Does it seem to you that people are losing their peripheral vision? It seems that way to me.
I halt at a stop sign, look to the left, look to the right — and then, just when I start to move, observe with horror that people are jumping off the curb and walking in front of me. I’m looking in their direction, but they’re not looking in mine. Oh no. They’re looking straight ahead, with no indication that they see my car, hear my brakes, or feel the heat of my engine as I screech to a stop three feet away from them. They parade in front of me with the gait of peacocks solemnly treading the Queen’s lawn.
(She does have peacocks, doesn’t she? In the summer? Or is it swans? Very well, with the gait of swans solemnly treading, etc. Swans always seem about as stupid as peacocks, except in Tchaikovsky ballets. And even then, they’re more beautiful than smart.)
There’s a general opinion that this kind of behavior is restricted (A) to persons under 25, and (B) to persons with electronic instruments jammed in their ear sockets. But no, it’s not. It has spread to every demographic group.
They don’t see anything. They just continue. Like those children of all ages, waltzing merrily in front of the oncoming traffic.
Have you ever been in a Whole Foods store? I ask that because Whole Foods is somewhat more expensive than your ordinary supermarket, and notoriously attracts a Better Sort of People — mainly NPR clones and trust-fund babies with tattoos, but lots of libertarians as well. (Like me.) These are sensitive souls, if anybody is. That’s why the baby seal advocates line up outside to get their signatures in support of sensitive causes. But you can’t walk through the aisles without constant attempts to avoid injury from NFL-class shoppers jumping in your way, then stopping dead in front of you, blocking the aisle. When you try to dive around them, boom! There they are again. If you make it to the dairy products, you can expect two or three of them to smash into you while you’re reading the labels, innocently attempting not to buy soy milk. They didn’t see you. They never see you. They have no peripheral vision.
Something of the same effect is achieved by all those people who make your life miserable in restaurants, movie theaters, and other places of public resort — the blithe spirits who yell, shriek, chatter, debate, and conduct lengthy reviews of their private lives for the benefit of everyone within a five-block radius. When you give them the meaningful look that, when your grandparents used it, would shush everyone but the most hardened conversational criminals, they just face you with a glassy stare. They’re not staring at you. They don’t see you. They don’t see anything. They just continue. Like those children of all ages, waltzing merrily in front of the oncoming traffic. Like their fellow hazards to health, the parents who chat idly with each other while their children run about the airport, the parking lot, or the edge of the nearest volcano, endangering their lives and the lives of others. Their parents literally do not see them. They have no peripheral vision.
This is the kind of behavior that was formerly common among those whom our grandparents rudely classified as trash. Only now is it manifesting itself as a mass phenomenon. Its counterpart is the recent, very large increase in loss of peripheral vision about what people are saying while they insist so much on saying it. No one seems to care that it might be embarrassing to tell a roomful of strangers all about one’s effing conversation with one’s effing bedmates, because said effing bedmates are getting fatter than effing hogs, not to mention being bad about their toilet manners. It must be stipulated, however, that loss of peripheral vision is especially pronounced among the self-important classes, who ought, one might think, to take more care about saying things that will disgrace them.
Strangely, this loss has coincided with an enormous increase in the retrievability of verbal gaffes. Nowadays, if you don’t have enough peripheral vision — once known as foresight — to notice that your words may possibly come back and bite you on the ass, it’s much more likely that they will come back and do just that. Digitally embodied, they will wait beside you, visible to all but you, until such time as they are ready to spring upon and permanently discredit you.
Suppose, to take a purely hypothetical example, a racial or sexual epithet should be scrawled on someone’s wall. These are the days of forensic science; it gets easier and easier to determine who did such things. If the action is in fact a fraud — an expression not of racial or sexual hatred but of a sick desire to advertise some cause or issue of the person who scrawled the epithet in order to make accusations about somebody else — chances are large that the fraud will be exposed. During the past few years, scores of these moral disasters have occurred, and have been well publicized. Now why are such fraudulent charges always attended by instant, loud, fanatical declarations of their unquestionable truth, delivered by every school principal, public official, church leader, and college professor in the neighborhood? These people practically crawl over one another to get to the microphone and announce their support for even the most ridiculous accusations. Then, when their charges, the charges they have made their own, prove false, they apparently think all memory of their words will be erased. Things don’t happen that way, but they still can’t see it. They have no peripheral vision. They don’t see the car that’s going to hit them.
Listening to friends of the current administration, one would think the attempt to “end poverty in our lifetime” had been a grand success. Apparently they never heard of Detroit.
To put this in a broader context: were you as astonished as I was when intellectual friends of the current administration began making loud noises about the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty? Their intention was not to mourn the devastation that the War (apt name) had visited on the poor in America. Their intention was to celebrate the War. Listening to them, one would think the attempt to “end poverty in our lifetime” had been a grand success — and also, curiously, that we need even more of it. Apparently they never heard of Detroit. Apparently they can’t see the neighborhoods that lie directly adjacent to the government zone in Washington or to 50 of those proud universities from which celebratory noises issued. Everyone else can see — so why can’t they?
Like the people at the intersection, they don’t see because they don’t bother to look; and they don’t bother to look because they feel entitled not to look, not to see, not to get hit by the onrushing vehicles — of failure, and of public exposure. They see themselves, of course, but only as the heroes of their inward vision. They haven’t a clue about how they look or sound to others.
And now we come to Secretary of State John Kerry. On Feb. 16, in, of all places, Indonesia, he delivered a speech about “climate change.” By now, almost everyone has observed that climate change is a term used by people who don’t want to admit that their wild predictions of global warming have been falsified. They don’t want to see the falsification, any more than the guy stepping off the curb wants tosee the car approaching. Truths are indeed inconvenient. To admit the existence of the car might require one to change one’s course — and who wants to do that? But the climate change people are in a worse position than the guy in the street. They actually believe that other people don’t see them either, see and rememberthat they predicted a lot of hurricanes, but now there are very few; that they predicted wet days for California, but California is in drought; that they predicted warm winters, but look at the country now. Well, as a satirical friend remarked last night, “the most devastating thing about climate change is its unpredictability.”
Kerry, being an old man and a failure in his real job, now wants another job. He wants the job of prophet. He declared to the Indonesians that “this city, this country, this region, is really on the front lines of climate change. It's not an exaggeration to say that your entire way of life here is at risk." "In a sense,” he said, “climate change can now be considered the world's largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction." “The science,” he said, “is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand." Like his boss, President Obama, Kerry has a real zest for clichés. And like his boss, he carries the clichés as far as they will go. He believes that climate change, whatever that is, must be regarded as settled science.
Now, Senator, I hate to tell you, but you’re strolling across a busy street. I’d be a little more careful if I were you. Most of the people on this street don’t think that what you’re talking about is settled science at all. Some suspect it’s an unsettled science. Some suspect it’s a pseudo-science. Some suspect it’s a real science that is disgracing itself by its cheap propaganda. Some, including many scientists who are close to the grant-getting game, know that it would look a lot less settled if so much weren’t being done to prop it up. Overwhelmingly, grants go to people who investigate the assumed effects of climate change, not people who set out to examine the process critically (if it is a process, and one process, and a process not competing with other natural processes). Schools and colleges deluge students and faculty with propaganda about the danger of climate change, with no hint of interest in the multitude of debates that attend this issue. Whole communities are mobilized to promote the kind of sustainability and climate friendliness that could be rationally defensible if (A) the theory had been proved, (B) the theory hadn’t changed so, well, unpredictably that right now it’s hard to tell exactly what is being proved or disproved, and (C) doing without paper bags could have the slightest effect on the global climate, no matter what condition it’s in.
Kerry doesn’t see the millions of eyes watching him, and noticing that he’s made a fool of himself.
A theory that you are not allowed to doubt is a theory that has proved its doubtfulness. A scientific theory that needs the support of sermons by such renowned scientists as a former vice president and a former senator from Massachusetts is a theory that confesses it is in serious trouble. Theories that appear to need this kind of assistance merely invite public ridicule. If they turn out to be true, which is always possible in a regime of true science, they have already damaged their own credibility, and the damage may be fatal. I think it is safe to say that only a tiny minority of the American population believes the party-linestatements that Kerry was making in his big, pompous speech, and the majority is even less likely to believe the theory, now that he has spoken.
Kerry doesn’t see the millions of eyes watching him, and noticing that he’s made a fool of himself. His way of avoiding the oncoming cars is by insulting their drivers, braying about “shoddy scientists” and “extreme ideologues” and comparing anyone who disagrees with him to members of “the Flat Earth Society.” And because there is no one this side of North Korea who is more arrogant, humorless, and condescending than John Kerry, no one who is fitter to be called the embodiment of social entitlement, he has done more to harm his cause than an army of deniers could possibly do.
He doesn’t see it. He’ll never see it. But what I saw, next to the news story about Kerry’s speech, was a series of teasers for other news stories:
Another Ice Storm Causes Havoc Across the South
New England Hit with Another Winter Blast
Another Messy Morning in Winter-Weary Northeast
Is this proof that Kerry is wrong about whatever theory of change he has in his head right now? No, probably not; one winter doesn’t make a case (although Kerry claimed individual meteorological incidents as conclusive evidence of change). Is it proof that Kerry is a fool? Oh yes. How hard is it not to look both ways before you cross the street?
