Eight crucial years — lost

My wife just returned from San Luis Obispo, which is halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles and a 15-minute drive to the cooling waters of the Pacific Ocean.

On Friday, the temperature hit an historic high of 113. Yesterday it cooled off to 108, a record for the date.

You can add those numbers to all the other evidence that the Great Warming is happening, folks.

The irony is that eight years ago this nation actually elected a leader, Al Gore, who was committed to using the power of the presidency to reverse our destructive course.

Instead, the Supreme Court gave us a cheerleader-in-chief for the oil industry, and worse, its Godfather, Dick Cheney of Halliburton.

We just lost eight critical years.

The result has been an oil cabal of deceit and destruction. Of cutting behind-closed-door deals with Big Oil over a secret “energy policy.” If invading Iraq and wasting thousands of lives and billions secure its oil wealth. (American Oil companies are on the verge of striking long-term, no-bid deals with the Iraqi government. And who will protect those oil fields?) Of coddling the oil-rich Saudi Royal regime (democracy anyone?). The House of Saud, an old Bush family oil ally, nurtured the fanatical Islamic fundamentalist movement that, in turn, spawned Al Qaeda and, well, you can see where this is going.

And the Christian Right, fixated on abortion and blinded by its own self-righteousness, twice helped Bush gain office, thereby endangering God’s entire creation.

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman lays out the most recent chapter in this tragedy: the off-shore oil drilling ruse.

Want some good news? Back in San Luis Obispo, it is starting to cool. Today’s high was 94.

Gore for president; Obama or Clinton for veep

Before the Democratic primary leg-gnawing hobbles any hope of Democrats taking the White House, how about changing the Obama/Clinton contest into a race for the vice-presidency?

As for the presidency, do what is historically and poetically just — nominate Al Gore, the one leader willing to speak "inconvenient truth" to the American people.

Besides, he has proven he can be elected president.

Hold the dew!

Before we get all dewy-eyed about Al Gore’s richly deserved Nobel Peace Prize and wallow in what might have been had it not been for hanging chads and butterfly ballots, we should consider four words:

Vice President Joe Lieberman.

Someone Please Explain ....

Al Gore’s book, “The Assault on Reason,” is something of a hymn to media literacy, even though he never says so in those words.

A core argument in his book is that television has utterly debased political discourse in America. Emotion, particularly raw fear, has utterly expelled reason in what the nation’s founders always assumed would be the free and open marketplace of ideas.

Now the marketplace has been decimated a societal suicide bomb of irrational shrapnel and mayhem. (Those are my overheated words, not Gore’s.)

Gore was defeated 5 votes to 4 — by a partisan Supreme Court. That he won the people’s vote may be the best counter-argument to his fears. But that was before 9/11 and the unraveling we have seen since.

Now for the strange parts in Gore’s media literacy riff.

Gore repeats the widely cited statistic that the average American watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of TV a day. That’s always been a frightening figure. I like to point out that it amounts to something like 17 solid years of the average person’s life.

But Gore puts it in a new context. “When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep, and couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat, and commute, [time devoted to TV] is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average America has. Younger Americans, on average, spend even more time watching TV.”

We are, in short, numbing ourselves in our “off-hours.” Aldous Huxley and “Brave New World” were closer to the truth than George Orwell and “1984.” Both are well worth rereading, and not just for their contrasting visions of the future.

Gore adds this bizarre and new (to me at least) finding, and the one I desperately need some help with:

“…the majority of Internet users report that they watch television — at least some of the time — while they use the Internet. Sixty percent of those who use both media simultaneously report that they regularly have the television on while they are using the internet. Studies show not only a continued increase in the average time Americans spend watching television each day but also an increase in the average time spent by Internet users watching the television while they use the Internet.”

I don’t get it.

Is this some weird multi-tasking, or multi-zoning out? Talk about a best-case scenario for attention-deficit disorder.

I’ve heard of folks who keep the TV on all the time to “keep them company” (whatever happened to the joys of solitude?) but why would you want the tube on while you are on the internet? Perhaps it’s a security blanket for the freedom offered by the internet’s welcoming invitation to inter-action. Even as we respond, we must be immersed in the babblings of an unquestionable source (TV), however questionable it might be.

I highly recommend Gore’s book, which serves as prima facie evidence that he still should be president. A Gandhi excepted, Gore is about as un-Bush-like a leader as one could hope for.

Let us count the ways….