The Academy Awards are tonight and with “The Goracle” undoubtedly taking home at least one Oscar we’re going to be hearing a lot about him. The Washington Post has an article about the phenomena of Gore’s new-found celebrity (he’s getting a honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota and has also be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize) that, for all its gushing, reads like something you’d see about some teen idol in the pages of Tiger Beat.
In the year since his film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, to a standing ovation, Gore has gone from failed presidential contender—and a politician who at times gave new meaning to the word cardboard—to the most unlikely of global celebrities.
Incredible as it may seem, Al Gore is not only totally carbon neutral, but geek-chic cool. No velvet rope can stop him. He rolls with Diddy. He is on first-name basis, for real, with Ludacris. But what does this mean? And how did it happen? Did Gore change? Or did the climate—political, cultural, natural—change around him?
In an e-mail exchange with The Goracle himself, “AG” typed to The Washington Post that the Oscar craziness and pageantry of the film premieres has been fun (his word) “but I’m old enough to know that a red carpet is just a rug, so I’ve been able to enjoy that part of it without losing perspective.”
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Before the film? He was more Willy Loman than Green Avenger. After his loss in 2000, a battered Gore began to schlep around the country, often solo, flying coach, giving his ever-evolving slide show about climate change, a threat that Gore, now 58, says he has felt strongly about since his Harvard days.
After the film? Says director Guggenheim, “Everywhere I go with him, they treat him like a rock star.”
Guggenheim is not being hyperbolic. Take the Cannes Film Festival: Al Gore was mobbed. By French people. He was a presenter at the Grammy Awards, alongside Queen Latifah, where he got one of the biggest welcomes of the night. “Wow. . . . I think they love you, man. You hear that?” the current Queen asked the former veep. Earlier this month, the ticket Web site at the University of Toronto crashed when 23,000 people signed on in three minutes to get a seat to hear Gore do his thing on the oceanic carbon cycle. At Boise State, Gore and his slide show sold out 10,000 seats at the Taco Bell Arena, reportedly “faster than Elton John.”
I suppose we’re supposed to be impressed by the crowds Gore can draw, but mass appeal is hardly an endorsement of Gore’s theories. Or his sanity. Heck even the nutball Jim Jones managed to convince almost 1,000 people to kill themselves, and in the 19th century William Miller was able to convince tens of thousands of people that the world was going to end on a date he predicted, a movement that exists - despite Miller’s predictions clearly being wrong - as the church of Seventh Day Adventists.
My point is that Gore is just the latest in a long line of proselytizers bent on shaping the people of the world to his view. His movement is all about control. Gore thinks we should all be living our lives a certain way, and he’ll do whatever he can to cram that “way” down our throats. The only difference between Gore and some of his counterparts in the past - like Miller, Jones and David Koresh - is that Gore brings political connections and the power of government to the table along with the half-baked, inconclusive science he use to support his theories. And his preaching has gone mainstream, which means that every one of us runs the risk of being pushed into toeing the line on Gore’s pseudo-religion.
