Squish The Grape

The time is now to crush the neo-cons using the environment as a central issue.

By Mike Roselle

I read in this morning’s Washington Post that not only did Sen. Barack Obama work for one of Saul Alinsky’s grassroots organization in Chicago, but Sen. Hillary Clinton also wrote her thesis on Alinsky’s approach to issues like poverty and social justice. Alinsky evidently thought highly of her and offered her a job, which she refused. Strangely, though, both candidates refused to be interviewed about their ties to the late polemicist and practitioner of what we now call guerilla media. Why are they so afraid of Saul Alinsky’s ghost?

The answer is because Alinsky believed that electoral politics offered few solutions to the problems of poor people. Quoting the Post’s Peter Slevin, “His (Alinsky’s) approach to social justice relied on generating conflict to mobilize the dispossessed. Power flowed up, he said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside”.  In Alinsky’s way of thinking, his former students had gone over to the dark side. Old Saul is surely turning in his grave.

Alinsky didn’t reject electoral politics; he simply operated outside of it. Slum dwellers could not elect a new mayor, but by raising a ruckus they could have their voices heard, and more importantly, their issues addressed. This required audacity, humor and courage. Saul Alinsky is to pressure campaigns what Walt Disney is to Animation. We still are using the technique’s he developed whenever we stage a protest or commit civil disobedience. When we exercise our rights to be rude, outrageous, disruptive, and uppity we are walking in his footsteps.

While we are on the subject of presidential candidates, you will recall that the Man Without a Bioregion predicted that Albert Gore would seek and win the Democratic nomination for President. If this is true, then why is Al Gore talking like a radical environmental activist? Why isn’t he listening to George Lakoff and Michael Shellenberger. He’s starting to sounds like Chicken Little. He has become an alarmist! Well actually, as a senator he held hearings on climate change 25 years ago, and he said that the internal combustion engine was obsolete. He is an old-school alarmist.

History will show that the Clinton/Gore administration did not heed the warnings made so clear in Gore’s book, Earth In The Balance. The book’s title now seems more prescient than ever. But Gore did waste eight years without going to bat on any of the pressing issues that we now grimly face. It is not all Al’s fault. When it came to alerting the American public to the threat, every warning was ignored, no matter where it issued from, and no one listened to the Scientists.

We never seem to listen to the scientists until it is too late. Socrates, who questioned religion and bemoaned the loss of forests around Athens, was not only ignored, but forced to drink poison. Galileo was locked in a tower for suggesting that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Charles Darwin was ridiculed by the religious right for stating the obvious, that all life on Earth descended over time from simpler organisms.

We ignored Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold who warned the nation about the plundering of nature and the loss of wildlife. We ignored Rachel Carson whose seminal work Silent Spring should have been more than enough warning about our careless use of chemicals. Not only were all the warnings ignored, but those sounding the alarm were portrayed as kooks, idealists, or prophets of doom. We can hear their wisdom now, beyond the grave.

Liberal politicians have always known that what environmentalists have warned of was real (and by liberal I mean anybody who is not a neo conservative evangelical Christian). Still, there remained a strong irrational, almost religious belief among liberals that technology would somehow save us. We believed one day we would live to drive our flying cars in a pollution free city on the hill, where bluebirds sang and the televisions were powered by windmills. Just last year the big fad was light bulbs. Screw in one of those puppies and you can tell your co-workers at the office that you are doing your part for global warming. Saving the planet would require only minor tinkering with the American lifestyle and the economy and population could continue to grow with no limits in sight.

But that was naive. Seeing that Mr. Gore is now making speeches to Congress that only an Earth Firster would have made 25 years ago I am starting to believe that he has gotten religion. So the question is can we trust Al Gore? He might be running for president, but do we want him to run?  Would he be better where he is, as Lance Olsen has said, as climate campaigner in chief rather than as Commander in Chief?

My answer is yes, absolutely. And as for Gore’s sometimes wishy-washy position on nuclear power and the Orwellian concept of “Clean Coal,” I think he can be convinced to abandon those kooky ideas if confronted by strong grassroots opposition. I believe, as I’ve said in this space before, that he is soft peddling solutions and being intentionally vague to avoid a technical debate, focusing instead on the moral dilemma posed by climate change. If we are to move forward on the climate debate we will have to trust Al Gore.

“Trust a politician”, I can already hear you say, “Are you out of your mind?” Well, of course I’m out of my mind, but one thing that progressives will still need to do is trust Al Gore. The man just came out for an international treaty to reduce atmospheric carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. He proposed a ban on any new coal fired power plants, a carbon tax and cap, and trade on carbon emissions. These are policies that I have been pushing right here on Lowbagger.org for the last two years. Until very recently they have been supported by the mainstream “Big Green” environmental groups emitting carbon dioxide and hot air Washington D.C.

We correctly predicted here in this space that Hurricane Katrina would reshape the political landscape and put global warming on the front burner. This election needs to be a referendum on the environment. It should have been eight years ago, but we must look forward now. If the environment didn’t run for president in 2004, then the environment didn’t lose either. This will be the first time that the American public, armed with crucial information, thanks to Mr. Gore’s Oscar winning slide show An Inconvenient Truth, will have a chance to vote for the Earth.

If I was Al Gore, I would use the NASA photo from space as his campaign logo. I am not saying that he should start wearing a hemp suit, go on a tofu diet, and do a tree sit with John Quigley. Rather I think he needs to put on his boots, don a helmet, grab a baton, and summon the nation to war. George W. Bush was able to take the country to war by convincing Americans that the biggest threat we faced was religious fanaticism in the Middle East. He was right, but it wasn’t Islamic fanaticism. It was the evangelical Christianity that afflicts most of the decision makers in this country. The fanaticism of Republican National Committee.

Never fight a fanatic with fanaticism. The enemy is fanaticism itself. We need to remind people that this debate we are having about climate change is not new. What is new is that the Republicans have lost the Global Warming debate, and they lost it on live television with the whole world watching as a Class V hurricane destroyed a city. There is no way that the Republican’s can frame that; they lost, period.

I sense that even more clearly than the starry-eyed liberals, the Republicans realize the enormous consequences and the major adjustments that responding to climate change will require. They properly see the changes needed as radical, even biblical. Therefore it is understandable why it turns their whole world upside down. A meaningful response will call for more taxes, government programs, knocking the oil companies and car manufacturers off of their pedestal, shrinking the military, lowering the speed limit, enacting a whole new bevy of environmental regulations, and throwing Dick Cheney in prison. Well, the last part is wishful thinking.

What we need now is not radical. It is purely rational. What could be more main stream than responding to a coming disaster through careful planning and organization? What is so radical about not wanting any more toxic gas dumped into the sky so the ice caps won’t melt and the polar bears will still have a place to live? I think its fair to say that the true radical’s are the ones who support the status quo, who support the Bush cleptocracy over the survival of our planet, who cling to medieval ideas about religion, and who reject three-thousand years of human scientific inquiry into the nature of the cosmos.

The Neocons are fond of evoking the spirits of dead white guys, especially dead Presidents, to bolster the cause that they are true conservatives. The wars these great Americans fought in the past are the wars that they fight today: war for justice, freedom, liberty, and the right to happiness. Yeah right! So let us also evoke the spirits of our dead warriors. From Socrates to Galileo, Darwin to Einstein, Muir, Thoreau, Carson, Brower and the legions of dead soldiers in the war on irrationality. We would have a great Zombie army of the rational thinkers who helped shape out modern understanding of the planet and alert us to the current crisis.

We will constitute a legion of reasonable minds battling an unreasonable truth. We are not the new-age, back-to-the-land, eco-saboteur, hippy, granola-crunching, earth-mother, tree-spiking, daisy-sniffing, butterfly-chasing, tree sitting, Luddite, communist Satanists that we have been portrayed to be. We are standing with all of the prophets, the saints, and messiahs who preached against conspicuous consumption, gluttony and the lust for power for its own sake. What is needed is to isolate these Flatearthers from their ties to the past and from the rest of civil society. They are now the kooks and their goals are self serving and dangerous. They represent but a small fraction of the 5 percent of the world’s population who live in the U.S.A., the ones who use 25 percent of the fossil fuels. The Neocons have become a tiny minority. It’s time to crush them like a grape.

Nobody likes a war; or rather everybody seems to like a war. The Iraq War was once approved by most Americans and Iraqis. No one likes it now, only some are still too stubborn to admit it. But unless we address the cause of war, instead of just reacting to it when it breaks out, we will all just be pissing in the wind. Ending war means first ending injustice. Violence is rarely effective in the long term, but violence does indeed occur whether war is technically occurring or not.

I’ve read studies that claim on the whole that warfare has been declining in the late twentieth century. Margareta Sollenberg from the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University reports a total of 226 armed conflicts have been recorded for the years 1946-2002. Of these, 116 were active in the period 1989-2002, including 31 in 2002. There were five wars in 2002. Both numbers were the lowest for this period. In 2002, a larger proportion of major armed conflicts were resolved, compared with new armed conflicts. It may not seem like it, but there is less warfare today than at any point in human history. There is still too much, and we spend too much of our resources on it to be able to meet the future of climate change.

Sollenberg lists the general causes or war. First, she argues that poor economic conditions are the biggest causes of intra-state armed conflict today, and that repressive political systems are also war-prone, especially in periods of transition. The degradation of natural resources, specifically soil erosion, deforestation and water scarcity can also contribute significantly to violent conflict. Finally, ethnic diversity alone is not a cause of armed conflict, but parties to a conflict are often defined by their ethnic identities. Climate change will only increase these causes of war.

It seems clear that it is not enough to be against the war in Iraq. Unless we address the root causes of war, we can march until the cows come home and it won’t make a lick of difference. Is it too idealistic to think that a new war, one that we all will have to fight together, is preferable to the old wars, in which we fight each other?  Al Gore was correct in his comparison of our current situation with the fate that the Spartan army faced at Thermopile. We must stop fighting amongst each other and fight the common enemy -- ourselves.

Many on the left think even using a military analogy can lead to violence. But humans have evolved over many millennia of constant warfare, it is in our blood. Gandhi understood this and mobilized an army around the concept of Ahimsa, or “Truth Force.” He understood to face a mighty army you would need a mightier army, and only one armed with non violence could hope to overcome the superior fire power of the British Dragoons. If the concept of an independent nation is worth fighting for, then why aren’t the skies, oceans, and rivers of the Earth? Without nature there can be no nations, and no nation can be independent from nature.

Let’s face it, if Al Gore can’t escape the “ozone man” image that Republicans have painted him to be, then he should co-opt it, master it, and turn it against the flat earth knuckleheads who mock him. He should become Earth Man. His response to any mockery should be “That’s Mr. Earth Man to you buddy, and by calling me that are you taking a position against climate change?”

We need a General now, not a politician. Al Baby, go for it, let’s raise an army. I am ready for a full-on, knock-down brawl on this issue. I’ll bet there are others spoiling for a fight out there too. We may never get a better chance than this one.  Environmentalism cannot be dead if an environmentalist is running for president.

Mike Roselle says that he will get an Al Gore tattoo if he runs for Treehugger In Chief.