H
Harry Hope
Guest
From The San Francisco Gate, 2/23/07:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/02/23/notes022307.DTL&feed=rss.mmorford
Behold, The Lost Americans
Who are the 13 percent of us who've never heard of global warming?
And how can they be stopped?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Behold, this bizarre demographic.
Behold this odd and simmering and rather shockingly large hunk of the
American population because chances are very good that at least some
of them live right next door to you and breathe the same air and steal
your parking spaces and often don't shower for six days at a stretch.
And maybe, just maybe you should be painfully, dreadfully aware of
them because they are -- in their quiet, seemingly innocuous way --
far more deadly than any gay evangelical preacher or meth-lab
gang-bangers and far more frightening than chicken-flavored soap
bubbles for dogs and far more disconcerting than Britney Spears'
barren skull.
They are, in short, the deeply uninformed.
The inexplicably ignorant.
The wondrously numb, the disconnected, the way, way out of touch.
And they are, apparently, legion.
Let me be clear.
I am not speaking merely about the ideologically lopsided and the
intellectually misshapen.
I am not speaking of, say, those armies of happy blank-eyed red-state
'Merkins who only read NASCAR-themed Harlequin romance novels and only
drink Hooters-branded energy drinks (real products, both) and who like
to bury their gay sex fantasies under mountains of happy homophobic
sing-along God-fearin' megachurch denial.
Nor am I speaking of your average Bush-lovin' bobbleheads who appear
to get their worldly information by way of licking the stuff found on
the bottom of the rocks in front of Fox News HQ and then tripping for
three days while watching "The O'Reilly Factor" from the bathtub.
Everyone knows about them.
And no one really takes them seriously anymore.
No, I am speaking of a group far more mysterious and far more
bewildering.
And they number, in fact, in the millions.
About 4 million, to be exact, or fully 13 percent of the American
population, if this recent, 46-nation poll is to be believed.
Here is one way you shall know them:
They have never heard of global warming.
You read that right.
According to this ACNielsen poll, there are, right now, upward of 4
million bipedal adult Internet-using Americans living in this nation
who have never, not even once, seen a program about the most dire
issue facing the planet today.
They have not read about it in a newspaper or seen photos in a
magazine or heard about it via an award-winning documentary or seen
monkey-like Republican presidents deny its existence and spit on
science and mock the simply insurmountable pile of evidence in the
name of oil profits and flagrant cronyism.
Who are these people, you ask?
Are they, say, millions of forgotten, heavily medicated shut-ins
across the land?
Are they the disregarded elderly?
People living in the backwoods of Louisiana or Appalachia and
therefore we can't expect them to actually read or watch television or
care much about the health of the planet (except, of course, to take
part in a broad, 46-nation Internet survey) because they're simply too
busy hunting squirrels and making fire and picking their teeth with
dinosaur bones?
Or perhaps they are the very young and the desperately teenage, so
packed to the skullcap with screaming hormones they can barely
navigate the lousy American education system much less name the
current president or flirt well on MySpace or understand how many tons
of greenhouse gases are pumped into the sky to crank out one
PlayStation 3.
You think?
Does this explain it?
Verily, it does not.
Not by a long shot.
Not when, for example, fully 95 percent of Latin America has heard of
global warming, and 75 percent think it's a "very serious" issue.
Not when the United States ranks dead last among all 46 nations in its
concern for the issue of dire climate change.
No, there is something more sinister at play here.
Something darker and just a little disquieting.
Do you know what it is?
I don't, either.
Do you ask, as I do, How the hell can this be?
What sort of people are these?
How can this survey be accurate?
How can anyone even moderately attuned to the culture not have heard
of global warming, even once?
Is it not part of the popular lexicon?
Is it not being used to sell sexy white jeans, fer chrissakes?
What, pray tell, gives?
Here is what we do know:
The United States is, by far, the world's worst contributor to the
root causes of global warming, and yet we are the least concerned
about it.
Read that again:
Despite how the United States pumps more pollutants and greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere than China or India or Russia, a scant 42
percent of us see the problem as "very serious."
Even China and India, those irresponsible mega-polluters of the
developing world we like to scoff at for their flagrant industrial
waste, are far more concerned and more universally informed.
It's enough to make you look at George W. Bush and want to slap him
across the face with the razor-sharp paw of a dead polar bear.
It's enough to make your heart shudder as you wonder who the hell we
are, really, as an ostensibly proud people, as a supposedly "unified"
nation, a global leader, a role model to the planet.
Is the great United States really just some sort of moral joke?
Are we really leading the world in anything except warmongering and
defense spending and sexual hysteria and cool iPod accessories?
Sure, the overall lack of concern is understandable.
After all, the vicious GOP spin machine has been working like a rabid
dog for the last six years to demonize science and mock
environmentalists and sneer at the Kyoto protocol and force eminent
scientists to bury their dire findings lest Dick Cheney visit them in
the night with a box of rat poison and a shotgun sneer.
And then there's this:
Only 13 percent of congressional Republicans see global warming as a
human-caused issue, compared to 95 percent of Dems.
That's right, despite the National Academy of Sciences, despite the
AAAS and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite the
U.N., despite every reputable (and often, very conservative)
scientific body on the planet, half of our own Congress snickeringly
denies humans have had anything to do with global warming.
Ah, how proud they must be.
But while that level of willful, greedy ignorance is relatively easy
to explain, this weird hunk of gaping blindness, this intellectual
black hole, isn't quite so easy to figure out.
Except for this:
Maybe it's the end result of the great, chronic dumbing down of the
American mind. Possible?
Maybe our 13 percent blindness rate is simply the brutal upshot, the
logical conclusion of all the endless stripping of school textbooks of
fact and perspective, of the push for silly literalist Christian dogma
at the expense of true awareness, of the systemic neoconservative
drive to get Americans to stop asking questions and stop thinking for
themselves and to hate and mistrust the media (except, of course, Fox
News), and wouldn't you be better off just enjoying your Wal-Mart
candy corn and your "Everybody Loves Raymond" DVDs and just turn off
your brain because it's all just far too complicated and messy and
suspicious anyway, so really, why care at all?
And oh, those dark storm clouds?
Pay no attention to those.
Those are just God's happy lint balls.
Go back to sleep.
_________________________________________
Once again, Mark Morford, ladies and gentlemen
Harry
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/02/23/notes022307.DTL&feed=rss.mmorford
Behold, The Lost Americans
Who are the 13 percent of us who've never heard of global warming?
And how can they be stopped?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Behold, this bizarre demographic.
Behold this odd and simmering and rather shockingly large hunk of the
American population because chances are very good that at least some
of them live right next door to you and breathe the same air and steal
your parking spaces and often don't shower for six days at a stretch.
And maybe, just maybe you should be painfully, dreadfully aware of
them because they are -- in their quiet, seemingly innocuous way --
far more deadly than any gay evangelical preacher or meth-lab
gang-bangers and far more frightening than chicken-flavored soap
bubbles for dogs and far more disconcerting than Britney Spears'
barren skull.
They are, in short, the deeply uninformed.
The inexplicably ignorant.
The wondrously numb, the disconnected, the way, way out of touch.
And they are, apparently, legion.
Let me be clear.
I am not speaking merely about the ideologically lopsided and the
intellectually misshapen.
I am not speaking of, say, those armies of happy blank-eyed red-state
'Merkins who only read NASCAR-themed Harlequin romance novels and only
drink Hooters-branded energy drinks (real products, both) and who like
to bury their gay sex fantasies under mountains of happy homophobic
sing-along God-fearin' megachurch denial.
Nor am I speaking of your average Bush-lovin' bobbleheads who appear
to get their worldly information by way of licking the stuff found on
the bottom of the rocks in front of Fox News HQ and then tripping for
three days while watching "The O'Reilly Factor" from the bathtub.
Everyone knows about them.
And no one really takes them seriously anymore.
No, I am speaking of a group far more mysterious and far more
bewildering.
And they number, in fact, in the millions.
About 4 million, to be exact, or fully 13 percent of the American
population, if this recent, 46-nation poll is to be believed.
Here is one way you shall know them:
They have never heard of global warming.
You read that right.
According to this ACNielsen poll, there are, right now, upward of 4
million bipedal adult Internet-using Americans living in this nation
who have never, not even once, seen a program about the most dire
issue facing the planet today.
They have not read about it in a newspaper or seen photos in a
magazine or heard about it via an award-winning documentary or seen
monkey-like Republican presidents deny its existence and spit on
science and mock the simply insurmountable pile of evidence in the
name of oil profits and flagrant cronyism.
Who are these people, you ask?
Are they, say, millions of forgotten, heavily medicated shut-ins
across the land?
Are they the disregarded elderly?
People living in the backwoods of Louisiana or Appalachia and
therefore we can't expect them to actually read or watch television or
care much about the health of the planet (except, of course, to take
part in a broad, 46-nation Internet survey) because they're simply too
busy hunting squirrels and making fire and picking their teeth with
dinosaur bones?
Or perhaps they are the very young and the desperately teenage, so
packed to the skullcap with screaming hormones they can barely
navigate the lousy American education system much less name the
current president or flirt well on MySpace or understand how many tons
of greenhouse gases are pumped into the sky to crank out one
PlayStation 3.
You think?
Does this explain it?
Verily, it does not.
Not by a long shot.
Not when, for example, fully 95 percent of Latin America has heard of
global warming, and 75 percent think it's a "very serious" issue.
Not when the United States ranks dead last among all 46 nations in its
concern for the issue of dire climate change.
No, there is something more sinister at play here.
Something darker and just a little disquieting.
Do you know what it is?
I don't, either.
Do you ask, as I do, How the hell can this be?
What sort of people are these?
How can this survey be accurate?
How can anyone even moderately attuned to the culture not have heard
of global warming, even once?
Is it not part of the popular lexicon?
Is it not being used to sell sexy white jeans, fer chrissakes?
What, pray tell, gives?
Here is what we do know:
The United States is, by far, the world's worst contributor to the
root causes of global warming, and yet we are the least concerned
about it.
Read that again:
Despite how the United States pumps more pollutants and greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere than China or India or Russia, a scant 42
percent of us see the problem as "very serious."
Even China and India, those irresponsible mega-polluters of the
developing world we like to scoff at for their flagrant industrial
waste, are far more concerned and more universally informed.
It's enough to make you look at George W. Bush and want to slap him
across the face with the razor-sharp paw of a dead polar bear.
It's enough to make your heart shudder as you wonder who the hell we
are, really, as an ostensibly proud people, as a supposedly "unified"
nation, a global leader, a role model to the planet.
Is the great United States really just some sort of moral joke?
Are we really leading the world in anything except warmongering and
defense spending and sexual hysteria and cool iPod accessories?
Sure, the overall lack of concern is understandable.
After all, the vicious GOP spin machine has been working like a rabid
dog for the last six years to demonize science and mock
environmentalists and sneer at the Kyoto protocol and force eminent
scientists to bury their dire findings lest Dick Cheney visit them in
the night with a box of rat poison and a shotgun sneer.
And then there's this:
Only 13 percent of congressional Republicans see global warming as a
human-caused issue, compared to 95 percent of Dems.
That's right, despite the National Academy of Sciences, despite the
AAAS and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite the
U.N., despite every reputable (and often, very conservative)
scientific body on the planet, half of our own Congress snickeringly
denies humans have had anything to do with global warming.
Ah, how proud they must be.
But while that level of willful, greedy ignorance is relatively easy
to explain, this weird hunk of gaping blindness, this intellectual
black hole, isn't quite so easy to figure out.
Except for this:
Maybe it's the end result of the great, chronic dumbing down of the
American mind. Possible?
Maybe our 13 percent blindness rate is simply the brutal upshot, the
logical conclusion of all the endless stripping of school textbooks of
fact and perspective, of the push for silly literalist Christian dogma
at the expense of true awareness, of the systemic neoconservative
drive to get Americans to stop asking questions and stop thinking for
themselves and to hate and mistrust the media (except, of course, Fox
News), and wouldn't you be better off just enjoying your Wal-Mart
candy corn and your "Everybody Loves Raymond" DVDs and just turn off
your brain because it's all just far too complicated and messy and
suspicious anyway, so really, why care at all?
And oh, those dark storm clouds?
Pay no attention to those.
Those are just God's happy lint balls.
Go back to sleep.
_________________________________________
Once again, Mark Morford, ladies and gentlemen
Harry