Notable & Quotable: A Message to Al Gore

"You do not deserve the [Nobel] Peace Prize. The Ladies in White in Cuba do, the Monks in Burma do. Learn some humility from them and RETURN the prize already." — Charlie Bravo, "My Message to Al Gore," Black Sheep of Exile, October 13, 2007

I never asked Al Gore to return his Nobel Peace Prize; but now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense. An isolated act does not make an honorable man. Still, he has to start somewhere and it's late in the game. This gesture, at least, would show the world that he respects human suffering more than he does his own whining, and values humans themselves more than his father the tree. Those who confuse abstractions for truths will in time forget what truth is and fasten their hopes to the abstractions. If such a thing as global warning exists, there would be no more reason to consider it a threat than a blessing. In fact, life tends to prosper where warmth prevails and decline where cold does. One of the world's oldest jokes is the Vikings' name for the huge frozen island atop Denmark — Greenland. Yet the joke is not so funny anymore. In fact, it is no joke at all anymore. We are living in the age of the greening of Greenland. If this is any indication of what the future holds, global warming, supposing such a thing exists, could be the greatest boon that ever befell this planet. Nevertheless, Gore and his co-religionists have evolved their own brand of secular Christian Science and Seventh-Day Adventism which is at heart a millenarian cult for the New Age. 30 years ago Gore and his ilk thought that the planet would die from overpopulation: too few resources and too many mouths at the table. These even breaker Malthusians were wrong. What happened, on the contrary, at least in the places they inhabited — that is, the West — was a precipitous drop in the birth rate which threatens to wipe out within another 50 years the tribe of Goths and Huns, indeed, most of Western Europe. Too worried about Indians and Chinese reproducing, they stopped reproducing themselves; the Arabs and Africans took up the slack in their very countries and now democratic Europe will belong to them in 50 years if Europe remains democratic. What was forestalled at Lepanto has been consummated without wars or unacceptable levels of social upheaval in three generations. Bush is refighting the Crusades when the demographic war has already been lost and the crusaders are in full retreat. If ever there was a scenario that invited Westerners to "Make Love Not War," this is it.

So, no, Al Gore's fantasies about the earth are no more tenable than any other Utopian's conceptions of the future. Gore is a Utopian, too, but his dream, like the superannuated dream of the Marxists, cannot be realized except by turning the world on its head and the consequent headache is likely to last for decades while the world again sorts out the eternal verities.

Spare the world the trouble, Al Gore, and renounce your ridiculous pretensions to relevancy; decline the award, or, at least, dedicate it to those like the Cuban dissidents who actually believe that peace is possible, that a better world is possible; not those, like yourself, who are actually counting on the destruction of the world through climactic changes as a vindication of your improvisations on a "Brave New World."

Al Gore has until December 10, 2007, the date of the Awards Ceremony, to reconsider whether he should decline the Nobel Peace Prize. Too bad the Nobel Committee doesn't have until then to re-consider its award.