The Scorch of July

PRESENTED BY THE RAPE AND ROT OF GRAFT

I married on the Fourth of July, during the presidency of Barack Obama. In the morning our wedding party joined the local Independence Day parade, the “longest continuously running 4th of July celebration in the State of Vermont.” Standing in the bed of a pickup truck decorated with homemade bunting, I was dressed as George Washington and my bride as Abraham Lincoln in a wedding dress. Our parents were garbed as Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, Mark Twain, and Susan B. Anthony. We had the Statue of Liberty and a walking Declaration of Independence, as signed in 1776. Relatives from England made highly convincing Pilgrims. Friends were decked in red, white, and blue, playing bluegrass tunes on banjo and fiddle and marching to drum and fife. We won a ribbon for “most patriotic float.”

After a simple ceremony in the afternoon with our pet lizards as ringbearers, the guests went to tables designated by the lesser-known presidents; each person’s place card bore a different interesting fact about that president.¹

We danced into the night. After the grandparents went to bed, we lit fireworks and watched them sizzle into the sky. One friend brought up an absurdly large firework; it had about ten rockets. It was extravagant and exciting.

The station on the peak of Mauna Loa recorded atmospheric carbon dioxide at 388 parts per million that day, a 38 percent increase from pre-industrial levels.

On our tenth anniversary, Donald Trump was president. My wife dressed as John Brown. Atmospheric CO₂ reached 413 PPM, a 47.5% increase.

Today, Trump is again the president. We’re at 430 PPM, 53.6% above the pre-industrial average. Temperatures will soar above 100°F in the nation’s capital for the third day in a row, after “cooling” to a sweltering 84°F at night. The heat index will be around 110°F. Relief from the deadly heat will not come until Monday.

In the Pacific Ocean, Super Typhoon Bavi is a fossil-fueled monster, a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds. It is expected to grow stronger before it strikes Guam, Rota, and Saipan. The fossil-fueled European June heat wave killed thousands; the extraordinary heat has set Spain and Portugal ablaze.

About forty large wildfires are burning throughout the American west. The Aspen Acres Fire southwest of Denver exploded to more than 100 square miles yesterday, forcing thousands to evacuate. Hundreds of fires are burning in Canada, sending deadly plumes of smoke into the United States.

Speaking of deadly plumes of smoke, Trump’s Freedom 250 Salute To America, Sponsored By Boeing, Deloitte, Exiger, John Deere, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Oracle, Palantir, Phorm Energy, RTX, SAP, Scotts Miracle-Gro (the “exclusive agent for the marketing and distribution of Roundup”), UFC, and United Airlines, is scheduled to conclude late at night with the explosion of the “largest fireworks display in history” — 850,000 fireworks shells launched from the scummy, militarized Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Potomac River barges, and the West Potomac Park, where Trump plans to illegally install his garden of creepy statues. This planned midnight barrage (thunderstorms are expected at the same time) will create a miasmic cloud of toxic metal and soot that will poison hundreds of thousands of people already besieged by the extreme heat and humidity.² This explosive assault will have a direct cost of $10 to $20 million.

The deadly heat, the inevitable consequence of the burning of a trillion tons of fossil carbon, forced the cancellation of Washington, D.C.’s annual Independence Day parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, but the 5000 armed National Guard troops and thousands of federal paramilitary forces will continue patrolling the city, looking for residents to harass, assault, or kidnap for crimes ranging from bus fare evasion to touching the Reflecting Pool.

Thirty-three military flyovers, one every fifteen minutes for nine hours, will deafen the skies, burning about 40,000 gallons of jet fuel to produce nearly 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of driving a passenger car one million miles.³ The flyovers will have a direct cost of $10 to $20 million.

Continuing a day of on-the-nose metaphors, our decadent emperor-king-baby plans to rant and ramble with a “really long speech” outside before an anemic audience of heat-exhausted, dehydrated supporters at 10 pm, before his symbolic bombing of the American capital.

Happy anniversary, us!

As ever, Langston Hughes reminds me of our unending challenge—to let America be America again.

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1  Chester B. Arthur was Mark Twain’s favorite president.

2  As studies of wildfire smoke and extreme heat have shown, the severe threats to health of each compound each other.

3  However, because the flyovers are forcing the full closure of National Airport from noon to midnight, cancelling hundreds of commercial flights, the net impact is probably to reduce avionic carbon pollution overall. That said, economists claim that commercial travel is economically and socially useful.