An Inconvenient Truth

I've been interested in seeing this movie for a while, mostly out of curiousity. What would a 90-minute science slide-show by Al Gore be like?

Turns out it was pretty damn good... which made it also pretty damn depressing. Seeing the man who was almost president made me long for what would have been, or at least what would not have been. There would be no war in Iraq, Americans wouldn't have to say they were Canadian in order to travel abroad -- to name a few. Gore needn't have been the next Lincoln to have had the country better off than it is.

And then it was further depressing because I could see how different Gore is when he's not campaigning (something he's admitted he sucks at). He was less stage-managed in this movie than during his 2000 campaign. He was knowledgable, approachable, even funny (it wasn't a political movie but he still got in two or three humorous jabs at Bush), and, most imporantly, curious. He likes to learn. He has imagination and vision. And it was depressing to think that all of these things can so easily get shoved aside in modern presidential campaigns, where the focus group is everything, and you have to be so careful about what you say because every word that comes out of your mouth will play on a hundred news stations.

After my regrets and my election-pessimism passed, the movie started to get scary. Terrifying. Because if it's even half correct on the effects of global warming (which apparently is agreed upon nearly unanimously by scientists even though the media portrays it as a theory), we're in big trouble.

If I had any problem at all with the movie as I was watching it, it was that I felt it sometimes portrayed Gore as too knowledgable, too borderline omniscient on the subject of global warming. He has been pushing this for over twenty years, but there was never a sense of "I told you so" from him -- that wasn't the issue. The problem I thought I would have was that the movie would end up presenting Gore as The Man To Fix This. And that gave me pause.

Everyone knows that the best way to gain power is by scaring people. It's been demonstrated in fiction, in, for example, V For Vendetta, wherein the regime seeking power secretly creates and unleashes a deadly virus and then runs on the platform of finding a cure. And it's been demonstrated in real life by the Bush Administration working the terror angle till they're blue in the face -- the old "Only we can keep you safe" routine. So I thought, is Al Gore showing this problem and positioning himself as the answer, as our best hope? Because this movie was pretty damn scary. Scarier than anything the Republicans have come up with.

But it didn't stay scary, and that's what separates it. After the pictures showing that there are no more famous "snows of Kilimanjaro," and that Glacier National Park is now more accurately called Lake National Park -- and after the simulations showing what the country would look like if the polar icecaps melted and the oceans rose twenty feet... after all that, it turned out to be inspiring. And it eased my earlier fears of a Gore power-grab. Because, at the end, he asks us to fix this problem. It was the furthest thing possible from Bush's tactic of "Go about your lives as normal while we handle the problem." Gore says the opposite: Do these things, some simple, some difficult, change the way you live, and you can fix the problem. He himself didn't factor into it. It was all about us.

And that's great. Because when was the last time we were asked to do anything? When was the last time we were made to feel like we can? It's as though our leaders are afraid of pissing us off by asking us to get off the couch. We are a great people in America, but we're lazy. We need to be inspired. Not since Kennedy has anyone looked to the stars and given us a seemingly impossible goal and told us to meet it. "America, get yourself in gear. Go, go and get me the Moon."

Gore, though not as eloquent as Kennedy, is giving us a similar goal with An Inconvenient Truth: Go, go and get me the Earth.

www.climatecrisis.net
watch the trailer.