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SEIFFE:  It's Al Gore's Time

Friday May 25, 2007

By Ralf Seiffe

I have just read an excerpt of Al Gore’s new book An Assault on Reason, the latest encyclical from the pope of the religion for those who do not already have one.  It shows that while the supreme priest of global warming may have invented the Internet, he doesn’t understand it. 

One must believe that a friendly publication’s selection of an excerpt will accurately represent the thoughts of the author.  Indeed, the editors at Time Magazine must certainly have asked the Global Warmer in Chief if the selection they planned to publish did comport with his true thoughts--and did receive confirmation.  It is important that they do this because many readers’ only exposure to the great man’s thoughts on reason will crystallize only through this small sample. 

And this sample is small.  In reading it, I came to think that the words “vast wasteland” would soon appear, whether credited to Illinoisan Newton Minnow or not.  Despite wondering whether the S.S. Minnow, shipwrecked on Gilligan’s Island, was the creative community’s revenge, one cannot help but be struck by the Veep’s rhetoric which seems like a lead-up to proposing a new PBS because Mr. Gore’s complaint is about television.

That hoary problem!  According to Mr. Gore, Americans are no longer concerned with truth and reason because, he opines, we no longer read newspapers.  Instead, we obtain information from television, making the point that watching consumes about 60% of an average American’s disposable time.  Gore avers that such devotion to the trials of Paris Hilton or O.J. Simpson means that we do not develop the intellectual heads of steam necessary to be able to apply reason and logic to our real problems. 

Always willing to listen to reason from anyone, I also observe that aphorism which cautions against blaming the messenger.  But, in this case, I am willing to make an exception because the messenger is the message.  So, let’s test the messenger’s value with existing evidence, one of the pillars of logic and reason. 

Al Gore’s record makes it clear that he’s deficient in the message department.  He claimed to be the male model for Erich Segal’s saccharine novel, Love Story.  Not supported by fact.  He told us he invented the Internet.  Absurd.  He told us he was elected President revealing his inability to grasp the strategy of his rival or to counter it in his own, home state. His most recent allocution on global warming follows his book which calls for “saving the planet” to become humanity’s central organizing principle.  Now, he recommends restoring logic.  He has the order for considering these last two events, confused. 

This same man tells us to reduce our carbon footprint while he resides in a home that’s responsible for the heat of twenty average homes.  He travels in private jets whose efficiency should be measured in dinosaurs per mile and he then perpetrates the fraud of “carbon offsets” sold by companies in which he has a financial interest.

Reason demands skepticism about his next subject.

So, we must question why he bemoans Robert Byrd’s speeches to an empty Senate chamber. We must discount his imaginings of military tortures when he could simply ask Chicago’s mayor to explain the nature of real torture as was once practiced in the Cook County Jail.  And, we must reject his theories of American disengagement.

The Internet is that vibrant public forum for those who have also rejected one-way network television preferring a duplex system for community discussion.  It is an unfiltered medium that, as his Warmness points out, has almost no barriers to entry.  It operates as it does because Americans crave some forum in which to interact and to argue the day’s concerns with others. 

Better than any other medium, the Internet denies the governing class control of information.  This is anathematic to those who became important by controlling last century’s mediums, like television.  Just as books displaced the Dark Ages with the Enlightenment, the Internet will marginalize politicians. Gore’s excerpt makes this connection and the rest of his book may speculate on what that means to those acolytes of a powerful, insatiable, centralized government.

Gore cannot be as myopic as his piece would indicate.  Nevertheless, his complaint that strange arguments are filling his comfort zone argues otherwise. He brings up the Iraqi War as evidence that Americans are no longer subject to reason but fails to note this is not new. His predecessors--and kin--created both the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty on evidence that was just as flimsy.  Now, forty years on, we have created a domestic quagmire.  If Mr. Gore and his allies respect reason, they should adopt Harry Reid's vision and declare the Great Society lost and redeploy our dollars back into our pockets as soon as possible.

Mr. Gore has underestimated the American capacity for logic. It has not eroded.  Instead, the Time Magazine piece shows that Mr. Gore loathes the diminished ability of the governing class to define the nation’s discussions in terms with which they are comfortable.  In that, Mr. Gore has mistaken logic for power.

© 2007 Ralf Seiffe

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.

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