04.30.06

Al Gore’s Message

Posted in Politics, Science at 9:55 pm by Moody

If you base it on the plurality, Al Gore should have won the election and become our next president, and G.W. Bush should have gone on his failure’s way without harming the nation. Instead, of course, we have been mistreated by more than a term’s worth of the Texas playboy’s non-stop foolishness, his social and linguistic gaffes, his simpleton’s peevishness and pseudo-messianic chutzpah. Science has been all but blacklisted, the so-called Christian religion has been held up as a governmental foundation, and we’ve found ourselves plunged into a war with Iraq on grounds that, even if you believe that the president and his administration are sincere, are faulted and shaky. As we near 2,500 U.S. dead in Iraq, as religious zealots continue to attempt to gain control of the government, as scientists continue to struggle against a nation largely ignorant of and often hostile to science’s findings, you have to ask yourself: what would it have been like if Al Gore had, based on the plurality and not upon the Electoral College (I will not here discuss the racial issues surrounding the Electoral College, but you might want to know that they’re there), — what if, I ask, Al Gore had won?

Ponder that for a bit.

And now turn your attention to what Gore has done since the election. In particular, turn your attention to his movie, An Inconvenient Truth (see the trailer here), opening in select theaters on May 24th. It is a movie about global warming, about what we as a society are doing to the environment, and about the very real, long-term consequences of our short-sighted behavior. Kottke has a lot to say about the movie, and I recommend reading his post. At the risk of looking like a copycat, I have to say that I, too, could not improve upon the words of David Remnick of the New Yorker, who said:

It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scène. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone—or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room—for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, “An Inconvenient Truth” is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. “An Inconvenient Truth” is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.

There are plenty of attacks on both Al Gore’s position on global warming and climatologists’ findings (witness the stark divide in opinions summoned by a relevant Google search). Indeed, it appears that our fearless leader may well have given his personal blessing to Michael Crichton’s crackpot point of view (see Crichton’s wingnut potboiler State of Fear). However, it’s Al Gore’s position that is backed by legitimate science and real findings. The questions that are still on the table are being assiduously researched, but the basic findings regarding global warming are not in doubt any more than the basic fact of evolution is. That is to say, only naïve, uneducated, or genuinely foolish people think that these are in question as basic premises upon which current theories are being debated by the highly educated scientific community.

Thus Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth arrives on the scene ready to both stir and confront a controversy that is, in reality, a controversy formed of spin and misunderstanding and not a genuine controversy. And so, too, it arrives on the scene in need of a supportive audience. It needs an audience who will talk about it, recommend it, share what they’ve learned from it and promote it’s message to a general American public for whom such movies are usually eschewed in favor of more “entertaining” fare, such as The Day After Tomorrow, the danger of which lies in the commonly faulty hyperbole and slipshod treatments such fare offers an audience. Realistically, a Crichton film, however faulty and politically motivated, will draw a larger audience so long as the general public is unsure of the truth, because a Crichton film will be more “exciting” for a general audience soaked in and blinded by so-called “fair and balanced” reporting that fails to shut out misleading, ill-informed or genuinely deceptive “points of view”. Al Gore’s movie deserves all the help it can get. I hope that you will consider lending your support to it. I hope you will help it reach the eyes and ears of those who, in large enough numbers, could change the world for the better.

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