Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [38]
Why are there no consequences for telling all these whoppers? Why is George W. Bush still occupying our White House? Where are the articles of impeachment?
How many more whoppers will it take before Congress is full?
CHAPTER
3
Oil’s Well That Ends Well
LAST NIGHT I had a dream. Actually I had a number of dreams. One had something to do with smearing Tofutti on a camel. Another involved me pushing around golfing great Fred Couples as he sat in my shopping cart while he recited sections of the Bhagavad Gita inside a Target store in Modesto, California. I know, I need help.
It was one of those nights when you have been out partying too hard and it’s like once your head hits the pillow some sort of high-speed megachannel DirecTV comes on in your subconscious and you can’t find the remote to turn it off. I had been out celebrating the killings of Uday and Qusay Hussein with friends and loved ones. You can never discount the importance of getting together with those close to you when your government is able to corner and gun down People We Don’t Like. But one too many shots of tequila, with the whole bar chanting, “Uday! Uday! Uday!” as I chugged them down, was a bit too much, even for me. I hadn’t partied this hard since the state of Texas executed that retard guy.
Anyway, back to my main dream. It was so real it felt like something right out of Scrooge. Suddenly, I was in the future. It was the year 2054, and it was the occasion of my one hundredth birthday. Either I had joined a health food co-op some years earlier or, for some reason, the world ran out of Ben & Jerry’s because I was looking pretty good for a hundred.
In this dream I received a surprise visit from my great-granddaughter, Anne Coulter Moore. I have no idea how she got that name and I was too frightened to ask. She told me she was doing an oral history project for her sixth-grade class at school and she wanted to ask me a few questions. But there were no lights, she had no computer, and the water she was drinking was not in a bottle. Here is how the conversation went, as best as I can recall . . .
ANNE COULTER MOORE: Hi, Great-Grandpa! I brought you a candle. For some reason we got an extra one with our monthly ration. I figured there might not be enough light for the interview.
MICHAEL MOORE: Thank you, Annie. Now if there is any way you could leave me that pencil you’re using when you’re done, I could burn it to keep me warm.
A: Sorry, Great-Grandpa, but if I give it to you, then I will have nothing to write with for the rest of the year. Back in your day, didn’t you have other things to use when you wrote something?
M: Yes, we had pens and computers and we had little machines you could speak into and out would come the writing.
A: What happened to those?
M: Well, dear, it takes plastic to make them.
A: Oh, yes, plastic. Did everyone love plastic back then?
M: It was a magical substance, but it was made from oil.
A: I see. And ever since the oil dried up, we’ve had to use these pencils.
M: That’s right. Boy, we all miss the oil, don’t we?
A: When you were young, were people really so stupid to think that there was enough oil to last forever? Or did they just not care about us.
M: Of course we cared. But in my day, our leaders swore on a stack of Bibles there was plenty of oil, and, of course, we wanted to believe them because we were having so much fun.
A: So, when you started to run out of oil, and you knew the end was near, what did you do?
M: We tried to keep things under control by dominating those parts of the world where most of the remaining oil and natural gas was located. Many wars were fought. For the early wars, in Kuwait and Iraq, our leaders had to come up with excuses like, “this bad guy had bad weapons,” or “these good people needed to be liberated.” We liked that word “liberated.”
But the fighting was never really for any of those reasons. It was always about the oil. We just couldn’t speak