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WEATHER OR NOT …
BY PETER KURTH (published 11.01.06)
Hey, can we talk about the weather this week? I don’t
mean “global warming,” which people talk about a lot, even
though nothing seems to get done about it. I’m sure you, like
all of us, are doing everything in your power, in your little bitty way, to
prevent the looming calamity of climate change, such as switching your
light bulbs and walking 40 miles to work each day. But let’s
face it – until the whole screeching, screaming, over-producing,
mass-consuming culture of predatory capitalism comes crashing down around
us, this planet’s going to keep on heating up. And the best
thing I can say about that is that we’ll get to blame the
Chinese when we pass the tipping point, because they’re so incredibly
irresponsible with their greenhouse gas emissions. I mean, really
– is a booming economy worth that much?
Think about it.
Or, rather, don’t. When
I say I want to talk about the weather, I mean I want to talk about it the
way people do when they don’t want to talk about something
else. It’s like when they say, “How are you?”
And you say, “I’m fine.” And they say,
“Me, too.” It doesn’t mean a thing.
It’s just a way of talking about nothing, when, in fact, you’ve
probably got terrible things going on in your life. Let’s say
you’ve just lost your job, or run over a cat, or found your wife in
bed with another woman – your sister, maybe – and you’d
do anything, absolutely anything, to enter that state of
“denial” everyone tells you you’re already in if
you’re dumb enough to let things get beyond the “How are you?”
point.
Well, talking about the weather is the same as saying,
“I’m fine,” only better, because people are constantly
surprised by the weather. They really are. It doesn’t
matter how hot it is, or cold, or wet, or dry. It doesn’t
matter how old they are or how many times they’ve seen the sun rise and
the rain fall and the snow fly. It’s like sex scandals in Washington – everyone’s amazed that
such a thing could be happening. It’s always news to
them. So talking about the weather is the very best thing to avoid
talking about something else.
Dick Cheney, for example. Nobody wants to talk about Dick Cheney, and if
you talk about the weather instead you’ll never have to do it. You won’t have to talk about Cheney’s response
last week to a right-wing radio host in North Dakota, who asked him, in reference to real or
imagined “terrorists” in American custody, if he thought
“a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives.”
Cheney answered, “Well, it’s a no-brainer for me,” and
wow! – did the winds blow hard after that! Why, things got so
bad that Cheney’s protégé, George W. Bush, actually got off his
rocking-horse and said, “This country doesn’t
torture!” Even though it does and everyone knows it does, and
even though Bush has already made it plain that he’s going to keep on
torturing anyone he wants, `cuz he’s the
decider, see, the commander-in-chief, and it’s his job to –
well, you know the rest.
Anyway, Cheney never used the word “waterboarding.”
He absolutely did not! That word never came out of Dick
Cheney’s mouth! “You know as a matter of common sense
that the vice president of the United States is not going to be talking
about waterboarding,” said White House
spokesman Tony Snow in his effort to contain this particular, um,
flood. “Never would, never does, never will. You think
Dick Cheney’s going to slip up on something like this? No, come
on.”
Right, come on! Dick Cheney only slips up down in quail
country, when he has a shotgun in his hand and too much bourbon in his
belly. No one explains what’s meant by “a dunk in
water,” of course – “A dunk in water is a dunk in
water,” says Snow – but I suspect it has something to do with
tossing Muslims into Guantánamo Bay and seeing if they can swim to Miami without getting eaten by sharks.
In hurricane season (you see what I mean about the weather?).
And it isn’t surprising that Cheney won’t talk about waterboarding, because Cheney doesn’t talk about
anything that he’s secretly up to. He’s had this written
into the Constitution, I think. And Cheney’s wife, Lynn, never
wrote a steamy lesbian novel, either – “No,” she told
Wolf Blitzer on CNN, “not necessarily. This description is a
lie. I’ll stand on that” -- even though her steamy lesbian
novel, Sisters, contains passages like these: “Let us go
away together, away from the anger and the imperatives of men. …
There will be only the two of us … twin streams merging into a single
river." But there aren’t any “obscenities” in
it, if you follow, not like those filthy Democrats who write war novels
that “demean women.” No, ma’am!
So trust me – the weather’s your best bet if you want to
avoid any topic of importance. Congressional elections coming up next
week? Who cares – we’ve got snow in October!
Homosexuals stampeding to New Jersey to get married? So what – it
gets dark these days at 4 pm! Iraq and all the Middle East exploding before your eyes? Get a
life – somewhere in the world it’s still hot and humid, even in
November. Now that’s
obscene.
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