“AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH” (2006)

Starring: Al Gore
Directed by Davis Guggenheim

Polly Staffle Rating: *

Dear Al Gore,

Inconvenient truth or dare?

Okay buddy, you asked for it.

Inconvenient truth number one: Your movie sucks. Why is that inconvenient? You wasted 100 minutes of my time. Instead of getting something constructive done, I watched a self-righteous, egotistical propaganda film. Who am I kidding; I probably wouldn’t have done anything constructive, but I could have watched close to ten episodes of “Aqua Teen Huger Force” in that time.

Inconvenient truth number two: You want to know why your movie sucks? It’s because you’re boring. You present some interesting facts, but you could suck the life out of a My Chemical Romance concert with your stage presence. Don’t quit your White House day job to try your hand at acting. Oh, that’s right. You don’t have a White House day job any more.

Inconvenient truth number three: Not only is your mockumentary a waste of time, it’s also the most offensive piece of garbage I’ve seen since “The March of the Penguins.” People are just getting used to the idea of actually leaving their house and paying money to see documentaries in a theater. “Penguins” is the second highest grossing documentary of all time and “An Inconvenient Truth” is third. If audiences get duped too many more times, I’m afraid the genre will revert back to strictly DVD viewings.

Now, before I get too deep into this letter, I also wanted to point out a few things. I didn’t vote for you, but I didn’t vote for George Bush either. I voted for Bill Clinton twice and then voted for Ralph Nadar. I boycotted the last election as not a single candidate said what I wanted to hear - “Iraq was a mistake, Afghanistan was a mistake, the troops are coming home the day after I am elected and we will stop bullying other countries.” I felt the need to bring this up so you don’t instantly write me off as a conservative Republican. I don’t care about religion or money. I care about people and the economical and physical situations they live in. Don’t blame me for the presidential election. People said a vote for Nadar was essentially a vote for Bush, but I disagree. A vote for Nadar was a vote for Nadar and I would do it over again. You essentially ran the election as a Republican and distanced yourself away from the man that made you vice president. You lost the election and have no one to blame, but yourself. The same goes for John Kerry. I truthfully hope neither of you try to run in 2008 or I may have to not vote again. I could get behind Hillary Clinton though, unless she decides to play wussy Republicrat games.

So back to the little documentary. Most critics praised the movie and said “run, don’t walk” to see it. After watching it, I’m not sure why. It’s an extremely boring watch with no entertainment value. You basically lecture the audience the length of the film and there is nothing revolutionary about what you say. You are basically saying over and over that it is hot, getting hotter and if nothing is done, it will create catastrophic problems. There’s no talk of what can be or should be done. So at its core, “An Inconvenient Truth” is a lot like Nelly’s song “Hot in Here,” only the played-out rapper with a band aid on his face for street cred actually offers a solution. “It’s gettin hot in here... So take off all your clothes,” goes the chorus. Look... We know global warming is for real. We feel it every year as the temperature rises. We feel the freaky changes in the Earth’s climate and know we’ve pissed off Mother Nature when mega storms rip through our cities to disrupt and destroy lives.

What I needed your movie to tell me was why it is happening and what I can do to make a difference. Neither of these are discussed. That’s because “An Inconvenient Truth” is not about solving any problems. It’s all about scaring the hell out of us, which is always every politician’s favorite thing to do. The other reason is, truthfully, we as individuals are not the ones that can make any changes happen. We are all powerless. Your lectures to the public are the equivalent of a football team’s injured offensive lineman chewing out the fans in the stands at a game about the team sucking. He’s not necessarily in the position to lead his team to victory because he’s not in the game and if he gets back on the field, he still isn’t the quarterback or the running back. But he still has more influence and can make a bigger difference than the fans can in the outcome of a single game and a season.

The last time I checked, I didn’t own an oil corporation, an airline, a car company, a billion dollar farm and meat processing factory, Wal-Mart, a huge monopolized power plant and the list goes on and on. (By the way, why aren’t all cars on the market hybrid? While I’m at it, what ever happened to solar energy? Oh, no money in having electricity and cars run off of free energy from the sun. I see.) Anyway, the last time I checked I also wasn’t even a politician, a lowly self-made millionaire or a rocket scientist that worked for NASA. All of these guys I’ve mentioned are the people you need to go after. Those are the guys that can make a difference. They are not only the biggest contributors to the environment’s demise, but are also the people that can do something about it. But why would they want to share any money or knowledge to fix the problem when they are making way too much money off the true culprits? It’s their cars, plane rides, meat, electricity, gasoline and never ending supply of materialistic garbage they sell us. You want the inconvenient truth about what’s destroying our planet? It’s consumerism, capitalism and the government.

Me driving my car to and from work every day so I can struggle to make ends meet isn’t destroying the Earth. You want me to think it is, but it just isn’t so. I found a calculator online that allowed me to tally a few things as far as CO2 emissions to prove my point. An average car emits 3.00 metric tons of CO2 per every 10,000 miles. Currently I live 19 miles from work, so I don’t make it to 3.00 metric tons until 526 days. A flight from Washington to Afghanistan emits 3.33 metric tons and Washington to Iraq is about 2.93. I’m not sure what the emissions are on a bomb, but I doubt those are good for the environment as they sure as hell aren’t good for people. Since you aren’t currently in the White House, let’s look at numbers that hit closer to home. In “An Inconvenient Truth” you have the audacity to shame the viewer about global warming, while there is footage of you boarding what appears to be a private jet, so you can fly all over the world to give your little science fair presentation. So, let’s see... A roundtrip of Washington to Los Angeles emits .80 of CO2. Four trips of that cross country trek is roughly equal to a year and a half of me and my car going back and fourth to work. Since I don’t know where exactly your travels have taken you, I’ll use .80 as the average. You said in the film, you’ve done the lecture over 1,000 times. That’s 800 metric tons of CO2 you personally have accounted for just in your travels to present your speech to people that do not own jet planes. If I personally had a hand in emitting 3.00 a year, it will take me 267 years to reach 800 metric tones with my gas guzzling, Earth destroying, non-hybrid car. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to point the finger at you. I’m simply trying to show you that you’re barking up the wrong tree.

The other thing that offends me about this cinematic editorial is how you play up the “humankind card” with such a holier than thou attitude. I too would like there to be a livable planet Earth for my children and my children’s children and their children’s children, etc. But I also think before we worry about the future generations that have yet to be born, why don’t we take a hard look at the people that are here now and make their living conditions better? Yes, I realize if the ice caps completely melt there will be millions of people displaced and it will be a terrible situation. At the same time, there are millions of people now that are homeless in our own country. According to a 2004 report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, as many as 3.5 million people are likely to experience homelessness within any given year. As many as 1.35 million of them are children. That’s in the United States alone. Who knows how many people are without shelter on an international scale. It is obviously fairly high though as UNICEF estimates there are 30,000 children dying each day, mostly due to conditions of poverty.

It’s not just the homeless that suffer. We the poor have it better than them, but we could still use some improvements. By the way, there’s a hell of a lot of us. Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau of 2005 show that about 37.0 million people, roughly 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, live below the poverty line. And we know those numbers are actually skewed because the poverty threshold is $19,971 for a family of four. In reality though, a single person making as much as $30,000 a year, which is way above the minimum wage, still struggles to keep their head up. That’s not enough to own a house and a new car in most major cities and that is about what the majority of the population makes. The median personal income data for Americans that are age 25 and up shows males average $39,403 annually and females $26,507. That includes the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich. When’s the last time you were making that little of money Mr. Gore?

I ask again, inconvenient truth or dare? Take the dare. Donate each and every nickel you make in 2007 to the poor, the starving, the jobless and the homeless. Stop flying in jets all over the world preaching to people about how they are killing our planet. Do like that Spike Lee movie “Get on the Bus” and go city to city talking to each and every single person (aka all politicians, corporate leaders and millionaires, which are usually all the same people) that could possibly get changes made in regards to our nation’s consumption of oil and energy. It’s either that or start discussing the real inconvenient truth.

But enough about all that. How’s Tipper these days? Is her crusade to rid the world of obscenities over? Put in a good word with her for me, so my site doesn’t get shut down anytime soon. Oh, by the way, thanks for inventing the internet in your basement and stuff.

Later Sk8er,

- CCF, December 2006

“P.S. We should be together too!” … Sorry, couldn’t resist a “Stan” reference somewhere.