Here in my little corner of the South we are experiencing our first wave of Summer heat and it's sucking the life out of me. This is why I haven't posted as much as usual lately. I'll get over it in a couple more days as I get used to the change in the seasons. If Al Gore paraded around the National Mall wearing a sandwich board and screaming, "We're all going to die," the nation's opinion leaders would roll their eyes and conclude that the former Vice President's long slide into insanity was finally complete. But because Al chose to express this sentiment using a more technologically modern medium -- a movie titled An Inconvenient Truth -- crazy Al has won back some of the sophisticates' respect he lost during the MoveOn.org/"how dare they!?" phase of his post-public office life.
Until then check out this essay in the American Spectator. Patrick Hynes takes on both crazy Al Gore and Dan Brown and their bogus movies.
One observation. Brown is more deserving of respect because he (sort of) admits that his work is one of fiction.
Al Gore has become to climatology what Dan Brown is to theology. And since we're on the subject, Dan Brown has become to theology what Eric Schlosser is to sitology and Michael Moore is to foreign affairs.
Movies are the new sandwich boards. Suddenly, crazy people with
daft ideas are being taken seriously. If you've got a crackpot theory that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of attention and is too intricate and abstruse to fit on two sheets of plywood, just turn it into 120 minutes of movie magic!
Back to Al Gore. There has been no shortage of debunkings of Al's end-is-near snuff film (here and here, for example). These point-by-point refutations use the printed word, research, scholarship, and cool logic -- but we are left unsatisfied. Al's got video of himself giving a PowerPoint presentation and computer generated graphics of what the world will look like if we all don't stop using disposable wooden chopsticks (no, really).
See you all in the morning.
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