[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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