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Bill Maher.
Photo by Bill Maher collection

by Jon Zilber
Plenary Session

The Bush administration's record on the environment may be outrageous, but Saturday night at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall, Bill Maher transformed outrageousness into uproariousness.

In a little more than hour, Maher (host of HBO's comedic take on current events, Real Time With Bill Maher) took the audience on a hysterical and insightful -- and yes, raunchy -- guided tour of just how much environmental damage the Bush administration has inflicted on the country, and how we got here.

How bad is it? Pollution is so bad these days that "Innuits have toxins in their blubber to rival Elvis." And just how clueless about the environment is W? Well, says Maher, "George Bush thinks 'Kyoto' is the guy his father threw up on."

Bush, according to Maher, seems to have no problem connecting dots that have no connection, and fails to connect others: "There is more of a link between global warming and the hurricane than there is between 9/11 and Iraq."

So why doesn't everybody see this? Part of the problem lies in the language – after all, Maher notes, "global warming sounds so...well, warm." And we seem to suffer from a national epidemic of short-sightedness. Is the earth hotter than it's been at any time over the past 1,000 years? "Yeah, but the weekend's gonna be nice...."

But nothing's going to change, says Maher, until we address the underlying cycle of corporations who fund political campaigns and subsequently control the agenda when their candidates get into office. If we can't fix this root cause, maybe we should just drop the pretense of representative democracy altogether. Maher has a modest proposal: "I think we should just replace the Congress, which is about 500 people, with the CEOs of the Fortune 500." At least, in Maher's vision, the corporate influence would be more visible in the exchanges on the floor of Congress: "Will the gentleman from Citicorp recognize the gentleman from ExxonMobil?"

Sure, some of Maher's schtick may have been recycled from his HBO shows. But, hey, recycling his material only goes to show that when it comes to environmental matters, Bill Maher practices what he preaches.

-- 09/10/2005 Sat
8pm