Giving the Nobel Prize to our new president, after less than 300 days in office, seems not just surprising but a little too flattering, doesn't it?
Still, as the Prez said, as a call to action — on climate, as much as any issue — it's a worthy gesture.
Personally, I would like to give Barack the highest of all praises simply for insisting that we stop playing a game of extremes in our politics. I thank the candidate Obama for endlessly reminding us — and on the campaign trail, no less — that we must not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
When it comes to adapting to climate, to mitigating its worsts and taking advantage of its opportunities, this maxim cannot be repeated too often.
Along the same lines, a deeper understanding of this concept from Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark has been on my mind.
She's not the only thinker to have walked down this path, but I doubt anyone has expressed this thought as well:
Judeo-Chrtistian culture's central story is of Paradise and the Fall. It is a story of perfection and loss, and perhaps a deep sense of loss is contingent upon the belief in perfection. Conservatives rear-project narratives about how everyone used to be straight, God-fearing, decently clad, and content with the nuclear family, narratives than any good reading of history undoes. Activists, even those who decry Judeo-Christian heritage as our own fall from grace, are as prone to tell the story of paradise, though their paradise might be matriarchal or vegan or the flip side of the technological utopia of classical socialism. And they compare the possible to perfection, again and again, finding fault with the former because of the latter. Paradise is imagined as a static place, as a place before or after history, after strife and eventfulness and change: the premise is that once perfection has arrived, change is no longer necessary.
To burn this fundamental shift, this crucial idea, into my thought and my memory, I'm going to link it to an image of a city, because if anything human embodies change, it's a city.
This image heralds the premiere of a new composition by John Adams, performed this weekend by the LA Phil under its new conductor…and a reminder that even ever-changing L.A. can be beautiful.
[Note: for those who want to hear the surprising, almost lulling new John Adams composition, the first performance live from Disney Hall can be streamed here up until the 15th of this month.]
Kit Stolz 