The Vanity Of Leaving Something Behind - The Jolly 'I Did That' Yale Reunion

Augustus Spillane stood on the podium before the Class of 19__, now old men giving their last hurrah, and intoned, 'Climate change...Existential threat or the nonsense of fools'.  Here he paused for effect, for everyone in the audience knew that he had been the head of one of the most influential environmental organizations and the United States' special envoy to the Conference on Global Environmental Rights. 

Gusty Spillane was a true blue social justice warrior on an international scale, a man of agency. 

Spillane was also a prick, and had been every since his Yale days.  He and his Opus Dei classmates considered themselves the intellectual center of the class, far more impressive in intellect, intelligence, ironic wit, and social stature than even Skull and Bones, Yale's most prestigious secret society of which both Presidents Bush were members.  

Gusty had curried favor with those assumed to be members - Peter Cabot of the Boston Cabots, Arthur Davenport of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founder of New Haven, and Fitch Longworth of Salem and Newport, colonial entrepreneur, trader, and owner of a fleet of ships plying the Three Cornered Trade. 

Nothing doing.  Skull and Bones never once considered Gusty's interest, thought him far from the patrician, old Anglo-Saxon family history required for membership.  Gusty was an arriviste, a pompous comer who thought that just because he had read Summa Theologica, he was somehow Skull and Bones material. 

Gusty took offence.  Who were these privileged toffs who had never had an original thought in their heads, vacuous, airy nothings?  

But the sting of rejection hurt and lasted throughout Yale.  He and his Catholic buddies, Chuck Moakley and Dean Farmer, huddled conspiratorially in a corner of the Trumbull College dining room and debated Aquinas and Augustine. 

They were 'douche bags', public school bursary boys who if not seen hunched together at a dining room table were behind the steam trays paying off their debt to Yale.  This double whammy - public school and need-based scholarship - was bad enough, but there they were in plain sight to all, white aprons and gloves, dishing out Salisbury steak to the private school, old monied idiots admitted to Yale on the basis of family legacy. 

Now as in the case of many poor boys who have made it to the first rung of success - Presidents Nixon and Clinton were motivated by their straitened circumstances and fought all the harder to work their way up the ladder - Gusty took the dismissiveness, sniffy scorn, and outright rejection at Yale and made it work for him.  He would show those assholes. 

It didn't take Gusty long out of Yale and the University of Michigan graduate school to join in the civil rights movement of the day.  He was a frontliner, an advocate for the black man par excellence, and an inveterate hatred for the white, privileged grandees of the South who cannily and easily restored slavery by calling it something else.  The tenant farming system instituted during the arch-punitive period of Reconstruction was nothing but slavery plus a few pennies spent at the company store.  

Gusty's hatred was visceral, a playing out of all the resentment and spite he felt for the Northern grandees who had made his life so miserable. This virulent animus gave him energy and a kind of ignorant courage, first to get beaten by Bull Connor's axe handles, bitten by his dogs, and set upon by his cracker mob.  He cared less about the fate of the Negro and more about venting his anger against white powers that be. 

 

From there, like most of his brothers-in-arms, he drifted from one progressive cause to another and somehow landed in the midst of the embryonic environmental movement.  This was a movement which relied on objectivity - historical data from sailing ships, temperature readings from the Humboldt current and Gulf Stream, and measurements of polar ice - and had a missionary zeal that other causes did not.  Climate change - then known as global warming - was an afterthought, a fanciful notion cooked up by zealots. 

Americans jacked up their air conditioners in the summer and their heat in the winter without a thought to the extra carbon emissions they were causing.  Global warming was simply a rousting issue for social activists, and when Gusty tried to convince others of the importance of immediate action, he was dismissed as convincingly as he was at Yale. 

More coal for the boiler. Gusty worked up a head of steam thanks to this mindless indifference, and was unstoppable, a whirling dervish of righteous fervor.  As he gained recognition within the movement, he was heard more and more at conferences, seminars, and protests challenging his supporters to do more, to join the army of the Left, soldiers in the crusade against human ignorance and darkness. 

So by the time Gusty stood before his classmates at their reunion, he was well-known as the world's environmentalist, the man to see, the person who more than anyone brought the reality of climate change before the people.  

Of course by this time the issue of global warming had faded from view in light of the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the resurgence of Russia and the preeminence of China; and especially considering new data from the polar ice caps and coastal areas of both the Pacific and Atlantic which showed, if anything, global cooling.  

Evidence from bio-geographers at Harvard who studied climate data from fossil records of the Pleistocene and after was particularly damning to the cause.  Cyclical climate change was the norm, not the exception, and the world was simply in one of these warming cycles which no amount of man-made influence could affect significantly. 

Nevertheless, despite the increasing evidence that the whole climate change thing was a fanciful invention, a mystical illusion fueled by Armageddon-like secular primitivism, and a total hoax, Gusty stood before his class and hammered on about incinerating croplands, the return of tropical disease, the inundating waters of the world's oceans, and the miasmic doom of an overheated world. 

Gusty, tired and spent - after all a man of his age could not be expected to gin up the energy of a young man - sat down to polite applause while the next speaker mounted the podium.  It could have been any issue - race, gender, ethnicity, corporate greed, immigration, or internationalism - for Gusty was not paying attention.  He had been the keynote speaker for a reason.  Global warming was an ineradicable threat!

The thing of it all was that each speaker was as addled by his cause and his achievements as Gusty.  One after another they intoned the obvious - old scores never settled - and went on to tick off line items on their resumes.  'When I was President of...when I visited Ndjamena last...As the Prime Minister said to me...', on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. 

Now, one would think that these men, perhaps in the last decade or even last few years of their lives, would be thinking of the vast unknown, and preoccupied with it.  What was coming surely should be more important than what was or what had been; but no, they banged on as though there were no tomorrow.  The record of the past had to be recalled, consolidated, properly archived, and revered. 'I did that' each man said over and over again.

Tolstoy wrote about death and dying in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a story about a man who realizes almost too late that his marvelously confected life, his brilliant architecture of living means absolutely nothing as he faces his end, eternity. 

It was easy for Ivan to content in his secure, well-ordered world while he was healthy, for then there was nothing but endless tomorrows before him, pleasant days and nights of respect, admiration, and camaraderie.  When the death sentence was passed and as he went through the various stages of denial, accommodation, and reluctant acceptance, he still clung on to the accomplishments of the past; and only at the very last did he come to his senses.  'Ah, death' he says, finally resolved and accepting. 

I wonder if Gusty Spillane will have an Ivan Ilyich moment.  It certainly didn't look like it would come any time soon as the old man banged on about the Albanian delegation and the new axis of environmental reform.

 'I did that'. Gusty said and believed that that would be enough.