Watching America Biodegrade

It's happening, right before our eyes, across America. Imagine you've been savaged by clusters of tornadoes, heavy rain has swollen your rivers to overflowing, your planted farm fields lie beneath inches of rain and now you're told to brace for days of heavy rainfall, a deluge that can reach anywhere from one to three inches per hour. A foot or more of rain expected through the weekend.

A pocket of severe thunderstorms will affect the central Gulf coast into the weekend. 

A small number of these storms may produce a tornado. Cities at risk for a tornado strike include New Orleans; Gulfport, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; and Pensacola, Florida. 

To complicate matters, heavy rainfall over the Central states and melting snow from the Rockies has created a surge of water from the Missouri and Arkansas rivers that is emptying into the Mississippi River and flowing southward. 

Over the lower part of the Mississippi Valley, this surge of water may occur at nearly the same time that heavy rain falls. 

The combination thereof could result in record-challenging high water on the lower Mississippi River, especially where the water levels are not mitigated by spillways toward the middle and into the latter part of June.

And what of the farmers? It's getting almost too late to plant corn and, as for soya beans, that crop is also in doubt.

Then there's a new report about the death tolls that face American cities if global warming/heating isn't held in check. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Oh well.

Bad as all this may be for the United States, it's worse in countries to the south. I read a report yesterday that looked at a mother in Guatemala who says her last remaining son has just two choices - stay and die of famine as his brothers did or at least try to get to refuge in the United States. Her husband is dead, her sons, save one, are dead, her crops have failed and she's about to lose the family farm. Meanwhile Trump's America is manning the ramparts, prepared to repel boarders fleeing the very chaos that the developed world bequeathed to these vulnerable nations with their little brown people.

This dovetails with an opinion piece by Fintan O'Toole that I posted yesterday that examined how Americans are being groomed for fascism:

...You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group.

...Trump’s claim ...that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures.

...Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality.

...The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality.

I suppose it really shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the ravages of climate change open a window into our inner fascism, instincts more widespread than we imagine.