At the end, Mandvi, through playing along, shows indignation. He asks of his interviewee, "What's the French word for douchebag?" Watch, it's funny:
I admit that I love that phrase, What's the French word for douchebag? Whenever I see someone pulling some kind of dick move - a politician, a celebrity, a pro athlete - it's usually the first thing that pops into my mind. What's the French word for douchebag? It's at least as deserving of an acronym as Oh My God, or What Would Jesus Do? WTFWFD? Although, just looking at it now, it's probably much more likely to be read as What the Fuck Would [name beginning with F] Do? than what it actually represents.
But it really should be used more specifically than even the way I use it. It applies best when used to refer to people who take actions that they know will lead to grave harm to other people or to other places, hiding serenely behind some kind of defense mechanism or another. Plausible deniability. Self defense. Economic necessity.
The problem is, of course, that even with that relatively exact definition, the sheer number of potential uses quickly becomes overwhelming.
Take the following. Several weeks ago I saw an ad similar to this in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Canadian Oil: Fuel for the Heartland job engine
The ad advocates for the further development of the Alberta tar sands, and for the construction of a pipeline through Canada and the United States that would carry the oil found there. The group behind the ad is an oil industry group called the American Petroleum Institute. The oil industry, of course, is in general best thought of as a pack of ghouls and vampires whose sole purpose is to profit through theft of the planet's natural wealth. They're not unlike the aliens in Independence Day, although their ugliness is usually lurking just beneath the surface rather in plain sight. In fact, the aliens of Independence Day would've been wildly more successful had they just landed their spacecraft outside the corporate headquarters of BP, Exxon-Mobil, and other similarly-minded paragons of the energy industry, sold them their resource-extracting technology, in exchange for, say, 50% of the resources extracted, and instructed them to package the whole thing as a massive jobs program. It's likely that President Bill Pullman, rather than jumping into a fighter jet to join the final battle, would have been proposing tax breaks for the companies openly colluding with the invading creatures. There would have been no alien for Will Smith to punch, and if he'd gone after the executives of the oil companies in the same way, I imagine he wouldn't have gotten very far if he'd started dragging the unconscious body of, say, the CEO of Exxon-Mobil though the deserts of New Mexico to Area 51.
This is not hyperbole. The Alberta tar sands rest under a very unfortunate and expansive forest, one of the last great boreal forests on the planet. As implied by the name, the oil there is in a more solid state than that found in the oil fields in, say, Texas, and so "extraction," as the process is so blandly called, is much more destructive and energy intensive than in those oil fields (which are themselves hardly a model for environmental stewardship.) In fact, it involves what can best be described as flaying the skin off the earth, to get at the oil mixed with sand and soil underneath.
The process is so sickeningly destructive that it almost defies description, so here's a picture:
And here is a lecture by Naomi Klein in which she talks about this complete monstrosity:
This has been on my mind for a while, because I think it reflects an unsettling sickness at the heart of this culture and this country. Someone created that ad above, someone decided to call this a jobs issue, and who can argue with jobs? Who can argue with the creation of however many jobs the American Petroleum Institute claims the Keystone pipeline will ultimately create? No doubt someone has done a cost-benefit analysis and decreed that development of the tar sands, and creation of the pipeline, are entirely worth it, just as drilling in an ice-free Arctic will be decreed worth it, just as drilling in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was thought to be worth it. And still is, by people who make those decisions. Douchebags, in other words.
But this sort of thing is inevitable according to the logic of our economy, our way of life. This is what I'm getting at. We're all douchebags, when you come right down to it. The oil from the Alberta tar sands will power our cars, our planes, our lights, our heat, our air conditioners. It's found in our plastics, in just about every product we consume. It powers our agriculture and is found in our food. As production in already discovered oil fields diminishes, as it must, we will go looking for oil in much less accessible places. like the tar sands, like the Arctic. And even under the most favorable cost benefit analysis, that oil will run out, too, but only after the destruction of ecosystems and the poisoning of the water and the soil. And even if you only consider the inevitable human cost, wholesale destruction of environments releases toxins into the same air and water and soils, and those who live anywhere near the tar sands will ingest in one form or another, in one way or another, those toxins. And we all live downstream. So much human disease is caused by this relentless environmental assault that I think we tend to ignore it instinctively, but the illness and death caused by cancer and respiratory illnesses, just to name a few, are almost beyond reckoning, and it is occurring because of this culture's abuse of the planet. We're all complicit, not just the people of Asbestos, Canada.
If you're interested in taking some concrete action, visit tarsandsaction.org. I'm planning on going.
