Double, Double, Oil and Trouble

At first I was puzzled by Bentley's choice of topics. You see, I'm supposed to be the conservative foil to Mr. White's New Democratism. Indeed, White has appropriately taken on the blogonym "Leviathan", putting him in close company with everybody's favorite 17th-century New Dem', Thomas Hobbes. As for me, I admit I'm guilty of a certain kind of conservatism. For one thing, I objected to White being added as a contributor to this blog. Too hasty a change, I said. Will incite the proles. Nevertheless, I tend rather toward the Bull Moose on certain issues, which puts me in the interesting position of playing the tree-hugging progressive (?!?) to Mr. White's reactionary centrism. Truly a stroke of Bentleyian postmodern genius. So before I dive in, I just want to say kudos to our iconoclastic moderator for 'undermining privileged discourses of power and problematizing false binaries' in a manner befitting a Lit Crit. major at Stanford.


So.......energy, eh?

Let me start by saying it's nice to hear that Mr. White is so amicable to the Republican plan to drill for oil in ANWR. Its high time we saw some bipartisan support for bringing huge MNCs and hundreds of thousands of tons of wrought steel into federally protected pristine wilderness. If Mr. White likes the filibuster-immune 2003 budget rider on which the drilling plan is predicated so much, I've got another one for him: H.R. 1912 "A Resolution to Pry Open Teddy Roosevelt's Casket and Squeeze out a Cleveland Steamer on His Chest."

But let's be fair. I'm sure Mr. White's support for ANWR drilling is contingent on a few conditions. (1) The rig operators and Caribou-relocation engineers must be closed-shop union represented, (2) Nobody on site must be forced, asked, or allowed to pray to or mention the name of God Almighty or any lesser deity, and (3) Anybody who knows and/or likes Dick Cheney must be excluded from profit.

I take a cue from Dennis Miller when I say that I, for one, think drilling in Alaska makes about as much sense as Odin blowing Margeret Fuller at the Hartford Convention. And as for the perpetual drinky-birds, I quote the Tao of Homer (beer not epics): "In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics."

So what of alternatives? I think White misses the big picture when he bemoans the Mideast Oil-War nexus. The idea is that petroleum is made out of long-since-dead things. So more dead things, more oil. And these Islamic fundamentalists aren't killing themselves...er...right.....(bad excuse for a bad joke: "Is that an RPG in your pocket, or are you just Wahhabi to see me?). In the meantime, we can conserve by confiscating all the H2's in this country and issuing their owners vouchers for penis-enlargement surgery and hair plugs.

As for more long-term solutions, I jotted down a few things the Democrats might donate to burn instead of fossil fuel:

1. Red tape
2. Howard Dean
3. Copies of the Starr Report whose pages are hopelessly stuck together
4. Their souls
5. American flags
6. Clinton's "bridge to the twenty-first century"
7. Ted Kennedy's liver (who needs cold fusion?)
8. Pork barrels
9. Howard Dean's charred remains
10. "terminated" Fetuses (Fetii?)

Perhaps Mr. White can pass it along to Terry McAullife at the next DNC meeting miles below Cambridge, Mass in the bowels of Harvard college.

But, of course, if it's truly 'clean, alternative' power we're looking for, we might take a cue from our friend House Resolution 1912. Let's tap the graves of Jefferson and Adams and Lincoln, and hook the old boys up to generators. Surely, they're spinning fast and often enough to keep us all up in SUVs and tanning beds till Kingdom Come.

-The Lorax.