Save The Reagan Owl
hat-tip: jblaque
by Hunter over at Daily Kos
It is difficult for conservatives to care about the environment: conservatism refers to the conservation of thought, not of resources. As far as conservatives care, the world will not be perfected until the last oryx is strangled with the intestines of the last lowland gorilla, their bodies burned in order to fuel an oryx-and-gorilla-powered Humvee. If solar panels could be weaponized, conservatives would demand we spend billions on them. If polar bears crapped gasoline, their futures would be bought and sold on Wall Street. But they don't, and they aren't.
On the other hand, what conservatives generally tend to care most about is themselves, and in maintaining the ongoing importance of conservatism as a movement. Conservatives are very, very invested in heralding their own. Reagan was a god, in conservative eyes. Joseph McCarthy was a hero. George W. Bush was secretly intelligent. Conservatives are all about the symbolism of things, like whether or not you should be able to burn flags, or deciding who should or should not be depicted on a dime. Ensuring we can still grow corn anywhere south of Manitoba, in fifty years -- not so much.
I think, then, perhaps we have the seed of an idea that will invest conservatives in the notion of preservation by making preservation into a more measurably self-interested endeavor. We must make it patriotic, but in that explicitly conservative manner of "patriotic" that means honor me and my ideas, or you are a filthy stinking traitor. We must wrap it in goodly portions of fear and loathing, add a touch of bigotry, then a monumental helping of idol worship. We must make conservation, in short, conservative.
I had contemplated this for some time before I hit upon the blindingly obvious answer (this is true of most blindingly obvious things, of course: they only become obvious after several hundred hours, or months, or years of thinking about them.) It's all in the name. Conservatives are all about giving names to things, and taking names away from things, and objecting to the names of things; that's why we have enhanced interrogation instead of torture, for example. No Child Left Behind, Healthy Forests -- you get the picture.
So if we give things the right names, all else will fall into place. Currently, nobody gives two twigs over the fate of the endangered northern spotted owl. It has the unfortunate habit of nesting in some prime timberlands (of which there is increasingly little, these days); that is enough to declare it an excess species, one of those nagging, irrelevant categories of animals that nobody would really miss, at least not as long as they were getting Pacific coast lumber at the lowest possible clearcut price. But would it be so easy, if it were named the Ronald Reagan spotted owl? Somehow, I think finding one of those dead in the chimney would cause a conservative far more sorrow, and the notion of wiping the Ronald Reagan owl from the face of the earth -- now, that would require much more thought.
Similarly, gray wolves reintroduced around Yellowstone (where they had been extinct for a half century) are having a difficult time, at the moment. Few ranchers or farmers like the thought of wolves strolling across their property, possibly laying primal-but-illegal claim to wayward animals. But what if they were not gray wolves, but Freedom wolves? Would it be so easy to shoot a Freedom wolf in the face, or poison a Freedom wolf with tainted bait? I think not. It would be practically unpatriotic: it would be something al Qaeda would do to our wolves, not a fine, upstanding conservative.
The desert tortoise? A bother, and a hinderance to the proper development of our southwestern suburbs. But a Patriot tortoise -- do not dare lay a finger on it! The endangered mollusks of Alabama would fare much better if given the names of past or contemporary conservative heros: the Roy Moore combshell has a fairly inspired ring to it, for example. Imagine the national outcry if the Atwater's greater liberty bird was about to vanish from the countryside, or if the Nixon thistle was being outcompeted in its environment by wayward, invasive immigrant plants from Other! Countries!. How much more cautious would Floridian boaters be, if they ran the risk of slicing the back of a Joseph R. McCarthatee to ribbons in their propeller blades, and how much more money would be donated to nurse the injured but lovable McCarthatees back to health?
You may doubt the plan, but I am confident it would work. The bald eagle was saved from the brink of extinction and is now in steady recovery simply because it was for two hundred years the symbol of our nation; the effort was taken for that species, and not for others, because it would have been profoundly embarrassing if we let the bird stamped on our money go extinct. Ponder that, for a moment: if Ben Franklin's turkey had become our national bird, turkeys would be on our coins, but the bald eagle would at this point have ceased to exist.
Consider product placement opportunities as well. How much would Anheuser-Busch spend to keep the Budweiser falcon from becoming extinct -- and what would your father do to you if you accidentally shot one? Even the lowly snail darter would receive far more publicity if it became the Pepsi Presents snail darter.
Raw fear can also be used to great effect. Currently, the United States is suffering from a threatening and apparently unclosable condor gap. South America has more condors than we do by a wide margin, and are breeding more. Are we content to let this happen? Who knows what risks to the country may result from the Andean nations having airborne fleets of their own condors -- ones that speak Spanish and other frightening non-English languages -- while the United States is reduced to a bare captive handful. And besides, surely we could use the massive bulk of the California condor -- hereafter to be known as the Texas condor, simply because there is no more surefire way to get hardcore conservative Texans to care about something than to make it about them -- to attach remote cameras to the birds, using them to monitor immigrants attempting to cross our border?
Kudzu, an invasive vine, has changed the very landscape of the southern United States. It has seemed undefeatable for decades, and is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses each year. I propose we change the balance of power by renaming it Aztlan, and sending the Minutemen after it.
My own county, in northern California, is well and truly overwhelmed by invasive starthistle. It has sharp spines and spreads like wildfire: if we rename it Muslimweed, we may be able to enlist federal support in battling it. Hitlerbeetles; the Woolly Ahmadinejad; partialbirthabortovine... with a little inventiveness, the list could go on and on.
Say what you will, but I am quite certain I am on to something. Getting a conservative to care about the environment is damned difficult; simply renaming their environment after things they do care about is by far the simpler plan, and something they already make a habit of anyway. After all, why merely dedicate a measly dime to Ronald Reagan when you could dedicate an entire species to him?
It would be a new world. From the forests of mighty Jesus trees to the George W. Bush Memorial Icecap, our planet would suddenly have a fighting chance.
by Hunter over at Daily Kos
It is difficult for conservatives to care about the environment: conservatism refers to the conservation of thought, not of resources. As far as conservatives care, the world will not be perfected until the last oryx is strangled with the intestines of the last lowland gorilla, their bodies burned in order to fuel an oryx-and-gorilla-powered Humvee. If solar panels could be weaponized, conservatives would demand we spend billions on them. If polar bears crapped gasoline, their futures would be bought and sold on Wall Street. But they don't, and they aren't.
On the other hand, what conservatives generally tend to care most about is themselves, and in maintaining the ongoing importance of conservatism as a movement. Conservatives are very, very invested in heralding their own. Reagan was a god, in conservative eyes. Joseph McCarthy was a hero. George W. Bush was secretly intelligent. Conservatives are all about the symbolism of things, like whether or not you should be able to burn flags, or deciding who should or should not be depicted on a dime. Ensuring we can still grow corn anywhere south of Manitoba, in fifty years -- not so much.
I think, then, perhaps we have the seed of an idea that will invest conservatives in the notion of preservation by making preservation into a more measurably self-interested endeavor. We must make it patriotic, but in that explicitly conservative manner of "patriotic" that means honor me and my ideas, or you are a filthy stinking traitor. We must wrap it in goodly portions of fear and loathing, add a touch of bigotry, then a monumental helping of idol worship. We must make conservation, in short, conservative.
I had contemplated this for some time before I hit upon the blindingly obvious answer (this is true of most blindingly obvious things, of course: they only become obvious after several hundred hours, or months, or years of thinking about them.) It's all in the name. Conservatives are all about giving names to things, and taking names away from things, and objecting to the names of things; that's why we have enhanced interrogation instead of torture, for example. No Child Left Behind, Healthy Forests -- you get the picture.
So if we give things the right names, all else will fall into place. Currently, nobody gives two twigs over the fate of the endangered northern spotted owl. It has the unfortunate habit of nesting in some prime timberlands (of which there is increasingly little, these days); that is enough to declare it an excess species, one of those nagging, irrelevant categories of animals that nobody would really miss, at least not as long as they were getting Pacific coast lumber at the lowest possible clearcut price. But would it be so easy, if it were named the Ronald Reagan spotted owl? Somehow, I think finding one of those dead in the chimney would cause a conservative far more sorrow, and the notion of wiping the Ronald Reagan owl from the face of the earth -- now, that would require much more thought.
Similarly, gray wolves reintroduced around Yellowstone (where they had been extinct for a half century) are having a difficult time, at the moment. Few ranchers or farmers like the thought of wolves strolling across their property, possibly laying primal-but-illegal claim to wayward animals. But what if they were not gray wolves, but Freedom wolves? Would it be so easy to shoot a Freedom wolf in the face, or poison a Freedom wolf with tainted bait? I think not. It would be practically unpatriotic: it would be something al Qaeda would do to our wolves, not a fine, upstanding conservative.
The desert tortoise? A bother, and a hinderance to the proper development of our southwestern suburbs. But a Patriot tortoise -- do not dare lay a finger on it! The endangered mollusks of Alabama would fare much better if given the names of past or contemporary conservative heros: the Roy Moore combshell has a fairly inspired ring to it, for example. Imagine the national outcry if the Atwater's greater liberty bird was about to vanish from the countryside, or if the Nixon thistle was being outcompeted in its environment by wayward, invasive immigrant plants from Other! Countries!. How much more cautious would Floridian boaters be, if they ran the risk of slicing the back of a Joseph R. McCarthatee to ribbons in their propeller blades, and how much more money would be donated to nurse the injured but lovable McCarthatees back to health?
You may doubt the plan, but I am confident it would work. The bald eagle was saved from the brink of extinction and is now in steady recovery simply because it was for two hundred years the symbol of our nation; the effort was taken for that species, and not for others, because it would have been profoundly embarrassing if we let the bird stamped on our money go extinct. Ponder that, for a moment: if Ben Franklin's turkey had become our national bird, turkeys would be on our coins, but the bald eagle would at this point have ceased to exist.
Consider product placement opportunities as well. How much would Anheuser-Busch spend to keep the Budweiser falcon from becoming extinct -- and what would your father do to you if you accidentally shot one? Even the lowly snail darter would receive far more publicity if it became the Pepsi Presents snail darter.
Raw fear can also be used to great effect. Currently, the United States is suffering from a threatening and apparently unclosable condor gap. South America has more condors than we do by a wide margin, and are breeding more. Are we content to let this happen? Who knows what risks to the country may result from the Andean nations having airborne fleets of their own condors -- ones that speak Spanish and other frightening non-English languages -- while the United States is reduced to a bare captive handful. And besides, surely we could use the massive bulk of the California condor -- hereafter to be known as the Texas condor, simply because there is no more surefire way to get hardcore conservative Texans to care about something than to make it about them -- to attach remote cameras to the birds, using them to monitor immigrants attempting to cross our border?
Kudzu, an invasive vine, has changed the very landscape of the southern United States. It has seemed undefeatable for decades, and is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses each year. I propose we change the balance of power by renaming it Aztlan, and sending the Minutemen after it.
My own county, in northern California, is well and truly overwhelmed by invasive starthistle. It has sharp spines and spreads like wildfire: if we rename it Muslimweed, we may be able to enlist federal support in battling it. Hitlerbeetles; the Woolly Ahmadinejad; partialbirthabortovine... with a little inventiveness, the list could go on and on.
Say what you will, but I am quite certain I am on to something. Getting a conservative to care about the environment is damned difficult; simply renaming their environment after things they do care about is by far the simpler plan, and something they already make a habit of anyway. After all, why merely dedicate a measly dime to Ronald Reagan when you could dedicate an entire species to him?
It would be a new world. From the forests of mighty Jesus trees to the George W. Bush Memorial Icecap, our planet would suddenly have a fighting chance.