In Al Gore’s already-notorious speech about how our democracy is in grave danger — evidently because whereas 50 years ago there were three broadcast networks controlling the flow of news and now there has been an explosion of information-gathering that just doesn’t behave the way Al Gore would like it to — the man who was very close to being president went off on a sociobiological tangent to explain why human beings like like TV. Evidently, it’s not because it’s fun. It’s because our ancestors on the savanna watched leaves the way we watch sports:

“Our brains – like the brains of all vertebrates – are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn’t look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call ‘the establishing reflex.’ And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously – sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, ‘glue eyeballs to the screen,’ is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.”

Gore’s preposterous adaptation of evolutionary biology to explain the success of the Fox News Channel indicates that a little learning (as Alexander Pope said) is a dangerous thing. Not to argue with someone so silly, but the thing about TV watching is that it is a passive act, inclining one to languor. It hardly stimulates the fight-or-flight impulse.

But no matter. His insistence on digressing into the blather of a college dorm-room pseud is yet another indication that his presidency, which would have placed the world at mortal risk, might have been entertaining only because the president would have had a case of intellectual Tourette’s like we’ve never seen.

Oh, and he also quotes the Marxist philosopher Jurgen Habermas in the speech, thus indicating that he continues to climb the greasy pole of pretentiousness ever higher.

Man, I hope he runs for president in 2008!