IN PRAISE OF A DORK

Think of a grown up version of Farmer Ted, the character in Sixteen Candles played by Anthony Michael Hall. As a teenager he was the “king of the dorks,” and now he’s just as dorky, only older. You shake your head at his complete lack of social skills. You laugh at his seemingly infinite self confidence, combined with his total lack of charisma. You could easily picture that dude saying that he invented the Internet despite the fact that he’s never worked for a computer company. You could see him trying clumsily to communicate to the public, but unable to do so without sounding condescending (after all, most of them are no more intelligent than the characters played by Molly Ringwald). You could imagine him telling stories about his visits to Florida classrooms that are full of petty embellishments, with just enough hyperbole to make you wonder if the dork ever even visited a Florida classroom. You could even picture yourself shouting at the television, demanding that he stop trying to tell heart-warming stories about his own family tragedies when, in fact, he was incapable of telling any story without sounding more wooden than a sequoia.

Oh, the 2000 version of Al Gore was a dork, alright. Much dorkier than Farmer Ted. At least Farmer Ted knew what to do with a pair of girl’s underwear. To imagine old Al with Molly’s underwear … I just don’t want to think about it.

To a large segment of our country, Al Gore isn’t fully human. He’s “Algore,” the cyborg. Part human being, part mechanized buffoon. According to his detractors, Algore exemplifies what it means to be a loser. You give him the Vice Presidency, add a popular President willing to campaign on his behalf, throw in a thriving economy and a world at peace, and he’ll take all those things and figure out a way to lose nonetheless. Why? Because the American people are people, and Algore is a cyborg. And people don’t want to be lectured by anything mechanized, particularly one that constantly insults their intelligence. We may be flesh and blood, but we’re not stupid. Right?

Wrong. The reality is that Al Gore – memo to Rush Limbaugh: his name has two words, not one – is actually very much human. He screws up, like other people, and indeed he screwed up the campaign in 2000 by carrying himself like a dork’s dork. But if you’ve kept your eyes and your mind open since 2000, you would have seen an impressive metamorphosis. No, Al hasn’t transformed himself into Cary Grant or Harrison Ford, he’s still a bit of a dork. Yet he seems able now to laugh at his wooden exterior. And increasingly, he’s able to give us a hint at what lies inside. From what I can tell, it’s a man who has excellent judgment as to which causes our country needs to take on, and which ones it needs to avoid. The last I heard, that kind of judgment is what makes a top flight President – not the ability to come across on TV as a cool, charming, or fun guy.

As the United States was about to fall into the bottomless pit known as Iraq, where was Hillary? Or Edwards? Or Kerry? The last I checked, they were voting for the war – before they were against it. But not Al. He was one of the war’s very few early opponents – perhaps serving for eight years as Vice President actually taught the man something about foreign affairs.

But the new Al isn’t one to just say “I told you so.” He’s moved on to bigger and better things – like pointing out what could be even a greater threat to our country and our planet than international terrorism. I’m speaking, of course, about global warming.

Say what you want about An Inconvenient Truth. Point out that it exaggerates the dangers of global warming – identifying the worst case possibilities as if they are the likely scenarios. Point out that it spent an inordinate amount of time demonstrating that the problem of global warming exists, and precious little time talking about how to solve it. I accept those rebukes. But in the big scheme of things, they are quibbles. The fact is that Al’s movie fires a fatal shot to the positions held throughout Conservative America: a consensus has emerged within the scientific community – not the rhetorical community, but the scientific one – that global warming poses severe threats to humankind and must be addressed soon, before irreparable damage is done.

Some of my friends think the global warming scare is just hype – sort of the liberal analogue of “weapons of mass destruction.” Others tell me that it is the supreme threat facing our planet. Like Al, I tend to trust the scientific community to resolve this debate – since there truly is a near consensus among that community, shouldn’t that be cause enough for us to act?

I’d like to see Al Gore make a run for President. I think the judgment he’s exercised since he won the votes of the majority of Americans has been spot on. But first, I’d like to see America engage in a national debate about the fundamental questions raised by his movie: How do we as a nation figure out whether this global-warming threat is legitimate? And if we determine that it is, what in blazes do we do about it?

Politics aside, these are questions that must be answered today. What, in the name of science, are we waiting for?