Pay Attention to Pres Policy

By John Kamp

The President sure has a snappy knack for making all seem well in the USA. Those sultry presidential antics we have come to love so well have done nothing but streamline all too splendidly the ills that have so rattled this country.

Acute class disparity, global warming, all the dilemmas this country has now formerly faced have been condensed into one, convenient, pre-packaged box of cake, sitting on display in that big white house situated in the middle of that mean capitol city of our beloved country.

"What a lovely cake," the visitors say as they walk by.

Yes, what a lovely cake.

It almost seems as if both Clinton and American commonfolk plain want public issues of this notion to be divided into two neat categories: cake and Lewinsky.

We commonfolk fancy the distilled problem set because we find comfort in thinking there are really only two problems this nation faces, and one actually isn’t a problem. It is a mere afterthought, a delicious postscript to a splendid meal.

And the other problem has a simple solution. Impeachment and repentance. Quick, safe, and involving no effort on our behalf. Leave it to those hard-working folks on the right to make our country pretty again.

Clinton must in some form fancy this historic moment where folks are only complaining about one thing the president has done. No one really cares about the cake.

Good deal for Clinton because he still has some not so insignificant decisions to make: to veto or not to veto, to support or not to support, to initiate or not to initiate. With no one really paying attention except corporate and conservative friends, the decisions should not be too difficult.

lt is indeed difficult to pay attention. If it’s a question of reading about what paper Clinton is pushing his pencil across, as opposed to where he has been pushing his other pencil, we choose option B.

While public interest groups, grassroots activists, students, are not going to make voting sound kinky to counterbalance the skewed American attention scale, we are attempting to make it known that if Clinton pushes pencil A the wrong way, the results will be scandalous.

E3’s (for frosh and transfers: the Wesleyan environmental organization) global warming campaign is offering a means of action to prevent a potentially scandalous situation. And this is not some Enquirer-style, muckraking scandal that is mere entertainment. Global warming is not entertaining.

There are two pieces of legislation that deserve one’s utmost attention. The first is a rider that states that the United States Environmental Protection Agency can create no new programs to curb global warming. The second states that the United States Department of Transportation cannot increase gas mileage standards, which would decrease the amount of C02 that enters our atmosphere and helps cook our planet.

These riders would be innocuous if global warming were the oh-so-kooky environmental scare that some say it is. But it ain’t, so they aren’t.

What is scary about global warming is not that the global temperature has increased one degree in the past century, but how much damage a one-degree increase can make.

Unprecedented droughts and heat in the south and southeast this summer. Unprecedented flooding. Increasing range of infectious diseases such as malaria and hantavirus. Increased ferocity and frequency of el nino.

Certainly no one event can be attributed to global warming. But we are not talking about one event, but hundreds, thousands, worldwide and mounting.

Ah but E3 has the snappy solution. Vefo-grams. Yes, many vetograms to President Clinton. Starting this week, we will be giving everyone the opportunity to express uncontrollable desire to our irresistible national leader.

Tables will be set up around campus. All you need to do is stop, pick up a red marker, and scrawl a word across one. We give you the marker, the message, and the postage.

Clinton will notice, because veto-grams are part of a national movement to ensure that he vetoes those budget bills that contain bad global warming riders.

Sure famous folks’ sex lives can be intriguing. But not now. There is too much to be alleviated, too much change that needs to be effected, too much work to be done. We know this to be true, because the cake is getting moldy.

Kamp is a member of the class of 2000.