Without a trace of ironic awareness that a Saturday Night Live skit is mocking people such as himself who believe that a Gore win in 2000 would have led to an American paradise, Remnick longingly sets up the premise of the show in his You Know Me, Al commentary in the New Yorker:
“Saturday Night Live” is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a “message from the President of the United States,” and Al Gore, surrounded by Oval Office knickknacks, came into focus to deliver what could best be described as an interim report from a parallel, and happier, galaxy. President Gore reviewed some of his actions and their unintended consequences:
In the last six years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine. But I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.
Nor was this the only problem. Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was “down to a perilously low eleven trillion dollars.” The price of gas had dropped to nineteen cents a gallon, and the oil companies were hurting. (“I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.”) After winning the plaudits of a grateful world—and turning Afghanistan into a premier “spring-break destination”—Americans could no longer risk travelling abroad, for fear of “getting hugged.”
Earth to Remnick: The SNL skit was making FUN of people like YOU who think that an Al Gore win would have led to a perfect world. Instead, Remnick uses that skit as a segue into a What Might Have Been if only America had been worthy enough to have elected the all-wise Gore:
The cruelty here was not to Gore, who probably requires no prompting to brood now and then about what might have been, but to the audience. It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate. The attacks of September 11, 2001, would likely not have been avoided, though there is ample evidence, in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, that Gore and his circle were far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism than Bush and his. But can anyone seriously doubt that a Gore Administration would have meant, well, an alternate universe, in which, say, American troops were sent on a necessary mission in Afghanistan but not on a mistaken and misbegotten one in Iraq; the fate of the earth, not the fate of oil-company executives, was the priority of the Environmental Protection Agency; civil liberties and diplomacy were subjects of attention rather than of derision; torture found no place or rationale?
For Remnick the Alternate Al Gore Universe is something to pine for. Of course, with a President Al Gore we might still be debating whether to place economic sanctions on the Taliban in Afghanistan. If you think Remnick can't get any more sickenly sweet in the worship of his blessed Goracle, you would be wrong:
On the issue of climate change, of course, he has exercised visionary leadership. With humor and intelligence, and negligible self-pity, he dispensed with the temptations of political martyrdom and became a global Jeremiah. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, he waged what was at first a fairly lonely campaign to draw attention to the problem; now, as a popularizing propagandist, he has succeeded in registering it as a crisis with nearly everyone, from field-tripping schoolchildren to reality-dubious members of the Administration. With his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore made the undeniability of the crisis a matter of consensus; thanks largely to him, an environmental issue will be an electoral issue. His secular evangelism has earned him an honored night at the Academy Awards and—almost as glittering—a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Concensus? Even the liberal New York Times has recently reported that there is something less than a concensus among scientists over Gore's apocalyptic global warming visions. Such skepticism doesn't even register with Remnick who goes on to yearn for the return of Gore in 2008:
While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama start competing––warily at first, and then, inevitably, taking direct aim at one another’s weaknesses––Gore can stand unbruised, nursing the lingering glamour of his popular margin in 2000 and, perhaps, demanding by quiet inference that we take stock of a distinguished public career that began three decades ago, when Gore was a twenty-eight-year-old Vietnam veteran freshly elected to Congress.
The now extinct Easter Islanders can be forgiven their blind worship of the famous stone idols of their island due to their isolation from the rest of the world. However, what is the excuse of the supposedly sophisticated David Remnick, editor of the even more sophisticated New Yorker, with his uncritical praise for the Goracle? For a funny take in detail on Remnick's Gore idolatry, check out the DUmmie FUnnies.
