Red Shirt; Blue Shirt

If there’s anything that makes me sick, it’s hearing the two sides accuse each other of fear tactics. Hey people! Forget about “tactics.” Let’s deal with plain old fear. You guys on the right. Are you really going to tell me there’s nothing to fear in filling our air with fumes and choking out all the oxygen? Nothing to fear in being the only mammal left on the planet? What the fuck’s wrong with you? Don’t you have a heart? Don’t you care that your grandchildren – everybody cares about their grandchildren – won’t have anything to breathe, and will be going around in gas masks, living underground with artificial everything, never seeing the light of day or the stars of night? And why? Because you won’t budge an inch and admit that anything but you, matters.

Use it all up now, hurry, hurry, hurry, right now, preferably in my lifetime, don’t worry about down the line, the market will take care of it, someone will invent a substitute for oil, we’ll get off this planet and leave it to what’s left of the animals who can live in the stench we made. There’s nothing to fear but fear itself, don’t listen to the fear-mongers.

These are conservatives talking. Hey, aren’t conservatives supposed to…you know…conserve??? Aren’t you the guys who stand for the good old values, like having fish to go fishing about, not wasting food – now you want to burn it? If you can’t get them to drill for oil, you’ll burn up their food? Is that nice? You know that little plot of corn you grow in your back yard that feeds you for the summer? If you stilled it down to hooch, you’d get about a one gallon jug. You could ride maybe 20 miles away from home on it. But you couldn’t ride back. Mother Earth puts forth your sustenance, and what do you do? You go joy-riding on it. God’s gift to … not just man, but life … and what are you doing? Burning it up to go fast. Well, we know where you’re going. And we know how you’re getting there. Fast.

You over there on the left! I see you, sitting smugly on your narrow asses, watching me berate the conservative creeps who don’t care about the planet, who just want to suck it all up and turn it into Walmarts. You’re getting all full of righteous inner warmth, you post-scientific fairies. I mean that in the nicest way, as a kind of sexless sprite. (Not sex, really, gender. But I liked the s’s in “sexless sprite”, and for that matter, the f’s in “…fic fairies”.) No disrespect intended. Other than what is deserved.

But for what could you paragons of virtue – an old cliché, but apt, don’t you think – deserve disrespect? How about for refusing to fear terrorists because if you do, you can’t accuse the Bush government of using fear tactics? Such a shame. So many things you paragons can’t admit are real because Bush says they’re real, so you have to say they aren’t. Is that smart?

“Hey, Rudolph. That’s poison ivy. Don’t run through it.”
“No it isn’t! I’ll prove it!”
Guess who’s in the hospital.

You know what? That cute little grandchick of yours will be peering out at the world from inside a burka if you don’t pay attention to people who say they want you to be like them or they’ll dispatch your infidel soul.

Were you the kids in the schoolyard who never hit back because you were afraid of getting beat up if you showed that you noticed the bully was slapping you around? Lemme tell you something. You hit back once, they go away. That’s the game. You don’t hit back, they keep slapping you around because you refuse to learn the rules.

Deep in your unindoctrinated brain, you know full well that we’re such pigs that all of us together are poisoning the planet, whether it’s in a motor boat out on the lake, or in an airplane, flying to an environmentally friendly vacation on a non-polluting sailboat in the Mediterranean. Pigs, baby, we’re pigs. Aren’t you a pig? I am, in a thousand ways. We were born like that. Being piggish is a survival instinct. Grow. Make yourself more. Your chances will be better.

Speaking of making yourself more, the big man, Mr. Gore, may be as wrong as I think he is, but this piggishness is still a problem. The Earth seems to be going through its natural paces. But Earth is doing it with the cancer called man metastasizing to every nook and cranny of the globe. It's everywhere, and the most threatening growth is not, at the moment, in the United States.

Fat Al or not, this is something we can’t close our eyes to. Unless we’re in China, where we have to. Both because it’s politically incorrect not to, and because if you don’t, you eyes will burn like hell from the pollution.

Oops! Come back here, you Libs, you careless, wanton lovers of humanity. You’re about to go to bed with someone who’s threatening to kill off everything you know and love. All you apologists for the Prince of Persia. Even he’s getting sick of you, by the way. He’s been slapping you around for years, and you keep finding another cheek to turn. He is amazed. He’s running out of latex gloves – he doesn’t want to touch you, he thinks you’re dirty. In fact, you homo-huggers, he thinks you’re about the worst segment of humanity on earth. Except for the one in Israel. It’s your acceptance of sodomy, of whoredom, of bastardry, of pornography, your disregard for the word of God, that makes you public enemy number one – the first ones who will be taken out and shot in Yankee Stadium if you don’t stop pretending this man doesn’t mean what he says, and doesn’t speak for the entire radical Islamist world when he says it.

So why don’t you red and blue teams send yourself to the cold showers, and wake up. When someone tells you to be afraid, don’t look at him, look at what he’s telling you to be afraid of, and judge for your own goddam self. Don’t dismiss it as a fear tactic. Fear tactics are hard to distinguish from genuine fears, and the way to tell them apart is not by looking at the color of the shouter’s shirt.