I'm Super Serial!! Or, a Lament for Al Gore...

Oh, Al Gore. What has become of you? Where is the man for whom I drove more than a hundred miles back to my home district to vote in the 2000 presidential election? Where is the patriarch who so charmed us with his family in that erstwhile Rolling Stone article (unfortunately no longer available on their online archive)? Where is the man who sparked such a following that we refused to believe he lost, and inspired us to take his cause to the highest ruling in the nation?

Gone. Gone to the four winds, to be replaced by this spotlight-addicted, self-righteous attention whore. Was it the shame of losing to The Puppet President that caused you to also lose your mind? Perhaps the fact that people had trouble taking you seriously after the proclamation that you invented the Internet (later proven to be media hype and not an actual quote, but it's just too good for this writer to pass up)? What was it that sent you from mere wooden boringness to full-on Michael Mooresque fanaticism?

I refer you to an interview in the London newspaper The Sun by journalist Victoria Newton (wearing outstanding shoes, might I add), titled, Al Gore - a Man with a Mission. While I'm loathe to trust any news article found in a London "newspaper" (in my experience, their average day's "news" consists of a few actual news articles padded with filler of the sort found in such sentient sources as The National Enquirer), I found quotes from the interview cited in various respected media outlets, lending it credence.

Exhibit A can be found in this article, in the form of a quote from the Gore-man himself: "The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton. We have to ask ourselves what is going on here?"

Huh? Al, my dear, are you questioning our priorities? Are you actually calling us to account for ourselves for turning to the braincandy of Hiltonwatch '07 when we should be talking about nothing but the most critical of topics - say, for instance, the 1°F rise in average temperatures worldwide since 1880?

To begin with, can you really blame people for turning to silly subjects like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, the late Anna Nicole Smith, [InsertCelebutanteScandalHere]? Average schmucks like ourselves are busily worrying about how we're going to pay our mortgage, get the kids to daycare, keep our jobs from day to day, and avoid slipping further into obesity. We're tired. We look at the news and its all crime, war, and disasters. We're looking for something to take us away from the drudgery of everyday life. So we turn to tacky sitcoms, reality TV, misbehaving celebrities, and other salacious subjects. There we can escape to watch the overprivileged and undertalented make utter fools of themselves and careen head-on into oblivion. "Serves them right," we think, and we relax in the knowledge that we may not have the resources that they do, but at least we're not the trainwrecks that they are. The news makes us sad. Celebrities make us laugh. Which do you choose when you're already exhausted and stressed?

We don't have the luxury of being paid six figures for a speaking engagement. Most of us don't make six figures in an entire year. If we did, we could more easily fund our lifestyle and afford ourselves the time and energy to ponder the heavy issues. But let's imagine if we did, and consider just some of the things we could and maybe should be stopping the presses to mull over:

• The war in Iraq


• The war in Afghanistan (call it what you will; I call it a war)


• The Hamas rebellion in the Palestinian territories


• Genocide in Darfur


• The impending Second Cold War


• The impending Third World War


• The impending nuclearization of Iran and North Korea


• Global famine


• Drug-resistant TB, influenza, malaria


• Lax border security


• The weakness and growing irrelevance of the UN


• International terrorist cells


• Black holes


• Manbearpig


• Environmental complacency

Note that I did not call it Global Warming. (Image credit to the creative cat-obsessed folks who post on the Woot! community boards.)

Nerd moment: Humans have only been charting the temperatures for a couple hundred years, and we've only been around in our current form really for a few thousand. There is no real evidence to support the theory that what warming has been noticed is unnatural. I refer you, for instance, to the Little Ice Age, to the fact that the last official Ice Age only concluded about 12,000 years ago, and to the identified pattern of the planet experiencing regular cooling periods approximately every 1500 years or so; the Little Ice Age being between 700-800 years ago suggests that we're at about the zenith of the current warming period. All of this leads me to believe that the planet naturally goes through periods of warming and cooling independent of human existence.

Do I believe that humans are completely innocent in our misuse of natural resources and general apathy toward our output? Do I mean to say that we should continue on our current path, willy-nilly, and the planet will regulate itself? No. Of course not. See my post below, "A Bright Idea," in which I clearly state that I support the move toward less-consumptive and less-pollutive methods of existence. The pollution of our waters and the drastic changing of our landscape is by and large on human hands. This is why I refer to our "Environmental Complacency" as something to think about and consider, rather than the aforementioned pet topic of the day. But I also am not so arrogant as to believe that the global climate should remain at the levels we have grown accustomed to. Who are we to determine what is and is not normal? The planet will do as the planet will do, and if that means it will warm, it will warm, and if that means it will cool again - brace yourselves - it will cool again, and WE should adapt to IT, not the other way around. This is not rocket science, folks. However, to return to the point...

Chicken Little - er, um, Mr. Gore - your current hysteria regarding the theory of Global Warming, as evidenced in your Live Earth concert scheduled for 7/7/07, your 2006 "Oscar-winning" (are you kidding me?!) slideshow-cum-documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" (which was also a book, published 5/26/06) , and your book The Earth in Balance (published 10/31/06), is sorta kinda...overkill. Slow down, buddy. I hate to quote Bob Geldoff, but hey, he's right: "Everybody’s known about that problem for years. We are all (expletive) conscious of global warming..."

You run around waving your arms and shrieking about how global warming ran over your dog and peed on your lawn, alarming the general populous and inciting near-panic about something that is only a theory.

It's as though you realized, in the wake of your loss in 2000 and your non-run in 2004, that people weren't paying attention to you anymore. No one was listening to you anymore. So you found something to make them listen, to make them pay attention to you, and now you're going to ride this horse into the ground and beat it till it bleeds. Now you're the darling of the Democratic party again. But the matter is cooling, making way for such topics-du-jour as border security - both from illegal immigration and biological weaponry, foreign policy, and the national economy. (Image credit to those overgrown adolescents who design, write, and voice South Park, and who I hope never run out of material.)

So here you are, talking out of your ass, trying to tell us what our priorities should be. In fact, your latest book, An Assault on Reason, is described on Amazon as "A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degradation of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason." I cry Hypocrisy. You are making yourself guilty of the exact things for which you lambaste the Cowboy administration. Don't you think your media onslaught has been an assault on reason in and of itself? That your saturation of the public consciousness with the theory of global warming has created its own culture of fear? That the near-blacklisting of global warming dissenters creates a culture of cronyism and blind faith? Rather than letting us decide for ourselves what to hold up as the topic of the day, you have joined the ranks of the rest of the media, telling us what to think, what to believe, what is and is not true. Is it any surprise that we just start to tune you out?