Eco-terror is rarely without Gore

Posted 1 year ago at 10:44 am. 0 comments

Last night my significant other, our robot cat and I were playing a lively game of “Fuck Off I’m Al Gore”.  It’s a popular pastime, currently sweeping the nation’s schoolyards and prison quadrangles, in which you compete to think up scenarios - novelty interviews, station idents, charity whimsy - so extreme or ridiculous that eco-Al would say “fuck off, I’m Al Gore” with a sense of astonished injustice.  The great thing about FOIAG is that you can substitute any notable celebrity; I understand “Fuck Off I’m Michael Howard” is particularly popular among some Labour backbenchers.  Anyway, votes were equally split over whether Al would queue up for a few days for an Apple iPhone: pros were that he’d appreciate the headline grabbing with the minimal of traditional advertising; cons however were that he’d be reluctant to wear the same suit for a few days in a run.

Mike Peake in today’s Sunday Times recalls an interviewwith the Gorester, who’s undergoing something of a publicity flurry right now with his Live Earth concert malarkey and trying desperately to make environmental issues sexy.  Al could take a leaf out of other growth industries such as rhinoplasty, terrorism and auto-erotic asphyxiation; the attacks in the UK this week have been automatically attributed to fundamentalist Islamic extremists, myopically ignoring the controversial public smoking ban that came into force today.

My theory is that, with the anti-smoking lobby receiving a much-needed fellate-in-the-bushes with the new clean-air legislation, irate tobacco-hounds have staged a number of aggressive protests aimed at significant locations in smoking lore: Glasgow Airport, home of duty-free bulk-buy fags, and a popular nightclub in London, such establishments being a common place for smokers to “light up”. 

As the UK government, newly under the baleful eye of Gordon “Marrowbone” Brown reacts with the inevitable nicotine ID patches and mandatory registration with the police for convicted cigarette-users, we can expect to see howls of protest unfurled across newspapers and pamphlets, keeping the topic firmly in the public eye.  And what do the the eco-mutterers give us?  A Toyota Prius and a glass of organic orange juice.  For shame!