Frank Rich is off this week. MoDo uses a story about the president of Brazil as a jumping off point on a weird rant called “Blue Eyed Greed?” in which she says with the Obamas in the White House, brown eyes may finally — and rightfully — overtake blue as the windows of winners. I have blue eyes, which I guess makes me either evil or a loser, or maybe an evil loser. MoDo needs to have her meds checked, and maybe increase her therapy sessions. The Moustache of Wisdom gives us “Mother Nature’s Dow,” in which he says if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it, too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows. Mr. Kristof, in “A Boy Living in a Car,” says if slum-dwelling Haitians can share what little they have, I hope we can be equally generous during this downturn when needs are greatest. Here’s MoDo, who hated her brown eyes, but now that we have a president with brown eyes feels much, much better:
As international lunacy goes, it was hard to beat the pope saying that condoms spread AIDS.
But Brazil’s president, known simply as Lula, gave it his best shot.
At a press conference Thursday in Brasilia with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain — who has a talent for getting himself into dicey spots — Lula started off coughing from some cheese bread he’d wolfed down. Then he suddenly turned accusatory.
“This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing,” charged the brown-eyed, bearded socialist president.
As the brown-eyed Brown grew a whiter shade of pale, Lula hammered the obvious point that the poor of the world were suffering in the global crash because of the misdeeds of the rich.
“I do not know any black or indigenous bankers,” said Lula.
He also told CNN he would press this theme at the G-20 meeting in London this week. He says his past as a poor, hungry, unemployed lathe operator gives him special insight.
“I lived in houses that were flooded by water,” he said, adding, “Sometimes, I had to fight over space with rats and cockroaches, and waste would come in when it flooded.”
The “Lula lulu” by the “Brazil nut,” as The New York Post dubbed it, became big news just as President Obama met at the White House with Vikram Pandit and a cadre of white-bread bankers who have taken the bailout — some of whom, like Jamie Dimon, have distinctly blue eyes.
And it is true, of course, that the upper-crust, underwhelming Anglo-Saxon leaders who allowed America’s financial markets to morph into louche casinos, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, were very, very white men with blue eyes.
As the Who sang: “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, to be the sad man behind blue eyes. No one knows what it’s like to be hated, to be fated to telling only lies.”
Every time Cheney looks into the camera with those ice-blue eyes and says President Obama is making us less safe, it sounds as if he’s secretly hoping we do get attacked just to prove his point that Obama is weak, even if he has to go up in smoke, too.
(When I double-checked the color of Cheney’s eyes, his daughter Liz Cheney jokingly e-mailed back, “Sorry, but that information is classified.”)
Before President Obama, whose brown eyes are opaque when you look into them, presidents have been more known for blue eyes. The ones with brown eyes, Richard Nixon and L.B.J., came a cropper.
Throughout history, whether it’s images of Jesus that don’t look Middle Eastern or Barbies who don’t look ethnic, blue eyes and white skin have often been painted as the ideal.
The cerulean-eyed Paul Newman once wryly predicted his epitaph: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”
Surveys show that people with blue eyes are considered more intelligent, attractive and sociable.
A 2007 University of Louisville study concluded that people with blue eyes were better planners and strategic thinkers — superior at things like golf, cross-country running and preparing for exams — while people with brown eyes had better reflexes, making them good at hockey and football.
Lula’s rant underscored an ancient rivalry.
When I was little, growing up in a house that prominently displayed a blue-eyed Jesus and a blue-eyed J.F.K., I felt my brown eyes were far less attractive than my brothers’ blue ones.
I obsessed on it so much, cutting out a picture of a beautiful brown-eyed model and keeping it in my scrapbook, that my mother finally reassured me:
“You look at blue eyes. You look into brown eyes.”
Later, of course, there would be the thrill of Van Morrison serenading a “Brown-Eyed Girl.”
Before Barack Obama, when I interviewed the brown-eyed sons of immigrants who were thinking of running for president, Mario Cuomo and Colin Powell, they seemed torn about taking the big plunge, given how far they had come in relation to their dads.
I asked Governor Cuomo if he was leaving the field to “the privileged blue-eyed WASPs” like Bush senior and Dan Quayle who felt entitled and never worried about their worthiness.
Barack Obama and his family have already had a profound effect on the culture in terms of what is beautiful and marketable. Black faces are popping up in all kinds of ads now — wearing straw boaters and other prepster outfits in Ralph Lauren ads.
With Michelle urging students to aim for A’s and the president promising to make school “cool,” brown eyes may finally — and rightfully — overtake blue as the windows of winners.
Words fail me… Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
While I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once — telling us we need to grow in more sustainable ways — some might ask this: We know when the market hits a wall. It shows up in red numbers on the Dow. But Mother Nature doesn’t have a Dow. What makes you think she’s hitting a wall, too? And even if she is: Who cares? When my 401(k) is collapsing, it’s hard to worry about my sea level rising.
It’s true, Mother Nature doesn’t tell us with one simple number how she’s feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning — in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it, too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.
Consider just two recent articles:
The Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, that “the pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said. ‘We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,’ Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said.”
The physicist and climate expert Joe Romm recently noted on his blog, climateprogress.org, that in January, M.I.T.’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change quietly updated its Integrated Global System Model that tracks and predicts climate change from 1861 to 2100. Its revised projection indicates that if we stick with business as usual, in terms of carbon-dioxide emissions, average surface temperatures on Earth by 2100 will hit levels far beyond anything humans have ever experienced.
“In our more recent global model simulations,” explained M.I.T., “the ocean heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. Not one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures. [But,] rather than interacting additively, these different effects appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the chance of much higher temperatures.”
What to do? It would be nice to say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a credit crisis, could you take a couple years off?” But as the environmental consultant Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics,” and she is going to do whatever they dictate. You can’t sweet talk Mother Nature or the market. You have to change the economics to affect the Dow and the chemistry, biology and physics to affect Mother Nature.
That’s why we need a climate bailout along with our economic bailout. Hal Harvey is the C.E.O. of a new $1 billion foundation, ClimateWorks, set up to accelerate the policy changes that can avoid climate catastrophe by taking climate policies from where they are working the best to the places where they are needed the most.
“There are five policies that can help us win the energy-climate battle, and each has been proven somewhere,” Harvey explained. First, building codes: California’s energy-efficient building and appliance codes now save Californians $6 billion per year,” he said. Second, better vehicle fuel-efficiency standards: “The European Union’s fuel-efficiency fleet average for new cars now stands at 41 miles per gallon, and is rising steadily,” he added.
Third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard, mandating that power utilities produce 15 or 20 percent of their energy from renewables by 2020. Right now, only about half our states have these. “Whenever utilities are required to purchase electricity from renewable sources,” said Harvey, “clean energy booms.” (See Germany’s solar business or Texas’s wind power.)
The fourth is decoupling — the program begun in California that turns the utility business on its head. Under decoupling, power utilities make money by helping homeowners save energy rather than by encouraging them to consume it. “Finally,” said Harvey, “we need a price on carbon.” Polluting the atmosphere can’t be free.
These are the pillars of a climate bailout. Yes, some have upfront costs. But all of them would pay long-term dividends, because they would foster massive U.S. innovation in new clean technologies that would stimulate the real Dow and much lower emissions that would stimulate the Climate Dow.
And now here’s Mr. Kristof, writing from Cap Haitien, Haiti:
As America’s unemployment rate rises, those paying the severest price aren’t necessarily in Detroit or Miami. One of the newest street children here in this northern Haitian city is a 10-year-old boy whose father was working in Florida but lost his job and can no longer send money home. As a result, the family here was evicted, the mother and children went separate ways to improve their odds of finding shelter, and the boy found refuge in an abandoned wreck of a car.
The boy is one of 46 million people in the developing world — more than double the New York State population — who will be driven into poverty in 2009, according to a World Bank estimate.
In Haiti’s largest slum, Cité Soleil, in the capital, Port-au-Prince, I stumbled upon a one-room public school. The principal, Claude Lafaille, lamented that enrollment had dropped from 150 at the start of the year to 60 today.
“Haitians in America stopped sending money back, and so their family members can’t pay fees,” he said.
The school used to provide free breakfasts to ensure that students got at least one solid meal a day. But in January, the charity that provided the food had to stop because its donations were dropping, so now the remaining children are often too hungry to concentrate.
In the St. Catherine Labouré hospital in Port-au-Prince, the number of children admitted for malnutrition has approximately doubled since September, said a pediatrician, Dr. Armide Jeanty. She pointed to a 15-month-old child, Richardson, skeletal and covered with sores. He stared blankly, for when children are severely malnourished their bodies shut down and do not waste energy crying, laughing or smiling.
It’s natural in an economic crisis to look inward, to focus on America’s own needs, but it’s worth remembering that the consequence of a deep recession in a poor country isn’t just a lost job but also a lost child.
In Cité Soleil, a woman named Chantal Dorlus told me that her 5-year-old daughter, Nasson, starved to death last month, and neighbors confirmed the account. Ms. Dorlus said that her three other children would have starved as well if not for the generosity of her neighbors, who share their meager food supplies.
If slum-dwelling Haitians can share what little they have, I hope we can be equally generous during this downturn when needs are greatest.
On this trip, I met a couple of American women, Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell, both in their early 30s, who offer an example of outward commitment at a time when most of us are retrenching and focusing on ourselves. Sasha and Sarah run a hand-to-mouth aid group, called SOIL; they speak fluent Creole and get around on motorcycle taxis while waving back at legions of fans on every street. (You can watch a video of them at nytimes.com/ontheground.)
I was interested in their work because it addresses two of the developing world’s greatest but least glamorous challenges. One is sanitation, for human waste in poor countries routinely spreads disease and parasites. The second is agriculture, for poor countries must increase crop yields if they are to overcome poverty and hunger.
Sasha and Sarah create dry composting toilets that turn human waste into valuable fertilizer. They say that the yearlong composting process kills the pathogens in the waste, making it safe to use the fertilizer.
Frankly, I was taken aback when, 10 minutes after they had met me, they pulled out a Ziploc bag and proudly declared that it was compost made from their own toilet. They were so impressed with what they had accomplished that I felt obliged to take a whiff and hold it in my fingers; it simply felt and smelled like rich potting soil, and I would never have guessed its origins.
Haitian farmers use virtually no fertilizer — less than a pound per acre, compared with about 90 pounds in the United States — and soils are severely depleted. But Sasha calculates that if half of Haitians’ human waste could be used as fertilizer, that would amount to a 17-fold increase in fertilizer use, more than doubling the country’s agricultural production.
Sasha and Sarah have deployed 45 of their toilets, and now they are trying to introduce a municipal composting system in Cap Haitien.
I don’t know if this is feasible. But I love the idea that even when the needs of the United States are so immense, a couple of young Americans aren’t complaining or finger-pointing, but are hard at work to assist others whose distress is incomparably greater than our own.
They probably have brown eyes…
