I

This is based on a true story. Say you are involved in modeling the lifecycle of a listed species. You and your colleagues rightly start out by aiming to develop and then integrate sub-models for: species reproduction; period-to-period, region-based species survival; movements between regions; and juvenile/adult mortality due to exogenous factors, such as human-made disaster.

It doesn’t take long to confirm what you and your colleagues suspected anyway that not only do the pertinent data not exist, but modeling errors and uncertainties work against integrating the exisiting sub-models into a comprehensive lifecycle model (LCM).

With more time and more funding, you all develop much reduced versions, called LCM1, LCM2 and now LCM3, each bringing to light further refinements and significant methodological and data constraints. The team embarks on developing LCM4 in the hopes that the research–funding permitting–is moving closer to identifying management interventions for the species.

The technical reports (now approaching 50 in number) produced during the decade of research track the refinements, improvements, insights and difficulties in modeling species reproduction, movement and survival. In so doing, the peer-reviewed literature on lifecycle models has been advanced in the view of outside experts by this research.

II

Unfortunately, none of the reports identify modeling and data uncertainties in a way that they can be contrasted to the uncertainties and errors made in the existing comprehensive model for managing said species.

What “comprehensive model,” you ask? Didn’t I just write there was no comprehensive lifecycle model? You see, during all the years the modeling research, real-time deliberations of interagency staff and scientists continued with really-existing decisions, period-by-period, over the management of said species.

From time to time the consequences of the management actions find their way into a technical report of the researchers, but here too modeling uncertainties take center-stage: “Though it is tempting to interpret declines in estimated [mortality] as evidence of management success, models of population dynamics are required to disentangle. . .”

III

One would think that the burden of proof has been on the researchers to demonstrate that reliance on life-cycle models would lead to better results compared to the next best alternative of current interagency deliberations of scientists and support staff. . .

But, not to worry: The judge who mandated the research asserted way back when: “All experts agree that application of a lifecycle model is the accepted method for evaluating the effects of an action upon a populations growth rate.”

This means all we need do is assume management isn’t improving faster than the modeling. And what could make more sense in reality than doing what is so needed in theory?

We forget how longstanding is the notion of addressing each case in its own right. Here is Aristotle:

But let it be granted to begin with that the whole theory of conduct is bound to be an outline only and not an exact system, in accordance with the rule we laid down at the beginning, that philosophical theories must only be required to correspond to their subject matter; and matters of conduct and expediency have nothing fixed or invariable about them, any more than have matters of health. And if this is true of the general theory of ethics, still less is exact precision possible in dealing with particular cases of conduct; for these come under no science or professional tradition, but the agents themselves have to consider what is suited to the circumstances on each occasion, just as is the case with the art of medicine or of navigation.

my underline and without endnotes and annotation; from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0054%3Abekker%20page%3D1104a

The underlined, “suited to the circumstances…” (pros ton kairon), has also been translated “as the occasion merits”.

What really strikes me in this passage is the hint of improvisational or makeshift, as in: working with what’s at hand.

Source: Thanks to Otto Linderborg for directing me to this (also see his https://antigonejournal.com/2023/01/history-socratic-problem/)

I

I graduated with a master’s in public policy studies from the University of Michigan in the early 1970’s and with a PhD in public policy from the UC Berkeley a little more than halfway through the 1980’s. I still identify as a policy analyst when asked my occupation/profession.

One misconception has been that in its early days policy analysis assumed problems were simpler and could be solved by the best and the brightest. That’s not how I remember my graduate training.

I had the good fortune to have been a student of Pat Crecine, the founding director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies (now the University of Michigan’s Ford School) and Aaron Wildavsky, a founder of the now Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Two different people you can’t imagine, but one insisting to his first-generation students that policymaking and budgeting were complex, while the other was the last person on earth who would say policy implementation was anything close to simple.

Another misconception: I remember a well-known policy academic upbraiding me that the “policy cycle” from policy formulation through policy evaluation/termination was a signal advance over early notions of incrementalism and the budgeting process. You only need implement something you had earlier planned to realize that the stage of “implementation” is itself a lethal critique of anything like a policy cycle.

II

But implementation is more than critique. We are, for example, used to thinking of a creeping crisis, like slow violence, as one that builds up until outright disaster triggers. Yet would one say that, given the inevitable gap between policies-as-stated and policies-as-implemented, implementation is the creeping crisis of policymaking and planning?

I don’t think so. We are just as apt to say implementation is de facto policymaking, and better for it when rendering more realism. In my view, we don’t ask, “Who’s going to adopt the recommendations and, if so, with what modifications?” before asking: “Who would implement the finalized recommendations and what are implementers’ scenarios for failing to do so?”

III

Realism doesn’t equate with intractability. At no point in my graduate training or later career do I remember being told that a policy problem not amenable to our toolkit was intractable. That toolkit, we were told, always had space for new methods and approaches. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to recapture that sense of policy analysis recasting difficult problems more tractably in the same way that policy analysis originally recast the field of public administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One way I think about what has happened is to distinguish between (1) the discipline as taught in graduate schools and the profession that policy analysts think they are joining upon graduation and (2) the profession as it is actually practiced at any one time or place and the varied careers that policy analysts have across time and place.

IV

For example, when I started out, it was said that 90% of a policy analysis was answering the question, “What’s the problem?” Having defined the problem meant you presumably knew what a solution would look like. It’s my experience today that 90% of a policy analysis—indeed of major policy practice and work—are its initial conditions.

In the 1970s, a key indicator of what is now called “a failed state” was its inability to publish an annual government budget that actually operated over the year. That happens all over the place today, and in parts of the US. But the point isn’t whether the “state” has in this way failed. It’s first about how the initial conditions have changed and become more differentiated.

What arises are cases in their own right. When findings do not converge across multiple orthogonal metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the analytical search becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may in reality be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case it its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.

V

A singular purpose of the toolkit remains that policy and management be presented from not just one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but many—including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more.

Yet what frequently gets missed are the implied hyphens, i.e., “from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”. Consider Polonius in Hamlet: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”

The hyphens there function as the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness. Interdisciplinary accounts of policy analysis and management, however, insist that analysts take their added wordage as anything but long-windedness.

The irony has been palpable. Over my policy analysis career, I’ve witnessed the 20-page policy brief reduced to the five-page memo into a fifteen-minute PowerPoint presentation into the three-minute elevator speech into this or that graphic and now a tweet or two. What next: Telepathy? The knowing look? This arc has been our very own version of long-windedness.

I hope to see in the future a peer-reviewed article whose abstract runs something like the following:

This article traces the evolution of Pastoralist Studies from its nascent stages in the 1950s anthropological literature to its current status as a recognized and integral part of global academic discourse. It highlights the field’s vital role in dissecting the multifaceted structures and functions of settler colonialism (Arab, European, domestic agriculture) and standing firm amidst well-funded and systematic counter-efforts to delegitimize it, principally by global or national techno-managerial and urban elites. The ensuing discussion foregrounds pastoralist scholarly achievements in advancing their narrative and countering marginalization, particularly within the academic institutions of both the Global North and the Global (principally urban) South. By examining the political dynamics shaping research methodologies in Pastoralist Studies, this article elucidates how the field has emerged as a legitimate academic discipline, offering new pathways in graduate education centered around Anthropocene uncertainties and complexities. In asserting that Pastoralist Studies is inherently linked to activism, aiming for transformative change, decolonization, and liberation, this article underlines the contribution of the field to challenging dominant colonial epistemologies and methodologies and reshaping power dynamics. Thus, Pastoralist Studies not only elucidates the realities faced by indigenous herder populations but also vocalizes their struggles and aspirations, positioning itself as a critical lens to understand, and engage with, Pastoralist scholarship and its broader anti-colonial implications.

---

Source: The above replaces “Palestinian” with “Pastoralist” (along with slight edits) in the abstract of Ilan Pappé, Tariq Dana & Nadia Naser–Najjab (12 May 2024). “Palestine Studies, Knowledge Production, and the Struggle for Decolonisation,” Middle East Critique, (accessed online at DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2024.2342189)

I

Anyone who studies emergency management in large disasters and catastrophes, at least in the US setting, knows recovery is the second part of emergency management. The first, very formidable phase is immediate response.

Just what, then, is immediate response in the Climate Emergency? That article you are reading starts with: “The climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid remaking of economy and society.” Yes, surely that and more; but what do we do immediately?

II

We could quibble, “Just how immediate is immediately?” But in the US setting, a disaster, like wildfires or flooding, entails the activation of a city or county emergency operations center (EOC) and/or incident management teams (IMTs) to coordinate immediate response efforts. States also have their own EOCs or equivalent.

This activation is done all the time, when high winds, ice storms, wildfires, heat dome effects, flooding and their combinations take down essential services, particularly backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms.

III

Now the thought experiment: Activate the EOCs and IMTs, or at least the ones which acknowledge and accept we are the Climate Emergency. And who, you ask, are the distressed peoples and sites? Well, that’s not something you, the reader, can answer a priori. It’s up to those really-existing EOCs and IMTs, who recognize the Climate Emergency is making local spaces uninhabitable, taking away local employment. . .

IV

The stakes thereby become clearer for both recovery and for immediate response when it comes to the Climate Emergency.

First, much of what outsiders recommend for now-now clearly belongs more under “long-term recovery” than immediate response, e.g., those net-zero emissions promises or those more resilient or sustainable infrastructures. Yet it is in no way news that this longer-term is invariably political with many stakeholders and does not have the same logic, clarity and urgency that immediate response has, e.g., disaster declarations that trigger immediate release of funds.

That said and second, those current appeals to “Stop oil!” and such immediately hit a major obstacle. In really-existing emergency response, fossil fuel is needed to evacuate people, transport goods and services to distressed areas, keep the generators running when electricity fails, and so on. Cutting down trees, distribution of water in plastic bottles, and wide use of readily available gas-guzzling vehicles, in case it needs saying, are also common because they are necessary..

V

As such, rather than focusing concern around the greater reliance in an emergency on petrol or like, we might instead want to think more productively about two empirically prior issues.

First, who are those EOCs and IMTs activated for the Climate Emergency? Their activation for wildfires, flooding and abrupt seasonal events have been increasing and increasingly responded to by all manner of city, county, state and agency EOCs and IMTs. These are climate emergencies—lower-case speech matters in a polarized US—even for those would never say the phrase, “climate change,” out loud.

Second, where EOCs and IMTs have been or will be activated, are they responding in ways that are climate-friendly? Or to put response challenge correctly: Where are the logic, clarity and urgency of the Climate Emergency requiring immediate eco-friendly response even before longer-term environmental recovery?

I ask the latter question, because I don’t think some of us who treat the Climate Emergency seriously have thought the answers through. It seems to me much more thought has been given by far many more people to the use of eco-friendly stoves, toilet facilities, renewable-energy generators, and like alternatives. Years and years of R&D have gone into studying, prototyping and distributing more sustainable options.

Shouldn’t we then expect and want their increased use in immediate emergency response as well, especially when (not: “even if”) expediting them to the distressed sites and peoples means using petrol and cutting down trees in the way? Do the activated EOCs and IMT’S really need new benefit-cost analyses to take that decision—right now?

I

It’s striking how similar responses-from-below regarding climate change are to immediate emergency response witnessed in recent large-scale disasters. (The similarity would have been more obvious if climate change is called for what it is, the Climate Emergency.) For example, a Mozambican scholar-activist has

outlined three major differences between these climate actions ‘from below’ and top-down solutions: (i) participation of local actors from planning design and implementation of projects; (ii) horizontal relations and equal access to information; and (iii) non-extractivist initiatives that retain benefits within communities for local consumption, without extractions and expropriations.

A summary of the plenary points made by Natacha Bruna, director of Observatório do Meio Rural, Mozambique, on September 27 2022 at the Climate Change and Agrarian Justice Conference, Johannesburg, South Africa

Immediate emergency response to major disasters–like earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and wildfires–also feature collective action among the remaining people involved (and not just in search and rescue). So too are featured the importance and centrality of horizontal and lateral communications (the work of Louise Comfort on emergency response in major earthquakes is exemplary in this regard). More, the collective action and joint improvisations are geared to restoring rather than depleting key services in these emergencies.

II

The similarities–actually, equivalencies–go further. The local site, including placed-based communities, is the pivot-point in emergency response as in climate action-from-below. Food sovereignty is mentioned as a priority in responses-from-below, and indeed localized food and water around the site becomes a priority in emergency response well into longer-term recovery.

Speaking of which, local forms of resistance to climate change responses directed from above look more like the conflict over longer-term recovery witnessed in really-existing disasters than it does conflict over a status quo ante. Why? Because recovery to a new-normal involves many different or changing stakeholders (think here: NGOs).

III

So what? What’s the added value to policy and management that comes with seeing the immediate emergency response features of climate action-from-below?

Foremost, claims that the Climate Emergency has already cancelled out response capacities need to be considered case by case. The point is: Emergency response doesn’t disappear. Collective action and improvisations will occur even in the worst emergencies.

Some may dismiss “immediate emergency response” and its suite of jargon as imported from the outside and “thus” incommensurable with traditional practices. It’s difficult, however, to argue that, e.g., a 1000 years of imperial Chinese flood prevention strategies and practices are incommensurable with “emergency response” as above.

Related sources

Louise K. Comfort (2019). The Dynamics of Risk: Changing technologies and collective action in seismic events. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.

Pierre-Étienne Will (2020). “Introduction,” in: Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A descriptive and critical bibliography. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Then he gets up, firmly
shuts the door, and--quietly, 
into the ear:
‘In 1921 or 22, 
 Gorky admitted to me sadly
 what Lenin had told him in strict confidence:
 “The experiment has failed.”’
 Grateful to Shkolvsky
 for placing such trust in me,
 I bowed to him in silence.
 We both remained silent.
 Without a word, he raised 
 one finger to his mouth
 and looked at me sternly. 
                  “Victor Borisovich Shklovsky” by Lev Ozerov, translated by Boris Dralyuk

I

There is the view that the unknown-unknowns of the 1930’s Depression in the US caused such widespread dread and fear that large-scale social experimentation, like the Social Security program, became possible (the Roosevelt administration’s “New Deal”)

I suggest what looks like large-scale experimentation in the midst of unknown unknowns was, at least in part, policymakers probing a set of known unknowns (i.e., known uncertainties).

Here’s why.

The primary fears said to have prompted the New Deal would have produced in control room operators of society’s core infrastructures (1) the avoidance of systemwide experimentation in the midst of unknown unknowns by means of choosing (2) to operate in the midst of uncertainties about probabilities or consequences they knew something about and about which they could live with.

II

One great fear giving rise to the New Deal revolved around deep worries about whether the leading liberal democracies could compete successfully with totalitarian dictatorships. Bluntly: Does resorting to presidential emergency declarations in exceptional times leave us a liberal democracy or tip us into rule by dictatorship?

Yet emergencies were far from unchartered waters in the US–and not just in terms of Abraham Lincoln’s executive actions during the US Civil War. The earlier Federalists also worried about emergencies, and the accommodation they made was that, yes, presidential emergency powers may be needed in extraordinary times, but these would not serve as precedent for governance thereafter.

From that prospect, the New Deal looks like managing against having to experiment in the midst of unknown unknowns by choosing to put up with known uncertainties though disliked.

Principal sources

C. Fatovic, (2009). Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.

I. Katznelson (2013). Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. Liveright Publishing Corporation. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY.

[Ulrich] suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. (Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I)

The future is not something up ahead or later on, but better understood as present prospection. As in: trying to predict the future is the current mess we’re in. One implication is that to predict the future is to insist that the present messes can be managed in differently.

The notion that what will save us ahead has yet to be invented misses the more policy-relevant point that pulling out a good mess or forestalling a bad mess or taking on different messes today is also a way to change tomorrow. The only place the future is more or less reliable is now, and only if we are managing our messes, now.

This also means that the microeconomic concepts of stable opportunity costs, tradeoffs and priorities, along with price as a coordinating mechanism make sense–if they make sense–only now or in the very short term when the resource to be allocated and alternatives forgone are their clearest.

So what? Such is why a risk estimate must never be confused with being a prediction, i.e., if the risk is left unattended, failure is a matter of time. But is your failure scenario detailed enough to identify and detail conditions for cause and effect upon which prediction is founded? Without such a scenario, you cannot assume more uncertainty means more risk; it may mean only more uncertainty over your estimate of risk.

GMM-TV announced their new line-up of Thai shows for next year, including a remake of the Japanese “My Love Mix-Up.” Some netizens worry that the actor in the Thai trailer doesn’t get the Japanese “ehhh?” right. This may seem minor, but it’s not.

If you search online, the Japanese “eh?” is equated to the English, “huh?”. Not so in the Japanese tv series I’ve watched. There, the elongated “ehhh?” means: really! or WTF. This difference between a simple, “huh?,” and the incredulous, “what?,” finds a parallel in public policy and management.

How so? There’s something of the German komish in the Japanese “ehhh?”: funny, but now responding to something also strange; even weird. I think a good number of us respond this way to today’s many formal policy pronouncements: “Ehhh?” “Ehhh?!”

Think: The New Weirder as a policy regime.

Jim:     …the presentation was an eye-opener, Professor. . .

Prof:    Call me Peter. And thanks for the help setting up…

Jim:     Sure thing. . . Dick, are you coming. . .

Dick:   I’ll stay behind.

Jim:     Professor…

Peter:  Peter.

Jim:     Peter, ah, this is Dick. . .

Dick:   Jim, I’ll handle my own introductions. Thanks.

Jim:     [Turns to Peter] Maybe catch you the next time you’re in the area. . .

Peter:   Right. [Jim leaves.]

[Dick and Peter are about the same age, though both older than Jim. They look at each other, almost say something, but Peter returns to packing up his briefcase. The room quiets.]

Dick:   Well. . .Peter [said as if testing the word], you don’t really believe that drivel of a presentation, do you?

Peter:   You came in late, didn’t you. . .Dick?

Dick:   Early enough to catch the guff about rapid population growth exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity. You’re scaring the shit out of …well, almost everyone.

Peter:   It’s pretty obvious that population growth is doing just that.

Dick:   Obvious to everybody but me, you mean.

Peter:   Obvious to everyone. [Closes the briefcase and looks about to leave]

Dick:   You know what I think is going on? The problem is experts–like you?–generalize too soon too much.

Peter:   “Generalize“? What, you don’t believe the evidence?

You don’t believe greenhouse gases are increasing and climate change disruptions are here to stay and worsen? You don’t believe loss of biodiversity and species extinctions are racing ahead, urban sprawl is metastasizing, waste and pollution out of control?

[More agitated]

. . .That violence and environmental conflict are on the rise everywhere? That what we need more than anything else is to reduce population growth in developing countries and per capita consumption levels in this, our so-called developed world. We went through The Great Lockdown and people died all over the place. Did you miss that?

Dick:   The Gloomy Scenario. You do it so well:

Quote. Populations are bounding forward without limits; the most rapid growth rates are in the poorest countries; natural resources are exploited and destroyed at ever expanding rates; the gap between rich and poor is wide and widening without stop; technology has fueled overconsumption and environmental degradation; and degradation everywhere continues to accelerate, be it congestion, poor sanitation, or the destruction of ecosystems, fields, forests or fisheries; humans have irreversibly changed conditions for the worse; and, last but certainly not least—right?—disease, conflict, nationalism and worse are burgeoning. Unquote!

Peter:   Read my lips: Quality-of-life-is-declining. What do you call the travesty of being locked down, all over the world? But you already know all this. . .

[It’s obvious by this point that there’s much more going on in this exchange, given its intensity.]

Dick:   There it is again: generalizing. For you it’s snap-easy to leap to the global. You guys [Peter looks at him sharply] talk about “global population,” “global CO₂,” “global greenhouse gas emissions” “global markets,” and “global pandemics”. . .

Peter:   And your point?

Dick:   If the global has any meaning, it’s exactly the level of analysis where you cannot generalize. The global must–right? by definition?–include all the differences that make up the world and because of that, things have to be too complex to be known with any kind of certainty at such an overarching scale. It’s not that our ignorance should humble us as much as we should be humiliated by going no further than recognizing the kind of certitude your offer is not what we have. . .

Peter:   Repeat: Your answer?

Dick:   If you want answers, start with those really-existing cases where more people make for a better environment, where more people make for less disease, less poverty, less inequality, where more people make for. . .

Peter:   You can’t generalize from a few site-examples.

Dick:   Nor can you generalize. The global is too full of difference to generalize.

Peter:   So your “answer” is that every time reduced population growth and per capita consumption and globalized disease control are advocated, you find an opposite example with which to counter? Every example of ours is matched by one of yours?

Dick:   I have no answers, or at least the big-A ones you lot talk about.

My guess is that if you started with all the differences out there, you’d find many more cases where reduced population growth and per capita consumption and globalized disease control can’t be the solution—and it is precisely these counter examples you and yours don’t talk about.

Peter:   That’s no help, and here too you know that. Start with differences? Which ones, pray tell?

At this rate, you’ll end up telling us it’s impossible to identify the ones that matter. That way, you don’t need to tell us what will happen if rapid population growth isn’t halted or per capita consumption sliced or what to do to avoid the next Great Lockdown.

When do we get really worried, as you keep adding to your list of differences? When the earth is suffocating under the weight of 10 billion people?

Dick:   There’s no such thing as the earth’s carrying capacity [makes quotation marks in the air with his fingers]. Which one of the hundred or so expert estimates are you going to choose as the carrying capacity of the entire earth? And even if you did, there is the techno-managerial elite to regulate to that number?

Peter:   We’re a million miles apart. What exactly is your point?

Dick:   That things are not what they seem to you. That there are no big A answers. [Pause]

There’s just. . .right here right now… [at a loss for words, he looks away from Peter]

Peter:   Don’t patronize me. You’re not talking to someone with a room-temperature IQ who does stupid. Anyone listening today knows I’m not locked into totalizing answers. What do you want from me? Continually repeating myself…

Dick:   You don’t want to see it, do you?

Peter:   Spare me the condescension. . .

Dick:   No, I mean, Peter, why are you always in a future that isn’t the mess we’re already in. Why aren’t you here, with that view [points to the window], in this instant?

Peter:   I am here. We may be seeing the same view, but I’m the only one who wants to ensure it’s there to see.

Dick:   Who’s “we”, bwana?

Peter:   We—you, me, every—

Dick:   You and me?

Peter:   . . .everyone.  Almost everyone knows we can’t continue using up Nature’s capital. Everywhere cries out for setting limits, for stewarding our resources. . .

Dick:   Stewardship! God, nothing is safe from that gaze. Stop a rocket from leaving earth, and it means you’re stewarding the universe!

There’s nothing you guys say you can’t manage, or at least try to, because there’s nothing that you guys aren’t responsible for stewarding, nothing, anywhere, no matter how far away.

Talk about delusional. Just another garden-variety imperialism…

Peter:   Excuse me, but where were you during the Great Lockdown? Repeat, we can’t continue on as we have been doing. We can’t go on abusing the planet this way. We have to love it and that means setting limits. . .

Dick:   . . .limits on love?

Peter:   [As if he can’t believe what Dick just said]

. . .when everything cries out for setting limits, safe limits, critical thresholds, establishing carrying capacities, accepting the very real risks that have to be balanced against the so-called benefits of new technologies etcetera. Rangelands, forests, wetlands, that sea over there. Every indicator of sustainability and health is flashing red, and here you are BABBLING as if none of this matters in your version of here and now.

Dick:   You see complete disaster where I see unfinished business.

Peter:   Whatever has this to do with saving the planet?

Dick:   Everything. We can’t save it, because there’s no such planet to save at the level you’re talking about.

Peter:   Christ, what a recipe for despair…

Dick:   Not despair. If we can’t find meaning in what remains, are you telling me you and the others’ll do a better job of finding meaning in the future. . .

Peter:   Just your postmodern scholasticism. This is getting nowhere. . .

Dick:   Sure this is getting us somewhere. It means it’s up to us to decide which unfinished business we want to give meaning to.

[Pause] Like all relationships.

Peter:  Everything has always had to be personal for you, on your terms. We can’t generalize, you say. We have to stay specific, you say. When all you’re saying is, I like tea. You like coffee. And there’s the end of it.

Dick:   So you’d still like me to believe.

Peter:   [Long pause, as if finally deciding something] OK, Dick. What are you really trying to say?

Go on, what is all this to-and-fro about?

Dick:   You know. You knew from the minute we started talking, the minute I showed up in this room…

Peter:   I don’t.

Dick:   You do.

Peter:   No.

Dick:   It has to be your way, like always?

Peter:   You have no solutions, no answers, only opinions.

Dick:   “Only”?

Peter:   [Pause] What’s the upshot, Dick?

Dick:   Hah! “up-shot-dick”.

Peter:   [Avoiding the obvious] Just tell me?

Dick:   Oh, Peter.

Peter:   What.Are.You.Saying.

Dick:  [Says nothing, and then]

So. . .let’s talk about the anger.

Peter:   Will you PUHLEESSE get to the point!

Dick:   QED: Anger.

Peter:   Anger?

Dick:   . . .and its flip side, hurt.

Peter:   And you’re not angry. No anger behind all this of your “here and now”?

Dick:   So, we’re both angry and not talking about it.

Peter:   What’s left to say?

Dick:   Ok, Peter, ok.

But try to meet me half way this time round.

Peter:   Your stakes and mine in all this aren’t the same. If they ever were.

Dick:   Try to meet me halfway.

Peter:   Which means?

Dick:   [Realizing Peter is not going to budge]. Ok, your way, Peter.

But enough of your ABSTRACTIONS!

Peter:   [The longest pause of both yet.]

Half way? OK.

When I walked in today, I half hoped you’d be in the room. And when I didn’t see you, I thought, What a fool I’d been to think I could try this. I must have been crazy.

[Another long pause]

. . .and while we’ve been arguing just now, I wondered for a moment, What would we be saying to each other instead?

Dick:   Me? What would I have said?

I wanted to come up and cup your face in my hands and say, “When do we kiss? Now, later. . .never?”

Peter:  Hah!

Dick:   I won’t give up my fantasies.

Peter:   You always were crazy for happy endings.

Dick:   That’s bad?

Peter:   Where’s the reality?

Dick:   Love protects reality.

Peter:   Even when the reality then was “Good-bye, Peter”?

Dick:   [Smiling for the first time in the play] That was then.

[Pauses] You know, Peter, no one can put his arm around you [Dick puts his arm around Peter’s shoulder, moves closer] and say [taps Peter’s chest], “You know, Professor, you really are right and have been all along!”

You know that.

[They face each other and Dick slides his other arm onto Peter’s shoulder, moving closer]

Peter:   Your addiction to happy endings. . .

Dick:   Happiness? That’s the messiness too.

Speaking of crazy, [Dick places his forefinger on Peter’s lips] you always said my mouth was your perfect fit. . .

Peter: Hey, this from someone whose career goal was to suck a mile of cock. . .

[Pause] So, all the rest we’ve talked all about is left to “Until then if not later”?

Dick: Until then if not before.

End