While I started this blog around the idea that it would benefit me to rail against the imperialist tendency of the Bush adminsitration, I find most of its policies backward and damaging. One broad strategy, or really lack of strategy, that is not unrelated to the war lust is the neglect of the environment in favor of anything, anything at all to promote the oil business. Plenty of people write that the WMD, no make that the democratization of Iraq is just a front for securing a better oil supply. Why would anyone be surprised? We have president and vice president who were respectively vice president and president of oil or oil service companies. Their stint in industry can't be demonstrated to have given them any special qualifications for the offices they now hold...unless having access to millions of dollars for campaign funding is a qualification. Looks like its a very important qualification apparently.
I have to assume that consiously or unconsciously the Bush and his creepy veepy are in bed with the oil industry as much as Sen Inhofe. They all prefer science fiction over educated explanations when it comes to arguing that [a] there IS global warming and [b] WE are causing it with our burning of all handy petroleum as fast as we can bring it ashore even if we pay a country that prays under their beards for our demise to get us that oil. They prefer oil derricks and roads for the sake of a two year supply of oil to the irreplaceable wild lands under which they think oil may be found. Its a boondoggle and a half since oil drilling is a huge tax dodge..they don't even need to find oil to make out.
This administration has systematically purged or intimidated any government paid scientist who spoke out too loudy for preservation of wild lands and species or urged that the US should sign the Kyoto Accords. Somewhat like the bible thumper's attempts to push evolution out of people's minds, the administration has quietly pushed its effort to erase the words "global warming" from the federal employee's vocabulary and affix the word "alledged" to all printed references. But maybe there are just too many of those pesty scientists for Bush's hacks at the deputy secretary level to find and club them all. They missed one. The National Center For Atmospheric Research scientists just refer to global warming as a fact and move on. Whats next once you can do the science without a gag and blinders? The link descibes predictions of who is going to get wetter [last weeks weather makes this prediction look like hindsight up here in New England] and who is going to bake. Read these before you buy land. Read them before you buy any politicians promise. Read them before one of Bush's religiously correct science policy henchmen cuts its funding for the whole NCAR team for their embarassing lapse into honesty.
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As a scholar and fan of the science fiction genre i would like to clarify your statement that Bush prefers "science fiction" to environmental truths/reality... yes, he is operating in the stream of technocratic science fiction developed by John Campbell, Hugo Gernsback, A.E. Van Vogt and L.Ron Hubbard... a celebration of American mechanical know-how as always winning out in the end.
On the other hand there is another stream of liberatory, radical and challenging science fiction writers... from the Futurians, to the 60s new wave, to contemporary feminist SF writers and slipstream/new weird authors who would spit in the face of their ignorance.
Just thought I should make the distinction ;)
My economy of words became a poverty of meaning. You are right of course that taken all together, science fiction includes some very well informed and , IMO, right-thinking authors. I really had in mind Sen. Inhofe who called on Crichton as a climate expert to testify before congress in order to confuse the simple legislators about a very straight forward and widely accepted observation that we are cooking our own planet.
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