HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
|
HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
|
Saturday, June 03, 2006It's Not Easy Being Green
Love horror movies? Enjoy getting so frightened by what's onscreen that you have to buy new underwear immediately after leaving the theater? Sick and tired of the J-horror trend that officially jumped the shark when Jennifer Connelly was menaced by a leaky ceiling?
Well, my wife and I saw the--the scariest movie of the year this evening. It's called An Inconvenient Truth. It stars Al Gore, but that's not what makes it so scary, although seeing those jowls thirty feet tall does give a person pause. If you haven't heard of this documentary, it's basically a feature-film version of a slide show that Gore has been giving for years on global warming. He walks the audience through the facts of global warming research and debunks some of the myths that the Bush administration and others have put out there to muddy the waters. It's scary shit. And I have a very hard time understanding how anyone can not believe this. How can you look at the weather in recent years, the very definitely melting glaciers, the dwindling worldwide population of magical dancing snowmen and not see that we're fucking things up on a biblical scale? Unlike some of the things I blame Bush and his cronies for (heart disease, the cancellation of Arrested Development, erectile dysfunction) this one can actually be laid, in part, right at George W's feet. One of the first things that fucknut did when he took office was to back out of the Kyoto Protocol. And he's followed up with bad policy after bad policy, putting his money-grubbing friends ahead of the future of our planet. Now, unlike New York magazine, I'm not among those who's been convinced by this movie that Al Gore should take another run at the presidency. He does come across in this movie as very knowledgeable, very passionate and actually funny. The statistics he cites would not, by themselves, have the impact that they do when Gore is tying them together. I think, if he'd shown this side of himself in 2000, we might be living in a very different country and you know goddamn good and well that we'd have had more progress on the ecological disaster facing us than lip service to alternate fuels every couple of years and ironically-named bills that pretend to be cleaning up our environment when they actually do nothing more than put money in the pockets of the president's corporate backers. Unfortunately--unfortunate in so very many ways--we got stuck with the Cracker from Crawford and so we find ourselves even closer to the environmental brink. I know that there are people who don't believe this. I know that there are people who get pissed off if you try to talk about it. I know that there's no way in hell that some of these people will come within a two-mile radius of a theater playing this film. But I did. And it's the sort of film that makes one want to take action of some sort. Even more action than writing about it on a blog read regularly by four people. Which is why I'm going to actually write a pen/paper letter to my congressman (Charles Rangel) and my senators (Chuck Schumer and...damn, who the hell's my other senator?). I've recently seen that taking the time to write a real letter can make a difference. But I'm going to do more than that. I'm going to try to make changes in the way I do things. I'm already relatively environmentally aware in my everyday actions, but I'm going to take it a couple of steps further. Because I don't want my children to look back at my life and wonder what the living fuck we were thinking. And I don't want them to have to take that look back from the raft they're living on because we've melted the polar ice caps and made the worst Kevin Costner vehicle ever into a fucking reality. I urge everyone I know to do something, too.
Comments:
Saw it, and ran screaming with terror into the night. What a wake-up call! But it's been right in front of us all this time and we've chosen to ignore it. Well, if THAT won't come back to bite us in the ass soon...
Eesh.
# posted by
 : 7:40 AM
Four readers... I think that's a good estimate.
I'll always be haunted by Costner drinking his p*ss at the beginning of that trainwreck of a film. I'm with you, though. I've got a small SUV to get rid of and a few more recycling bins to empty (in fact, I coerced my school to institute the program). Aerosol? A thing of the past. Air Conditioning? Windows open. Considering polar bears are my favourite 'aminal', I too worry about global warming. I heard about the film this morning on CNN. Hopefully it plays here in the Booflax.
going bio-diesel by the end of summer. Our friend, Patrick B. saw Mr. Gore deliver this speech live. He is currently building a pretty big boat.
Post a Comment
|
|
|||
| . | |||||
