In Al Gore’s latest diatribe — lamenting how his climate-change crusade has been undermined by self-interested skeptics — he seems weirdly unaware of the role of imagery in our media-driven society — weird because he himself used to be the past master of the sound bite, the bombastic phrase, and the multimedia publicity campaign that, in part, won him a Nobel Prize and hundreds of millions in green profits.
He deplores the Climategate e-mail fraud, but it was as understandable as it was an enormous setback — just as would have been Sarah Palin’s leaked e-mails had they revealed commensurate and conscious efforts at deception.
Gore himself took on prophet-like status and wished to equate the global-warming/climate-change religion with his own godhead, and yet he now seems surprised that his movement suffers bad publicity, oblivious that it might be, at least in some small part, also related to his own public hypocrisies, whether the multiple energy-gorging luxury houses he owned, the private jetting and yacht, or the “crazed sex poodle” charges.
The point is not whether these hypocrisies or unproven harassment charges have anything to do with the purported warming of the planet, only that a guru who lives by defining his cult-like movement through his own person, should not be shocked that his cause suffers in the court of popular opinion when its media-absorbed, globe-trotting self-appointed messiah hits hard times.