Chicken Little Went to Town-Part 1
"One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when—KERPLUNK—an acorn fell on her head. 'Oh my goodness!' said Chicken Little. 'The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king.'"
Al Gore has come a long way since the days when he was moping around the house in his bathrobe all day, looking under the sofa cushions for his misplaced presidential election victory. He grew fat; he grew a beard. His future looked grim.
Al was having a tough time getting over being robbed, in 2000, of his chance to take joyrides on Air Force One. And even some of his hardcore fans hadn't forgotten the slightly tawdry spectacle of those endless vote recounts during which the Al-Gore-For-President Creative Recount Team struggled mightily to include, on their side of the ledger, hanging chads, pregnant chads, and even chads that weren't pregnant yet but hoped to start a family some day.
The whole thing looked a bit unsporting, and that wasn't the only thing. Al is rumored to have a tendency to polish the apple just a little too much, like allegedly claiming that he and Tipper were the inspiration for the book and movie Love Story; or that he exposed the trouble at Love Canal, even though, strictly speaking, he didn’t; or that he "took the initiative in creating the internet," and so on.
But that’s all behind him now, and it’s been been a wild ride on the Global Warming Express.
Books. A docu-drama. An academy award. An Emmy. And then… the Nobel Prize! Al won the Big Enchilada—and for peace, no less!
So what if Planet Al hasn't contributed anything to peace, specifically? Neither did any of the recent menagerie of Peace Prize recipients, like the vile terrorist toad, Yassir Arafat. Or that perennial embarrassment, Jimmy Carter, for that matter - although Jimmy does talk a good game on the subject.
Or Rigoberta Menchu, that fraud, who proved that even lying, Marxist, gravy train hobos like herself can still get a fast plane ride to Stockholm if the political tailwinds are favorable.
Still, who would have believed that there was a Nobel on the shelf for Al? How do you motivate a bunch of old ninnies who live in a place guaranteed to have nine months a year of brain-numbing sub-Arctic cold at the absolute northern edge of nowhere - how do you get that crowd whipped into a fearful frenzy about the WARMING of anything?
Well, you can’t. The fact is that they gave the peace medallion to Al for other reasons. (“Castigate the industrial West and win a prize!”)
Arafat, Carter, Menchu, et al - those awards are not the hoof prints of your standard collection of conservationist crackpots and free-range tree huggers.
Al’s global enthusiasms are beside the point. The Nobel panel is a different sort of beast - a political animal. “Bugger the details of this global warming thing,” seemed to be the general tone on the Prize Committee. “I like the cut of this Gore fellow’s jib.”
Al’s really onto something this time. He’s a Big Picture guy, and the picture doesn’t get any bigger than this. Why settle for even a grand role on the great stage when he can be Captain Earth? What’s more important than Everything in the World, and the world, too?
"Chicken Little Went to Town-Part 1", was submitted 08/12/2011 under category Short Story.