11th Hour

11^th Hour

“In the president’s lone losing race, his 1978 run for Congress from West Texas, the victor stressed Bush’s two Ivy League degrees. Bush resolved never to allow himself to be outdumbed again. And the Democrats haven’t outsmarted him since.” - Steve Sailer, Bush’s Brian

There was girl in my hometown, bright as the day is long. At least that is what her parents claimed. They were the type of parents who frequently liked to throw around their daughter’s name and the word “gifted” like a beach ball at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Their little darling might have been the brightest thing to ever walk on two legs. She was going to do big things. She took all the special classes with the other twitching freaks and report cards were love feasts. She turned sixteen and got to drive. Until she got a vehicle of her own, her father allowed her to drive his brand new, fully loaded pick-up truck. It had all the bells and whistles and was his pride and joy. After a few weeks she got a little lazy about putting gas in it and events took their natural course. She ran out of gas on a gravel road just outside of town. The truck came to rest right where the railroad tracks cut through the road. After trying to start it several times, she decided to walk to her best friend’s house and get some help there. Within a few minutes, she was at her friend’s door. Her friend noted that her older brother would be home in a little bit and he would be glad to help. The two teenagers talked for over an hour before the friend’s brother came home. As he got out of his truck, the two girls ran up to him with the news about the truck on the railroad tracks. The young man smiled and said, “I don’t think you are going to have to move it. Listen.” It was the sound of a train whistle. Moral: The brightest people often believe and do some really dumb things.

Movie critics like to note that it takes a brilliant director to make a colossally bad film like Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, Oliver Stone’s Alexander The Great, or M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water. While people like to believe that the rosters of cults like Heaven’s Gate, The Branch Davidians, and The Peoples Temple were filled with ignorant, clay-eating, inbred hillbillies, a cursory glance at the names and occupations of the dead finds doctors, lawyers, and other urban professionals. Some of the brightest people in this nation’s history were behind things like New Coke, the Edsel, the Bay of Pigs, and the George W. Bush administration. Just because you are smart or talented in one area of your life or on one subject matter, sometimes your logic gets stuck like a ham sandwich in Mama Cass.

The jury is in. Global warming is a reality. There are no ifs, ands, or buts on the subject matter. In fact every science teacher in America should point out with pride how the scientific process works, how in our lifetime a fringe idea in the 1960s as more data came in became mainstream and almost universally accepted, except by a few lunatics getting paychecks from big oil or those who think climate change is just God’s way of giving us a better tan. It is why most of the nuttiest Republican knuckle draggers have retreated into admitting that global warming is real (but of course there is nothing we can go about it). We are heading off a cliff. So, instead of trying to put the brakes on the car, just take another swig from the bottle, enjoy the view to the bottom, and book your tickets for spring break in tropical Minnesota, 2061. This attitude is pretty difficult to swallow for a nation that has revolutionized the world, landed a man on the moon, put a personal computer at the average Joe’s finger tips, developed the atomic bomb, and unlocked the secret’s of the gene.

Everyone likes to believe that their life is more than just wasting good air that someone else could be using. To champion and support some issue or ideal bigger than yourself, is what we all long and search for. It is why some people will give up their complete individuality and own moral compass to embrace some of the goofiest religions and political movements imagined. No one thinks of themselves as the bad guy, not even Nazis, Klan members, or the bottom feeding lawyers who defended O.J. Simpson. The idyll rich and Hollywood stars are the same as everyone else. They want to be seen as more than just pretty things. In turn, they have always been at the forefront of almost every major cause since the first orange grove was knocked down in California. During World War II, actors and actresses crisscrossed the country selling war bonds. Tinseltown has slapped itself for the next half-a-century because a handful of stars stood up to McCarthyism and marched in the Civil Rights movement. When the farm crisis gripped the Midwest, our Senators and Congressmen listened to three sexy actresses because they played farmer’s wives on the big screen. Bo Derek and Willie Nelson almost single handedly stopped the slaughter of horses in this country. Every cause has to have its celebrity spokesperson. The environment is no different. Ed Begley Jr. times his wife’s showers and peddles an exercise bike to warm up his toast in the morning. Sexpot Daryl Hannah handcuffs herself to a tree and sleeps naked in a teepee behind her mansion for her causes. Laurie David and Sheryl Crowe harassed Karl Rove at a dinner and slept in a bio-diesel bus to promote public awareness. Inspired by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio, the baby faced star of Titanic, The Departed, and The Aviator, has joined the club with his global warming documentary The 11^th Hour. The title is a reference to a figurative clock used to symbolize how much time we have left. It is almost midnight (for those who see themselves made in God’s image) if we do not do something about our contribution to climate change.

Leonardo DiCaprio, with first time writers and director sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, try to make a documentary that takes things one step farther than Al Gore did. The former Vice-President pretty much convinced people that global warming is human caused and real with his brilliant documentary An Inconvenient Truth. DiCaprio wanted to make a documentary that gives people concrete steps on what humanity can do about it. The concept is a wonderful idea. Interview 50 of the smartest people on the planet about the issue and what they think we can do about it. Among the individuals he talks to are Mikhail Gorbachev, Sylvia Earle, Thom Hartmann, Stephen Hawking, James Woolsey, David Suzuki, and Bill McKibben. One little problem, it falls into a logical fallacy, an argument from authority. This fallacy states that a claim is true because a person or group with perceived authority says it is true, even if they do not have expertise in the field they are making statements about. In other words, as bright as an Alan Greenspan might be when it comes to the economy, if I am having a strange knock in my car engine, his opinion on what to do about it is pretty meaningless. If I want to understand the cosmos, Hawking is the first person I would seek out, but his field of expertise is not our planetary climate. Gorbachev oversaw the dismantling of the Soviet Union but is an empty suit who must rely on others when it comes to environment. In between these talking heads, DiCaprio provides clumsy narration as scenes of environmental destruction from Hurricane Katrina, to rush hour traffic, to slaughterhouses, and to fishermen over harvesting the oceans play out on the screen. The premise is simple. We have been insensitive to the environment and over-relied on fossil fuels.

If we continue on this path, check please, we are dooming our children and grandchildren. We need to stop thinking that we have dominion over the planet, and live more in harmony with it and all life forms on it. The solution to our problems lie in renewable energy sources and eco-friendly structures. We must reduce our current consumption habits. Some of these people are extremely smart and most of their solutions are common sense. Other featured viewpoints need to be taken with a grain of salt.

I often ask myself where we would be if we had listened to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, when he tried to push this nation into using alternative forms of energy and to lessening our consumption rates. Global warming is the train that is coming and we need to do something quickly or we are going to get hit like a ton of bricks. Hear that? Sounds like a train whistle to me.

Verdict: Rent An Inconvenient Truth instead.