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Superstorm Puts Politics In Perspective

By Jim Taylor

02 November, 2012
Countercurrents.org

Flooded subways. Over eight million people without power. Around 80 dead in North America – plus another 70 or so in the Caribbean. Fifteen thousand flights cancelled. Atlantic City’s famed Boardwalk washed away. Grand Central Station echoing empty.

I don’t need to name the event. You know what it is – superstorm Sandy. Not even a hurricane, technically, by the time Sandy roared ashore in New Jersey – downgraded to a mere tropical storm that strayed north.

But what a storm!

I struggle to understand the physics of it all. Here’s what I get. Because we live north of the earth’s equator, low pressure areas in the atmosphere tend to spin counter-clockwise. (High pressure areas, obviously, spin the opposite direction.)

The spin forms a funnel effect – like a tornado, only much much wider. The faster the spin, the greater the reduction in air pressure created within its walls. Inside that whirling funnel, reduced pressure tends to suck the surface of the ocean upwards. Just like sucking water up a straw. Except that this “straw” is 1000 km across.

And inside those walls, the vacuum raised the sea level more than four metres, about 14 feet.

Which is, incidentally, only about half as high as sea levels are supposed to rise if the worst predictions on climate change come true. It’s unthinkable, unimaginable. But then, so was Sandy….

It’s worth thinking about. Because even this change of sea level gave the U.S. the equivalent of cardiac arrest. The New York Stock Exchange, the pulsing heart of American capitalism, shut down completely for two days.

Damages to property and businesses could run to $50 billion – twice as much as the bailout of U.S. auto makers following the economic crash in 2008.

Perhaps most amazing, in a country just days from an election, presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama quit skewering each other with barbed darts for three whole days.

A natural disaster like Sandy tends to put things into perspective, somehow.

For the last few months, almost every news story out of the U.S. has been spun for its political overtones. Since the primaries started, American media have viewed every issue through red or blue glasses.

You’d think there were no other issues.

But four states -- Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington – will vote on whether gay and lesbian couples deserve the same right to marry as everyone else. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado could approve personal marijuana use. Massachusetts could join Oregon and Washington in legalizing physician-assisted suicide. California could outlaw the death penalty and require labels on genetically modified foods.

“In all,” the Toronto Star summarizes, “there are 176 measures on the ballots in 38 states.”

As an outsider, I sometimes think that Americans try to treat their presidents as omnipotent. I remember my high school teacher painstakingly explaining that in the Canadian federal system, any power not specifically assigned to provinces reverts to the federal government. In the U.S. system, the opposite pertains; states have authority over anything not specifically delegated to federal legislation.

The president appoints the administration. The president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. But everything else depends on negotiation and compromise. How many opponents can a president persuade, cajole, or bribe with “future considerations” to get his way?

The president can send Americans to war in places many Americans never even heard of until their sons and daughters started dying there. But the president cannot make banks and mortgage companies behave responsibly. He cannot force industries to stop contaminating the environment. He cannot keep women from getting raped.

He can’t even mandate a minimal standard of education, intelligence, or common sense among those who seek election.

In some ways, a Canadian prime minister has more power than a U.S. president. Stephen Harper can at least require his party members keep their mouths shut.

You recall the story of King Canute, a Dane who ruled England before the Norman conquest. Canute’s courtiers flattered him, praising his absolute power over everything in his realm.

So Canute (or Knut) parked his throne on a beach. As the tide rose, he ordered the waters “not to rise onto my land, nor to wet the clothes or body of your Lord.”

The sea continued to rise, of course. It soaked his feet and legs. The king moved his throne, and reproved his courtiers: “Thus should all inhabitants of the world know that the power of kings is vain and trivial.”

Superstorm Sandy affirmed Canute’s wisdom.

Either Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney would have looked equally ridiculous wading into the surf in New Jersey, ordering the storm surge to go away.

No political figurehead could deflect the power of the storm, nor mitigate the damages. Not even if such a person got elected with 100 per cent of the votes.

So much for the power of politics.

Jim Taylor is a Canadian author and freelance journalist.

 




 

 


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