Science, society catch up with Gore's warnings, style

[RestoreGore]

I agree. The political system is a rigged game and Al Gore knows this and is acting accordingly to work around it. The Assault On Reason is the primer for doing that as was An Inconvenient Truth in seeking to alert us to find our moral consciousness again to see how rigged this system is and work to change it with Live Earth being the catalyst. Breaking through the lies and fear that have pervaded all of these years which has caused the climate crisis to be obscured and diminshed in importance is going to be a great task to accomplish, but one we must accomplish before any other steps can be taken to solve it. Hopefully, the words in these books and the message of Live Earth will not be forgotten in assessing that plan.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0731reader_for_pg._3jul31,1,911976.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Science, society catch up with Gore's warnings, style
By Joe Conason | Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
July 31, 2007

Why do our leaders feel that they can speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth only after they have left politics? After spending nearly half his life in public office, from which he was separated involuntarily in the 2000 election, Al Gore knows the answer. As he explains in his new book, the American political system has become a rigged game that suppresses honesty and rewards deception.

To anyone paying attention over the last few decades, the underlying causes that Gore identifies will be familiar, including the ascendancy of mindless television, the domination of corporate money, the concentration of ownership in influential media and the decline of engaged citizenship. In "The Assault on Reason" (Penguin, 320 pages, $25.95), he lingers over those well-worn topics and others, employing the same didactic method that used to provoke irritation or even ridicule during his hotly contested presidential campaign.

Yet Gore's professorial style, with its touches of sarcasm, omniscient tone, erudite asides and, yes, its occasional exasperated sighs, elicits a different response today than it did seven years ago. Many of the same publications that once poured scorn on him now offer up paragraph after paragraph of admiring prose.

The change in attitude is as obvious as the reason behind it: The overwhelming scientific consensus has since confirmed Gore's years of warnings about the most important issue facing the planet, a stunning reversal that suggests those who mocked him were fools in the first place and that we can continue to ignore him only at our own peril. Even when he is saying something we already know, his voice adds a note of prophetic confirmation. Then again, Gore has changed too. Always unusually smart and farsighted, he nevertheless spent most of his public career emphasizing the expedient and conventional rather than the critical and visionary. Liberated from those constraints by defeat, he kept silent until fall 2002, when he spoke out against the invasion of Iraq.

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What he is telling us today -- with the moral authority of a man who many believe was wrongly barred from the presidency -- is that American democracy and indeed American society are in danger from the authoritarians of the right. Without much polite varnish, he warns that self-serving plutocrats and self-righteous theocrats have nearly banished reason from the public square; their machinations disable us as we try to confront the enormous problems that threaten our future. According to Gore, Americans cannot adequately protect the nation from terrorism because our ideas about national security have been distorted by fear and falsehoods. Nor can we address what he calls "the carbon crisis," potentially "the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization," because the truth about global warming has been obscured by industrial and government propaganda.

end of excerpt