MT. PINATUBO BAR & GRILL

On June 15, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo erupted on an island in the Philippines. The eruption sent millions of tons of sulfur dioxide and poisons into the atmosphere that resulted in persistent atmospheric effects some three years after its eruption.

I ask you how it is that Al Gore can make his way all the way from a defeated presidential candidate to the stage of the Academy Awards ceremony and not mention this fact. Global warming is all our fault instead, you see.

Yet in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, Mr. Gore travels all over the globe in airliners that emit gasses from burning fossil fuels in order to popularize our irresponsible lifestyles. But did anyone bother to consult whether nature itself is to blame in large part for the fact that the Earth just ain’t what it used to be?

Nope, you will never hear a word about nature any more. It’s all somebody’s fault. Somebody, somewhere is to blame for every little thing that goes on in this world that somehow even remotely causes the world to tilt ever so slightly away from the Mayberry vision that the storybooks told us it ought to be.

Of course, this phenomenon should come as no surprise to anyone. After all, being victimized for everything that goes on in the world is something that our culture demands of us. Call it Reverse Darwiniansim: People with the least amount of information will conquer the minds of those who are even less informed. Repeat, repeat, repeat; hammer in the message over and over again. Hire a good content manager, slap together some nice Powerpoint presentations, and oh, be sure to lose the tie. Try not to look too bourgeois. Appeal to the masses instead. Keep on message.

The phenomenon of believing anything coincides perfectly with the uber-rich and their penchant for conspicuously dining over fattened lamb shank with a fine fennel sauce, a scoop of risotto, and two carrots that make you wonder if they were not intended instead for decoration. For the rich, eating out is not about being hungry. It is a show. It is about being seen in precisely the same way that the master spinners of faux news for the nouveau-informed convince us that anything other than the Mt. Pinatubo’s of the world aren’t really a factor in the Earth’s own natural ebb and flow.

And yet, the magic and mystery behind the phenomenon of believe now- pay later, is that we passively relegate our lives to the powerful and let them decide for us what to believe. We write a blank check to them to produce and direct our behaviors, ideas, and values in return for a safe, warm and fuzzy feeling as we sit clutching our can of Chef Boyardee pasta while feeling grateful that we have been told that there are absolutes in this world that everyone agrees on. Yes, everyone, except for the folks who are clunking glasses and toasting the naivete of the huddled masses. They go home after dinner and plan their next assault on our patchwork of various and sundry collected parts of the media that we have passively adopted into our psyche.

And while you watch the reruns of Al Gore collecting that Oscar, remember that he rode on to the scene conspicuously in a Toyota Prius, while Toyota is having record breaking profits and American auto makers are laying people off. The media scores another one on us while overlooking this inconvenient lie.

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