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Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, has announced that he will not run for another term in the U.S. Senate. This must be sad news for Democrats, since Helms was one of their best fund-raisers.
Whenever he ran for re-election, the alarming
direct-mail pleas would go out across America, reaching
even registered Republicans in the empty middle of remote
Colorado. The letters always said something like Unless
Jesse Helms is defeated this November, racial segregation
will be re-legalized in the United States, homosexuals will
be rounded up and put in concentration camps, the United
Nations will go bankrupt and the ozone hole will be bigger
than Jupiter. The only way we can stop Helms and his
regressive agenda is with your small $5,000 contribution
...
None of those dire consequences came to pass, of course. I never sent any money, but the Chicken Little appeal must have worked on quite a few people, because such letters appeared regularly.
Helms will be missed for many other reasons, though. The Democrats can always find another bogey-man, just as the Republicans have managed to replace Rep. Pat Schroeder with Sen. Hillary Clinton as the Official Mouthy Woman Who Threatens All That We Hold Dear.
But who can replace Helms as America's leading media hypocrite? Helms was always ranting about the Biased Liberal Media, as though there were a conspiracy to silence him. But would you have ever even have heard of him without the Biased Liberal Media, which made him a national figure?
Of course not. And where did Helms work before he got
on the public payroll? At WRAL, a television station in
Raleigh, N.C. -- as a commentator. Without the
media
that he loved to denounce, he wouldn't have had a
political career.
It's not hard to find other hypocrites, though. One of my favorites was Phyllis Schlafly, who flew around America speaking at rallies, where she said that women should stay home.
I once asked one of her supporters why Ms. Schlafly couldn't just take her own advice and stay home and keep her mouth shut. The reply was that somebody has to get the word out.
That was similar to the reply I got when I asked much
the same question to a fan of Roderick Nash. Nash, who
wrote Wilderness and the American Mind,
once spoke
in Gunnison, where I heard him.
With great eloquence, he explained that full legal protections should be extended to microbes and rocks, as we Americans were trashing the planet by consuming like sailors on shore leave.
But before he started his formal talk, Nash talked about how much he liked the Gunnison Country. The family had a second home in Crested Butte, which they liked to visit when they weren't sailing in the Pacific Ocean aboard their private boat. He also traveled extensively by jet -- you know, those devices which consume lots of fossil fuel while disrupting the ozone layer that protects all life on earth from destructive ultra-violet solar radiation.
All that consumption was necessary, of course, for him to get the word out: We need to tread lightly on the earth. That is, we rabble needed to tread lightly. Nash's message, like Schlafly's, is presumably too important to be taken seriously by the speaker.
The environmental movement is rife with similar contradictions. At hand is an envelope designed to look as though it had been hand-addressed, although closer inspection shows that the address was produced by a computer.
It came from the Sierra Club. Much of the You must
respond immediately
propaganda, including two pictures
of arctic wildlife, is printed with soy ink on recycled
paper, although the enclosed decal (show your support
for wildlands protection!
) and official membership card
(protect America's imperiled natural treasures
)
appear to be made of plastic.
But even if everything in the envelope was made of wholesome green recycled and recyclable material, it still took energy to process them and assemble them and deliver them. In other words, the environmental group is consuming petroleum to get me to sign a petition against drilling for petroleum in Alaska.
Maybe that makes sense to somebody -- someone who could
also explain a fat 9-ounce envelope that came from the
Wilderness Society. It contained eight gorgeous photos of
areas that might be invaded by drilling rigs, along with a
handsome folder and a dozen pages of background material
about various Four Corners parcels that are Too Wild to
Drill.
And just how much petroleum was consumed in this effort to persuade columnists to write about how important it was to lobby congress to vote against the Bush administration's energy bill? Did it equal the amount of media time and space that Jesse Helms used, over the years, to rant against the media? Somebody's got to come up with a way to measure these things.
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