Sixty Days and Counting Book

I have mixed feelings about this series. On one hand, it has a lot of interesting facts, not only on climate change but on many, many other topics. On the other hand, it has too much politics for my taste and a couple of side storylines which could have been less detailed.

Still, this last part ties all loose ends and we get a reasonable ending. If it starts out as a dystopia in the first volume, it ends up almost as a utopia. But one can dream, right? A country to have a president whose prime concern would be the health of Earth and its inhabitants, not wealth and power. LOL. Utopia, as I said.

Below fragment is one 'posted' by the new elected president, Phil Chase, on his blog. How not to love KSR for his way of thinking?

"CUT TO THE CHASE
Posted 11:53 PM:

We Americans don't want to be in a state of denial about our relationship to the world and its problems. If we're five percent of the world's population and we're burning one quarter of the carbon being burned every year, we need to know that, and we need to think about why it's happening and what it means. It's not a trivial thing and we can't just deny it. It's a kind of obesity.
There are different kinds of denial. One is sticking your head in the sand. You manage not to know anything. Like that public service ad where there's a bunch of ostriches down on a big beach, and all the big ones have their heads in the sand, and some of the little ones do too, but a lot of the little ones are running around, and they see a giant wave is coming in and they start yelling down the holes to the big ones, There's a wave coming! and one of the big ones pulls his head out and says Don't worry, just stick your head in like this, and the little ones look at each other and figure that if that's what their parents are doing it must be okay, so they stick their heads in the sand too'and in the last frame you see that all the holes in the sand are windows made of little TVs and computer screens. That kind of says it all. And there you are seeing it on TV.
But there are other kinds of denial that are worse yet. There's a response that says I'll never admit I'm wrong and if it comes to a choice between admitting I'm wrong or destroying the whole world, then bring it on. This is the Götterdämmerung, in which the doomed gods decide to tear down the world as they lose the big battle. The god-damning of the world. It's a term sometimes used to describe what Hitler did in the last months of World War Two, after it was clear Germany was going to lose the war.
Of course people are offended by any comparison to the actions of Adolf Hitler. But consider how many species have died already, and how many more might die if we keep doing what we're doing. It may not be genocide, but it is ugly. Species-cide. As if nothing else matters but us, and specifically the subset of us that agrees with everything we say. When you take a look at our own Rapture culture, these people pretending to expect the end of the world anytime now, you see that we have our own Götterdämmerung advocates, all very holy of course, as the world destroyers always are. And it's an ugly thing. Countries can go crazy, we've seen it happen more than once. And empires always go crazy.
But right now we need to stay sane. We don't want the United States of America to be hauled before the World Court on a charge of attempted Götterdämmerung. We can't let that happen, because THIS IS AMERICA, land of the free and home of the brave'the country made of people from all the other countries'the grand experiment that all world history has so far been conducting! So if we blow it, if America blows it, then all world history might be judged a failure so far. We don't want that. We don't want to go from being the hope of the world to convicted in the World Court of attempted Götterdämmerung.
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As a whole, this series is 100% North American. It has a lot of references specific to American history, details which I am not aware, one of them being, for example, the friendship between Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book abounds in quotes from both of them, which are very interesting and relevant but I failed to grasp the point of their relationship to this story. There are also a lot of geographical features, how they changed, what that means for those who knew them before the change and many other references.

However, to an American, it will have a totally different impact than it had on me. I dare to say that I almost see it as a mandatory reading. To see all the differences caused in the ecosystem and not only, because of our actions, it is kind of frightening and also, awakening.

I will leave here few more fragments; love them too much and I think they are worthy to be read:

" 'There are good anchors to reality and bad anchors to reality. Try to avoid the bad ones.'
Ha!" Rudra snorted. "Thanks for such wisdom, oh High Holiness! Look, he even calls them the Four Bad D's. It's like the Chinese, they are always Four Thises and Six Thats."
"The Eight Noble Truths?" Frank said.
"Bah. That's Chinese Buddhism."
"Interesting. And what exactly are the Four Bad D's?"
"Debt, depression, disease, death."
"Whoah. Those are four bad D's, all right. Are there four good D's?"
"Children, health, work, love."
"Man you are a sociobiologist. Could you add habits, maybe?" "No. Number very important. Only room for four."


"We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life."


"This generation has a rendezvous with destiny." Our time has to be understood as a narrow gate, a window of opportunity, a crux point in history. It's the moment when we took responsibility for life on Earth.