Fiddling about Global Warming while Terrorism Burns

After years of trying to insist that terrorism was a) our fault b) an exaggerated myth c) kills less people a year than cancer d) would go away if we just apologized to everyone, liberals have realized that the best way to distract from a real crisis isn't to pretend that it isn't there, but to promote a larger phony crisis to distract attention from it while serving their own ideological aims.

If the War on Terror was concerned with the petty deaths of thousands or millions or the welfare of the Free World, the War on Global Warming was to be concerned with nothing more and nothing less than the destruction of the world. Little else could be expected from a cause so heavily identified with Hollywood and most widely promoted through a movie. After all if there is one thing that Hollywood has it's a flair for the dramatic and a talent for distracting people with the absurd.

Forget about suitcase bombs in your cities, the Global Warming industry cries, pretty soon the whole world will be underwater and we'll all have to grow gills and wear sunscreen all day to survive.

Every millennium seems to have its millennial terrors and while Hollywood has stolidly ignored the real dangers of terrorism (except when making box office bombs depicting the evils of the government for fighting it) it has embraced the idea of global warming as the doom of the 21st century. If in the 20th century Hollywood expected us to be terrified of the West's nuclear defenses against the USSR's ICBM arsenals, in the 21st century we're expected to be terrified of non-recyclable consumer products.

"Help Ma, that detergent is contributing to global warming." "Every sandwich you eat kills Polar Bears." "If you leave that lamp on in the morning, the earth will melt in the sun."

Hollywood has been in the business of terrifying Americans for a long time and the crazed towering Al Gore is certainly tinseltown's scariest monster in a long time. But still a conceptual crisis based on the premise that the world will be destroyed under a wave of melting ice for its transgressions against And while Liberal dogma is scary, it has a long way to go before it can outdraw Frankenstein or Osama or even Obama.

But a distraction doesn't necessarily have to succeed to fulfill its purpose. The very focus on rebutting global warming alone diverts energy from the War on Terror and keeps the debate going. The political ideology of global warming doesn't have to win in order to be victorious, it just has to become the focus of our attention. If global warming advocates can keep us fiddling while terrorist groups and terrorist nations are given the time and space to develop and deploy nuclear weapons, they can go on fiddling while our cities burn.