trying to survive, are fighting for survival and clicks, and that eventually we'll figure this all out.  More pessimistically, that hacking and trolling is taking us down the path to a version of  Orwell's 1984. Just a few decades later than Orwell predicted.

You want more?  An obvious part of the problem of getting the big picture is follow up of stories.  So here's a video that was posted two days ago - a talk by Robert Tibbo, Edward Snowden's attorney in Hong Kong who is also the attorney for the refugees in Hong Kong who hid Snowden while he was there.  It seems the Hong Kong bar association has created trumped up charges against Tibbo and are trying to disbar him.  He tells us that they demand information from him, but the complaint against him is from an anonymous source and they refuse to give him any details.



I'd note that I lived in Hong Kong for a year when the British were still in charge.  While it was nominally a democracy, people didn't have a whole lot of power compared to many democracies.  Today  it is part of China and the special protections Hong Kong people thought they'd gotten before they were handed back by the British, have little meaning.  The fact that the bar association is doing what the government wants it to do is hardly surprising.  China doesn't treat lawyers or anyone opposing them with much respect.  Tibbo's arguments here are based on bar association standards in Western countries.  I didn't hear him citing any Hong Kong rules or laws (though I may have missed it.)  That's not to belittle his situation or his valiant efforts on behalf of his clients.  But it suggests this video is aimed at the West, particularly Canada (his home) whose government is also dragging its feet in accepting this refugees.

Here's a Montreal article about Tibbo.  It gives more background on Tibbo's life and legal career in Hong Kong.  I can't figure out the date, but it seems to be much closer to when Snowden was in Hong Kong.