"Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad".

It's an ancient Greek proverb that Euripides quoted in his tragedy, Medea. I think of Cassandra too: her fate was to be cursed by the gods to utter dire but true prophecies that would would be scorned, laughed at, never believed. I know how she felt. My 1968 prophecies about the future need for doctors weren't dire but too optimistic. I said that well-educated future generations would safeguard their own health, follow the precepts of public health and preventive medicine and stay healthy into extreme old age. In future, I said, we would need more home care specialists, more community nurses, better trained kindergarten and grade school teachers (there were a few hisses and boos when I said their importance would be recognized by higher salaries than the income of the average GP). I said all this with abundant facts to back it up, in the Great Hall of Sydney University before an audience of several thousand doctors and the press and TV cameras waiting to hear all about the first successful heart transplant from Christiaan Barnard who would be the first speaker after the coffee break. My fellow speakers in that panel discussion on "Future Community Demand for Doctors" were Lord Todd who had chaired the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education (for which I had directed most of the research from my base at the University of Edinburgh) and a gaggle of distinguished leaders of Australian medicine. I was reminded of all this recently when brother Peter sent me a framed photo I'd never seen or long forgotten, of all of us on the platform. All greeted my facts and arguments with sarcasm, derision, scorn or a mixture of all these. We were all wrong, they more wrong than I. (My text was published in the British Medical Journal in 1969); like everybody else on the panel, I failed to predict the explosive growth of medical technology, and the massive international migration of medical specialists that began in the 1970s.

In the late 1970s my research focus shifted to environmental health problems, especially to the global environment, and the complex life-support systems, marine and terrestrial planetary ecosystems without which life as we know it would be unsustainable. This time I hope I'm a Cassandra because if I am not and my predictions are true, my grandchildren and their children face a grim future. Reflecting on this, and on the ancient Greek proverb Euripides quoted, I think our elected leaders are not just mad but criminally insane. They don't even have plans to cope with the mildest let along more severe kinds of climatic catastrophes that are now quite certain to strike with increasing ferocity and severity as each future decade unfolds. As the scientific evidence mounts, becomes overwhelming, so too does the defiant denial, the lies, the opposition to seeing, hearing, learning the truth. Our government in Canada is among the world's worst offenders. I wonder what kind of people they can be. Have they no children, grandchildren? Do they care nothing about the future? Willfully, knowingly, they eliminate funds for monitoring and surveillance in the Arctic, give tax breaks to the most environmentally destructive "development" - the Alberta Tar Sands - that the world has ever seen, suppress reports they themselves sponsored when these reports reveal the undeniable truth about harm to human as well as ecosystem health. That ancient Greek proverb assuredly applies to them.

Canadian peccadilloes pale to insignificance compared to the grosser misconduct south of our border. When we arrived in Vermont in 1964 Wendy and I were disgusted by the profligacy, greed and waste manifest all around us, as seen in the loaded plates of people at buffet tables (and the way they elbowed others aside, like bloated pigs at a trough); we were appalled at the wasted food, discarded appliances, good clothing, furniture, put out with the garbage -- not passed on to the needy. The "manifest destiny" concept was explained to us, along with the absolute necessity of belief in god (I asked "Which one?" Was Thor acceptable? Or Zeus?). That was in the middle 1960s; since then the American Empire has declined further, shows more visible evidence of crumbling away even more rapidly than the British Empire did from 1945 onward - and we were the better for that empire's dissolution. More than half a century later, the dysfunctional American political system has demonstrated its inability to cope with its glaring social and economic problems as well as its inability to pick which wars to wage, and to win them; its security can't and won't be guaranteed by the gaudy array of extremely costly high-tech weaponry on which the bulk of the nation's borrowed money is spent. That ancient Greek proverb applies with terrible truth to the American people. To the detached observer they show many signs of collective madness far more destructive than the Civil War, the idiocy of Prohibition, the paranoia of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the "War on Terror." The Tea Party reached the nadir of dissonant madness with its demand for lower taxes and less government, and the way things are going, it's not impossible to imagine them running the country in a few years. But enough already! Let's change the subject!

On a more cheerful note, today I roasted a chicken with all the trimmings, and without even a single glance at Wendy's notes. I should have tied its legs together to stop the stuffing oozing out, and I should have strained the fat off the gravy but I think my gallbladder can stand the slight overdose of fat. And the vegetables were cooked at the same time as the chicken was ready, so my timing is improving. All the same, I miss Wendy terribly. Her roast chicken was far better than mine.