Before delving into this week’s column, a quick reply to Mr. Noonan, the editor of the newspaper, about global warming: I’m not particularly offended that Mr. Noonan quotes that great unmarried marriage counselor, Bjorn Lombord, in his dismissal of global warming’s importance. Lombard, a political scientist, says just the right things to make head-in-the-sand folk feel warm and fuzzy. Meanwhile, I’ll stick with what actual climate scientists have to say.

I’m also not really offended by Mr. Noonan’s customary rhethorical tactic of creating guilt by association – in this case, associating environmentalism with anti-religious impulses. The National Religious Partnership for the Environment (http://www.nrpe.org/), however, may feel differently.

I am shocked, shocked, however, that Mr. Noonan can’t tell the difference between weather – the specific and often unpredictable state of the atmosphere in a particular location – and climate, the average weather in a region that actually is predictable. For example, we may not know if it will rain in L.A. tomorrow or not (weather), but we know our area has a consistent Mediterranean climate, which means mild, wet winters and hot summers. Of course, many global warming skeptics, using any moment of cold as a refutation of global warming, also forget that global warming refers to the planet’s average temperature, not to any specific location’s temperature on a given day.

Now, on to this week’s column…

How Not To Be Popular at Parties

There are things you just can’t say. Well, you can, but it won’t make you popular at parties, probably won’t get you any action (wink, nudge), and is liable to make people feel as if they’ve been poked in their pride. Without getting into encyclopedic explanations, here’s a brief glance at two:

Class Warfare Is Alive and Well

It’s not fashionable to use the words “class warfare” these days. After all, that’s the language of those radical people handing out pamphlets at farmer’s markets and protests, right? Yet, try as we might, there’s no escaping the existence of distinct economic classes in America, as demonstrated by facts such as the determination that CEOs earn, on average, more than 364 times what the average U.S. worker earns (See http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2007/staggering_cost_of_corp_leadership.html for more information on the distribution of wealth in the U.S.). There’s also no escaping the fact that different economic classes (employers/employees, big business/small business, rich/middle class/poor) have different interests, simply because that is the nature of capitalism as an economic system. The rich, for example, have freedoms, such as how and when they work, that the poor don’t have. The rich have buying powers that the poor don’t have. In fact, that buying power can only come by having poorer people around to spend money on in exchange for services and luxuries. Whether the existence of economic classes is considered acceptable or not naturally depends on one’s political perspective. But given how everything from politics to social security to healthcare is predicated on economic interests, class warfare is the elephant in the room we can’t ignore forever.

The Terrorists Are Winning

That Sept. 11th hasn’t (and shouldn’t have) changed everything isn’t a new argument among the non-right – Paul Campos skewers the 9/11 cult nicely http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/14/3157/ – but it is one that gets ignored and vilified because it flies in the face of America’s glorified self-perception.Yet when snakeoil politicians likes Rudy Giuliani continually refer to a “post-Sept. 11th world,” and use the tragic attacks to justify war and decreasing civil liberties, it’s clear just how widely the notion that Sept. 11th “changed everything” has permeated politics and the media. But when we remember that terrorism is a tactic intended to sow terror and negative change, saying that everything has changed — creating a distinction between the brutal reality of a post-Sept. 11th world and a kinder, more naïve pre-Sept. 11th world – is really an admission of defeat. It means the terrorists have succeeded in making us change ourselves and our way of life. The Bush Administration’s false and self-serving association of Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein not only led to an unnecessary war, it denied the country an opportunity to properly mourn, heal and craft a rational response to the attacks – one that doesn’t compromise America’s identity. Six years later, American politics and culture are severely fractured, the ghost of Sept. 11th continues to haunt, and the cultural dialogue needed to make America true to its ideals – ideals that don’t involve torture or occupation – is absent.

Next week: Two more things you’re not supposed to say – and they’re doozies.