An Inconvenient Truth

This week’s column is all about crap.  Without a proper understanding of crap, you cannot understand how Rush and the other boys of hate radio work.  Their job is take their right wing agenda to whatever issue concerns Americans, pull down their pants, twist the facts, lie, and do their duty all over it.  Sometimes, issues are as crystal clear as a tub of pure water, then along comes these high priced verbal streetwalkers and by the time they are done, the water is so dirty most observers don’t know what the truth is anymore.  They do whatever they can, so they can turn to the people listening and say, “Who are you going to believe, me or those wild eyed liberals who are trying to destroy America?” One needed to look no further than the Terri Schiavo case. (Remember her?) Michael, her doctors, and the courts, in accordance with the law passed by a conservative Republican state house decided to honor her right to die rather than live in a persistent vegetative state.  There is not a human being alive that cannot sympathize with her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler.  No parent should have to say good-bye to their little girl.  Her parents videotaped her for hours and found a few moments where it looked like she was responding to them, totally understandable.  What should have remained a very private event mediated by the courts became a three-ring circus. Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck camped out with yahoos in front of the hospital.  The President, who later didn’t cut his vacation short for the disaster in New Orleans, flew back from the Crawford Ranch to Washington to sign Terri’s Law.  Fox News dug up so-called experts who claimed she could be rehabbed.  Right-wingers even accused Michael of tried to kill her. Americans sitting at home didn’t know what to think.  When everything was said and done, the autopsy showed that her brain was half the size it should have been.  The cerebral cortex was almost completely gone.  Whatever Terri was, she wasn’t in the rag doll body that used to be her.  I never heard an apology from anyone that horse hockeyed all over one family’s grief for their own political ends.  None from Jeb Bush, not from Bill Frisk, Hannity, Rush, the President, or the hundreds of other talking heads who wiped their backsides with the Schindler and Schiavo families.  So much crap, the waters so murky over something that her own doctors and conservative Republican judges said was crystal clear.  What happened on a small scale with Terri Schiavo is occurring on a large scale when it comes to global warming. 

My grandfather was a wine maker, and I must admit that I was always a little afraid to take a slip of some of his rocket fuel because most of it seemed to have come from yard waste – dandelions, rhubarb, and whatever seemed to fall of the trees in his backyard.  Yet, I became particularly fascinated by watching him make up a batch of his rot gut and what I discovered is that every alcoholic and booze hound in the world can thank a single cell organism named Sacchromyces Ellipsoidues, a.k.a. yeast, for their buzz.  This little bugger turns the sugar in the juice into alcohol and carbon dioxide.  In simple terms, the yeast organism eats the sugar and poops out alcohol and carbon dioxide.  So, the yeast eats and craps, eats and craps, but there are a couple of little problems for this brave little colony of yeast.  There is only such much sugar in the bottle and its waste is toxic. If too much of it builds up in the keg or jug, the single cell organism dies in its own waste, much like us and our dependence on fossil fuels.  We are a society that consumes oil, gas, and coal.  It is the marrow that keeps the engine of our society going.  We spray petroleum products on our fields, power our tractors, trucks and cars with it, transform it into plastics and keep our lights on with it. Yet, like the little yeast organism we are crapping out green house emissions, which is leading to global warming and our own destruction.  We are dying in our own waste and sadly like the Sacchromyces Ellipsoidues don’t even know it or can’t seem to stop ourselves. 

There is not a peer-reviewed scientific study that does not agree that global warming is happening.  The Environmental Protection Agency, even under a pro-business administration, agrees with that fact. Last year, Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency — five Republicans and one Democrat — got together in Washington D.C. to criticized the Bush White House for what they described as a failure of leadership on an issue that is crystal clear to them. Christine Todd Whitman, a Bush appointee, stated, “You’d need to be in a hole somewhere to think that the amount of change that we have imposed on land, and the way we’ve handled deforestation, farming practices, development, and what we’re putting into the air, isn’t exacerbating what is probably a natural trend. But this is worse, and it’s getting worse.” Our own governmental and universal scientists are telling us in one solitary voice, global warming is a reality and we are aiding this process by burning fossil fuels like a drunk on a 7 day bender.  Crystal clear, no debate, no argument, dot the i, cross the t, no if and ands or buts, it is a reality. The only serious debate is due to the number variables that need to be taken into account.  No right-winger can produce a peer-reviewed study that says otherwise. This is not a message that powerful segments in our society want to hear. Looking to the horizon, and riding to the rescue, are the F-Troop cavalry known as hate radio and the Ann Coulters of the world.  They dig up their so-called experts, imply that scientists are part of a liberal cabal, pit one study against another, say we need to study the issue more, and stir the waters with their crap until they are so murky that no one can see a thing.  Terri Schiavo on a large scale. More than one body is going to hit the floor when we finally accept that they are wrong. The autopsy will say global warming, an inconvenient truth. 

    The new documentary of the same name by former Vice-President Al Gore attempts to get Americans concerned about global warming.  Gore, or as he likes to introduce himself as the man who “used to be the next president of the United States," has been concerned about global warming for over 30 years. Since leaving office, he has been on a crusade to reverse global warming, to alerting young people to the dangers of doing nothing.  Showing a charisma that he never had in his political life, he gives a multimedia lecture on the results of our CO2 emissions – ice caps melting, droughts, rising temperatures and sea levels.  He then goes on to outline the steps we need to take to avert this disaster.  Yet, in more private moments, the film shows a man trying to find meaning in his life, when the central focus of his adult life, being President of the United States, has vanished.

Cynics will see this film as a way of getting Gore back in the political spotlight, getting public interest back in him for the 2008 Presidential campaign. The problem with this mindset is global warming as an issue is as popular as horse riding at a retreat for hemmroid sufferers.  The issue is too murky for most voters and most people have already made up their mind about the issue.  Most people would rather not admit there is a problem. Like yeast in a keg, continuing their consumer consumption blissfully happy not realizing that they are killing their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  My father likes to remind me that the truth is not concerned with anyone’s perception there of, neither is global warming.

Verdict: An Interesting Documentary