Let us now praise biased judges, vote suppressors, mudslingers and superficial media for casting Al Gore from the center of power in 2000. They just might've helped save the Earth.
By liberating Gore from his oddly self-limiting role in Washington, D.C., they inadvertently set him on a path to international acclaim and the Nobel Prize.
It's an honor sure to bolster Gore's mission to inform the world about global warming, an honor that brings public awareness several degrees closer to the tipping point.
How galling this must be to the man who was finally (s)elected president in 2000.
I mean, who would you rather be? The president who goes down in history as maybe the worst ever? Or a prophet who sparked a movement that might yet rescue our world from flooding, species decimation, drought, famine, energy depletion and resource wars?
Our battered yet still-beautiful world has long needed a hero--a latter day Paul Revere to warn us, if not an outright prophet to lead us to a brighter future, and behold:
The new Al Gore. Same as the old Al Gore. By which I mean the young Al Gore.
This is Al Gore as Phoenix, rising from the ashes of one who flew to the Arctic Circle and elsewhere in the 1980s. One who held hearings about pollution at Love Canal, one who began writing "Earth in the Balance" 20 years ago. Even then evidence of global catastrophe was compelling. Who knows? Had we all been smarter, truer, this world might've given enough of the old college try decades back to lower the intensity of Gaia's hot flash and prevent the drowning of New Orleans by Katrina.
We might yet forestall any number of such disasters.
So let us now praise famous Republican Supreme Court justices who selected George W. Bush president in 2000. Let us praise happy spinners at Fox News who glibly stated that Gore claimed to've invented the Internet. Smooth politicos such as Katherine Harris and Karl Rove who suppressed the Democratic vote in Florida and elsewhere through a raft of dirty tricks. And let's not forget Gore's fellow Tennesseans, who gave Bush their dozen or so electoral votes in 2000, without which the count in Florida would've been irrelevant.
Working together they all obscured the clarion call of Gore's popular majority and cast him from the center of power as the new millennium dawned. It's a new millennium in which, Gore naively predicted, the organizing principle of international relations would be a concerted effort to save us all from global warming. Little did "Chicken Little" know such scorn would fall upon him....
Still, I tip my hat to all who denied Gore his presidency. As I wrote here recently, the Law of Unintended Consequences will not be revoked. And here's an unintended consequence of all the conniving that cost Gore and supporters like me so much pain.
I should warn you that what I'm about to say sounds so corny I almost hate to say it, so I'll stall by quoting something that old-fashioned poet Edwin Markham wrote.
They drew a circle and shut me out
A heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win,
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