When it came to the latest, bleakest scientific report yet on the future of the rapidly changing planet we live on, the Daily Beast didn’t pussyfoot around — “U. N. Climate Experts to the World: We’re already fricasseed.”
Except, of course. It didn’t say “fricasseed.” The Beast tends to be a bit friskier than the Monitor.
In any event, the online newshounds reported (with justifiable alarm) that the prestigious U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report (described as the world’s largest report and most up-to-date) saying the Arctic is melting three times faster than anyone had estimated. The consequences are dire, to say the least.
We’re seeing it almost daily in the rapid increase of ever more catastrophic and unrelenting weather changes across the globe, manifested in cataclysmic floods, fires and heatwaves.
One U.N. scientist called the findings “a code red for humanity.”
And the collective reaction here in the good old U.S. of A. seemed to be, at least based on news coverage of the sobering report, a short collective gasp, followed immediately by an abrupt switch back to what’s really important today.
Which is speculation, at least last Wednesday, when I wrote this, about the future of New York’s (abruptly ex-) Gov. Andrew Cuomo who seems to have ended the beginning of a promising political family dynasty when he conceded (in his usual portentous Big Voice) that he was indeed a good old-fashioned male chauvinist pig, a phrase I personally want to revive.
By the way, I strongly suspect that I wasn’t the only woman to take great satisfaction in the fact that the said M. C. P. Cuomo was replaced by a woman.
Perhaps the highest/lowest point of the disgraced governor’s self-righteous and self-pitying farewell speech was when he said, with great sorrow, that he had always “played by the rules” but that no one told him that “the rules had changed.”
Hey, smart guy, you couldn’t figure that out? Pathetic loser.
And speaking of ambitious governors, there is something decidedly wrong with Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has the serious hots for the White House. His crusade against mandatory face masks for Floridians, especially those of tender years, is starting to sound pathological.
He seems to be particularly rabid when it comes to ensuring the right of elementary school children and their teachers to get sick and die. He’s actually threatening to take away the pay of any school employees who violate his edict.
One of these days I fully expect to see TV news footage of the governor bolting from his office, racing to a nearby school and ripping face masks from the faces of second graders and stomping them. The masks, that is, not the children, although one does wonder. Perhaps he’ll settle for amassing huge piles of seized masks and setting them afire. Sort of like book burnings in a darker age.
DeSantis may have a death wish for other people, but he should consider that most voters do not have one themselves and are seriously afraid of a possible president who’s so quick to strike a match and ignite public passions.
And on his next trip to New Hampshire his tour guides should take him on a stroll through our abundant historic old cemeteries filled with heartbreaking markers for infants and young children because back then there were no vaccines for childhood illnesses — smallpox, tetanus, rubella, measles and polio, the scourge of my childhood. People had to have abundant children just to keep the family going.
Mandatory vaccines are good. Parents no longer routinely bury their children before their time. Someone should tell the Florida governor that.
Speaking of good things, Granite Staters might pause and give a silent cheer for Dan Colgan, who was for many years the anchoring voice of New Hampshire Public Radio. He was on the air almost continuously until he retired last month. In fact, he was so ubiquitous that in our household there was a strong belief that he clearly must have, like Harry Potter, slept under the stairs.
We Dan fans knew our hero had really arrived when Tony Soprano, on the lam from some homicidal rival or another, hightailed himself up to New England to hide out in a cheesy motel.
Which state wasn’t mentioned, but in the episode called “Johnny Cakes,” we alert locals instantly knew Tony’s location when the charismatic thug woke to the dulcet tones of Dan Colgan on the clock radio. We should wish him — Dan, not Tony – well and welcome his replacement, Karen Trop, who (we trust) will not have to sleep under the stairs.
It’s been 20 years since “The Sopranos” was cut short in a New Jersey diner, leaving the family in limbo and offering a final mystery for fans to bicker about ever after. And if someone wants to see the series through again, keep looking. Sooner or later you’ll find it.
And it’s a sure bet you’ll find it more entertaining than sitting around helplessly and hopelessly, brooding about an overheating world heading to oblivion.
(Monitor columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)