GREEN HUMMERS?

"Green is the new Red, White and Blue." There’s nothing cheesier and nothing that can help a group avoid the facts quite like a good slogan. For some reason, if you simply have a catchy, short slogan, any reasonable amount of work on one’s part to justify it becomes unreasonable.

"Save Our Planet" is a popular bumper sticker. I guess just wearing it on your bumper proves that you and the celebrities you worship possess all the wisdom necessary to automatically make it profound. It’s especially profound when you see it on a ratted out 70s vintage clunker that’s spewing farts of black smoke and leaves such a sulfur, burning oil, rotting exhaust stench that you have to pass it on the highway to keep from gagging or passing out from the unholy emissions….or if you see it on a SUV sporting soccer decals or - my favorite - a Hummer!

Some of you are at least as old as I, so you may remember global cooling. In 1975 the New York Times couldn’t find enough ink to scare the hell out of any among the unwashed (and fairly enough, gullible) masses needy enough for sensation to read it, with warnings about how we would soon be under advancing glaciers. Then it was in the 80s that we got to hear a constant drone about the hole in the Ozone layer. This was trapping greenhouse gasses, so the “experts” told us, which were going to wreak imminent hell and unfathomable disaster if we didn’t raise taxes. We supposedly blew the hole in the Ozone with Aerosol cans and such. Now scientists are saying that the hole in the Ozone layer was caused by excessive cooling from the Arctic and Antarctic. (I’m so confused!!) It’s nothing short of amazing how a few short years of research and better science can solve such potentially catastrophic challenges.

As the 90s progressed we saw more and more “proof” of the impending doom we call global warming. Here is a phenomenon that demands raising taxes, weakening the U.S. economy and sacrificing our national sovereignty. That’s OUR national sovereignty. Or, as another solution one idiot recently suggested to me, we should turn off the water while brushing our teeth! That one falls firmly into the ‘I SHIT YOU NOT!!!’ CATEGORY! I guess the non-polluters like China, Russia, India, etc. (you know, the little countries with no industry) need not participate much in the solution.

Global warming made headlines when 1,600 scientists signed a letter warning of the “devastating consequences” of global warming. But the mainstream media left out the part of the story about the 17,000 scientists who signed a petition saying there’s no convincing evidence that greenhouse gases will disrupt the earth’s climate. Another little tidbit of information…if you look at a temperature anomaly chart covering the past 10,000 years, you’ll see that for most of those years the temperature was warmer than it is today. But hell, that isn’t the kind of stuff that sells newspapers or gets seven or eight people tuning into Katie Couric every night!

My favorite author, Robert J. Ringer, long ago observed that “As a general rule, the less a slogan says, the greater the popularity of its basic ‘philosophy’ and the more people to whom it has the potential of appealing.” This part I particularly want to note: “Slogans are used because, to the unthinking individual, they appear on the surface to be interchangeable with fact…the more clever the slogan, the less the crusader need concern himself with facts.”

So, take this as you wish, but if you’re simple enough… Please, “Save the Planet!”

So much to say, so little time before we 'destroy the planet.'

JD.