Former VP Offers an Impassioned Plea for the Planet

By Mary Breslin

Among people of faith, heads are likely to nod in agreement with the title of Al Gore’s book – “An Inconvenient Truth.” Often it’s easier to turn away than face the facts about pressing issues such as poverty, injustice, war and more.

Truth be told, the text is apt to make readers squirm, clear their throats, shift in their seats – it’s as much “uncomfortable” as it is “inconvenient.”
Gore is nothing short of blunt in the introduction, where he writes: “Not only does human-caused global warming exist, but it is growing ... at a pace that has now made it a planetary emergency.”

Calling the subject matter – essentially global warming caused by excesses of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases – a “moral issue,” the former U.S. vice president asserts that the world community has moved from denial to despair where the problem is concerned.

In the 300-plus pages in paperback that first hit bookstore and library shelves in 2006, Gore’s presentation is graphically dramatic; he wraps together impressive four-color photography, informative graphs and easy-to-read charts with hypotheses offered by experts from academia such as John Mercer, Roger Revelle and Lonnie Thompson. Gore holds the reader’s attention by weaving in family vignettes that add human emotion and support to the otherwise textbook-style writing.

Alarming before-and-after photos, such as the drastic changes in glaciers over the past 50 years, are compelling. And captions in oversized fonts give the reader pause. For example, a photo of the havoc in New Orleans taken in the August 2005 aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is matched with the following statement: A major study at MIT in July 2005 “supported scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more powerful and more destructive.” Another, a double-spread photo of a refuse dump in Mexico City, is accompanied by the simple sentence: “We are witnessing an unprecedented and massive collision between our civilization and the earth.”

Global warming is a searing subject, making filmmakers, scientists and senators alike sit up and take notice. Undeniable facts, such as the 35,000 killed a few years ago in a European heat wave along with the documented steady rise in global temperatures since 1860, are cause for a meltdown among those who would refute Gore’s claims.

Though this may not appear on any professor’s list of required classroom reading, it might well be recommended for students from advanced junior high through university level studies and certainly the general adult reading population.
It should be noted that readers might be justifiably disappointed that the Tennessee native regularly injects partisan politics and takes frequent jabs at the present administration, placing blame and responsibility squarely on the shoulders of legislators who sit on the aisle opposite his party of choice.

Nevertheless, the message outweighs the distraction of political affiliation. And if you’re a “believer” and ultimately swayed by the author’s assertions, he has saved the best for last. The final 15 pages at the conclusion of the text are a composite of individual and collective action responses to the thickening of the atmosphere that has trapped infrared radiation from the sun, adversely affecting air, land and water.

Breslin is editor and general manager of the Catholic Explorer, newspaper of the Diocese of Joliet, Ill.

We would love to hear your comments about global warming.

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O’Reilly Biography Walks Line Between Detractors, Supporters

By Brent Kallmer

“Do you want to be lectured by some 8-foot guy telling you you’re an idiot ... and he gives you the last word, then he interrupts and goes to commercial? I don’t know, I wouldn’t.” One might guess that these are the words of one of Bill O’Reilly’s many detractors; they are in fact those of Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, speaking to the fate of the guest on his network’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”

It is merely one of many memorable quotes from Marvin Kitman’s “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly,” undoubtedly the most complete biography of the Fox News personality and cultural phenomenon to date. Having written the television column for Newsday for 35 years – a column O’Reilly grew up reading – Kitman was allowed unprecedented access to the newsman, including some 29 interviews.

The story on O’Reilly is that people either love him or hate him. He is either the defender of all that is good and true and decent or a charlatan and a bully who passes off spectacular diatribes as journalism. Kitman seems to buy into neither version, taking pains to portray O’Reilly as eminently human though not always sympathetic.

He shows the reader O’Reilly the mischievous youth, the pugnacious college student who raised the hackles of students and faculty alike with his provocative writing for the school paper, and the high school teacher who collected $1.75 from each student in his class to purchase an air-conditioning unit that had been denied him by the school’s administration. Through it all, one is impressed by how much of O’Reilly’s professional bearing was there from the beginning.

Described in detail is O’Reilly’s well-publicized feud with liberal pundit Al Franken (now a candidate for a Minnesota Senate seat). Kitman gives a play-by-play of Fox News’ legal action against Franken over his provocative book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” the cover of which featured an unflattering picture of O’Reilly with the word “lies” from the title positioned suggestively nearby. The lawsuit turned into a debacle for Fox, whose lawyers’ claims of copyright infringement for Franken’s use of the network’s “fair and balanced” were met with laughter in the courtroom.

While Kitman’s biography is comprehensive, one wonders whether much remains to be said about O’Reilly that has not already been said by O’Reilly himself, and readers may be forgiven if they do not share Kitman’s enthusiasm for the O’Reilly phenomenon.

Still, his discussion of the man in the sweep of television journalism is most insightful. He concludes in the end that “O’Reilly as a proponent of subjectivism and activism in the news is more in the channel of Ed Murrow than Walter Cronkite and his successors.”

As a television writer, Kitman also has a unique gift for packaging the O’Reilly phenomenon in pithy terms: “He is perpetually upset. Every night he brings passion to the tube. The need not to ‘let those bastards get away with it’ is an eternal flame, a nuclear pile of anger continually recharging itself.”

Of course, a major demographic seems to be overlooked in all of this: those people who do not give a great deal of thought to Bill O’Reilly and who are only vaguely aware that there are cable news networks given over almost entirely to people screaming at each other. Whether or not this group will agree with Kitman’s assessment that “it’s probably a better world having people like him on the TV news” is unclear. In any event, Kitman gives interested parties a very human view of “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up.”

Kallmer is a former research fellow with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Social Development and World Peace and a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.