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December 26, 2003
Al Gore: Christmas fruitcake
From Henry Miller: Tech Central Station - Al Gore, Our Christmas Fruitcake. Excerpt:
Gore's patronizing, apocalyptic and overwrought "Earth in the Balance" offers disturbing insights into its disturbed author. In it, Gore trashed the empirical nature of science for disconnecting man from nature. "But for the separation of science and religion," he lamented, "we might not be pumping so much gaseous chemical waste into the atmosphere and threatening the destruction of the earth's climate balance." He ignored that but for the separation of science and religion, we would still be burdened with the notion that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth. (Recall that historians call the last epoch when religion dominated science the Dark Ages.)It gets worse. Throughout the book, Gore employed the metaphor that those who believe in technological advances are as sinister, and polluters are as evil, as the perpetrators of the World War II Holocaust. He accused Americans of being dysfunctional because we've developed "an apparent obsession with inauthentic substitutes for direct experience with real life," such as "Astroturf, air conditioning and fluorescent lights . . . Walkman and Watchman, entertainment cocoons, frozen food for the microwave oven," and so on. Makes you wonder why he bothered to create the Internet.
Talk about a straw man! Why bother to put the boot into Al Gore and "Earth in the Balance?" The book is years and years old, and the former VP's views have almost certainly changed; Gore himself is out-of-office, and is unlikely to run for President again.
Give it up! You can relax! Republicans have won! They control both the House and the Senate, and barring a miracle of some sort, will enjoy another five years in the White House. Why must conservatives always indulge this bizarre sense of being an entrenched opposition movement, when the country has been moving steadily to the Right since Goldwater?
Sore loser.
Damn right.
ya. . .and much of the right needs to give up the Clinton-bashing. That horse is dead and glue now. Don't know what Jason is a sore loser about; if he voted for Gore, then he was victorious according to the will of the people (yet another dead horse beaten to death but thought I should mention it). And besides, science pretty much has divided society from nature, I just wish Gore could have put it in more nuanced terms.
At least he was funny on Saturday Night Live.