There are two reasons why Al Gore made An Inconvenient Truth.  The first is that he wanted to bring attention to a global crisis.  I don’t know what the second reason is, but I know there is one.

After Al Gore lost the 2000 election, he disappeared from the public eye for several months, only to reappear unexpectedly sporting a manly beard, not unlike Star Trek’s Commander Riker.  Disreputable journalists suggested that perhaps he had gone Up The Mountain for a cleansing vision quest, seeking a way to renew his purpose in life.  Turns out, they may have been right.

Fast-forward beyond a few quiet years for Gore and a few disastrous years for almost everyone else, and you have the year 2006 and the Powerpoint presentation/movie An Inconvenient  Truth.  When critics talk about An Inconvenient Truth, they often use phrases like, “a shocking eye-opener” and “a dreadful wake-up call”.  Now, I suppose it is generally assumed that these phrases are intended to refer to Gore’s explanation of the impending destruction of the world’s climate at the hands of  mankind.  But I don’t see why that’s surprising.  Anyone who wasn’t already aware that the environment was on the verge of total collapse must be a charter member of the Voluntary Retards Club.  What, did you sleep through the environmentalist movement of the early 1990s?  Or were you just too busy driving around aimlessly for hours on $0.99 a gallon?

But I, too, left An Inconvenient Truth feeling very surprised.  Not because of global warming or approaching climatic chaos, I knew those were coming; but because I learned that Al Gore is interesting.  This was a genuine shock, requiring a quick debate (and a round or three) at the pub next door to the theatre.  I’m sure some of you are old enough to remember that, back when he was Vice President, everyone in America thought Gore was duller than the Home & Garden Network.  Maybe it was partly in comparison to the hyperactive Clintons, but not totally, because we thought he was boring when he ran for president, too. Hell, I even bought one of those Nader T-shirts that said, “Bush and Gore make me wanna Ralph.”

Why am I bringing up old shit now?  I’ll tell you why.  Because An Inconvenient Truth just proved to me that Al Gore spent a lot of years holding out on us.   All of a sudden, out of seemingly nowhere, Gore has become charming, charismatic, intelligent, well-spoken, funny, and dedicated to rescuing the whole fucking planet.  He suddenly looks like a really great guy.  The 2000 election was easy enough to deal with when we thought he was just a boring fucker with no better alternative.  But now he’s cool?  Where was this when we needed it?

Al Gore, the real inconvenient truth is that you tricked us into thinking you sucked.  But now we know better.

Here’s the thing about Gore: he’s turned himself back into a wild card. Plenty of people fade into obscurity (what’s Dennis Kucinich up to these days?), and our society is accustomed to that.  But Gore’s returned from the edge of oblivion, and this is the kind of comeback that has the potential to be big.  It’s intelligent.  It’s blunt.  It’s devoid of racism or big money or deceptive false evidence to justify mystifying agendas.  It’s the opposite of all the stuff that the American people are sick of.  It’s saying, “Hey, humans!  Put down your ground-to-air bazookas for a minute and help me patch up the climate, ferfucksake!”

It just might work, Mr. Surprise Candidate.

At this point, someone’s going to call me cynical and suggest that perhaps Gore really does want nothing more than to selflessly save the world.  Sure.  Fine.  If that’s really the case, then I’ll help start the Cult of Gore and write scriptures and treatises on the holiness and divinty of reducing CO2 emissions, and usher in a new age for all earthlings.  But  it’s more likely that he’s getting ready for an interesting Election 2008.

Journalists salivate over Election 2008 because it’s going to be a bloodbath.  Bush can’t run again, and Cheney’s too dead to run.  Shortly after the midterms, we’re going to see ruthless cage-match combat in each party’s territory for about a year before the two parties even get around to attacking each other.  In the Republican camp it’ll be Moderate vs. Swine, and in the Democratic camp it’ll be like a game of Smash Brothers.  But who’s ready?  Obama may be a bit young yet. Hillary needs to make up her mind.  Kerry needs to sit the fuck down.  John Edwards… has good hair and a friendly accent.  And maybe, in the meantime, Al Gore is going to work on saving the planet.  And that’s either selfless and wonderful, or very politically shrewd.

Mark my words, the new trend for the absurdly rich in 2009 will be adopting displaced baby polar bears.

On a planet of six and a half billion humans, Upper-Middle Class White America is doing its part to make the population explosion even worse. You’ve got be kidding me.

So: the firm I’m currently temping for decided to take a four-day weekend, and, since I’m not one to leave the house before noon if I don’t have to, I found myself on the couch watching NBC’s Today Show. If you’ve never watched the Today Show, only the first fifteen minutes are worth it. That’s when they get all their relevant stories about current events and politics and interviews with John McCain in. The rest of the three-hour onslaught is mostly romance tips, cutesy banter, and concerts by that Nick guy that married Jessica Simpson. At this point I should probably mention that I don’t have cable at the moment.

Anyway.

Half-asleep, I actually watched some of the fluff this morning, and learned something that, while it was packaged as cutesy family trend blather, should have appeared right between the latest Baghdad roadside bombing and predictions of the upcoming Category 47 Hurricane Jones. It appears, according to this morning’s Today Show, that the current trend in white upper-middle class America is now to pop out an average of three children per household. Do a little arithmetic, and that’s two humans, making an average of three more, per “traditional” marriage. On a planet with a human population of around six and a half billion. This is probably a problem.

There are statistics involved, which I’m not going to bother looking up, because a bubbly “expert” was on hand to explain. She specifically explained that this was the “new affluence”, and that, among well-off suburban Americans, a flock of screaming munchkins are now considered “status symbols.” As in, “I make so much money I can afford to feed all of these things, and eventually buy them cars and put them through college.” Christ, if anyone other than Angelina Jolie considered adopting starving African kids as status symbols, that continent’s under-ten population would relocate to Maine and Delaware overnight.

The trend seems especially strange to me, as I had been operating under the assumption that the two primary goals of Americans in the 20-to-35 category were 1.) writing Dave Eggers-esque memoirs, and 2.) making whiskey cool again. However, I suppose it makes a certain sick kind of sense. You can kick a trophy wife to the curb anytime. But a trophy kid is going to be a burden for a minimum of eighteen years, and usually more like thirty. You’ve really got to be rich to pull off that shit.

So, Trophy Wives are now popping out Trophy Children, because suddenly Hummers just aren’t cool anymore. We can thank high fuel prices for that one more than we can any amount of environmentalism or common sense, but just when you thought Mother Nature might get a break without going all Noah’s Ark on us, now it’s time for a fucking overbreeding crisis. Because America, other than some of the bars I like on a Friday night, is not overpopulated. But the resource consumption of one American is equal to that of like three thousand people from India, and that means that any increase in our populace is potentially as worrisome as when China passed the one billion marker. It also means Al Gore may need to make another movie.

I should mention that this trend is not universal to all Americans. For example, after the Today Show, I flipped to an episode of Maury Povich which featured Telia, a woman who’s appeared on the program eight times, and genetically tested ten different men to find out if they’re the father of her child. Each man, upon learning that he was not the father, jumped and shouted with blissful euphoria, high-fiving the audience. So, happily, not everyone is interested in further fueling the population explosion. Telia, your tears are a ray of hope.

There is a bright side to this, I suppose. Namely that, after the horrors of the absurdly cocky (post-WWII) Baby Boomers, expectations were that all Social Security money for Generation X and my own marginally later generation (Gen-X Part 2, The Revenge) was going to be used up, and none of us would ever get to retire. Well, with the first baby boom of the 21st century, if those little fucks are going to swarm the workforce and make me obsolete in my fifties, then at least there will be enough of them to pay for my Social Security and Medicare and robotic respiratory implants. Though it’ll be interesting to see how they manage to get to work without oil.

Watching daytime TV is basically a bad idea, so I’ll turn it off now, but not before mentioning that for as long as I can remember, Bob Barker has ended every episode of The Price is Right with the phrase, “Help control the pet population; have your pets spayed or neutered.” So I’ll close this article with, “Help control the human population; put a fucking rubber on your willy.”