The inconvenient truth about Al Gore

By Al S. Mendoza

I didn’t watch Al Gore speak live in Manila.  Intentional.

One, I knew what he’d tell his listeners.

Two, he’d bore me to death.

Three, I didn’t have a fortune: P17,000 per ticket.

I had a hunch: My IBA a.k.a. Imported Buloy Al (local buloy Al Fernandez remains dearest to me) would merely repeat himself.

And I was damn right.

“Love the earth,” he said.  “It’s the only one we got.”

Or words to that effect.

But who doesn’t know that?

Who doesn’t love the earth?

He’s told the world that many times.  In fact, he even produced a film on that.

And, by golly, it won him an Oscar.

And I thought the Oscar people were cerebral?

It also earned Al Gore the much-coveted Nobel.

Al Gore’s pitch all these years has been, still is, for us to be kind to Mother Earth.

Have we not been doing that?

I don’t torch dried leaves in my backyard like many of my neighbors.

I don’t throw plastic wrappers into the river.

I don’t use urea to fatten my vegetable patch, to induce flowers from my garden of roses, violets and gumamelas, and fruit trees like santol, mango, rambutan, makopa and avocado.

I know, you know, that the masses of the world’s people are basically earth-lovers.

Aren’t mainly the greedy the main destroyers of Mother Earth?

They bleed our forests dry of precious timber.

They stab the ozone layers with their factories that billow black, poison-laden smoke.

They acidize our soil with chemical-laced fertilizers.

They inject killer pesticides on our farmers’ produce.

They spray the air we breadth with choking mists disguised as fresheners.

To embellish his advocacy in his globetrotting ways, Al Gore consistently shows reams of footage of gory images about nature’s wrath: Landslides, floods, glaciers melting.

Who is he frightening?

Not me.  I knew it all along:  The world’s so-called leaders themselves in cahoots with greed-driven capitalists and imperialist states are to blame.

It’s them Al Gore should train his guns on.

But he can’t, couldn’t.

Why?

His film answers that:  The inconvenient truth is, he’s part of the Old Boys Club.

So, why would I go to his party?

That’s his parlor.  Once you step inside, you are his—lock, stock and barrel.

I knew the papers would tell us the next morning what Al Gore had talked about the day before.

So, why bother?

Seventeen thousand pesos is a lot of money to waste for one man’s saliva.

Who’d been had?

Ah, suckers are born every minute.

Not me, though.

Part of that P17,000 went to a more worthy cause: Augmenting the matriculation fee of my grandson, Dakila.

Who knows, Ilak (that’s his nickname) might even become a better speaker—it not a genuine advocate—when he grows up.

Ah, to be a grumpa.

Who said the family pipeline ends after marrying off your kids to “basterds” you do not even know from Adam?

Life’s a never-ending journey.

To me, that’s the CONVENIENT truth.

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