As I’ve established in this space before, I love The Simpsons. Or rather, like most Simpsons fans, I love the first ten or so seasons and I have a vague affection for the subsequent 25 years of the show.
One of my favorite running gags on The Simpsons is that when faced with the slightest inconvenience, the citizens of Springfield will immediately form an angry torch-wielding mob.
In one memorable episode, a bear is spotted in Springfield. Everyone loses their minds, forcing Mayor Quimby to institute a Bear Patrol. When everyone realizes that the expense of the bear patrol has caused their taxes to rise, they riot a second time, prompting Quimby to ask an aide, “Are these morons getting dumber or just louder?”
After consulting his clipboard, the aide replies, “Dumber, sir.”
It’s a great joke, although it becomes a little less funny with each passing day.
The damage and loss of life caused by the one-two punch of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton was a tragedy. The effects of Helene, in particular, will be felt for years if not decades to come; in some areas of the south, homes, buildings, and even the very roads were washed away, and even now many people are still cut off from help. While Milton mercifully lost a lot of its punch as it ran across Florida, it still brought rain and wind to areas already battered into submission by the previous storm.
If life were a movie, this would have been the moment when Americans came together as neighbors after being faced with an existential threat. But of course, that did not happen. Instead, people have become further divided in ways that even someone with a low opinion of humanity would have had a hard time predicting. The morons, miraculously, have become both dumber AND louder.
I certainly never predicted I’d one day be struggling to write a column about how the government can’t control the weather, and yet, here we are.
There are people — people who presumably vote, hold down jobs, and live right in your neighborhood — who believe that the U.S. government can control hurricanes. They believe that Hurricane Helene was piloted into North Carolina to free up lithium mines or punish Trump voters or something. They believe this, and yet they probably drive a car, or scan their own groceries, or open cans of soup without grievously injuring themselves in the process.
If we apply the smallest amount of critical thinking to this, it would seem likely that if the government COULD control the weather, it would use that power to provide irrigation for agriculture or send storms into enemy countries, not destroy a massive chunk of the southeast.
And yet, folks like Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Congresswoman who has built her lair in Georgia, have both taken to Twitter to say that Hurricane Helene was an attack on our nation caused by government-orchestrated weather manipulation.
The situation has gotten so insane that FEMA workers in Rutherford County, North Carolina had to change their operations after receiving credible threats that they were going to be targeted by armed militia members.
Normally, this would be the part of the column where I explain why the U.S. government is incapable of controlling hurricanes, or explain what cloud seeding is, or point out the irony of thinking the government can control the weather but that climate change isn’t real.
But frankly, what’s the point? If you don’t think the government can control the weather, I’m wasting your time by reiterating the point. If you do think the government can control the weather, you probably didn’t read this far, and even if you did, I wouldn’t change your mind by presenting evidence to the contrary.
There is a temptation, especially as we rapidly approach the most important and possibly last Presidential election in our nation’s history, to attempt to correct the tidal wave of misinformation that washes over our nation on a minute-by-minute basis. However, much like an exhausted, sleep-deprived gambler staring at his last twenty dollar chip, sometimes we must realize that it’s better to push away from the blackjack table and regroup. You can debate someone about the merits of a flat tax; you can’t debate someone about Operation: Hurricane Steering Wheel.
As Jonathan Swift wrote, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
