Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [57]
Speaking of Florida, that state can also be held responsible for this sorry mess. Why? Ask Mr. Freon. Before air conditioning, Florida and the rest of the South were lightly populated. The heat and humidity were unbearable. I mean, you can barely move on a 100-degree day in Texas. The air is so thick in New Orleans you can hardly breathe. No wonder people down South spoke with “such an unintelligible drawl. It was just too damn hot to form a series of vowels and consonants. I believe this brutal, paralyzing heat is also the reason no great inventions, no new ideas,
And no contributions toward advancing our civilization ever came out of the South (with a few notable exceptions: Lillian Hellman, William Faulkner, R.J. Reynolds). When it’s that hot, who can think, let alone read?
Then the air conditioner was invented—and suddenly you could actually get some work done in the South. Skyscrapers went up all over the region—and northerners, sick of the winter, came down in droves. They found that you could drive to work in your air-conditioned car, work all day in your air-conditioned office, study all day in your air conditioned college. Then you could go home at night to your air conditioned house to plan the weekend’s cross-burning and block club barbecue.
Before we knew it, the South had risen and was now controlling the country. Today, the conservative ideology that was born in the Confederate South has the nation in its grip. Mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in public places; teaching creationism; insisting on prayer in school; banning books; fomenting hatred of the federal (northern) government; calling for reduction of government and social services; thirsting to go to war at a moment’s notice; and looking to resolve any problem through violence—these are all trademarks of the elected lawmakers of the “New” South. If you think about it, the Confederacy has finally won the Civil War—a long-awaited victory won by luring stupid Yankees down there with a promise of 5,000 BTUs and a built-in icemaker.
Now the South reigns supreme—and if you still don’t believe it, just look at our last four presidential elections. If you wanted to win, you had to have been born in the South or adopted it as your home. In fact, in the last ten presidential elections, the winner (or Supreme Court appointee) was the one with his feet planted most firmly in the South or West. No longer can anyone from the North get elected to lead the nation.
Air conditioning made it all possible. And now, having opened the door to southern pols and Dixie climes, it’s also promising to export those hot southern winds all over the world—by making the hole in the ozone layer a reality. That hole is now over Antarctica—and is two and a half times the size of Europe!
The ozone layer in the earth’s atmosphere protects us from ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which can give us cancer and kill us. The hole we’ve ripped in its fabric is caused by chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals typically used in air conditioners and refrigerators and as propellants in aerosol cans. When these chemicals are released into the atmosphere and struck by high energy light waves such as ultraviolet light, they form compounds that destroy ozone. The biggest contributor of ozone-depleting CFCs? Car air-conditioning units—one of America’s favorite traveling companions.
Which reminds me of another (literally) indispensable accessory du jour for hip young Americans on the go: bottled water. Why drink water out of a tap or fountain for free when you can pay $1.20 for the same thing—and get a plastic bottle you can pretend to recycle later?
I didn’t always drink bottled water in New York. In fact, I used to put faith in the folk legend that New York’s water supply is among the cleanest in the world. The water itself, I learned, is collected and stored in twenty-two open-air reservoirs in the Catskills