By G.D. Maxwell
At the risk of completely losing readership, here we go again... for the last time if that’s any consolation.
Sunday night, for the first time since the veil of darkness fell across the land south of the border nearly three years ago, I allowed myself to be optimistic. Watching Bush Lite dodge and weave, prevaricate and obfuscate, I wondered if I was the only one who had a sense he was staggering instead of swaggering. He looked worried, like a punchdrunk pugilist coming out of the fog and suddenly becoming conscious of the fact he just might lose this fight.
Not necessarily the fight in Iraq, although he wouldn’t be the first faux conqueror to be bushwhacked in the cradle of civilization, but the fight for re-election. Like his daddy before him, Junior’s squandering the goodwill of the people of the USofA at dizzying rates. The fact that Saddam’s out of power – though still lurking in the shadows like some malevolent boogieman – is scant succor to a population finally realizing this isn’t going to be some Hollywood slam dunk war.
The thing that just might send the prez back to Texas four years earlier than he ever imagined, and the rest of us had any right to hope, won’t be the body count intoned on the nightly news. It won’t be the criminal environmental record he’s racked up. It won’t be the sight of him having to suck up to the French and Germans and the ‘irrelevant’ United Nations to come help bail his sorry butt out of what’s shaping up to be Vietnam: The Sequel. It won’t be any sense of shame felt by my fellow countrymen over the utter contempt in which nearly every country in the world other than Great Britain now holds the U.S.
It’ll be the everlasting power of greed.
The wages of war, or at least the expense, are coming home to roost. Bush finally told the American people he didn’t have a clue what he was getting them into or how long it would take to get them out. He asked for 87 BILLION dollars to further prosecute the war and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, that other little hotbed of terrorism we’d almost forgotten about. This 87 billion didn’t include the 79 billion he asked for and got just a few months ago. That pocket change was just to get the war through this fiscal year, ending this month.
With a budget deficit – not debt, deficit, as in current year shortfall – already approaching HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS, a ‘recovery’ without jobs, an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, and a pack of Democratic hopefuls baying like bloodhounds on the trail of an escaped convict, the American people are finally beginning to wake up and realize Bill Clinton’s Oval Office blowjob wasn’t nearly as bad as the screwin’ Mr. Bush is layin’ on the whole country.
And like his daddy before him, once you start picking peoples’ pockets too deeply, once you threaten their lust for new SUVs and big screen TVs, well in the vernacular of Junior’s neck of the woods, "you in a heap o’ trouble, boy".
The fact that greed, unenlightened self interest, may be the force to hound a scoundrel out of an office he never should have been awarded in the first place, doesn’t elevate it out of the ranks of deadly sin or grant it pride of place in human endeavours. It’s still killing us.
So let’s get out of world of politics and bring it all back home to Whistler and the neverending quest for sustainability.
Good intentions aren’t enough. Slogans and words aren’t enough. The lessons to be learned from even a cursory study of propaganda, be it Goebbels, Bush, Campbell or council, is that you have to look behind the words to the actions and you have to understand the words themselves.
This council, like the one before it, with one lone, marginalized voice, says ‘sustainability’ and means ‘growth’. It buys into the corporate environmentalism of the Natural Step, it pays lip service to reducing our ‘footprint’ on the Earth and then gears up to support a satellite community of around 8,000 in the Callaghan, urged on by supposedly ‘green’ voices of notable AWAREists who, like all the rest of North America, want to live in bigger houses even it if means houses in the suburbs with a nice commute thrown in.
Sustainable? Sure it is, as long as sustainable means sustainable growth and we limit our time perspective to our own lives.
In the meantime, we’re dazzled with distractions like low-flow toilets. Get real. Low-flow toilets, while serving a real purpose in places like Phoenix, don’t even rise to the level of bread and circuses in Whistler. You want to flush less water, flush less often. If it’s yellow, let it mellow. Low-flow toilets are a good example, like recycling, of corporate environmentalism. Fill your landfill with perfectly good toilets, support ‘green’ manufacturing and give yerself a big pat on the back for doing your part.
"Did I just hear him diss recycling?"
In Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are , Robert Lilienfeld and William Rathje raise an interesting point – the only thing former civilizations who practiced recycling have in common is they’re all extinct.
Yes, recycling is good. But not if it’s just a convenient excuse to use more, and more harmful, stuff. Recycling is the weakest leg of the stool – reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling a million four-ounce tetrapaks of orange juice because you’re too lazy to pour juice into a reusable bottle for your kid to take to school isn’t much of a victory for sustainability.
The battle for sustainability, cleaner air, clean water, is fought – and will be won or lost – in your own head. Every day, many times a day, over and over. It’s a battle against Denis Diderot’s new bathrobe and the dissatisfaction you feel with your old ski jacket when you buy new skis. It’s the battle against feeling you’re a failure because you live in a hovel compared to the house on the hill which is, in turn, threatened by the hotel on the lake. It’s a fight against the weird logic of someone who craves the tranquillity and thrill of untracked powder and so buys a thousand cc, two-stroke snowmobile and a one-tonne pickup so he can enjoy it.
Most of all, it’s the fight against everything we’ve been brought up to believe is right. Consumption is not only good but vital to the economy. Bigger is better. Newer is nicer. Packaging is God. Use more, care less.
Depressingly, it’s a battle we’re not likely to win. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fought.
