Under the Volcano

SORRENTO, Italy — In sunny splendor on an Old-World terrace facing Naples Bay, I sipped Campari and crunched bruschetta drizzled in luscious olive oil. A Fellini fantasy. But out past the beautiful people and a riot of bougainvillea, I fixated on a distant lump of conical rock.

It was why I’d come back yet again to Italy’s iconic volcano. For the reporter in me, Mount Vesuvius is the mother of all metaphors.

The message is clear. “Media” mostly ignores global crises — metaphorical volcanoes — until they are “breaking news.” By then, all anyone can do is try to get out of the way.

What too many people don’t know is killing us.

Vesuvius caught Pompeii by surprise in 79 A.D. despite ominous signs that it was about to blow its top. The eruption rose 21 miles high. Archeologists continue to find half-eaten meals in summer villas buried in the molten rock that rained down.

Volcanologists monitor its every burble and belch. It last erupted in 1944, during my lifetime. A big blow, unlikely but not unthinkable, could obliterate millions if Naples, a rabbit warren, chokes with panicky gridlock.

West of Naples, the Campi Flegrei, “fields of fire,” are yet more menacing. Virgil’s Aeneid depicted them as the gateway to hell. Molten magma in underground craters — calderas — pushes to the surface, at times breaking through with searing heat and spitting rock.

Mount Etna, down in Sicily, two and a half times bigger than Vesuvius, had 16 eruptions in 2001 and a year later sent up a fiery column visible from space with ash falling in Libya. It blew 11 times in three weeks in 2021 and last year spewed lava for three days.

Volcanoes across the globe release noxious gases. But human activity produces more than 100 times as many. And now a pissed-off Mother Nature flings ever more deadly “events” with little warning. Earth is both drying up and washing away.

Meantime, we bumble into unwinnable wars despite the lessons of Vietnam. Avoidable famines are beyond biblical proportion. Pathogens rage out of control before a broken global system can thwart them. Families besiege borders. Terrorist ranks swell.

There is time to act, if damned little. The United States is best equipped to take the lead. But the operative word is united. Americans can’t do the right thing until enough voters know what that is.

If citizens rally behind an effective president and give him a congressional majority to lower the heat in a world on the boil, America has a shot at restored sanity. 

Back in 1889, a Remington typewriter maven devised a sentence to help people master the keyboard: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Adding in women and other variations, that has never had more meaning.

Remember “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” that absurd 1978 sociopolitical horror show? Outer-space invaders — sort of weird plant forms — inhabit earthlings’ minds and souls, creating automaton “pod people.” Today a similar scenario, homegrown, is playing out for real in America.

Pod people reject truth, rule of law, factual education, even women’s rights over their own bodies. Criminal indictments in four separate courts only increase their idol’s poll numbers and campaign coffers.

Never mind how many charges. The world watched his violent coup attempt in real time. Irrefutable evidence shows his treacherous effects to keep stolen highest-level classified documents, including plans to repel a Chinese attack and lists of secret agents.

Chris Christie made the point in the Republicans’ Aug. 23 debate. Whether or not you believe the charges, he said, “the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States.” That brought a chorus of boos.

Vivak Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur, stole the show, revealing a stunning ignorance of foreign affairs. He called climate change a “hoax” and said America should help itself, not Ukraine.

Trump dodged the debate, instead interviewing himself online via Tucker Carlson. Why risk questions to help voters make their choices next year?

Amusing labels like Orange Julius and Clown-car Caligula are less funny in the ruins of Ancient Rome where despots of that ilk turned a republic into an empire that collapsed in ignominy.

—————

America is caught in a vicious circle. Few correspondents are out keeping watch because so many readers and viewers prefer their own dubious sources, often purposely distorted. News organizations lose ad revenue and cut budgets.

Technology is no substitute, nor is much-touted AI. “Artificial intelligence” is a moronic oxymoron. It has enormous value. But it is a tool, like a hammer that can build a house or bash in a head. Homo sapiens is a species designed to think for itself.

Moses downloaded his Ten Commandments from a cloud onto a tablet long before computers. America’s founders wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights by hand. Citizens only need to vote for leaders who take them to heart. Instead, a party corrupted by cupidity at the top and stupidity below ignores most of them.

Just consider Moses’s big one: Thou shalt not kill. Bob Woodward has detailed how Donald Trump ignored expert presidential aides’ pleas in January 2020 to treat Covid as a catastrophic global emergency. His only thought was a second term. His depraved indifference took hundreds of thousands of American lives. We can only guess at the eventual worldwide toll of his refusal to confront climate collapse.

Failed coup leaders in other countries are locked up or worse. In America, money prevails. Woodward recently conferred with 25 oil executives in Houston. He asked how many thought the 2020 election was stolen. None did. When asked if they would vote for Trump in 2024 despite serial indictments, every one of them thrust up a hand.

It gets worse. By any measure, Joe Biden swiftly restored Trump’s road-kill economy to robust health despite a Republican stonewall. He reunited NATO to humble Vladimir Putin, he reengaged with China and much else. Yet the latest polls show a dead heat.

Nate Cohn, in the New York Times, described an 8 percent category of first-time voters who want more Trump. “Nearly 90 percent said the economy was poor,” he wrote, “…just behind the Right Wing in their economic pessimism. A similar number said the country was heading in the wrong direction.” Ignorance is hardly bliss.

A Mort Report project — A Guide to the Universe for Generations XYZ — aims to help young people understand what we old guys got so wrong. Many work hard to save their world. But polls and my own interviews suggest many more get only erratic news tidbits in social media echo chambers. Focused on the present, they ignore the past.

An Associated Press survey with academic partners estimated 71 percent of “young people” between 16 and 40 rely on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Musk’s Twit-X and others – even Nextdoor, dominated by such long strings as one about dog poop on a sidewalk and a woman’s distress after someone insulted her chicken soup recipe.

Only 32 percent say they enjoy following the news or talking about it with family and friends. Seven years ago, 53 percent of millennials said they did.

Real news is what it is, whether we like it or not. When ignored, reality bites hard. Facts are its structural framework but reporting needs human context and “color” so people an ocean away can understand why other cultures act the way they do.

—————

A casual glance at Italy today suggests it is in no position to cast aspersions about chaotic government. Prime ministers have the shelf life of fresh mozzarella. Mafias persist, and corruption prevails. That’s the trouble with casual glances.

Those old Romans built to last, not only spectacular structures, many still standing after two millennia, but also the basis for preserving a society with close family ties, lifelong friends and a fierce attachment to things that money can’t buy.

Tourism, far more than terrorism, is fast eating away at that. Americans, if hardly the only culprits, have an outsized penchant for taking their habits and judgments with them. “When in Rome…” now seldom applies. Rather than learn from others, visitors often complain bitterly when they can’t find what they left at home.

In ancient times, leaders made sure the poorest people had bread. And, in the Colosseum, circuses. Gladiators were groomed and forced to battle ferocious beasts, or each other, to the death. Satisfied blood lust helped keep violence off the streets.

Modern America has a new twist all its own: a planned clash of egos between a puffed-up muskrat and a Meta-mogul omnivore whose rival social-media ventures lead an underinformed nation deeper into distractions. Bring on the lions.

Italian authorities decided to move the gimmicky cage match to some other place. The Colosseum, an enduring cultural treasure, could be damaged by an overexcited foot- stomping crowd.

Often when I rant about Mark Zuckerberg, and more often when that is a sputtering tirade about Elon Musk, young people give me puzzled looks. Not many like Zuckerberg. A whole lot of them love Musk.

Musk’s brilliant mind could do much to build a better world. His God complex presents serious problems. Like Vesuvius, he is a metaphor for cataclysmic subsurface trends ignored at our peril.

He magnanimously offered his Starlink to keep Ukraine online and allow its defense forces to blunt a Russian onslaught. He then restricted its use. After meeting with Vladimir Putin as a self-appointed diplomat, he proposed an ingenious plan to end the war: capitulation.

But the real problem is Musk’s dream of ruling what is left of Earth and its environs from a colony of handpicked disciples on Mars. No need to elaborate. Just watch “Don’t Look Up.” A cold-hearted tech tycoon blasts off, leaving billions to fend for themselves.

NASA spends a hefty chunk of its annual $30 billion budget on contracts to SpaceX. Just a bit of the Republicans’ $2 trillion tax giveaway in 2017 could be funding those rockets that fly America’s flag, free of anyone’s personal interests.

And this gets to the underlying problem, which long predates Trump. A functioning democracy cannot outsource its essential elements to private vested interests seeking profit and power.

A nation’s military is an extension of its foreign policy and global reputation. Private- contractor mercenaries operate beyond a chain of command. Blackwater in Iraq was a precursor to Putin’s Wagner thugs.

This applies down the list. Schools should be public – and better. Privatizing them widens the gulf between an elite and easily exploited pod people. Prisons should reform inmates; private operators earn more by hardening them. The Post Office predates America’s independence.

Why cede domestic and international monetary policy to cryptocurrency freebooters? A few operators amass wealth with untraceable, energy-sucking systems. Workaday people suffer for it.

One basic institution needs to stay free of government: what we used to call the press. “Media” is far down the path of being something else. Citizens need to sift through a towering slag heap to find trustworthy sources.

The ruling gerontocracy is fading away. By 2028, young people will outnumber diehards resistant to change. Republicans are desperate to dig in while they still can. But a firm seasoned hand needs more time to steer the ship of state off the rocks.

—————

Not long ago, I hiked up Vesuvius with a Neapolitan friend on a wet winter day. Alone, we sat on a rock to feel its power. “People know what it’s capable of,” he told me. “But it has a magical draw.” Many love it and live on its slopes, he said, but they pay close attention to its every mood.

On my terrace table in Sorrento, la dolce vita still prevails. At least for now. In grand Amalfi villas, Italian filmmakers imagined all sorts of sudden shifts in orderly lives. But forget Fellini. Jimmy Buffett was closer to it:

Let me hear you, now
I don't know, I don't know where I'm a gonna go
when the volcano blow.