The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (11 page)

eco-freakos, it’s time to spar a lil’ bit with that crude-oil-consumin’, big-truck-drivin’, air-conditioner-blastin’, endangered-species-devourin’ rogue, your ol’ buddy ChaCha! Ready to trade some shots?

Before we get started, I have a few requests. First, go take a shower. You smell like a springbok that waded five miles through a swamp to escape a pack of hyenas. You don’t use deodorant, so what did you expect? Next, take off the love beads, the hemp bracelet, and the organic-cotton dashiki. I know you think some barefoot Bushwoman from Namibia wearing mismatched American hand-me-downs decades out of style wove the dashiki while chewing on a mouthful of leaves, but it is actually a 50-50 poly-cotton knockoff that was made in a sweatshop in Vietnam right next to the fake
Twilight
T-shirts. I know, I know, you bought it at a street fair full of “fair trade” and “organic” merchandise, so it’s gotta be real. After all, there are no hucksters in the world of green living, right? You’ve got a vaguely identifiable, hysterical need and no oversight, and that combo never breeds dishonesty or corruption, does it?

But wait a second. Didn’t that fellow who sold you that “fair trade,” “organic,” hideous pseudo-serape look suspiciously like the guy manning the sausage ‘n’ peppers stand at last week’s Italian-American street fair? You know, the booth you pointed at in righteous disgust before you turned up your snooty little vegan nose. They look awfully similar, that’s all I’m sayin’.

Now I want you to remove those filthy Jesus sandals. God, if Jesus only knew that his name would become irretrievably linked with people like
you
, wearing shoes named after
him
, I think he would have fast-forwarded himself to modern times for a brief shopping interlude. Before heading back to the dust and distrust of the New Testament, he would have snagged his holy self a pair of Bally driving moccasins to gallivant around in.

Great, so glad you’re out of them filthy, phony duds. Dang, you’re a
scrawny
one, arentcha? Unka ChaCha is going to call up a meatball-parm air strike from my favorite pizza place while we getcha all scrubbed up. That’s right, little guy, crawl under that translucent, shimmering column. It’s what we call a “shower.” Yes, that stuff coming down is heated, flowing water. It helps carry away dirt and grime. I’m hoping it can also carry away self-righteousness and stupidity, but that’s probably expecting too much. There ya go! How’s that water feel? You know, water has a friend, kind of a sidekick or lil’ helper. He’s like water’s Tonto. We normal human beings call him soap. He’s right here—I told him all about you, and he’s dyin’ to meetcha.

Now get under that hot water, grab that soap, and start scubbin’. While you’re doing that, getting all warm and clean for the very first time, I’ll go outside, chop down an endangered tree, and use its life—its very essence—to make a fire so I can burn your clothes, your shoes, your grubby accessories, your grimy hacky sack, that dime bag of skunk weed I found in your pants, and your well-thumbed copy of
Silent Spring
.

Finished? Good. You no longer smell like a plague-ridden rat. You still look like the lead singer from the Spin Doctors if he had been swept up by a tornado, spun around for three weeks, and then deposited in a cistern somewhere, but for you it’s an improvement. Your cell phone? Oh, I burned that, too. Too many chemicals and minerals and slave-labor-manufactured parts. It hadda go. If you want to communicate with your girlfriend and let her know where y’are and what y’are doin’, just bang out a coded rhythm on that hollow log like all those indigenous tribes you admire so much would do. Oh, she’s in jail? Disturbing the peace again, you say? Well, I’m sure she did it for the “right” reasons. Throwing that brick through the plate-glass window of a Starbuck’s during last week’s rally against corporate America really sent a message to … well … somebody, I guess. Hope she’s enjoying that orange jump suit and grape Kool-Aid in the slammer.

But let’s focus on you, my newfound, newly clean(ish) friend. Here’s a Team Quest T-shirt. Wait—gimme that back. Here’s an Anderson “the Spider” Silva T-shirt for your emaciated lil’ midriff. It’ll give me something to aim for once we start our verbal sparring; you know, I hit him about 697 times when we fought. Plus, I’ve got
lots
of these T-shirts. Since he’s got no fans, I scoop them up on eBay for two bucks a pop. I use them to wash my truck, which I do five times a week using as much clean, fresh water as possible. I like to make sure every inch of my “highway star” is gleaming, just in case I have to drive to a rally in support of Monsanto or Halliburton or Raytheon or any one of the dozen other evil corporate entities you battle like a mangy little Don Quixote; corporations that perform functions like creating drought- and plague-resistant strains of crops that keep millions of people around the world from starving, or technologies to prevent maniacs in turbans from frying your Mecca, San Francisco, with an atomic devise.

Washing my truck is a waste of water, you say? Well, exactly how is it being wasted? After it gets my truck all bright ‘n’ shiny, it goes down a storm drain, ready to perform another job. It doesn’t disappear into thin air like Nicolas Cage’s career or Kim Kardashian’s dignity. It goes
back
to work; it evaporates, turns into a cloud, falls into rivers that drain into a reservoir, and gets pumped back into my pipes, so I can spray it on my truck and start the cycle all over again. It’s called recycling! A perfect system. Aren’t you proud of me, He with An Empty Head Who Points Filthy Fingers at Others? That’s your new Native American name. Just thought it up. You like?

OK, enough of this shilly-shallyin’, Nature Boy. It’s time to start takin’ some shots. Let’s see what you’re really made of underneath all that grubby unctuousness. Take this headgear and pull it over that empty head. Now put in this mouthpiece. God! When’s the last time you let a dentist take a look at those choppers, Jungle Jim? What, no toothbrushes available at the sit-ins? Anyway, the bell is about to ring. Throw up your mitts and guard your grille. I’m about to spit some knowledge, and it’s going to come hard and fast.

First things first. A little history lesson.

Your attitude and behavior are direct ideological descendants of the student-protest movement of the 1960s. It shares that movement’s overwhelmingly self-mythologizing, self-referential, colossally reckless, insensitive, and vile aesthetic. Just so you know, the student protesters of the ‘60s weren’t all students. They were a small group of semi-professional agitators who didn’t fit into society and rode herd over a bunch of lost, dimwitted, self-impressed, highly impressionable, sub-adults ripe for indoctrination and processing. In theory, structure, and practice, the leaders of the protest movement marched in philosophical lockstep with that other world-weary, grizzled, pimp and failure Charles Manson. And let me ask you this—did your ideological predecessors ever stop to think about how the lives of the overwhelming majority of college students were disrupted and derailed thanks to their protests and attacks? Of course not. For the protesters, what
they
believed in, what
they
wanted to tell the world, was the only thing that had value to them.

Thousands upon thousands of students, many of whom may have opposed the Vietnam War themselves but chose to manifest that opposition by voting and maintaining society, were inconvenienced. They had their entire academic lives upset and defined by the actions of a scurrilous few who occupied buildings, disrupted classes, and made unlawful and ridiculous demands on society and the institutions of higher learning that they targeted. Hopped up on illegal drugs, they fomented showdown after showdown with the forces of reason, law, and order—with disastrous results. I often speculate on the actual nature of that famous photo taken at Kent State: a young hippie woman, looking, I should observe, not unlike Squeaky Fromme, kneeling down over the prone body of some male hippie, her mouth frozen in a scream, her agony captured for all time by a clever and fortunate fellow hippie photographer. I wonder if that young man lying there, instead of being the victim of some justified act of self-defense meted out by some heroic National Guardsman, isn’t actually just laid out in the middle of the street in a narcotic haze from a bag of really potent dope. I also wonder if his aggrieved female counterpart isn’t just screaming to their dealer across the way for another bag, so she can join him in the land of Nod for a while
^*
.

That is
your
heritage, friend. That is whom you take your cues from.

Feelin’ the heat yet, Activist Boy? Seems like it. You’re starting to sweat a lil’ bit. Starting to stink again, too. But this time you reek like a root cellar full of musty rutabagas. We gotta get some deodorant on you, stat.