SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B7
for entrepreneurship and competition, with
riches coming to those who can invent an
efficient carbon-sucking widget. They would
just have to pay their workers a decent wage
and give back a fair share. Maybe it will really
be all of the above: green capitalism chasing a
new alternative gold rush within the sturdy
guardrails provided by a strengthened public
sector.
It’s not enough to lament the world we
would have had if we had acted sooner or to
picture the future we want to avoid. We need
something to aspire to, to work toward.
Dwight Eisenhower famously said that plans
are useless but planning is indispensable. But
here the plan is essential. It i s lacking in detail,
grandiose and surely flawed in some respects.
But the people need a vision, and “On Fire”
challenges us to choose the Green New Deal or
try to find a better one — in a hurry. A t present
it is still a vague outline, not a detailed policy
proposal. But this plan, or some version of it, is
going to be part of our urgent national and
international conversation on this most press-
ing of issues. Reading this book will equip you
to enter into that dialogue with a rich under-
standing of the rationale. Klein lays it out
vehemently and clearly for us to debate, adapt
and improve upon if necessary. Time is of the
essence, and we’d better choose right.David Grinspoon is a senior scientist at the
Planetary Science Institute and the author of “Earth
in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future.”obligation, to change course. She sketches an
alternative future, possibly within our grasp,
which is imaginative and inspiring, a world
where “day-to-day life for working people has
been improved in countless ways, with more
time for leisure and art, truly accessible and
affordable public transit and housing, yawn-
ing racial and gender wealth gaps closed at
last, and city life that is not an unending battle
against traffic, noise and pollution.” The
Green New Deal draws upon Roosevelt’s New
Deal as historical analogy and proof-of-con-
cept that we are capable of responding to crisis
with creative transformation. Klein proposes
that once again, government-supported art-
ists should play a vital role, helping us imagine
and realize our societal renovation as Works
Progress Administration artists did in the
1930s.
Although Klein and the Green New Deal
will be accused of building a Trojan horse for
socialism, in the vision laid out in “On Fire,”
capitalism is not discarded, just somewhat
tamed. Klein talks about “democratic eco-so-
cialism,” but the examples she holds up are
Sweden and Denmark, places where capital-
ism is alive and well. The future United States
she describes is not Venezuela. The pursuit of
wealth is not eliminated, but obscene excess is
constrained, with resources channeled back
into supporting infrastructure for a cleaner,
fairer economy and safety nets for those
displaced in the transition. The market i s alive
but defanged. There’s s till room in this pictureand crumbling infrastructure.
As a scientist I was on the lookout for
misrepresentations. It i s, of course, not strictly
true that “science says that political revolution
is our only hope.” (Wouldn’t it be great if
science could give us a blueprint for how to
organize ourselves as a society?) But science
does tell us that our current course, absent a
radical and rapid change in our energy sup-
plies, will lead to disaster. I am bothered by the
fetishization of somewhat arbitrary deadlines,
as in: “We are fighting for our lives. And we
don’t h ave twelve years anymore; now we have
only eleven. And soon it will be just ten.” But
we are facing an existential threat, and per-
haps the repetition of these numbers will help
people appreciate the urgency, which is real.
Basic quantitative reasoning confirms one of
Klein’s central arguments — that the survival
of a healthy biosphere on this finite planet is
inconsistent with an economic system de-
pendent on continuous growth. Whether or
not one accepts every detail of the Green New
Deal as currently conceived, it is hard to deny
that a successful fix to the climate crisis will
involve a radical reduction in corporations’
influence over our political process.
Klein’s tone is urgent but hopeful. She
reminds us that looming disaster can some-
times bring out the best in people, awakening
transformative impulses in the nick of time.
She highlights the work of inspiring young
activists to show us that no future is written in
stone and that we have the choice, and theC
limate disruption looms, and we are
dithering. We are in need of a vision.
You can be forgiven the occasional
moment of paralyzing despair. But
then snap out of it, because we’ve got
work to do. But what exactly? We’d all love to
see the plan.
Some say technical wizardry and unleashed
market f orces can come to our rescue, as green
entrepreneurs chase the gold of alternative
energy. B ut in “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for
a Green New Deal,” Naomi Klein makes a
keenly argued, well-researched and impas-
sioned case for why market capitalism cannot
get us out of this mess and the only way to
avert a climate breakdown is to undertake a
radical reset of our entire economy. This will
require a vast e xpansion of public investment,
including sectors far beyond those directly
associated with energy and climate resilience,
such as health care, education and labor
rights. Given that Klein was promoting a
similar program before she explicitly tied it to
climate action, one has to ask whether this
truth is a little too convenient. In “The Shock
Doctrine” ( 2007), she described “disaster capi-
talism,” i n which corporations and the politi-
cians they control never let a good crisis go to
waste, using the pretext of emergencies to
achieve neoliberal goals of privatization and
erosion of the public sphere. Here it’s fair to
ask if Klein and her colleagues in the Green
New Deal movement are practicing “disaster
socialism,” s eeking to use the climate threat to
vastly expand the role of government and
quash corporate influence. Klein enthuses
that “battling climate change is a onc-
e-in-a-century chance to build a fairer and
more democratic economy,” and she doesn’t
mince words about her belief that “climate
change supercharges the preexisting case for
virtually every progressive demand on the
books, binding them into a coherent agenda
based on a clear scientific imperative.”
Is the Green New Deal a plot to use the
climate emergency as a pretense for social-
ism? Klein is well aware of this accusation. She
makes her best case for why an effective
societal response to the climate crisis must
include a rejuvenation of genuine democracy
that wrests power from the petrochemical and
extractive industries; forces a more equitable
distribution of resources; subsidizes massive
new investments in energy, transit and hous-
ing infrastructure; and protects those whose
lives are upended by the rapid economic
transition. Parts of the argument are some-
what strained. Yes, we need comprehensive
health-care reform, but does it absolutely have
to be part of a climate package? K lein insists it
does because an improved and fairer health
system will help Americans weather the nec-
essary economic dislocations and the expect-
ed increase in natural disasters.
Is the only plausible way to avert a climate
breakdown a full transformation of our soci-
ety from corporate to social democracy? Can’t
we put out the climate fire first and then get
the rest of our house in order? I don’t think
this book will convince anyone who is not
already fairly open to these ideas. Klein is not
subtle about applying her ideological lens to
the problem. However, if you are sympathetic
to the goals of the Green New Deal but are as
yet unconvinced, as I was before reading “On
Fire,” you need to read this book. Klein
marshals the most powerful arguments for
why climate change cannot be effectively
addressed without a simultaneous deep reck-
oning with our society’s other ills of wealth
and income inequality, racial discrimination,ing to the descendants of Charles Willson P eale
in Philadelphia and rebranded it “PT Barnum’s
Museum of Living Wonders.” Theaters in those
days were unholy places, suspected of being
populated by pedophiles and whores. But his
museums had venues for dramas and became
family affairs with discount tickets for the
kiddies — doing for theater what Walt Disney
would do for the carny amusement park.
He created acts so famous that people still
know of them. To m Thumb, Chang and Eng,
even animal acts like Jumbo the elephant.
These extravaganzas were an attempt to dis-
play the world to America, he said, but just as
much, America to itself. After returning from a
European tour, he wrote, “There everything is
frozen — kings and things — formal... here it
is life.” He repeatedly gave a famous lecture,
which nearly every crass self-promoter has
plagiarized, “The Art of Money-Getting.” Al-
ways trying t o get the mix of acts and the name
right, the showman eventually joined forces
with circuses and at o ne point began touring as
the “great travelling museum, menageries,
caravan, hippodrome, international zoological
garden, and Dan Castello’s Mammoth Circus.”
He was a brilliant editor who of course
wrote most of his own press, seducing the
media into publishing it as news. (When Mark
Twain was near death and asked for three
books to read in his final days, one of them was
Barnum’s biography.) And as Barnum ended
nearly a century of trying to edit that sense of
wonder into the mot juste, he finally nailed it
at the end. Sure, the historians and essayists
wrote about America a s a “nation conceived in
liberty” or “a city on a hill.” But for this young
country, such stately branding was undersell-
ing the place. Barnum was on the road booking
“Zazel, the Beautiful Human Cannon Ball” a nd
a “$25,000 Hippopotamus from the river Nile,”
and from town to town he was busily puffing
ticket sales, arriving in hundreds of brightly
painted train cars, spilling out into parades,
selling out venues, and for well over a century
after he died, his spectacle would tour America
with its wonders. Not a nation. “The Greatest
Show on Earth.”Jack Hitt is the author of “Bunch of Amateurs: A
Search for the American Character” and most
recently a co-host of the history podcast “Uncivil.”an American ear, even if the possessor of that
ear didn’t know that it was a real place in
Brazil.” Barnum would plant little squibs pro-
moting the exhibit but just as often challeng-
ing the authenticity o f the mermaid. He p layed
both sides of the argument to build huge
audiences and then sent the exhibit on tour
(along with an automaton, a glass blower and a
real orangutan). He worked the media as hard
as he possibly could. After his naturalist barely
escaped from Charleston, S.C., safely, the mer-
maid was shipped back to New York. “She will
probably have to lie still a spell — perhaps
forever,” Barnum wrote his partner.
When he took over his first New York
museum, it was a shabby joint whose owner
paid an annual rent of “one peppercorn.” He
expanded and stuffed his new place wall to
wall with unheard-of and unseen things. He
bought a revolutionary-era museum belong-lay just beyond the acceptable or the believ-
able, and after moving to New York, Ta le
became the Barnum we all vaguely know. In
the 1830s, in a young nation eager to connect
to the past, Barnum toured w ith Joice Heth, an
enslaved woman who claimed to be 161 years
old and the former nursemaid to George
Washington. Assembled audiences would lis-
ten to her as she reclined on a couch, singing
ancient hymns and chortling about the child-
hood antics of the founding father.
When she died, there was a call to have an
autopsy in the hopes of understanding her
longevity, and Barnum agreed. And then sold
tickets. Fifty cents a pop to see a human being
dismembered. The arena held 1,500 people
and sold out.
Barnum’s grotesque work, especially early
on, seems extreme to us, but it seemed extreme
then, too. Wrote one reviewer: A “more inde-
cent mode of raising money than by the
exhibition of an old woman — black or white —
we can hardly imagine.” And we have to read
Barnum today for what is obviously there —
issues of race and misogyny, abuse and con-
tempt. But the river that runs through it is
marketing.
When minstrel shows were the thing —
white men in blackface mimicking African
dance moves — Barnum got into the business.
He discovered the best dancer, but there was a
problem. The performer, according to a jour-
nalist of the time, “was a genuine negro, and
not a counterfeit one, and there was not an
audience in America that would not have
resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult
of being asked to look at the dancing of a real
negro.” So Barnum created a new kind of
blackface that made a black man look like a
white man looking like a black man — and the
show went on.
When he began marketing a new find — a
stuffed mermaid (a taxidermied fish tail sewn
onto the body of an orangutan whose arms had
been shortened with a saw and reattached) —
he worked every angle. He knew that exotic
spellings of the “Fejee Mermaid” would make
her all the more attractive, as would insisting
that the naturalist he hired to defend its
authenticity had arrived “recently from Per-
nambuco.” Wilson informs us that Pernambu-
co was “an exotic and mildly romantic name toE
arly on in a new American century,
there appeared a self-promoting
blowhard of a man with an easily
branded name and a poof of notice-
ably weird hair. He conjured for-
tunes and then lost them in spectacular catas-
trophes. He w ould eventually catapult himself
into political office as a Bible-hugging Chris-
tian, committed to reclaiming American vir-
tue. His proper name would become a com-
mon noun, a contemptible exclamation and
novel profanity. Throughout it all, he found
one way or another to seize the gaze of the
media, often by slipping to the press short bits
of provocative writing, then known as squibs.
His name was Phineas T. Barnum.
For Robert Wilson’s smart new biography,
“Barnum,” t he author chose the plainest subti-
tle, “A n American Life,” perhaps because near-
ly every one of the myriad connotations of that
central word can be traced to the work of our
nation’s first and greatest impresario of grift.
Wilson could have gone with one of those
overheated subtitles that claim too much, like
“How One Man Created America, Marketing,
Showmanship, Humbug, and Laid the
Groundwork for Spam, Infomercials, Buzz,
Influencers, and Maybe the Nigerian Prince
Scam.” But that doesn’t come close enough to
describing the epic achievements of Barnum’s
showmanship as well as the forgotten contri-
butions to what his contemporary, Alexis de
To cqueville, tried to describe as the American
character.
As a young kid growing up in small-town
Connecticut in the 1820s, Phineas Ta ylor Bar-
num, or Ta le, as he was known t hen, right away
picked up a key quirk of marketplace capital-
ism. On the one hand there were simple
transactions — selling a thing for a fair price —
and on the other, more impulse purchases,
often hypocritical because they came laced
with unspoken hope or morbid curiosity. He
noticed that the very clergymen and churchgo-
ers who condemned alcohol also found all
kinds of excuses — at funerals, for instance —
for why they had to drink. And so teenage Ta le
created his first truly profitable line of work,
selling lottery tickets hyped by worthless priz-
es to congregations that otherwise thundered
about the perils of gambling.
Americans were curious about things thatBIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY JACK HITTThe showman and grifter who held up a funhouse mirror to America
ENVIRONMENT REVIEW BY DAVID GRINSPOONAn audacious plan to stop climate change calls for remaking the whole economy
BARNUM
An American
Life
By Robert
Wilson
Simon &
Schuster.
341 pp. $28ON FIRE
The (Burning)
Case for a
Green New
Deal
By Naomi Klein
Simon &
Schuster.
308 pp. $27ASSOCIATED PRESSP.T. Barnum in- For decades,
he presented
traveling exhibits,
museums and
circuses that
featured oddities
and scams like the
“Fejee Mermaid”
and “Zazel, the
Beautiful Human
Cannon Ball.”
BLOOMBERG CREATIVE PHOTOSNaomi Klein writes
that an effective
response to the
climate crisis must
include huge new
investments in
clean energy, like
wind power.