[thechat] Energy crisis part deux
david a. mclean
damclean at home.com
Sat May 19 11:18:33 CDT 2001
What the hell is going on down there?
-d
-------
"Years down the road, alternative fuels may become a great deal more
plentiful than they are today. But we are not yet in any position to
stake our economy and our way of life on that possibility."
- U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, May 2001
As you may have gathered, my dream derived from reports in which
Cheney elucidated U.S. energy policy -- specifically, that Americans
do not intend to forsake their "way of life" for the sake of
conservation. (That's how he put it -- way of life. Like Nubian
herdsmen, or the folkways of the Navaho.)
As they say back home, "Well, I nearly died."
To suggest that scorched-earth consumerism, waste, fouling one's nest,
are not sins -- but a legacy? The idea is monstrous. It offends every
Presbyterian bone in my body -- I, who have been known to scrape out
the last of the toothpaste with a nail file.
Likewise, my developing ecological conscience (the presence of my
kids) reacts in horror: How do I explain to the boys the logistics of
scorched-earth economics?
Certainly the truth won't suffice. Hardly responsible to tell a
15-year-old that you think the Vice-President of the United States is
nothing less than the Beast, slouching to Bethlehem.
Hence, unable to voice my visceral hatred of a man I had never met, I
recreated him in a dream -- the only forum that would allow expression
to my malignant desire that the Vice-President might have another
heart attack and die. (This is very Celtic. Think, the witches in
Macbeth.)
- John MacLachlan Gray, Globe and Mail, Wednesday, May 9, 2001
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