I worked on the Hill for a couple delirious years, and I wish I could explain what is happening up there this week. I invite your attention. There is Reconciliation, which they have tried to explain over the last few weeks, and failed, and this week there is something called “Deeming.”
 
I think this means that members who cannot be seen to be on the record supporting the Health Care Bill can vote to deem the legislation as having been passed without actually voting for the Reconciled Bill, and save their sorry butts from the wrath of the people.
 
That whole process beats the hell out of me, but I guess they will tell us what happened when it has come to pass. We will all- members and public alike- deal with the consequences.
 
We have a situation in the family that I don’t need to share with you. I had occasion to look at some options for extended care, just in case, and when I did the math on what it might cost to deal with the matter, the numbers boggled my mind.
 
Could you really spend the fruit of a whole working life on the end of it? Or more?
 
I had been warily dealing with the attempts at reform from a personal basis. I am not sick, don’t plan on being sick, and have a modest though guaranteed health plan. Being forced to take a broader view of the system, the way it works across the whole domain of human life in this great nation, left me more perplexed than ever.
 
It is like time, I suppose.
 
I am concerned about the next few minutes, when I really should be doing something else. There is Closing Time, when the bartenders in England would say “Time, Gentlemen,” to impose the government’s solution for the sale of ale.
 
There other metrics, increasingly fuzzy, which include the plan for the week, and the looming specter of the next weekend.
 
There are elephants and clowns in it, a dizzy spinning dreamscape that will arrive in its own time.
 
Then there is season, since I can see the bare spare black branches across the parking lot starting to have the slightest blur as new life begins to spring forth. The longer view is more elusive, coming and going, featuring some vague tax planning for the year, and beyond that a gaping blank hole about the rest of this new decade.
 
That is human stuff, since there is also Real Time. The universe has it in such quantities that we cannot comprehend it. We cannot really even understand the span of our own species.
 
There has been something of a time-quake of late. You probably did not feel it, since it is not a physical thing like the massive shifting of the earth’s pretty skin that actually shifted the axis of our spinning sphere a few hundredths of a degree and left so much misery for the human riders.
 
I doubt if we will notice the difference, since our virtual and self-imposed changes, like Daylight Savings, have much more profound and intrusive effects on our daily existence.
 
An hour here or an hour there can make such a difference. Imagine what that means played out across thousands of years? It is enough to flummox the brightest.
 
How does one measure the things that happened before there were instruments and pencils and note-pads?
 
The common wisdom was that dedicated scientists could excavate material from terrain favorable to the preservation of the husks of once-living trees.
 
The surviving rings of a species of tree native to Siberia formed the baseline for the climate in which they lived. It was trail-blazing science a few years ago. If you picked your data carefully, you could demonstrate all sorts of things about the world before the thermometer.
 
I heard the thoughtful voice of National Public Radio pose a question the other day. “Could the media have influenced the decline in support for the concept of Global Warming? How can the process be re-started in the face of massive indifference?”
 
I don’t understand the tree-ring business any more than I do health care, but I do know it provided the basis for the current popular theory of climate change over the millennia, and how it correlates to what we do.
 
Living in my personal version of time, it has been colder than hell lately and that was probably the reason that no one in their right mind thinks it is getting warmer.
 
That directly conflicts with the natural view of all humans, which is that things were better when we were younger, and things are going to hell in a hand-basket.
 
“O, Tempore, o Mores!” is how Cicero said it to the Roman Senate two thousand turns of the earth ago. He was waxing eloquent in his forth oration on the failure of the state to execute Catiline, who had conspired to overthrow the Roman government and assassinate Cicero himself. “Oh,” he said. “The times, the customs.”
 
The trees were alive and growing in Siberia at the time, and the climate impacted them as much as it did the hot-house of Rome. There were no thermometers, though.
 
It appears that our common wisdom about the meaning of the rings of the dead trees may be flawed.
 
Other enterprising scientists have harvested bi-valve mollusk shells from an inlet in Iceland, a place that once was much warmer than it is now.

This is complex, but not any more so than the Siberian trees. This is what my pal Tacitus told me, based on his continuing research into the matter:
 
“The mollusks each lived from two to nine years.  Their shells contain varying amounts of the heavy isotope Oxygen-18.  Spectrum analysis of the shells provides a pretty precise proxy for water temperature, which itself closely tracks with air temperature, particularly there close to the shore.  A 2000 year climate record was thus derived.  The results are interesting.  The warmest year in the mollusk record is 130 BC, at the very start of the Roman Warm Period.  The coldest year came just after 1320 AD, as the Medieval Warm Period ended.”
 
Tacitus is my favorite contrarian, and he makes you think. He has a taste for the classical age, and a fierce reluctance to accept the passing public fancy. He is rooted in a different time, though he lives perfectly well in this one.
 
I had to take it onboard to think for a while. When Cicero lived, the the Roman Republic’s armies and fleets were gobbling up the Hellenistic World of the Eastern Mediterranean.  They had good campaigning weather.  It is now called the Roman Warming period, when it was much warmer than it is now.
 
The Mollusks reflect it. Their mute shells also show the change of climate in the 1300’s that forced the bold Vikings to abandon their settlements in western Greenland, where surviving written annals record that the people ate foxes and ravens and hurled their old and infirm off the rugged cliffs to stretch their food supply. Neither the warming then, nor the cooling later, correlates with atmospheric levels of Carbon Dioxide.
 
So there must be more too it. I will be interested to see what the Mollusks might tell us about times, and the customs, and whether or not we will be driven to a Viking approach to health care.
 
Should be an interesting week, wouldn’t you think? I’ll try to save some time to consider it.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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