The Cable Gamer has no opinion on Al Gores's energy and environmental policy. I mean, I am a little skeptical that it will be as easy to no-carbon in ten years, as the former Vice President says, but I can always be persuaded that science can work wonders.
However, my opinion of Gore on one topic is cemented--he is a snob. Consider these comments, made in (where else?) San Francisco, as reported by Caroline McCarthy of CNET:
One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated.
In other words, Gore is still pushing the "vast wasteland" meme put forth by FCC Chairman Newton Minow a half-century ago. It was always a snobby thought, and now Gore has, uh, recycled it, deriding what people choose to watch as "deadening."
And all this time, I thought that Gore's speaking style was deadening!
Revealingly, Gore's answer to the TV status quo is Current TV, which is also deadly. Gore co-founded Current in 2005, as a way, I suppose, of letting proto-Obama supporters show their videos and stuff. Think of Current as a dumb version of YouTube, only without the fun.
But in the meantime, Gore thinks that the TV shows that the rest of wish to watch are "deadening." He didn't say why, but of course, to a San Francisco crowd, he didn't have to. Everyone in his live audience would undoubtedly take it as a given that the stuff that the proles watch is obviously deadening. (Although maybe there were a few regular TV watchers in the audience--although they were surely too intimidated to do anything other than applaud as Gore bashed them for their bourgeois taste.
