Humor: Fueled by Petrol

I was in the coffee shop upon which I inflict the occasional Petrol Presence the other day, watching a Polar Bear taking a long swim in Northern waters.

The Polar Bear. Writ large as they are formidable. Such a sight, “streaming” across the all- knowing, all- seeing internet (internets, bowing to Mr. Bush, if he is reading) …such a sad sight, that great bear wallowing around in the cold water, trying vainly to mount ice-flows too small to bear his bulk.

We formed a small but moist party of mourners there at the Coffee shop, the wait-staff and I, all of the same mind and making quite a racket about the terrible fix we are all in now that the planet is warming so.

So much a racket, I am embarrassed to admit, that a fellow nearby gave up on his paper and came over to see what we were watching on the internet(s).

I glanced up at him over my shoulder. He was staring pop-eyed at the screen, where the bear was at last going under for the third time, having been swimming for days and days and succumbing at last to exhaustion and cold. Through moist and bleary eyes I could see that this fellow was unmoved. Shocked, I was. What sort of fellow could bear to watch the bear’s stoic bearing as he bore the burden of mankind’s folly?

I asked him, blowing my nose and wiping my eyes for effect.

“What?” he queried, looking down with a distasteful grimace as I honked and dried. “Stop blithering, you fool !” He was a funny little man, nearly albino, so seldom had he seen the sun. A hermit of sorts, I thought, looking at his clothing, styled about the McCarthy era.

We stared at him, the bear now just a ring of bubbles on the arctic water’s icy surface, the cuddly Polar bear himself now shark-bait below.

“Stop with all this Global warming crap, you idiots !” Can’t you see that bear is simply hydrophobic? He’s like those whales that beach themselves and die….you couldn’t get that bear up safe on the ice with a Helicopter and a net. He’s suicidal, like the whales.” He smiled down at us, a kindly sort of smile a University Professor might use upon a freshman class as he explained to them that he would be leaving the teaching to an assistant, while he busied himself with important research in his office. We blinked and blew, some still glancing at the bubbles on my laptop’s screen. One of the wait-staff burst into tears anew.

“Oh come now,” went on our Teacher, taking a pipe out of his tweed coat and starting to pack it with tobacco, ignoring the city ordinance prohibiting smoking in coffee shops, “the whole thing is a hoax. They just want you to be afraid to buy large, American cars and consume like consumers were meant to consume! They want you to buy little Korean cars and conserve energy so they can give it to other countries ! It isn’t about Global Warming !”

He glared around at us, his pipe blowing smoke like a locomotive. His eyebrows knitted themselves together in an angry scowl. I was impressed; he certainly looked and sounded like he know a thing or two!

“Here….move aside, my little misguided Socialist friend,” he said to me, giving me a push that belied the troll-in-the-basement theory and landed me flat on the floor.

I dusted myself off and took up a place behind our new mentor, watching as he deftly brought up the Rush Limburger website and clicked his was to the pages that dealt with the environment. Watching earnestly, I watched as we raced by pages which documented the facts that there are more trees on the planet than in the 1800’s….that there are more fish in the sea than we could ever eat….that the air is clear and pure, considering that coal-burning plants produce nothing harmful….that Oxycotin Addiction does not cause hearing loss!

And finally, dizzy from information overload…we were there.

A page as pretty as you please, with graphs and charts which indicated clearly, to those with brains to read and understand, that the planet is cooling, not warming.

Our mentor puffed away and grinned up at us, little sparks from his pipe lighting on his tattered tweed jacket and burning little holes in its ancient fabric. He looked at us, letting us read and interpret.

“But what about the Ice?” I cried, still locked in the liberal mind-set that says that empirical evidence is more valid than charts and graphs produced by basement trolls.

Our puffing professor clenched the stem of his pipe between impatient teeth and growled, “Ah, the ice. It comes and goes, you fool. Nature has her ways. Such a big planet, you know…a little ice here or there hardly matters. Why, the planet was covered in it several times in the past…and now it is getting shed of it. That’s all. But it doesn’t alter the fact that the planet is getting cooler. Look at that chart. See? There where it talks about sea temperatures….there…at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, it’s colder there by three degrees!”

I wavered. The data was clear. Several places on the planet were getting colder. I looked again. The list was long. The deepest parts of the oceans, world-wide, were cooling drastically! Some by as much as four or five degrees! And there… the upper atmosphere, above forty-five thousand feet was down two-point-seven degrees Celsius and dropping like a rock!

Our kind instructor eased himself to his feet and pocketed his pipe. It was still lit and the pocket of the moth-eaten tweed began to smolder, but I could not bring myself to shame him by bringing his error to his attention; he was obviously a proud and sturdy fellow.

He smiled round at us, just like that same professor mentioned earlier would just before deserting us to a semester Student teaching and dissected cats.

“Go on, now, my friends. Worry no more. Drive hard, live hard, drink hard and let the Marketplace determine all things. The planet will be fine, just as soon as we finish plowing her up and ridding her of all these invasive species the liberal fools call diversity”.

He trundled off, coat now fairly billowing smoke and left us to our thoughts. On the monitor, Rush’s carefully compiled evidence of Planetary Health glowed like a beacon in the night. I thought of lighthouses, set to save the drifting ship from doom on rocky shores, to lead the errant sailors home.

And I knew. He was right. The planet was fine…the whole thing was a hoax designed to keep me from enjoying my American Birthright as a consumer at the top of the Food Chain ! They wanted to give my gasoline to people who didn’t deserve it, like the Arabs and Serbs whose land it lay beneath! What would they do with it, anyway? Nothing that Americans couldn’t do better!

I fumed. Mr, Gore, indeed. Polar Bears gone amok. Whales without sense enough to stay off the beach. People driving little tiny cars, shaming real Americans with their timerity. No wonder the Terrorists were emboldened to strike! What a Travesty!

I resolved to take action. I looked at the screen where the Polar Bear had taken a dive. The wait-staff had switched back to the Polar Bear web-cast.  The producers  were showing Socialist Bear go under again and again, playing on the heartstrings of fools world-wide in order to promote their evil, anti-capitalist agenda and allow third world countries to ascend without merit.

I called Kat.

“Book me tickets to Greenland ! Tomorrow ! Pack my parka and long-underwear, Kat…we’re going to set those dummy Bear research people right. They’ve got to know they are dealing with suicidal bears! They don’t understand the danger !”

And off we went…to Greenland, to the Ice….To Glory !

Image via Wikipedia

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