soon
James Kunstler, who is to environmentalism what Doug Bradley was to light bondage play, takes Harry Shearer (like Al Franken and anyone who works for The New Republic, a member of the Eddie Haskell Liberals Sewing Circle) makes a point about what's shaped up as the "responsible" opposition to the invasion of Iraq:
So Shearer was on the radio and I'm not crazy about his show because he puts across a self-congratulatory air of moral superiority that, after a while, gets on my nerves [kinda like you, Jim]. Yesterday, he was twanging on the Iraq War again and especially on the notion that the public was swindled into entering it on the phony pretext of "weapons of mass destruction( WMDs)," with the implication that he was a superior person for having figured this out.
[snip]
Because as Shearer was twanging on about WMDs and Iraq and how deplorable the whole thing is, I started wondering about Shearer's real life in Los Angeles, and imagining him driving from his house in one of the better sections of the city to the studio where he does the show, or Shearer motoring across town to Melrose Avenue for sushi, or Shearer tooling up into the canyons above Hollywood to have drinks with friends, or Shearer transporting a child, perhaps, twenty miles down the freeway to a soccer game. And I was wondering what kind of car Shearer drove, and I couldn't help imagining it was probably not a cheap car, and perhaps not a little tiny car, and if Shearer was married or lived with somebody, then his wife / partner undoubtedly had a car, too -- because that's how life is lived in Los Angeles, despite some of their strides in public transit. And as I imagined Harry Shearer driving around Los Angeles in an expensive car deploring this terrible war in Iraq, I couldn't shake the feeling that Shearer was getting, so to speak, a free ride.
Kunstler goes on to say that the war was a "desperate attempt" to secure oil for countless Americans like Harry Shearer to drive their super-sized vehicles. Kunstler's thesis is for the most part wrong: the invasion was more about the Great Game involving China and Russia, along with neo-con messianism - at the end of the day, the very end, Hummers and SUVs are par for the course. But he makes a point.
One of the more stomach-turning developments of the war has been the squawking of the New Chickenhawks, Barely Legal College Republicans who spend their semesters plotting the downfall of lefty professors and how they can fuck with the various campus minorities in the name of a skewed and insulting mutant "diversity"; taking pains, all the while, to duck the fact they're dodging "the war against Islamofascism," one they consider it treasonous to protest, even if you're an old woman who'se feeling a little duped since her son got offed on some serious bullshit premise.
Nevertheless, we've heard very little outside of some radical lefties - some of whom have been saying it all along - that breaking the country's dependency on foreign oil is more than just bird-dogging the Saudis, and that being against the war should be more than, well, just being against the war.
What the anti-war community needs to do, collectively, individually, whatever, is to start putting it's proverbial money where it's proverbial mouth is. Ask yourself: how often do you drive to get where you're going, when you could really bike or walk? Do you really need to drive at all? How often do you shop at the farmer's market, or even the health food store (whose products will be less likely to use fountains of chemicals, and therefore, petroleum inputs)? How much fresh food do you buy? What sort of light-bulbs do you use?
Kunstler's profound misanthropy aside, he makes a point, in the above post and elsewhere. The sad fact of the matter is that the way in which we live our lives is balanced almost entirely on the backs of other countries around the world (in addition to our poorer communities), and our access to the resources beneath their feet. Being anti-war, being anti-empire, is fine and dandy. Working harder, smarter, learning to go without, would mean much more than words and donations to MoveOn.
There will come a time, after all, and soon, when we won't have a say in the matter.
<< Home