We
still think of idealists as men in worn coats sleeping on cots in cold
basements. Those sorts of men can still be found, but the basements are
the old digs of an evicted Latino 7th Day Adventist Church with the
paint scraped off to expose the fashionably bare brickwork and go for
$2,500 a month on the wrong side of the Williamsburg Bridge strewn with
cots from IKEA and kept cold as a statement about Global Warming. Their
shivering denizens work profitably at an environmental non-profit as
social media managers in the great national and international network of the left.
Five
years later they're living in a posh bedroom community in Jersey as the
heads of some shell organization aimed at young people that's funded by
mysterious family foundations and angling for a job in D.C. advising a
Senator or a Cabinet member on the environment. If not they'll have to
settle for a gig at some Green consultancy telling old timey
corporations on how they can get sustainable to win over the kids and
score some sweet tax breaks.
If they're truly lucky, the
dedicated idealist may even earn a chance to ghostwrite Al Gore's next
book about the environment. At parties, they'll take out a pristine copy
of the
New York Times bestseller, a status it achieved through the efforts of social media managers
who coordinated mass buying efforts followed by mass returns for zero
net profit but maximum status, whose cover features Gore gazing
contemplatively at the Earth, and whisper to the person they're trying
to impress. "I wrote that."
Idealism is a brand now, and few men
have profited from it as thoroughly as Albert Arnold Gore Jr. Where
former presidents Carter and Clinton dashed to different philanthropies
around the world, Gore, true to his stodgy unimaginative image invested
in one brand of idealism. Environmentalism. Carter could have his houses
and Clinton could sit in luxurious hotel rooms in Haiti counting all
that aid money, but Gore, like the intrepid tobacco farmer he was, bet
everything on the whole planet.
In the 90s, environmentalism was
just one of many stocks in the rainbow market of liberalism, alongside
AIDS, racism, sexism and world hunger. A good
MTV VJ could
manage to incorporate all five into a hope for world peace, followed by a
grunge band, a rap video and a series of seizures. And environmentalism
was still limited to saving cute animals and being angry at oil
companies for being all about the oil.
Al Gore's environmentalism
seemed as boring as everything else about him. It was fitting that a
man with the bearing and personality of a tree would spend all his time
yammering on about trees. But then a series of Mayan tablets predicting
the destruction of the North Pole by 2007 or 2012 or 2092 came into the
possession of a humble former Vice President and everything changed.
Racism
was bad, but it wouldn't kill everyone. Neither would AIDS. World
Hunger was something for the Africans to worry about. But Global Warming
brought back Armageddon in a big way. Like the Cold War, cold basements
or bungee jumping, it reminded the numbed children of privilege that
they could die at any moment. And it stroked their egos by telling them
that, just like in all their favorite Saturday Morning Cartoons, only
they could save the world.
Al Gore, like many a bearded prophet,
had gone to his mansion in the wilderness of Belle Meade (median income
$194,016) and returned with pie charts and cockamamie theories made up
by other people that would make him extremely rich. Idealism was a
brand, and unlike Clinton, Gore seemed sincere, if only because he came
off as too unimaginative not to be.
With luxury goods, the brand
is also the product, and environmentalism is the ultimate luxury good.
Luxury products are at their most profitable when marketing intangibles.
Flying over calf leather from Italy is expensive. Giving American
leather a fancy name is cheap. Environmentalism is much the same. The
real commodity being sold is particular a state of mind and membership
in an exclusive club.
Capitalism made luxury hard work by making
everything cheap. Suddenly it wasn't enough to just lie in bed and order
the butler to bring you exotic pomegranates from the Orient and
champagne from the vineyards of France. Those things could be found in
any supermarket courtesy of the jet plane. Status stopped being a lazy
man or woman's game and became a frenzied rat race. Fat was out and
hyperactive workouts were in. Anyone could afford good art, so those
with discerning taste chose bad art. Anyone could vacation abroad, so
they bought old farm houses, restored them and painted bad art while
trying to grow their own food.
Status
itself became a sign of a lack of status. Anyone could buy a suit, so
the occupations of the rich became those where you did not have to wear a
suit, where you could become very wealthy while wearing jeans, a hoodie
and sneakers. The grandsons and granddaughters of the nouveau riche
relearned the old lessons of the upper crust that displays of wealth
were vulgar and status lay in a self-conscious lack of it. When everyone
has cars, you ride a bike. When everyone can afford steak, you buy a
thimble cup of 200 dollar organic magic beans. When everyone wants
things, you show how little you need things by convincing everyone to go
Gandhi and give up things.
Environmentalism was the ur-brand of
philanthropy. A philanthropy as big as the planet for a cause so
generous that it was completely anti-materialistic. And like all luxury,
it was also hugely and obscenely profitable.
While his rival was
getting tangled in Iraq, Al Gore was becoming the Giorgio Armani of
environmentalism. And environmentalism was much bigger than men's coats
or women's shoes. It was a lifestyle, a cause and a movie deal. It was
everything.
Causes are like copyrights. A company that believes
in a cause, donates money from its profits to the cause. Sometimes
that's explicit, as with the Red label, mostly it happens behind the
scenes. But the green label is everywhere, on the product and behind the
scenes. It's the lifestyle that says you like to buy things, but you
also care about the planet. It says that you're a modern sensitive
person who loves the peasants of Guatemala and
the ice
of the South Pole. And just like buying a silver vest covered in
diamonds, it says that you shouldn't be allowed out of the house with
money.
But environmentalism is bigger than all this. It's not
just green toilet paper and recycled rubber shoes, washing machines that
don't work and recycling carts with usage meters on them. It's numbers.
And the numbers are really big.
Money used to be gold, now it's
numbers. The digitization of all things, art, poetry and music are just
drops in the great numbersphere. The flood is in the financials where
everything is imaginary and has value until the economy is one great
numbers game. Environmentalism is one more layer of numbers in a numbers
game where social justice sells homes that people can't afford and then
sells the debt and then the debt of the debt.
In the post-modern economy everything is stripped down to its definitions, monetized, hollowed out and resold as an
investment to funds and persons scrambling to outrun inflation by investing in consensually real unreal
investments. Environmentalism, like all idealism for hire, sells out the one thing that it stands for... the right to pollute.
The
right to pollute is not a small thing in a world where exhalation is
pollution. The right to pollute means the right to drive a car, build a
factory, buy non-local produce, eat a burger, fly to Miami and exhale.
It is nothing less than the right to live.
Communism criminalized
commerce and then legalized it on its terms. Environmentalism
criminalizes life and legalizes it on its terms. The terms are paying a
tribute to one of the many green companies owned wholly or partially by
Al Gore and his merry band of green investors who steal from the rich
and give to the even richer, and steal from the poor and give to the
Gore..
Idealism is a commodity and when the investment comes due,
you sell out in exchange for power and profit. One minute you're
standing in front of a spreadsheet of a quarter ton of cow farts a
minute being emitted by the livestock of New Zealand which, you claim,
spells imminent doom for all the ice on the planet, and the next minute
you're opening a business to sell pollution indulgences to the
environmentally minded who want to fly to Fiji on a first class moral
ticket.
One minute you're warning about fossil fuels and
the next minute you're selling your news channel to a Middle Eastern oil
tyranny for 500 million bucks. And you're doing it because idealism is a
commodity to be cashed in for a tidy profit right before tax season. The longer you allow your idealism to appreciate, in the eyes of others, the more money you can make cashing it out.
Al
Gore sold access to China and made campaign calls from the White House
because there was no legal controlling authority that said he couldn't.
He claimed that he invented the internet because there was no one,
except a million comedians, to say that he didn't. He claimed that his
relationship with his wife inspired Love Story, because when you lie all
the time,what's one more lie?
The Gore lost the election, went
into the wilderness of Belle Meade and came out with the revelation that
it's time to drop all the little lies and stick to one big one. Forget
claiming that you invented the comma and the cocoa bean while on a
conference call with Isaac Newton and just focus on warning everyone
that the planet is about to explode. A lie as big as a planet. A lie
that was too big to fail.
Gore
monetized that lie, he took it to every bank on the planet and then he
took it to every cable company and convinced them to give him access to
40 million American homes so that he could tell them that the planet was
about to blow up. And just as he had at the White House, Al Gore cashed
out that access and sold it to an enemy nation.
There are
idealists who sell out and become hollow men, and there are hollow men
who pretend to be idealists. Gore is a hollow man selling someone else's
alarmist hollow earth theory so he can make it to the next stage of a
career that has no meaning or purpose. Like most professional idealists,
Al Gore cares for nothing except money. Having sold out so many times,
his only idea is to keep doing it again and again.
The
professional idealist is a hollow man. A soulless man who is tasked with
convincing everyone of the existence of the thing that he does not
have. The left has created an endless number of professional openings
for such soulless men, for paid liars and faithless tricksters, who live
only to convince the world that they believe just long enough for them
to sell out one more time.
