The 'War on Bad Weather'

Every culture has a great fiction to explain the origin of the world. Whether it's a monumental explosion in the blackness of space, a herd of giant animals or an omnipotent patriarch with skilled hands, the basic message is the same: in order to understand life we need stories.

For most of the last 2,000 years, Western civilisation was dominated by a single story. The story was of a mythical father figure in the heavens (God), who conferred the majesty of his power and the demands of his will on to an earthly father figure (King, President), who enforced it through a network of additional, subordinate father figures (ministers, bishops, sheriffs, teachers).

The people who believed in this story were compelled to obey these commands through their fear of the mythical father, whose wrath resulted in eternal torment and a variety of imaginative plagues involving skin disorders and locusts. Those that were less sure of it were compelled to believe by their fear of the subordinate fathers, who had a lot of sharp objects and bare-chested men wearing black hoods at their disposal. This is what modern academia refers to as "the patriarchal paradigm". Inextricable from it is a second paradigm; that of "compliance through fear".

Since the end of World War II, in what has been labelled the "post-modern" period, these two paradigms are alleged to have languished. This is true to the extent that other voices have indeed arisen to shout their own stories through the cracks in the framework, but it is not true when you look at the actual exercise of power.

The power of bishops and teachers may have waned, but it has been more than taken up by news networks, advertising companies and global corporations. The efficacy of the God story has diminished slightly, but it has been vigorously replaced by modern fictions such as the current War on Terror and the rapidly emerging narrative of climate change.

Central to the essence of the fear paradigm is the idea that the world is permanently on the brink of destruction. Thanks to America's partisan struggles, this paradigm, far from disintegrating, has entered a new golden age; a glittering renaissance after the dark centuries of enlightenment, reason and romance.

There has never been a better time to go out into the street wearing a sign saying "the end of the world is nigh" and feel confident that you won't be carted off to the madhouse. On the other hand, go out in public and say that there's absolutely nothing to worry about and you'll soon find yourself lumped in with holocaust deniers, Klan leaders, Danish satirical cartoonists, practioners of voodoo and those wacky Islamic preachers.

That's why, even if I don't necessarily agree with them, I can appreciate the position of the climate change sceptics. We've bought into so many grand political fictions in the last few decades that it's little surprise people have become suspicious.

Scientists, environmentalists and greens have been talking about global warming for years but, for most of us, it was just a vague threat, like a young man being told by his doctor that he might have liver failure at the age of 65 if he doesn't lay off the booze.

It is very possible that most of what they were saying was right, but right or wrong on a scientific level has nothing to do with it. Politics is all about what people will believe, and the only way to get large numbers of people to believe anything is through good marketing.

Did I say "good" marketing? Good is a relative term. The current marketing strategies of the Bush regime employ much the same crude logic that the Nazis used in the 1930s. Create fear of specific groups (communists/terrorists), implicate these groups in dramatic attacks (the burning of the Reichstag, September 11), stoke the fires of nationalism with incendiary rhetoric, flag-waving and parades (axis of evil, web of terror, innumerable garbled German phrases involving the word Reich) and allow people's own insecurities and petty hatreds to do the rest.

Although they would never admit to it, the far-right in America were clearly admirers of the ideas of Josef Goebbels. They applied them feverishly during the 1950s to weed out commies, the 60s against hippies (less successfully), the 80s against the Soviet Union (more commies, this time with nukes), the 90s against Saddam and now the 00s against terrorists.

In each case, the strategy was the same: demonise a particular group, develop a series of specific linguistic terms (essentially inventing a new language) in order to influence people's thoughts, show some strong visual images that support your thesis, thus penetrating public imagination, then repeat, repeat, repeat, until it becomes "the truth".

If you scan through our familiar literature for a similar model you'll find a perfect example of this sort of tactic being employed. It's the story of The Boy who cried Wolf. The problem there, as with here, is that eventually the wolf actually does arrive and slaughter both the boy and the sheep. For the naturally cautious among us (i.e. most of the population), this presents a dilemma. When are we to know whether the threat is real or invented? If there's even the slightest possibility that the boy might be telling the truth, shouldn't we run up the hill armed with our sticks and torches just in case? I suppose so. But we must also ask ourselves this: how many times are we going to let the lying little bastard get away with it before we give his job to someone more responsible?

Enter Al Gore, the "loser" of the pivotal millennium US election, with a (now Oscar-winning) film called An Inconvenient Truth. Before this film, climate change was a fringe issue, still mostly the domain of greens and lefties, real back-of-the-shelf stuff. Now it has more or less displaced terrorism as the Western world's number one fear. Bolstered by images of Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Tsunami, it has ceased to be a vague threat and become a clear and present danger to our lives. An "inconvenient" truth? Hardly. It's exactly what those longing to topple the Bush regime have been waiting for. A "truth"? Well, does it really matter?

What's brilliant about the climate change narrative - for the sake of simplicity let's call it "the War on Bad Weather" - from the Democrat point of view, is that it directly threatens both of the neo-conservative's key areas of support. For starters, it fuels public demand for alternative energy sources, which is very bad news if you happen to get your biggest pay cheques from oil companies. It also threatens to divide their strong Christian fanbase along the following line of argument: "If God is responsible for the weather, then what on earth is making him so angry?"

The far-right Christians may be happy to believe that God's wrath is a way of telling us to kill more Muslims. More moderate Christians, however, may be quite easily swayed by arguments that irresponsible industrial practices, spurred on by corporate greed, have played a part. Then there are the even groovier followers of Christ, who may be readily convinced, if they aren't already, that this illegal and disastrous war their government has waged in God's name is the number one thing that's pissing the big guy off.

Whatever the case, the right will have a tough time defending itself on the climate change issue. Either it ignores it completely and makes a dramatic attempt to hold power by trying to pick a fight with another Middle Eastern country a few weeks before the election, or it seeks to discredit it.

The real problem is that there's no way they can keep the issue out of people's minds and under any sort of control. Everybody in the Western world talks about the weather all the time. We don't need sophisticated media propaganda to tell us it's getting hotter. Whereas convincing people to be afraid of terrorists requires constant invention, an ever-developing narrative of hidden cells and a large cast of invisible enemies with sinister accents and beards, climate change just requires them to go outside and look up at the sky.

It's a far superior fiction, because it's much easier to sustain. If you feel your party is losing because your electorate is more interested in the weather than politics, then just make talking about the weather a political action. It's a narrative masterstroke by the opponents of the far-right.

Best of all, for them, is the fact that volcanoes, hurricanes and tsunamis happen around the world all the time. History has proven it. If those things are your enemy then you are guaranteed of having visual proof of enemy activities more or less whenever you want it. If you have to wait for terrorists to blow something up, on the other hand, you could be waiting forever.

Stories of police foiling a "massive terrorist plot" involving planes, bridges, nukes, poison gas and or dirty bombs just don't have the same appeal. The strength of the fiction depends on its ability to deliver plausible action set pieces. Without the explosion, it's just a political thriller. The audience for these sorts of films is much smaller, and they're the wrong sort of people. They think too much.

This is not to say that the Democrats won't contrive to mess it all up again in the months leading up to the election, but you feel it would take a master piece of story-telling to steal public attention away from the new fiction set into motion by Gore's movie. It will certainly take more than the collective imaginations of Tom Clancy, Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer to save the Republicans this time. Staging an alien invasion might do it, but how would they keep all the extras quiet? Besides, every time we go to look at the skies we'll just be reminded of how crazy the weather is.

As to whether An Inconvenient Truth is actually "true" or not, that's an entirely separate issue.

I'm in no position to judge and neither are most of you. The fact that it puts pressure on unpopular entities such as Big Oil makes a lot of us feel good about believing it. The fact that there's no obvious reason why adopting a more environmentally conscious approach would lead to mass slaughter is another plus. Recycling might be a lot less exciting than separating the members of your community into friends and terrorists, but it's also a lot easier to do. As to how effective this activity is in combating the threat of global warming: again, that's another debate. For now, it's a welcome shift in our collective story. Bush and his circle of pulp novelists have been out-narrated and must slink into the shadows like Gollum.

If there's one consolation for the far-right though, it's that people's memories are not much longer than their attention spans. In ten years time, when Arnold Schwarzenegger strides out on to the White House lawn, you can bet he'll have them charging up the hill again looking for that elusive wolf. Asians, Hispanics, atheists and intellectuals beware: next time, it could be you!