If a tree falls on your wife, and you don't hear it...
Some guys don't want to take a hint
There’s a stupid old joke I remember my Rabbi telling, and I’ve been thinking about it because of the news lately.
It’s a joke about faith in God but ignore that part. That’s not why I’m telling it. Also, it’s a Jewish joke so it’s way too long, so grab a snack or something.
Anyway, it goes like this:
There’s a man, let’s call him Samuel, with unwavering faith in God. One day the wise men in Samuel’s town start warning that there is a great flood coming and that everyone needs to evacuate their homes. Samuel refuses.
“I am going to prove that God watches out for those who believe in Him,” Samuel says. “I will remain in my home during the flood, and because of my faith, God will make sure I am safe.”
So the entire town evacuates except Samuel. He stays in his house as the waters start to rise. The waters are at his ankles when a man on horseback arrives.
“I can’t believe I saw you in your home!” the man says. “Get on my horse, I’ll ride you out of here.”
“Thank you,” Samuel says. “But I don’t need your help. God will keep me safe.”
So the man on horseback rides away. The water fills up Samuel’s first floor, so he goes to the second floor. A boat passes by his window.
“I can’t believe we saw you in there!” say the men in the boat. “Hop in, we’ll row you to safety.”
“Thank you,” Samuel says. “But I don’t need your help. God will keep me safe.”
So the boat rows away. Now the water fills up the entire second floor of Samuel’s house, so he goes to the roof. He is sitting on his wet roof when a helicopter arrives.
“I can’t believe I saw you down there!” shouts the helicopter pilot. “Grab this rope, I’ll fly you to safety.”
“Thank you,” Samuel says, “ but I don’t need your helicopter. God will keep me safe.”
So the helicopter flies away, and the waters keep rising, and after a few minutes Samuel is swept away by the flood waters and dies.
Anyway, Samuel gets to Heaven, and he meets God, and he is pissed.
“Hey, God, what the hell?” Samuel says. “I believed in You fully. I thought you were going to keep me safe.”
And God, exasperated, goes, “Hey, idiot: I sent you a horse, a boat, and a helicopter. What more was I supposed to do?”
*
Last Wednesday an oak tree fell on Ron DeSantis’s house. This was during Hurricane Idalia, one of the increasingly frequent and ferocious storms that have turned Florida into Mother Nature’s punching bag.
No one was hurt, though Ron’s wife and 3 young daughters were all in the house when the tree fell on it.
I have two thoughts:
One: There was a giant wooden disaster in Florida last week — but enough about Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign!
Second: A lot of people, mostly young people, sit around wondering what it will take for Republicans and their voters to accept that climate change is a threat.
You would hope that “A tree falls during yet another hurricane and almost kills your family” would maybe cause some reflection?
But alas: DeSantis, who has decried “the politicization of the weather,” remains undeterred — even as the weather just politicized his roofline.
Even though 90 percent of his job nowadays is now tropical storm cleanup and allocating money for dams to stop Miami from becoming the Super Mario underwater level, he talks about climate change the way the mayor in Jaws talks about shark attacks in the movie’s first 20 minutes.
And thus, after a tree almost crushed his wife, he was asked whether he had any new revelations about climate change. He took a giant gulp of Florida air and answered with all the charm of a dusty catcher’s mitt:
So, I think sometimes people need to take a breath and get a little bit of perspective here…the notion that somehow if we just adopt, you know, very left-wing policies at the federal level that somehow we will not have hurricanes, that is a lie. And that is people trying to take what happened with different types of storms and use that as a pretext to advance their agenda on the backs of people that are suffering. And that’s wrong, and we’re not going to do that in the state of Florida.
Obviously this is lard-brained and stupid for all the predictable reasons.
No one is claiming that investments in green energy will cause a permanent end to hurricanes; though I am going to steal this line of argumentation.
“The notion that if somehow I order a side salad instead of fries means I am going to become an Olympic marathoner? No thank you. Fries please, EXTRA salty.”
But this is why I’m thinking about the overly long Jewish joke.
How many signs does God have to send you that climate change is going to fuck your state? Just this summer: Algae blooms are poisoning your largest lake; your ocean water is reaching hot tub temperatures; your coral reefs are dropping like John Wick bad guys; Miami, Orlando, and Daytona Beach all recorded their hottest months in history; more and more insurers are completely pulling out of the state; and, oh yeah, a fucking tree almost pancaked your family.
Ron DeSantis is not bothered by any of this.
Last week he rejected $350 million in federal funds that would have gone to Floridians for making their homes more energy efficient. Later that day his house got rocked by a hurricane-battered tree. The helicopter should be showing up any minute.
*
One of the problems here is that climate change is so big and amorphous.
It’s not like you can take a sample from the oak tree that fell on Ron DeSantis’s house, take it in the lab, run it through the Cyclotron, and say definitively, “Yup, just as I thought: Trace amounts of climate change. Checkmate, RON.”
It’s not like climate change is definitively creating new natural disasters.
If scientists in 2013 were like, “Just wait: Because of climate change it is going to start raining blood,” and then a decade later the beaches of Miami were shut down due to yet another Type O-negative hurricane, then there might be some movement on this topic.
That isn’t what climate change is, though.
And so Florida Governor/Robot-American Ron DeSantis can say things like, “Well, Florida has always had hurricanes.”
And presidential candidate/failed Slap Chop salesman Vivek Ramaswamy can rocket up the polls while calling climate change a hoax. (Ramaswamy, in his own Samuel-in-the-Flood Moment, was giving a campaign speech on Wednesday when he was struck in the head by a sign that said “TRUTH” on it. He was unhurt, as were Ron DeSantis’s wife and children.)
These guys can get sent horses and rowboats and helicopters, and hurricanes and algae blooms and 118 degree days, and they’ll reject it all.
Yesterday climate scientists announced that this was, officially, the hottest summer on record.
My advice for those sticking it out in Ron DeSantis’s Florida: If you’re offered a helicopter, take it.
*
I previously wrote about Florida’s terrible year here.
I also wrote about the insufferable Vivek Ramaswamy here.
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