Thoughts on the recent Gore re-inflation…
Originally published 7 July 2007.
Remember those first few years after the 2000 election, when it seemed that no one, not even Democrats, wanted Al Gore around anymore? To the New York Times’ Bill Keller, Americans had rightly written him off as “an opportunist, a phony.” Joe Klein called him “stiff and synthetic and multifarious,” a “dreadful candidate” who “never seemed reliable enough to be president.”
When Gore refused to go away, the catcalls became worse. In 2004 he made a 6,600 word speech about Abu Ghraib, referring to “Bush’s Gulag,” demanding the resignations of Rice, Rumsfeld and Tenet, and saying things like: “One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one’s soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Fox, “It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.” Dennis Miller told his CNBC audience, “At one point I respected Al Gore, but I think he’s lost his mind.”
Since then a number of circumstances, from accelerating Arctic melting to America’s struggles in Iraq, have helped bring Gore and his causes back into public esteem. His resurgent popularity has inspired comparisons (by himself among others) to Churchill’s triumphal political re-emergence in the late 1930s – except that Gore now has a star status only a modern media could have pumped to life.
According to a profile earlier this year in New York magazine, Gore “has sounded nothing like the Gore we remember – calculating, chameleonic, soporific – from the 2000 campaign. He has sounded like a man, in the words of a top Republican strategist, who ‘found his voice in the wilderness.’”
Not to be outdone, Time recently called Gore “a natural born teacher,” and an “improbably charismatic, Academy Award-winning, Nobel Prize-nominated environmental prophet with an army of followers and huge reserves of political and cultural capital at his command” – a description almost unimaginable a few years ago.
Gore has been asked to run for president in 2008, but he says he prefers to stay where he is, opinionating, consciousness-raising, making bundles of money, and basking in the warmth of global adulation. As his unabashedly worshipful Time profiler, Eric Pooley, put it, “There’s an even deeper issue here, and with Gore, it’s always the deepest issue that counts. What’s at stake is not just Gore losing another election. It’s Gore losing himself – returning to politics and, in the process, losing touch with the man he has become.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt assured Pooley that Gore had gone “through a difficult personal transformation in order to achieve greatness.”
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Considering how swiftly the air was forced out of the Gore balloon six and a half years ago, it seems only right to wonder at this sudden reinflation. Are we are now seeing a “new” Al Gore, unhampered by all the constraints of politics, an Al Gore who says smart things and uncompromisingly sticks by them? Or is he the same old multifarious opportunist who says one thing and does another?
It isn’t hard to find evidence of Gore’s continuing hypocrisy. Although he has long been urging Americans to reduce their energy use, it was discovered recently that his huge house outside Nashville has been consuming power at twenty times the rate of the average American home. (The Gores also have a big house in suburban Virginia, plus an apartment in San Francisco.) Gore has been chided, too, for his involvement in the Live Earth concerts. Their massive carbon footprints, and the spectacle of colossal energy hogs like Madonna preaching about conservation, caused even some pop groups to stay away.
Perhaps understandably, Gore’s supporters have been apt to dismiss these criticisms as politically motivated, and Gore’s lapses as minor aberrations. But a case can be made that with Gore, hypocrisy isn’t an aberration—it is his standard operating procedure.
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“What politics has become,” Gore loftily told an interviewer recently, “is something that requires a kind of tolerance for artifice and manipulative communications strategies that I just find I have in very short supply. I just don’t have the patience for things that seem to be greatly rewarded in today’s political system.”
Gore has turned this sentiment into a thesis, in his recent bestselling book, The Assault on Reason. He claims that America makes big mistakes, such as failing to elect him in 2000, removing Saddam Hussein from power, and “ignoring” global warming, because its political culture has become steeped in propagandistic manipulation.
The relative vividness of televisual media, according to Gore, allows it more easily to activate our brains’ primitive arousal networks, stimulating emotions like fear, greed, and sexual desire, and bypassing our more rational faculties. All this stimulation creates a neurochemical rush to which we can become addicted, he says, along the way losing our ability to think critically about what we are seeing and hearing. In his book he compares “the political economy supported by the television industry” to “the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.” He also solemnly warns that the “systematic exposure to … arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician.”
Not exactly a new idea, of course. But an odd one coming from Gore, considering that as a politician he was notorious for his use of “artifice and manipulative communications strategies.” These ranged from his periodic good-old-boy affectation to his televised tongue-lock with Tipper at the Democratic convention.
Gore says now he regrets some of the things he did to play the game, back then. But he is still playing this game, as blatantly as ever. To take one of the most obvious examples: Although he says he condemns the practice of “ratcheting up public anxieties and fears, distorting public discourse and reason,” his global warming film, An Inconvenient Truth bills itself as “by far the most terrifying film you will ever see” according to its posters.
Gore’s film makes blatant use of visual propaganda techniques, and grossly distorts the science on which it is ostensibly based. All this was elaborated in an eye-opening article in March by science reporter William Broad at the New York Times. As Broad made clear, the inaccuracies in Gore’s film are not minor, random ones. They all concern the big issues in global warming research, and they are all biased to produce more fear, not less.
The film, for example, misleadingly links hurricanes like Katrina to global warming. Even its poster depicts a cyclonic storm coming out of a factory’s smokestacks – a classic use of scare-imagery of the kind Gore says he abhors. The reality is that global warming and storms are not very well connected in current atmospheric models. “We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than [Gore] is,” NASA climate physicist James Hansen admitted to Broad—and Hansen is one of Gore’s heroes.
Gore’s film also plays fast and loose with predictions about the most dramatic physical effect of global warming, a rising sea level. “Mr. Gore,” wrote Broad, “citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.”
The italics I have added to emphasize, again, that Gore here has used blatant visual propaganda. The current models actually suggest that global warming’s major side-effect will be relatively slow in coming, producing sea level rises on the order of only a foot or two by century’s end if nothing is done – and on the order of only inches during the next few decades, arguably giving us plenty of time to shift to non-polluting energy sources and to devise carbon-reduction technologies.
Gore’s film deceived in a number of other ways, for example by failing to place the current warming trend in the context of historical climate shifts, by falsely claiming that global warming has intensified malaria, and by suggesting that the scientists who question Gore’s alarmism are in the pay of oil companies (I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Broad quoted one professor saying. “And I’m not a Republican”).
Gore’s propagandizing has not been limited to televisual media. The recent “Live Earth” concerts, inspired and promoted by him, were clearly not exercises in “public discourse and reason.” They were, instead, designed to hook young people on the “arousal stimuli” inherent in a pop music concert, so that they would accept his environmental message uncritically. (“If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down,” shouted Madonna at one point. “Come on, mother-fuckers!”)
Gore has said he will follow up the Live Earth spectacle with a create-an-ad contest, which he hopes will generate still more enthusiasm for his global warming cause. According to the New York Times:
Mr. Gore, through his environmental group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, has sent invitations to advertising agencies to submit 15-, 30- and 60-second “ecospots” explaining the global warming phenomenon and urging action to address it, at either the local or national level. The alliance is soliciting entries from anyone with a camera or video-editing capabilities.
It doesn’t seem to embarrass Gore that campaigns like this one utterly contradict his book-length fulmination against mass-manipulation techniques. “The way nations and societies make up their minds in the modern age has much more to do with mass advertising than many of us purists would like, but that’s the reality,” he told the Times. “Since we face a true planetary emergency, we have to give the planet a P.R. agent.”
Connoisseurs of Gore’s duplicity will love his use of the phrase that’s the reality, because it is an excuse he has explicitly rejected in the past. During the 2000 campaign, at a “town meeting” of young people ginned up for him on MTV, he piously condemned hip-hop music as a seductive but harmful cultural influence:
Gandhi once said you must become the change you wish to see in the world. I don’t think it’s good enough to say, ‘Well, we’re just reflecting a reality.’
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After condemning the misuse of television and similar media by unscrupulous advertisers and politicians, Gore goes on to argue, in The Assault on Reason, that television as we know it is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy democratic society. A laudatory reviewer of Gore’s book in The Atlantic wrote that “We can have television or we can have democracy. The evidence Gore adduces suggests that we cannot have both.”
Needless to say, Gore himself is having it both ways. His argument that the TV industry is at the heart of our cultural decay hasn’t stopped him from hobnobbing in Hollywood with friends like actor Bradley Whitford (from The West Wing and Studio 60), Larry David (creator of Seinfeld) and Laurie David (co-producer of An Inconvenient Truth, and a long-time worker in the TV industry). It also hasn’t stopped Gore from joining the industry himself. In 2004 he and several other investors, including Whitford and businessman Joel Hyatt, bought a cable network, for which Gore serves as chairman of the board.
Ostensibly Current TV, as this network is now called, is meant to produce a good kind of TV, not the bad kind. Gore explains:
In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.”
Current TV is supposed to “democratize” TV content, by letting viewers produce it. “We are about empowering” – said Gore, two years ago – “this generation of young people in the 18-to-34 population to engage in a dialogue of democracy and to tell their stories of what’s going on in their lives, in the dominant medium of our time.”
Specifically, Current TV encourages viewers to submit the videos – “each just a few minutes long,” says the Current TV website – that the network will broadcast.
However, two years after it started, less than a third of Current TV’s content is produced by amateurs; the rest is produced professionally. Apparently the network’s audience, which has 100+ cable channels, tens of thousands of DVDs and video games, and the video universe of the world wide web to choose from, is not exactly clamoring for more viewer-created content. It seems that the “viewer-created content” angle is helpful to Current primarily because it holds down production costs. The real hook for its (young) audience is its shallow, tidbit-sized content, which is seldom political. Many of the better videos supplied by amateurs are ads for consumer products, whose producers hope for a deal with the products’ manufacturers.
“This is an audience that has become ‘media grazers,’” CurrentTV’s head of programming, ex-CNN executive David Neuman, admitted in 2005 to writer Ari Berman, “and we decided to create a network that didn’t fight that but rather facilitated that.”
“Less and less they’re trying to run a company with a social mission,” Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism and a CurrentTV board member told Berman. “They want something that’s new and interesting and economically viable.”
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On the whole, Gore’s sellout of his supposed beliefs about television seems about as thorough as it could be. In addition to being chairman of a TV network that produces YouTube-ish pap, he is a prominent, active member of the board of directors of Apple, Inc. – formerly called Apple Computer, but renamed earlier this year to emphasize that it is now also a media company. With its iTunes store Apple distributes a vast amount of media content; and all the iPods, video iPods, Apple TV boxes, and now iPhones that it sells represent hundreds of millions of devices for playing that content. Apple on its website exclaims that “You can feast your eyes on movies and TV shows for up to six-and-a-half hours” with an iPod. The company’s new iPhone, in its function as a “wide screen iPod,” can keep this moveable feast going for about as long, with its own web connection to supply the content. In other words, the company encourages the kind of TV-dependency that Gore laments in his book:
Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day – 90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of the discretionary time the average American has.
Obviously, Gore has done nothing at Apple to turn this situation around. In fact he is known for only two significant accomplishments at the company, neither of which reflects well on him.
The first is Gore’s apparent inaction in the face of pressure from environmentalist groups, who complained about toxic chemicals like lead and mercury in iPods. “Why,” a writer at Fortune asked a few months ago, “would Al Gore, America’s best-known environmentalist and a member of the board of directors of Apple, oppose shareholder resolutions that ask the computer maker to become more green? That’s what Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Consumers Union, the National Environmental Trust and the Computer TakeBack Campaign want to know.”
Recently, Apple caved and announced “Greener Apple” policies. Unsurprisingly Gore has spun this his way. Through Time’s Eric Pooley, he let it be known that he had “patiently nudged the CEO to adopt a new Greener Apple program that will eliminate toxic chemicals from the company’s products by next year.”
Probably few of those who have complained about Gore’s past stonewalling will find such a claim credible. Jim Puckett, of the Basel Action Network, describes the “Greener Apple” scheme as deceptive anyway, falling well short of the environmental responsibility that his and other groups had expected: “Apple’s statement was craftily designed to obfuscate and ‘greenwash’ what they were doing. They made a statement that sounds really good to the general audience that doesn’t know the issues.”
Gore’s other achievement at Apple was his leadership of a board committee tasked with investigating grants of backdated stock options to Apple executives. Such backdating amounts to tax evasion, of course, and Jobs admitted knowing of the practice. Moreover Jobs, who avoids paying income tax by taking his compensation as stock options (taxed at the lower capital-gains rate), was found to have received options a few years ago, for a chunk of 7.5 million Apple shares, that were backed by a phony board authorization with a probably phony date. Somehow neither Jobs nor any other member of his senior management team could recall the circumstances under which the phony board authorizations had been produced. Yet Jobs was exonerated by Gore’s committee, the excuse being that he had managed to avoid cashing in any of those questionable options.
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Around this time, perhaps unsurprisingly, Steve Jobs was encouraging Gore to run for president again. He told Eric Pooley “there’s no question in my mind that he would be elected.”
But Gore says he has almost certainly left politics behind. As he modestly explained to Pooley, “I’m not convinced the presidency is the highest and best role I could play.” Plus, says Tipper, he is now “free and liberated and doing exactly what he wants to do. And that is fabulous.”
Fabulous indeed – in the old, straightforward sense of being like a fable. For although Gore is no longer constrained to adopt the phony poses of formal politics, his new milieu of media and entertainment, mass-persuasion and making money, involves its own constraints. It appears that whatever his ideals are, he cannot afford to annoy Steve Jobs and other people with money and status, who could seriously wound him if they ever turned on him. He cannot really turn his back on the TV industry without costing himself money and friends, including fellow investors. And he cannot really eschew the use of manipulative mass-persuasion techniques without, as he sees it, weakening the messages he want to put out. He seems as constrained to betray his own professed ideals as he would have been were he a politician, if not moreso.
Some may believe that Gore at any rate is saying things that do need to be said, and are backed up with some scientific rigor. His book, for example, is liberally salted with quotes from scientists and philosophers, and Eric Pooley referred to his “intellectual firepower.”
Speaking of which, no one seems to have remembered the story the Washington Post broke early in the 2000 election campaign, about Gore’s astonishingly low grades in high school and college, and at the postgraduate schools (divinity, then law) he never finished. In his sophomore year at Harvard, according to the Post, “Gore’s classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana.”
None of that background would matter, if there was evidence that Gore had acquired some intellectual rigor later in life. But one of the reasons his speeches, essays, books, and documentaries have been mocked so often in the past is that they have not been very carefully put together. On the subject of global warming, his posturings have so distorted the science that he has embarrassed the very scientists whose work he cites and praises – and this despite having had more than a decade to study the subject, with personal access to the top researchers in the field.
His arguments about media and culture are unoriginal, to put it mildly, and despite salting his discussions with various supportive quotations he omits a vast amount of research conducted over the past several decades. He also manages to come up with conclusions — such as his equation of amateur TV content with democratic dialogue — that seem harebrained. Obviously television or any other media content may propagandize or exploit viewers, by appealing to their baser, shorter-term impulses at the expense of the more judicious and “rational” parts of their minds. But in the ferocious Darwinian arena of a free media, most content wouldn’t survive if it didn’t push consumers’ emotional buttons in some way. The availability of those emotional buttons guarantees that, and whether the content is “viewer created” or professionally created makes little difference – except that an amateur production almost by definition will be less watchable.
To really change the character of television content, making it supportive (instead of corrosive) of civic and social institutions, would mean operating television wholly as a non-commercial public service, as many countries still do. But clearly Gore is not about to propose abolishing the commercial TV industry, with all his friendships and investments there.
There are other holes in Gore’s argument, such as his narrow emphasis on the political harm from television and relative neglect of the broader social harm. The past few decades have seen huge erosions in age-old institutions such as marriage, the two-parent family, friendships, and civic associations, and much of the blame for this has been pinned on television. But Gore would rather gripe about TV’s influence on the political culture, i.e., on the culture that inflicted on him the “terrible emotional whiplash” of the 2000 election, and then chased him into the wilderness with ridicule.
In any case, there is hardly any point now in distinguishing “television” from other electronic media. All forms of media content – TV shows, films, music, short videos, video games, web pages, books, blogs, newspapers and magazines – can exploit our animal weaknesses in their own ways, and all are now deliverable by the Internet. How this “multimedia” environment will shape our culture is already becoming clear: The current trend, which Gore’s own TV network has followed, is towards shallower, faster-paced, more swiftly consumable content. And given the much, much greater competition inherent in the Internet’s multimedia environment, we should expect to be have our arousal circuits jolted harder than ever – in other words, we should expect more of the stuff Gore says is harmful.
You would think that Gore, who as a Senator was an early promoter of the Internet, would grasp some of this. But he fatuously contends that the Internet is some kind of electronic savior:
It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.
Yes, for “reason,” whatever that means, and also for fake Viagra, spyware and phishing scams, downloadable hip-hop and pop-up ads that buzz like mosquitos, pictures of atrocities and wayward celebrities, a mammoth porn industry, and a fast-growing population of amateur exhibitionists with webcams.
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The sophomoric flimsiness of Gore’s ideals, and the consistency with which he betrays them, make it hard to escape the conclusion that Gore, fundamentally, is not about lessening CO2 in our atmosphere, or TV in our living rooms, as much as he is about giving us more Al Gore.
In this sense, it is absurd to talk of his being “liberated” or “unpackaged” or “unscripted.” His mask is still there, just better crafted this time; and circumstances have made his audience more susceptible. But his artificiality is still evident, especially when he tries, as he has for years, to sell himself to that all-important market of 18 to 34 year-olds.
Here he is, for example, clutching a mike and hyping CurrentTV to an arranged audience of young people:
How many of y’all would like to see an opportunity to talk about what’s going on in your world that you can participate in with television?
And here he is confiding to Eric Pooley:
Did some grilling last night with my friend Jon Bon Jovi. His new record is great.
Gore’s relentless popularity-seeking is in one sense predictable. After Jimmy Carter’s own electoral heartbreak, exactly twenty years before Gore’s, he set out to restore his public reputation with a number of earnest books and pious good works, and was eventually rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize and the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism. Bill Clinton eagerly followed, setting up a foundation like Carter’s, and embarking on several humanitarian campaigns, for example to make HIV treatment more affordable.
Gore’s arc is similar, but perhaps in part because he never made it to the presidency, there is an emotional neediness about his actions that demands not just acclaim but superstardom. His relentless hypocrisy, his heavy use of self-promoting propagandistic techniques, and his hints that he is an American Churchill, suggest a narcissism that surpasses even Clinton’s.
The Gore comeback story does bear a superficial resemblance to Churchill’s. However, there is in some ways a better resemblance to the political comeback of one of Churchill’s contemporaries. While in his own political wilderness (spent largely in Landsberg prison) Adolf Hitler wrote a bestselling book that, like Gore’s, was much concerned with the decline of political culture and the power of propagandistic mass-persuasion techniques. He would later make deliberate, skillful, and above all deceitful use of those same techniques, somewhat as Gore does now, to create a social contagion of apocalyptic fear and thereby empower himself.
Gore, no Gandhi, is of course no Hitler either. But given his Hitlerian fixation on media and the manipulations of crowds, we might count some of his personal shortcomings – his spinelessness, his phoniness, his still-callow intellect – as our blessings.