By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, February 08, 2019
Where is Gary Larson when you need him?
I loved Calvin and
Hobbes, Peanuts, Dilbert, and Bloom County, but I was in awe of The Far Side. Larson could do more in one panel — daily — than the best often did in
three. And he was weird, and I like weird (you’d know that if you could see
what I’m wearing right now).
Anyway, I could write about Larson all day long, so long
as the armadillo I have under my breastplate doesn’t need to go to the
bathroom. But I should get to the point.
Larson loved cows, and he made them into cultural things like no one before. “I’ve always
thought the word ‘cow’ was funny,” Larson once said. “And cows are sort of
tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.”
And that’s why we need him now.
Contained within the FAQ for the Green New Deal is one of
the greatest sentences ever written with the intention of being taken very,
very seriously:
We set a goal to get to net-zero,
rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be
able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.
I love this sentence so much I want to stand outside its
house holding up a boom box blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
I love the attempt to seem pragmatic. We’re not crazy radicals here, we’re just
going for net-zero emissions rather than zero emissions in ten years because we are part of the reality-based
community.
This is like the straight man in a comedy team saying
something banal and serious to set up his partner for the punchline. “We just
need a little more time to get rid of
the farting cows and the airplanes.” It’s like Ben Franklin’s “Fart Proudly”
essay, except they’re not really in on the joke.
And this is where we need Larson. The Green New Dealers
don’t want to get rid all of the cows because bovine genocide is not part of
the Commissar’s Ten-Year Plan. But fear not, we’ll get there one day. And even
the farters have a little more than a decade to get their affairs in order. But
make no mistake: We’re coming for you flatulators (shut up, I need that to be a
word). We’re like Kurt Russell in Tombstone,
and there’s gonna be a reckoning for you cud-chewing milk-beasts because while
we like the cheese we get from you, you must be liquidated for the sin of
cutting the cheese.
Leave aside that “Farting Cows and Airplanes” would make
a great band name. Forget that it can be read in such way that the airplanes
fart too. How many Far Side cartoons
could we get out of the image of cows turning on each other for the sin of
letting one rip? Remember, all cows
fart. (I want to thank the Powers that Be for giving me the opportunity to
write that sentence in the context of a serious public-policy debate.) So
singling out just the “Farting Cows” as if they are a separate class of animals
— the hooved climate kulaks of Al Gore’s Animal
Farm remake — conjures images of cows throwing each other under the bus
when the Green Commissars show up.
“It was Clarence!” Shouts a cross-legged cow.
“Shut up, Bessy! The Inspector knows that whoever smelt
it dealt it!”
You know what you call the cows that successfully survive
the purge? The laughing stock.
(On that note, as Dom DeLuise shouted from his trailer
before coming out in a Speedo, let me apologize for what you’re about to see
next.) It would be udder chaos as each cow tried to be neither seen nor herd
because the steaks would be so high. I know I’m milking this by butchering a
very serious topic. I don’t want to steer you wrong, and I understand why you
might have beef with all of these puns that have moved pasture your lactose
tolerance.
They Put It in
Writing
Don’t have a cow — I know I am having too much fun with
this. And, yes, I know that the methane from cattle is a serious issue. But
come on. Just look at this whole thing from a hard-nosed political perspective
and you have to see what an unbelievable gift this whole thing is to the very
people whom believers in the Green New Deal hate the most.
If you tilt your head and squint, this whole thing looks
a bit like Jerry Maguire.
If you’ve never seen the movie, you should. It’s good.
But I’m going to assume you did and not recap the whole thing. The kid of a
hockey-player client makes sports-agent Jerry Maguire feel guilty about how he
exploited his dad. Combined with a bout of indigestion, Jerry writes a 25-page
manifesto on why his firm should have fewer clients. He distributes the memo to
all of his partners and they all applaud, knowing in their cynical hearts that
he signed his own career death-warrant. Soon, he’s asked out to lunch by his
Beta — excuse me, Beto O’Rourke-esque partner Bob Sugar to get the bad news.
“You did this to yourself. You said ‘fewer clients.’ You put it all on paper,”
Sugar explains.
Later, Jerry realizes the full scope of his screw-up and
why he’s “cloaked in failure.”
They will teach my story to other
agents on “do not do this” day in agent school. Why? Let’s recap. Because a
hockey player’s kid made me feel like a superficial jerk, I had two slices of
bad pizza, went to bed, grew a conscience and wrote a 25-page Manifesto of
Doom!
Now, I know some of you are thinking, “How’s that
armadillo doing?” He’s fine. Don’t worry. I also know that others of you are
thinking that I self-owned myself because Jerry
Maguire has a happy ending. Well, here’s the thing: This isn’t a movie.
I’m not going to go over all of the reasons why anything
like the Green New Deal will never happen — though I covered a couple in my
column. All you have to do is contemplate the tens of millions of jobs —
automotive, oil and gas, manufacturing, agricultural — that would be destroyed
to understand why politically the Green New Deal, as proposed, might as well be
a call to mandate that vegan unicorns crap iPhones. And you can promise to
tackle farting cows and planes down the road all you like, it won’t sound any
more reasonable to the voters who decide every election. I mean, it’s never a
good sign when Nancy Pelosi — who considers climate change her defining issue —
brushes you off like she’s a high school principal handed a student petition to
abolish homework.
And yeah, I know, the Green New Dealers have an answer:
Think of all the jobs we’d create building a new electric grid and high-speed
rail system, retrofitting every building
in the United States, not to mention the Great Round-Up of the Gassy Cows.
Even if one were to take all of that seriously — an if
larger than Egon’s hypothetical Twinkie in Ghostbusters
— you don’t have to be Mancur Olsen to understand that the interests invested
in the economy as it is aren’t going to bite at your offer of magic beans, and
not just because beans make you fart.
Don’t Uncork the
Champagne
Nancy Pelosi has many faults, but she understands the
facts on the ground. It was Pelosi more than Obama who pulled off Obamacare
because she understood that you have to co-opt the “stakeholders,” not declare
war on them, to achieve anything significant. She knows that if she were to
embrace the Green New Deal (or Medicare for All) it would be the greatest gift
she could give to Donald Trump and the GOP, because the stakeholders would
stampede, like a herd of cattle fleeing the fart police, to the party that
promises to save them.
There’s a reason President Trump proclaimed in the State
of the Union last year a few days ago, “Tonight, we renew our resolve
that America will never be a socialist country.” If Trump is going to get
reelected — another giant-Twinkie-sized if in my opinion — he needs to reignite
the Flight 93 Binary Choice panic that allowed him to pull off his win in the
Electoral College last time. (As of now, there’s almost zero chance he can win
the popular vote.) The White House is reportedly — and understandably — giddy
over the Dems’ lurch left. Kamala Harris recently told Jake Tapper that she
would like to erase the insurance plans of more than 100 million Americans and
destroy private insurance companies wholesale. Where will those voters and
insurance PAC dollars go if they took her seriously?
Yet none of this means all is good with the world. Many
conservatives — including yours truly — are having great fun watching leading
Democrats embrace something that can so easily be turned against them.
It’s a quaint memory now, but the goal of the
conservative movement was not to make the GOP more conservative. That was step
one in a two-part plan. The real goal was to make the country more
conservative. That requires moving the center of gravity in politics rightward.
How does that project
look today?
So while it may be good news in the short-term for
Republican politicians for the Democrats to veer wildly to the left, it’s not
good news for the country or our cause that conservatism has been redefined as
Trumpism for millions of Americans (including millions of conservatives). When
large swaths of young voters — the largest bloc of voters in America — look to
someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as their spokesperson, the Overton window
moves in a direction conservatives should not celebrate because it is likely to
slam shut on our squishy bits. Many of the people spinning the largely
frivolous Trump State of the Union as a masterstroke are implicitly endorsing
his moves leftward on legal immigration, infrastructure, trade, paid family
leave, and — I would argue — foreign policy.
The larger point is that when you ask for and get a
“disruptor” in the Oval Office, you don’t necessarily get to choose the form of
the disruptions you get. Conjure a Stay Puft Man or Godzilla all you like,
there’s no guarantee that the behemoth will only smash the things you want
smashed. Retaining walls that serve valuable purposes will likely get smashed,
too.
The Democrats have become radicalized in no small part
because of their hatred of Donald Trump. And because that is the defining
mindset of the Left these days, it creates breathing room for other forms of
radicalism. The people pushing Trump to declare a national emergency to build
his wall will undoubtedly rationalize the move on the grounds that he was
elected to be a disruptor and the fact that the Democrats are so
“obstructionist.” Maybe he’ll get the wall, maybe he won’t. But he will leave
in his path enough flattened barriers to executive power that the next Democrat
will have no problem using the exact same talking points for her or his
emergency declaration. (As I write in the new cover story for National Review, the Left is much
better, and has a far richer history, at declaring national emergencies to
justify its power grabs.)
More broadly, the Trump years may mark some significant
policy and political victories, but culturally it has been a boon for the Left.
Just in the last week or so, we’ve seen the Democrats come closer than ever to
literally — not figuratively — endorsing infanticide and socialism. Again,
that’s arguably good news for partisans looking at the next election, but it’s
a nightmare in the larger context, in part because the Democrats could still win despite that baggage.
And while the Unicorn Caucus will never get everything that it wants, you can
come well short of the slaughter of the farting cows and still do profound
damage to the country.
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