Energy

I made a pit stop at the gas station yesterday, Bush. Two dollars and fifty-one cents—not to forget the extra nine-tenths of a cent, making it effectively two dollars and fifty-two cents a gallon. I can’t help but think that this must be in good part the result of your Cheney’s energy policy. Remember that secret meeting, Bush? We don’t know who was there and we don’t know what plot was hatched in the guise of a national energy policy, but we do begin to see the results. And you have the incredible gall to give us all a little lecture about conservaion! I think yesterday was very nearly the first time I heard the word on your lips, when you came out with one of your wonderful platitudes. I wish I’d had a pen and paper to record it, but I happened to be driving at the time. Something like: “If we conserve, we’ll use less.”

So here’s the right-wing conspiracy view of the energy situation: you strangle the supply with wars and things until the prices go up nicely to please your energy friends; then you announce a crisis and an emergency need to drill for oil in Alaska (only two thousand acres, you promised us, again on the radio yesterday, the size of the airport in Columbus. I swear I heard you say this) and please your oil production friends. Nice work. And meantime we obedient consumers stop at the gas station in the gas guzzlers we’ve been sold to keep up with the Joneses, and fill our tanks at two dollars and fifty-two cents a gallon.

Mind you, Bush, I must be one of the few Americans who really don’t mind paying my share for gas (in the global context, we still get it cheap). Besides, I drive a Prius. I drove sixty miles yesterday at an average of fifty-one point two miles per gallon. How’s that for conservation? The question of course is, why did we wait so long, and why are we so slow making thoughtful decisions about what we drive? My theory is, we’ve been sold a bill of goods by our government and our corporate exploiters. But that’s just me on my right-wing conspiracy hobby-horse.

By the way, my travels yesterday took me to a couple of notable art exhibits, Bush. I actually went to see the one I mentioned the other day—the new old masterpiece show? Thumbs down. What a yawn. What you should see, Bush, if you could take the time to travel so far, is the two great globes by the artist Russell Crotty. I guess about four or five feet in diameter, they’re suspended from the ceiling of this huge, otherwise empty gallery space at about waist height, so they look enormous. Their surface is covered with millions of tiny scratch-marks (graphite, I think)—the one, to create a vast image of the night sky, with stars; the other, an image of both night sky and Earth, with a jagged horizon line of tree outlines around its girth. The pair of them a powerful homage, I thought, to the energy, the intricacy, the interdependence and, yes, Bush, the incredible beauty of this planet and its celestial environs. It’s worth conserving.