The Lorax in Concert

The Beatles played their last paid concert in San Francisco. As did the Sex Pistols and the Band. It isn’t so much that rock stars don’t come to the Bay Area; it is that we get them after their peak – the entertainment equipment of a baseball player after too many off-seasons eating hot dogs instead of weightlifting being told that from now on he will a designated hitter. There are parts of the performance that remain, little bits that can still amaze with the energy that came from the younger self, but the complete concert is reduced to at best a greatest hits compilation with the occasional song of the new album that serves as a reminder of how the new work is vastly derivative. Few have good second acts. Last Wednesday I saw one of the great exceptions.

It had been 19 years since I had last heard him speak, and after all these years the first thing I noticed is that we are both about 30 pounds heavier than the time he visited my college. Whatever effects there are from global warming are exasperated by the extra layers we ate into ourselves. Physical charisma isn’t as important to him now; no longer a heartbeat away from his boss’s job, he has moved on from the power that comes from an elected official to a new role of his defining, our environmental designated hitter. He is, now more than the last decade, our political rock star. He is Al Gore.

There was a buzz at the Masonic Auditorium on Wednesday night for Al Gore’s City Arts talk that is usual reserved for sport events or half off Christmas sales. If there is a city that longs more for a few hundred votes going a different way in Florida, I don’t know it. David Remnik in the New Yorker captured this angst about how different the world would be as did a skit on Saturday Night Live. The sketch shows a future with each 2000 presidential candidate. George Bush’s world is in flames, and Will Ferrell played him as a bumbling maniac. There was a time when the show made fun of how incompetently Bush spoke, but it stopped after that September as if the planes not only collided with the towers but their sense of irony as well. What was supposed to funny now actually came true: America was burning.

The skit of Gore’s possible future was of a bored nation. He had the country open up text books, and spoke like a disappointed history teacher to the state of Iowa. In real life he speaks with monotones and sighs. He hesitates to form the right sentence, and in these pauses I could feel he was weighing the choices; considering the balance between environment necessity and human urges, educational reform and television regulation, between Nuclear power and carbon offsets; and examining each item as is connects to the fabric of understanding that comes from a life that not only gained access to scientific experts, but also the far harder choice of seeking them out and listening. Al Gore is a rock star.

At first I thought crowd around me murmured only agreeing giggles when he talked, but it came clear in the word of Mark Anthony that some came not praise him, but bury him. The woman behind me bristled every time the interviewer asked Gore about the greatness of private schools. She seemed oblivious that she was sharing a lecture with the rest of the crowd, and the experience she had hoped for the $15 was to ramble loudly as if she were watching the former vice president on television. Perhaps she just had a couch mode where politics were meant to be drowned out by sound of ones own voice.

The hard part is that she wasn’t alone.

A third of the way somebody else started screaming about how 17,000 scientists didn’t believe in global warming. I was taken back by how anyone could heckle Al Gore. The sentence about Al Gore that use the word “polar” should it before the words “ice caps” and not “’izing figure.” Being against Al Gore is a bit like being against Smokey the Bear. Both are against C02 from forest fires.

Somebody else right behind me was ejected for yelling about carbon offsets crushing the third world. There is an angry showmanship side to San Francisco politics; there is a point when radicalism shifts to a destructive force, a time where a good concept such as making San Francisco more bike friendly shifts into beating up people in minivans. Sometimes it seems we are city of bull horns instead of Boy Scouts.

I do believe strongly in free speech but have a larger hesitancy about free shouting. It isn’t so much that someone yells fire because in that case at least the expression is being heard, but it is more the conundrum that if everybody yells then no one can hear what is being said. The strength of a political argument is not measured by the volume of sound, but by the analysis of its points. It needs dialog. It needs people who are willing to weigh the information of the world. It needs Al Gore.

At most of the lectures in the City Arts program there is a book signing afterwards, but Gore disappeared quickly once the talk was over. It is much harder for him to mingle than say his predecessor Dan Quayle (though granted his successor isn’t coming to San Francisco anytime soon). Without the epilogue the lecture seemed short.

I left knowing that screaming “encore” wasn’t going to help anymore than “four more years” did at the start of the millennium. I believe that my voice is bettered used to talk about his points with smaller groups of friends. My voice isn’t meant for the big stage; we can’t all be rock stars.