Scripted TV drama does very little for me. Feels limited, and kinda hokey. You know the scripting routine. A bunch of writers and jaded executives try to drum up a plot line with "high stakes"-- often involving guns and/or the end of the world. Reality TV, on the other hand, has a fresh team of writers-- the performers themselves. The result is you can get a more nuanced view of life from reality TV and it gets more popular by the day.
I caught two reality shows last night that I don't know that well-- a Kardashian segment called "Kourtney and Khloe Do the Hamptons," or something to that effect, and "Nellyville," a new BET show profiling the rap singer and some of his youthful inner circle.
The show featuring Nelly and what looked to be two teenage sons and a teenage niece had a nice appeal. All the kids had a gangly, sincere quality that stands apart from child actors. One boy struggled with a football injury, possibly career-ending. Nelly asked the kid if he had a Plan B, should football not work out. The young guy came up with "I could be a football analyst," as a career option and Nelly challenged him to offer some football commentary right on the spot. The kid admitted he had nothing to day. At least he amused by his own lack of commentating chops. The youngster smiled and, have to admit, Nelly had done a nifty piece of instant parenting. Later in the show, the youngster tossed a football with his older brother tossed on the sands on a LA beach. They counseled each other-- a nice exchange-- and the brother even thanked his older sibling!
The niece, a 18 year old girl with aspirations to be a model, wanted badly to participate in a twerking class with a more mature woman, seemed to be Nelly's significant. Nelly had sternly warned not to allow the 18 year old to twerk. It didn't work and they had but a great scene in twerking class where the youngster could not help herself. She twisted, turned and moved around until she finally worked her way into the action. And she's a great dancer.
The entire crew of kids and pater familias visited the set of "Real Husbands of Hollywood," another BET show, featuring Nelly, Kevin Hart and Nick Cannon. The show's co-producer showed the kids around and got some nice laughs comparing his fitness level and physique to the show's stars. The kids seemed happy to have a more educated view of the world of TV and we viewers got a similar feeling of contentment from the time spent in the company of Nelly and family.
Maybe I'll skip a discussion of the Kardashians-- and stick with "Nellyville" as a prime example of the positive side of reality TV.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Poor in Mississippi
I grew up in New York and attended high school in the middle class suburbs of Long Island. However, I've lived in Austin, Texas for over forty years. I recall being astounded the first time I saw the tiny white wood-frame houses skirting downtown Houston when I visited there in the Seventies. The houses were referred to as "shotgun shacks"-- nicknamed that way because a single blast from a shotgun would kill all the occupants. The warm Southern climate made shoddy houses workable, though hardly acceptable for human habitation. The rows of houses had a Civil War feel, reminiscent of slave housing or perhaps homes at the level predicted for tenant farmers. My neighborhood in Austin, believe it or not, still shows signs of the shoddy housing. A few shacks dot the area even as the property values push $500,000 for some of the town homes, condos and solidly built McMansions.
A few nights ago I had a conversation with a friend who grew up in Mississippi. I'll give him the fictional name of Del. He speaks in deliberate, somewhat syrupy cadences at a pace slow enough to drive a New Yorker to finishing his sentences. But I always love hearing his recollections of a childhood growing up poor in Biloxi, Mississippi. He has told me his mother worked at a Shrimp Factory. I immediately thought of Forrest Gump. This story is real though. Sometimes his mother left for work at the factory with absolutely no food in the pantry. Del, as only a little tike, sought her out at the job one day because he was hungry. But Del went into a bit more detail with this telling and I found myself amazed at his story.
Del's mother was initially housed in a "shotgun house, provided by the company." The company was the Shrimp Factory. Eventually their family bought their own house, still a shotgun house but their own this time an apparently a step up from living on property owned by the company. They had no sheet rock and the walls and would hunt around for cardboard to provide some insulation for the colder times of year. He doesn't recall his mother ever having a wedding ring. She did have 8 children with her husband, four boys and four girls. Del had a job working in a store as a 13 year old and got a job at the store for his 11 year old brother. They used some of their earnings to buy furniture for the house. The four girls occupied a single room. They even took in a runaway girl which, I guess, added another occupant to the room. Each corner of the room had a piece of rope hanging from its sides and served as a clothes closet for each of the girls.
I asked about his father. The father worked for a timber company and one time a pile of logs fell down and put him out of commission for an entire year. The family owned 95 acres of land and moved into the city. The sold the land for less than $1.00 an acre! Del said moving into town was likely a mistake. They may have subsisted better on the land. Biloxi and the Shrimp Factory offered wages and an alternative to subsistence farming.
Del joined the Air Force in 1963 and got some training. He did find himself back in Biloxi working is stores and driving delivery trucks before moving on to Texas. Del could tell I enjoyed hearing about a world so foreign and exotic and drifted slightly in tone. He told me that there were good times and "we didn't know we were poor because everybody was poor." He said "there were good times and bad times and the house was filled with laughter with my mother." There was a gossip about the sister's boyfriends. But the laughter died down as the years passed and his mother grew older. I liked the simplicity of Del's observation and its connection to all homes, rich and poor. People make the laughter happen and relationships make us rich in those moments, but with the passage of time all these things fade to oblivion. Del said he had no bed for his entire childhood. "I slept on on the floor, probably until the age of twenty-two."
Incredulous, I asked "On the floor?"
"Well, on a palette on the floor."
So different than my existence on Long Island.
There it is-- a conversation between a relocated Yankee and a Southern man.
A few nights ago I had a conversation with a friend who grew up in Mississippi. I'll give him the fictional name of Del. He speaks in deliberate, somewhat syrupy cadences at a pace slow enough to drive a New Yorker to finishing his sentences. But I always love hearing his recollections of a childhood growing up poor in Biloxi, Mississippi. He has told me his mother worked at a Shrimp Factory. I immediately thought of Forrest Gump. This story is real though. Sometimes his mother left for work at the factory with absolutely no food in the pantry. Del, as only a little tike, sought her out at the job one day because he was hungry. But Del went into a bit more detail with this telling and I found myself amazed at his story.
Del's mother was initially housed in a "shotgun house, provided by the company." The company was the Shrimp Factory. Eventually their family bought their own house, still a shotgun house but their own this time an apparently a step up from living on property owned by the company. They had no sheet rock and the walls and would hunt around for cardboard to provide some insulation for the colder times of year. He doesn't recall his mother ever having a wedding ring. She did have 8 children with her husband, four boys and four girls. Del had a job working in a store as a 13 year old and got a job at the store for his 11 year old brother. They used some of their earnings to buy furniture for the house. The four girls occupied a single room. They even took in a runaway girl which, I guess, added another occupant to the room. Each corner of the room had a piece of rope hanging from its sides and served as a clothes closet for each of the girls.
I asked about his father. The father worked for a timber company and one time a pile of logs fell down and put him out of commission for an entire year. The family owned 95 acres of land and moved into the city. The sold the land for less than $1.00 an acre! Del said moving into town was likely a mistake. They may have subsisted better on the land. Biloxi and the Shrimp Factory offered wages and an alternative to subsistence farming.
Del joined the Air Force in 1963 and got some training. He did find himself back in Biloxi working is stores and driving delivery trucks before moving on to Texas. Del could tell I enjoyed hearing about a world so foreign and exotic and drifted slightly in tone. He told me that there were good times and "we didn't know we were poor because everybody was poor." He said "there were good times and bad times and the house was filled with laughter with my mother." There was a gossip about the sister's boyfriends. But the laughter died down as the years passed and his mother grew older. I liked the simplicity of Del's observation and its connection to all homes, rich and poor. People make the laughter happen and relationships make us rich in those moments, but with the passage of time all these things fade to oblivion. Del said he had no bed for his entire childhood. "I slept on on the floor, probably until the age of twenty-two."
Incredulous, I asked "On the floor?"
"Well, on a palette on the floor."
So different than my existence on Long Island.
There it is-- a conversation between a relocated Yankee and a Southern man.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Frank Gifford: Last of the Great White Running Backs
Frank Gifford was a hero of mythological proportions in the late 1950s. Frank played running back for the New York Giants. New York has a way of creating legends, mythologizing sports stars and gilding them with Greek-godlike attributes. Frank fit the bill. He had the looks. Frank ran gracefully as a running back as the New York Giants football team, the tam that found its identity in hallowed Yankee Stadium. As a ten year old kid I liked the guy, number 16 on his uniform, and he embodied the traits we liked in our Fifties heroes-- modesty, hard work and a nose for victory. Frank outlines his exploits and the hard scrabble early days of the New York football team in The Glory Game, his 2008 book about the NFL championship game of 1958.
He never deviates from his modest temperament across the pages of The Glory Game. Gifford, ever the ambassador of goodwill demonstrates equal affection for his teammates guys like Sam Huff and Charlie Conerly and for the Baltimore Colts, the opponents, a team that included Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti and Raymond Berry.
Gifford cannot claim to be the last of the great white running backs-- that was my term. Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung achieved great running statistics for the Green Bay Packers in the 1961 season, after Gifford's glory years had passed. And Jim Brown symbolized the future of football. Jim Brown anticipated the arrival of the great African-American running back. Jim Brown, Lenny Moore and Bobby Mitchell, the early black stars, jump out from the cold, hard statistics on rushing yards as the future of pro football. The sport had to accommodate the unquestioned superiority of the African-American running back, for sports by definition are a level playing field.
But Gifford had a certain aura. He as a King of New York in the 1950s-1960s and beyond. He straddled the electronic era, the era of television and football's emergence as the TV sport par excellence. He announced the games on Monday Night Football, poised between Don Meredith and Howard Cosell, the Texas hick and the New York prick. Both guys were funny and they needed the gentler spirit of Frank Gifford to class up the joint.
Gifford got in trouble with sex scandal, a tabloid affair with buxom Suzen Johnson in 1997. His Monday Night Football days were numbered. Frank partook of the electronic landscape for gossip long before TMZ made it an art form. And even that hotel room setup adds to the luster. Suzen did a Playboy spread and you had to sympathize with Frank's fall to temptation. Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank's wife and a powerful figure in daytime TV, struggled to keep the marriage to Frank going despite the massive media circus and the marriage continues to the present day. Frank is now 83 years old.
But Frank should not be forgotten. The son of an oilfield worker, Gifford did not have the grades to get accepted to USC. He eventually made it there. His strong delivery as a TV announcer proves he had no lack of intelligence. Frank was a King of New York, pals with Toots Shor make that a natural fact. Gifford had all the right stuff, really proved himself a natural for the Big Apple spotlight. His book, The Glory Game, continues in the vein of grace and modesty. He acknowledges David Halberstram would have been the man to capture the 1958 NFL championship game and all of the sociological implications-- the integration of American life through television and the rise of Frank's favorite sport. Halberstram died in a car accident while pursuing the subject of football's rise from the 1958 championship game. But Frank's version makes a damn fine book, smooth and effortless as a crafty running back cutting through the line.
He never deviates from his modest temperament across the pages of The Glory Game. Gifford, ever the ambassador of goodwill demonstrates equal affection for his teammates guys like Sam Huff and Charlie Conerly and for the Baltimore Colts, the opponents, a team that included Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti and Raymond Berry.
Gifford cannot claim to be the last of the great white running backs-- that was my term. Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung achieved great running statistics for the Green Bay Packers in the 1961 season, after Gifford's glory years had passed. And Jim Brown symbolized the future of football. Jim Brown anticipated the arrival of the great African-American running back. Jim Brown, Lenny Moore and Bobby Mitchell, the early black stars, jump out from the cold, hard statistics on rushing yards as the future of pro football. The sport had to accommodate the unquestioned superiority of the African-American running back, for sports by definition are a level playing field.
But Gifford had a certain aura. He as a King of New York in the 1950s-1960s and beyond. He straddled the electronic era, the era of television and football's emergence as the TV sport par excellence. He announced the games on Monday Night Football, poised between Don Meredith and Howard Cosell, the Texas hick and the New York prick. Both guys were funny and they needed the gentler spirit of Frank Gifford to class up the joint.
Gifford got in trouble with sex scandal, a tabloid affair with buxom Suzen Johnson in 1997. His Monday Night Football days were numbered. Frank partook of the electronic landscape for gossip long before TMZ made it an art form. And even that hotel room setup adds to the luster. Suzen did a Playboy spread and you had to sympathize with Frank's fall to temptation. Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank's wife and a powerful figure in daytime TV, struggled to keep the marriage to Frank going despite the massive media circus and the marriage continues to the present day. Frank is now 83 years old.
But Frank should not be forgotten. The son of an oilfield worker, Gifford did not have the grades to get accepted to USC. He eventually made it there. His strong delivery as a TV announcer proves he had no lack of intelligence. Frank was a King of New York, pals with Toots Shor make that a natural fact. Gifford had all the right stuff, really proved himself a natural for the Big Apple spotlight. His book, The Glory Game, continues in the vein of grace and modesty. He acknowledges David Halberstram would have been the man to capture the 1958 NFL championship game and all of the sociological implications-- the integration of American life through television and the rise of Frank's favorite sport. Halberstram died in a car accident while pursuing the subject of football's rise from the 1958 championship game. But Frank's version makes a damn fine book, smooth and effortless as a crafty running back cutting through the line.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
McLuhan-- All of the Candidates are Asleep (part 1) 1968
Saturday Evening Post (August
10, 1968) p. 34-36
Marshall McLuhan
discusses the effects of television on politics and explains why the current
candidates are irrelevant.
All of the Candidates are Asleep
By: Marshall McLuhan
“Would that even today you knew the things that make for
peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.” (Luke 19:42)
An election is a period of programmed violence, because it
is a quest for new images of national identity. The present elections is a
“tragic” one, because the American sense of identity has been in jeopardy from
new technology for some time. Every new technology creates a new sensory
environment that rearranges the images we make of ourselves. To discover and to
elect representatives in a period of deep personal uncertainty is to be
involved in a struggle for images, not a struggle for goals.
A tragic hero has no goal. He has to find out who he is when
the foundations of his world have fled. His “irrational violence” is a probing
of the unknown. Like our own TV generation, he cannot “fit in” to a world that
has changed radically. His tragic agon,
or struggle, is a process of making, not matching. He cannot “represent” people
until he has invented or discovered them anew.
The Vietnam war has taught Americans that they cannot have a hot war in a cool, or involved, age. When electric immediacy has got everybody involved in everybody, mechanized violence is no more tolerable than mechanized education or mechanized politics or mechanized charity.
The ballot box is a “hot box” that is hard to cool in an
election year. An old-fashioned hot campaign is hard to accommodate to a TV
public engaged in the “first world war fought on American soil.”
All wars are world wars, under electric conditions. TV
brings them into our homes, and some American parents have seen their own sons
killed on TV news programs. Seeing them on TV, moreover, we experience all sons
as our own.
From all the present candidates for the Presidency, the TV
viewer gets the impression that it would be possible to have an intelligent
conversation with any one of them under conditions of privacy and solitude,
during which that candidate could be allowed to learn some of the central
events in the contemporary world.
The simple fact is that no such possibility of intelligent
conversation exists. If any one of them were to become aware of the actual
dynamics of the 20th century, he would at once dissociate himself
from political lie. The compliance and submission needed in “practical
politics,” or for any cooperation with any political machine excluded the
possibility of any serious character appearing on the scene.
Now that Bob Kennedy has left the scene it is easier to see how much bigger he was than the mere candidate role he undertook to perform. His many hidden dimensions appeared less on the rostrum than in his spontaneous excursions into the ghettos and in his easy rapport with the surging generosity of young hearts. He strove to do good by stealth and blushed to find it fame. It was this (reluctant hero) quality that gave integrity and power to his TV image.
None of the candidates understands TV, either in its effect
on him or on society. If Canada’s
Pierre Trudeau is a great TV image in politics, it is because he is indifferent
to political power. Anyone who looks as if he wants
to be elected had best stay off TV. TV demands sophistication—that is,
multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the
viewer.
Sen. Eugene McCarthy could have come out of any Hollywood casting bureau as a small-town philosopher. His yokel quality provides a very pleasing feeling of TV involvement, which gives him a nice, modest rapport with the young.
TV, of course, has transformed the primaries from regional
popularity contests into national mage-making shows. Radio and jet travel, like
press coverage, still count on the candidate’s have a special slogan, a special
issue, that identifies him. TV has ended that. The press can only tag along to
comment on what happened on TV.
But, in a deep sense, TV bypasses the ballot box as a means
of creating political “representatives.” TV is not concerned with views or
interests or issues. It is a maker and finder of images that ride over all
points of view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national
and party politics.
Why should TV demand sophistication and insouciance? Simply because it is a depth medium for which earnestness is fatal. Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. An all-at-once world, fashioned by electric information, demands a candidate full of puns and unexpected nuances. Such a man is one who knows so much about the contemporary interface of all cultures that he cannot possibly be deluded into any earnest regard for any one of them. The new changes are not moral but technological.
The question is whether we are to “go to bed” and “take our
slumber” for the next four years with Humphrey’s “platform of happiness” and
bubbly ebullience, or with Nixon’s “serene certainty” to “jog along” with
Senator McCarthy, or to fix our gaze on loner Reagan. This question has all the
immediacy and involvement of the choice between listening for four years to the
same theme songs. Are we to endure four years of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles (Humphrey), I Love You Truly (Nixon), Believe
Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms (McCarthy) or As Time Goes By (Reagan)?
In merely media terms, a Negro in the White House would have the most soothing and cooling effect on both national and international politics. Negroes make enormously better color-TV images than whites, because the contour of this image does not depend upon light and shade.
In media terms, a glance at presidential candidates, past
and present, reveals that “running for office” only became possible when
transportation reached a high degree of development. Until the telegraph and
the railway, the office had to chase after the candidate. He sat home, writing
letters to the local press. Slogans were basic. Cartoons and photography began
to play a large political function even before railways made it possible for
candidate to enter the age of caboose and whistle-stop oratory.
The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
How to succeed... 8 keys
8 Keys to Success
* Have fun
* walk every day
* wear clean clothes
* smile
* say "thank-you!"
* call your parents
* breathe deeply
and #8
* love stronger
* Have fun
* walk every day
* wear clean clothes
* smile
* say "thank-you!"
* call your parents
* breathe deeply
and #8
* love stronger
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Dave Letterman-- Tense Moment with Brian Williams
Watched the Late Show with David Letterman a few nights ago. Brian Williams, the NBC Nightly News anchorman, was his lone guest. Brian knows television performance but jumped in almost too eagerly. He wanted to be funny and you cannot rush funny. And never try to compete mano a mano with Dave Letterman or even exchange volleys with David right from the get-go. But Dave stayed cool and brought Brian back down to earth and guided him closer to his sweet spot. They got to talking in a comfortable way and Brian's humor came across.
On odd moment came about when Brian Williams brought up his actress daughter Allison, a star on Girls, the HBO series written, directed and acted in by Lena Dunham. Williams spoke highly of the talent of Lena Dunham in the manner of a true gentleman. He did not brag on his daughter or even speak much about his daughter until he mentioned she had an upcoming appearance on the Tonight Show. Whoops! Brian corrected himself, she actually had an upcoming appearance on Dave Letterman's show. This seemed like a genuine slip of the lip by the seasoned anchor pro. The plot thickens...
Most interesting was David's toxic reaction to Brian's mention of the Tonight Show. Dave slipped from his confident self to a bitter David. You could feel the the tension, the tears of a clown began rising from the normally unflappable Letterman. Williams tried to calm things and mentioned he was doing a documentary-style story on the promotion of Jimmy Fallon to the Tonight Show chair as a special for NBC. David mentioned that he too should be interviewed for the story. David insisted he should be part of the documentary, and referred several times to "little Jimmy Fallon" in a snide way. A bit of strained comedy ensued within the tense exchange. Jimmy is a kid-sounding name (and coincidentally also Jimmy Kimmel's name, the other new kid on the late night schedule). Jimmy Fallon, certainly not diminutive in a physical sense, can seem like a well-meaning child compared to the comic brilliance of Letterman. Never forget... Letterman brought the late night talk show genre back from the somnambulism of the latter part of Johnny Carson's tenure. And he worked to keep Carson relevant.
Letterman's reaction to Williams' faux pas revealed the deep pain still being felt long after he lost the Tonight Show gig to Leno. He again referred to little Jimmy Fallon. David always has had an edge, an maybe that's why the network chose Jay Leno over David Letterman.
I remember watching Beavis and Butthead once and they referred to Dave as "Letter-dude." That cracked me up. Dave's stodginess needs to be punctured from time to time. "Letter-dude" helps bring Letterman down to earth. I've always had an immense fondness for Letter-dude. For large portions of the audience he will always be a bit too acerbic...But the good news for fans is we can keep watching and enjoying Letterman, the maestro of late night.
On odd moment came about when Brian Williams brought up his actress daughter Allison, a star on Girls, the HBO series written, directed and acted in by Lena Dunham. Williams spoke highly of the talent of Lena Dunham in the manner of a true gentleman. He did not brag on his daughter or even speak much about his daughter until he mentioned she had an upcoming appearance on the Tonight Show. Whoops! Brian corrected himself, she actually had an upcoming appearance on Dave Letterman's show. This seemed like a genuine slip of the lip by the seasoned anchor pro. The plot thickens...
Most interesting was David's toxic reaction to Brian's mention of the Tonight Show. Dave slipped from his confident self to a bitter David. You could feel the the tension, the tears of a clown began rising from the normally unflappable Letterman. Williams tried to calm things and mentioned he was doing a documentary-style story on the promotion of Jimmy Fallon to the Tonight Show chair as a special for NBC. David mentioned that he too should be interviewed for the story. David insisted he should be part of the documentary, and referred several times to "little Jimmy Fallon" in a snide way. A bit of strained comedy ensued within the tense exchange. Jimmy is a kid-sounding name (and coincidentally also Jimmy Kimmel's name, the other new kid on the late night schedule). Jimmy Fallon, certainly not diminutive in a physical sense, can seem like a well-meaning child compared to the comic brilliance of Letterman. Never forget... Letterman brought the late night talk show genre back from the somnambulism of the latter part of Johnny Carson's tenure. And he worked to keep Carson relevant.
Letterman's reaction to Williams' faux pas revealed the deep pain still being felt long after he lost the Tonight Show gig to Leno. He again referred to little Jimmy Fallon. David always has had an edge, an maybe that's why the network chose Jay Leno over David Letterman.
I remember watching Beavis and Butthead once and they referred to Dave as "Letter-dude." That cracked me up. Dave's stodginess needs to be punctured from time to time. "Letter-dude" helps bring Letterman down to earth. I've always had an immense fondness for Letter-dude. For large portions of the audience he will always be a bit too acerbic...But the good news for fans is we can keep watching and enjoying Letterman, the maestro of late night.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Doesn't take a weather man...
From ABC news... Jan. 5, It hasn't been this cold for almost two decades in many parts of the country. Frostbite and hypothermia can set in quickly at 15 to 30 below zero.
Mind boggling cold weather in the Midwestern United States. Cold that threatens lives. Cold beyond the wildest imagination of men. What weather does Mother Nature have in store for us-- in the days weeks, months and years to come?
Mankind makes a silly presumption; we presume Nature will operate according to the patterns of the past, simply because we like those patterns, we expect them and understand them. Nature owes us nothing and cares even less about our expectations. Climate is a reality of physics, indifferent to human emotion but very much connected to human behavior. If you put horrendous amounts of garbage, spew carbon into the atmosphere with unrelenting fury, as industrial man has done with nary a care about poor old Mother Nature... well then.
Don't tread on me states the motto on the yellow flag from the American Revolution-- just below a coiled rattlesnake. We tread on Mother Nature to our own detriment.
Mind boggling cold weather in the Midwestern United States. Cold that threatens lives. Cold beyond the wildest imagination of men. What weather does Mother Nature have in store for us-- in the days weeks, months and years to come?
Mankind makes a silly presumption; we presume Nature will operate according to the patterns of the past, simply because we like those patterns, we expect them and understand them. Nature owes us nothing and cares even less about our expectations. Climate is a reality of physics, indifferent to human emotion but very much connected to human behavior. If you put horrendous amounts of garbage, spew carbon into the atmosphere with unrelenting fury, as industrial man has done with nary a care about poor old Mother Nature... well then.
Don't tread on me states the motto on the yellow flag from the American Revolution-- just below a coiled rattlesnake. We tread on Mother Nature to our own detriment.
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