The blogosphere is unnecessarily puzzled by Mitt Romney’s repeated claims, to audiences of Michigan Republicans, that
The trees are the right height.
I explained all this a fortnight ago. The question whether trees have the “right height” has meaning only for large, long-necked herbivores; in our day giraffes, in the Jurassic many different and much bigger sorts of sauropod dinosaur.
The Michigan white pine, pinus strobus, has a normal maximum height of around 45m, and the current record-holder reaches 56m. So it’s about half the presumptuous (and evolutionarily problematic) height of the Californian coast redwood. Young white pines are therefore just right – for brachiosaurs.
Vast, tiny-brained juggernauts, trampling their way through opposition by sheer mass towards their single hard-wired goal of hoovering up every vote leaf in sight and transforming them into mounds of poop.
Remind you of the Romney campaign?
Too bad George Washington didn’t have the presence of mind to tell his father that he had chopped down the cherry tree because it was the wrong height.
Until I hear otherwise from a historian who specializes in US elections:
Romney holds the record for presidential campaign pandering.
Like champagne bubbles, Romney panders.
It just oozes relentlessly out of him.
So much so, it’s a wonder his wife can stand him.
You should try living for an extended time in an unfamiliar landscape. You will understand what Romney means, even if he can’t express it well.
If you have spent extended time in one type of forest, other forests look and feel wrong. It feels good to be in the forest, but it is unfamiliar at the same time. It is alienating in the other forests– something familiar is strange.
I’ve seen the wrong kind of trees, the wrong kind of snow, the wrong kind of farms (crops tractors and barns), and the wrong kind of lakes. It sounds funny but it is very reassuring to see the right place. Romney was trying to convey that.
Attack Romney because he is making the wrong kind of America– he will make everything right for the one percent, while claiming it is right for the middle class. (Just don’t call it alienating).
I’m with the ev. psych. boys on this: all forests feel wrong and a bit alien, compared to our ideal landscape, a savannah with water and shelter, and (I’ve been privileged to see this at dawn in Kenya near Lake Naivasha) giraffes browsing the scattered acacias.