Time Essay: The Weather: Everyone's Favorite Topic

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The prime oddity in the whole snarl of attitudes is the fact that almost everybody develops perverse pride in abominable weather when it happens to be their own. Abroad, there are the desert tribes that profess to revere their baked domains. Similarly, the New Englander or the Minnesotan boasts about his frozen Februarys and the snow that waits till spring before uncovering the earth again. The Deep Southerner seems proud of those stifling summers that reduce everybody to sweat and distemper. Human responses to weather are, in sum, as variable as the weather itself.

If man sees the weather differently according to his circumstance, healthy fear works at the hub of his obsession with it. Facing the awesome grandeur and cruel humors of the weather, ancient man was forced to attribute the mysterious cosmic moil to deities. Wishing desperately to better his odds against the weather (or lessen its against him), he invented innumerable prayers, supplications, sacrifices, all intended to coax the gods to bestow better weather. Wanting exactly like modern man to know about tomorrow's wind, he developed the practice of looking for omens of coming weather in the conduct of animals, the tones of the sky or the turnings of foliage. He tried rituals, such as dancing, to control the weather. They did not work, of course, but they made for some lively times.

Through human history, weather has altered the march of events and caused some mighty cataclysms. Since Columbus did not know where he was going or where he had arrived when he got there, the winds truly deserve nearly as much credit as he for the discovery of America. Ugly westerlies helped turn the 1588 Spanish Armada away from England in a limping panic. Napoleon was done in twice by weather: once by the snow and cold that forced his fearful retreat from Moscow, later by the rain that bedeviled him at Waterloo and caused Victor Hugo to write: "A few drops of water ... an unseasonable cloud crossing the sky. sufficed for the overthrow of a world." In 1944 the Allied invasion of Normandy was made possible by a narrow interval of reasonably good weather between the bad. It was so narrow, in fact, that Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisen hower later expressed gratitude to "the gods of war." Paganism dies hard.

Every year brings fresh reminders of the weather's power over human life and events in the form of horrifying tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. These leave behind forgettable statistics and unforgettable images of devastated towns and battered humanity that can only humble people in the face of such wrath. Farmers often suffer the most, from the drought and plagues of biblical times to the hailstorms or quick freezes that even today can wipe out whole crops in minutes. Last week's icy assault on the Midwest, for all its ferocity and cost, is merely another reminder of the in escapable vulnerability of life and social well-being to the whims of the weather.

And history is packed with reminders of far worse. The weather, for example, provoked a major social dislocation in the U.S. in the 1930s when it turned much of the Southwest into the Dust Bowl.

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