Coonridge Digest: Last-Chance catalog

Greetin’s from the Ridge.

"It may be your last chance to see Abraham Lincoln’s nose! Only a few remaining tickets available!"

This is the "grabber" I intend to slap on the cover of my new brochure.

Then you’ll open the full-color catalog of Crump’s Last-Chance Travel Agency to find "Come see Old Faithful Before It Gets the Shaft!" Later on the small print will explain that the Black Hills of South Dakota are still one of the nation’s richest gold deposits and that not only gold, but silver and other valuable resources are to be found in and near Yellowstone National Park. If the same greedy idiots in the House of Representatives who voted to drill oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge get offered enough campaign bucks to destroy what’s called the American Serengeti then Abe and Old Faithful are surely doomed. The least I can do is give folks a chance to see these never-to-be-replaced treasures one last time.

Face it, some things can’t be fixed. Our memories of a philanderin’ President will some day fade away into the world of TV movies and the National Enquirer. We can tolerate the present embarrassment who can’t put two intelligent sentences together. But you try to replace the remainin’ 5% of the Alaskan Coastal Plain that’s been reserved for caribou, polar bears, muskoxen, arctic foxes, grizzlies, and snow geese and even a fuzzy national memory can’t erase the damage. It’s eternal, honey. It’s forever.

The House Republicans got enough Democrats to float this sellout of the nation’s soul by promisin’ the Teamsters 700,000 jobs tearin’ up the wilderness. The oil-slicked shysters sold this criminal insanity by promisin’ to drill on just 2000 of the park’s 1.5 million acres. But there’s a sloppy and slippery catch: the acres don’t have to be contiguous. That means with each drillin’ platform takin’ 10 acres, they can spread out over the entire park, complete with roads cut to get there, helicopter platforms and pipelines.

And for what? An increase in oil production that at best is estimated to raise our supply 4% (a one-mile-per-gallon efficiency improvement in autos would double that!) It’ll take ten years for the first gallon to be produced and the effect will last six months! And that’s if nothin’ gets spilled. In 1999 alone there was more than one oil spill a day.. a day!.. on Alaska’s North Slope at Prudhome Bay, releasin’ 45,000 gallons of crude oil, diesel fuel, propane and other toxic tidbits. And oh yea..remember Exxon’s little goof?

(My brochure explains that the easiest route to the gold in Mt. Rushmore will be through Lincon’s nose. Tours will start at his chin and move upward.)

The idiots in Congress depend upon two things: First that you and I won’t care. Alaska is just too remote and we don’t live there anyway.

The name Yellowstone is more familiar. We can relate. Second, they hope you’ll buy into President Bush’s lamebrain notion that this will "put us on the road to energy independence." Georgie boy, as long as we insist on petroleum as our favored fuel, that’s just a dream. A nightmare.

Listen to what the leading experts at the conservative Cato Institute say: "The claim that Arctic Refuge oil can help produce U.S. energy independence is foolishness. " Mr. Bush’s claim that we can effectively combat international oil forces by increasing our domestic production is beyond nonsense…. It’s nonsense on stilts…. ‘Energy independence’ thus makes for good political rhetoric but inane economic policy…

(The rest of the world will) dominate the world market whether we allow drilling in environmentally sensitive areas or not." (A new feature in this month’s tour catalog will be a week in the Florida Everglades before the Bush administration teams up with their land development buddies. Just think of it! All that land and not a strip mall anywhere! How can they call this America?) Let’s look at a few more facts, Mr. Prez: Ninety-five percent of the Great Arctic Coastal Plain is already open to oil exploration. Now the big-bucks oil babies are squallin’ because they can’t have the remainin’ 110 mile strip of coastline. And this isn’t one big reservoir, but a scattered bunch of accumulations. Ninety-five percent isn’t enough. They want to poison the whole enchilada.

(The 2002 Crump Last-Chance Travel catalog will feature Final Tours of the Mississippi. It’s been rumored that a secret committee of the House of Reps has come to the conclusion that it’s nothin’ but a bunch of water that doesn’t do a thing but run downhill. Developers have lobbied the Bush Administration to divert the channel westward near Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to provide easy access to the new Mt. Rushmore Mining Company then north for easier access to the Alaskan Oil Slick.) You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.