Al
Gore: ‘To The Ramparts Of Reason!’
By Martin LeFevre
10 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
You have to hand it to Al Gore
for chutzpah. He voted for Gulf War I, which paved the way for George
W. Bush and Gulf War II, and nearly destroyed the United Nations. Now
“the Goracle” lectures the American people for their “lack
of outcry” about the second Gulf War, decrying the “Assault
on Reason” that he sees as the root of our present morass and
malaise.
Al Gore obviously sees himself,
as do many of his erstwhile supporters, as a victim of something that
has gone “terribly wrong in America.” But in fact he was
the historical pivot upon which our long punishment under Bush Junior
turned.
Not because of Gore’s
ineptly run 2000 campaign, or his naïve post-election strategy
that virtually conceded Florida without a fight. It goes back to 1991,
when Gore voted for the first Gulf war, taking just enough senators
with him to give Bush Senior the Congress (and with it, the implicit
support of the American people).
Gulf War I was the straw
that broke the American spirit, though at the time our glorious victory
in Iraq was celebrated with parades in many cities. The ensuing years
of spiritual and emotional deadness has little to do with the “assault
on reason,” except that when a people perish, rational thought
in the public forum becomes impossible.
A recent picture of a pasty-faced
Gore in Time magazine, standing behind his wife Tipper, gives me the
heebie-jeebies. He looks like the embodiment of American zombification,
which not only made George Bush possible, but also made the Democratic
Congress retire to their coffins recently rather than deny funding for
“our troops.”
As novelist Ian McEwan has
said, “all virtuous positions have been used up in Iraq; there
are no great virtues in leaving or staying.” True, and that is
precisely the metaphysical trap.
The propagandistic lies of
Gulf War II have been exposed. Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant, but
there is no virtue in war. (The use of force to stop genocide or prevent
conflict from spreading is not war.) War is evil, except in self-defense,
and one evil cannot correct another.
“In order to solve
the climate crisis,” Gore intones, “we have to bring reason
and logic back into the American process.” Setting aside his American
ethnocentrism for the moment, “these perceived causes are actually
a symptom of a much deeper crisis,” to use Gore’s own words.
Reason is not what fires people; rather, what fires people finds, with
true leadership, rational expression.
“Our democracy is in
danger of being hollowed out,” Gore says. For someone who prides
himself on being ahead of the curve (the Internet and climate change
for example), Gore is way behind on this one. Our democracy was gutted
before the Bush Administration slithered up through its rotting foundations,
and Gore was integral to the cratering, both before and during the Clinton
years.
Though “The Assault
on Reason” is ostensibly about “the diminishing role of
reason…[causing] the systemic decay of the public forum,”
it has turgid undertones of romanticism, with a thick coating of American
exceptionalism. “The intrepid migrants who ventured across the
Atlantic carried the potent seeds of the Enlightenment and planted them
in the fertile soil of the New World.”
Gore beats a broken drum
with his frequent references to the philosophy of America’s Founders.
The old mythologies cannot resonate in a people that have perished,
and mean little to de facto members of the global polity, to which all
of us now belong.
“Our Founder’s
insights are just as relevant today as they were more than 200 years
ago,” sayest the Goracle. But that’s simply untrue. The
American Founders’ set of “universal values and ideas”
does not apply in a global society. Besides, present-day hyper-commercialized
America is the logical end of Hamilton’s worldview (Jefferson
lost the debate long ago).
More importantly, the Enlightenment’s
belief in reason as the cornerstone of humankind’s social and
political progress has become a cynical joke in the wake of evil’s
game of one-upmanship on the Bush-Blair/Al Qeda battlefield in Iraq--the
primary theatre of “the global war on terror.”
The Enlightenment philosophers
were wrong, and the Enlightenment is a misnomer. The human spirit and
brain have another capacity, far greater and more important than reason—the
capacity for insight. With insight, there is passion and reason; but
when thought and reason reign, insight and passion wither away, as they
have in America.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.