Exclusive to this site, December 30, 2007

 

Resolution for 2008
by
Pierre Lemieux

Here is my New Year’s resolution, which I would also like to recommend to my readers. But before you continue, you must sign that you are at least 21, and that blasphemy doesn’t shock you. My resolution for 2008 is to regularly kick a tree. For I have had enough of the environmental religion. I was paying my Hydro-Québec bill in my National Bank account on-line, when I was asked if I would accept receiving my invoices by e-mail instead of snail mail. I was going to accept when I caught one of the reasons given in the sales pitch: it’s ecological, ma chère! “Reduce the volume of paper,” they say, “and do something concrete for the environment!” Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna! The environmental incantation was enough to change my mind. Hell! Send me the paper. Give me paper or give me death! Just as I say at the grocery check-out counter: “Double plastic!” Kiss my earth. If you doubt that we live under the yoke of the environmental religion, here is another story. But again, please, read on only if you have been vaccinated against political correctness and, indeed, if you don’t mind foul language which I don’t often use myself. À la guerre comme à la guerre! Recently, I had the idea of putting on my car a front licence plate (in Québec, there is only a rear one) saying, “Fuck the Earth!”. This statement would probably put my Kia Rio at risk, but one has to take risks to fulfill one’s social responsibility. We are at war against the Green Plague herself. “The Green Plague” (La Peste Verte) was the title of a book by Professor Gérard Bramoullé that we published at Les Belles Lettres, in Paris, when I was a book series director there. That was in 1991, and the plague has not subsided since. I went to www.4bumperstickers.com, a seller of custom bumper stickers and licence plates. If you don’t have a text of your own, they have some ready-made offers, like “Jesus Saves, I Shall Spend.” A dissenting and rebellious bunch, aren’t they? Wait. As the site wouldn’t accept a Canadian address, I asked an American friend to order my “Fuck the Earth” licence plate, gloriously written in green letters, to her own address. After she placed the order, she was surprised to rapidly discover that it had been cancelled and refunded. No reason was given. She e-mailed the company and asked for an explanation, but never got a reply. Obviously, we had committed the ultimate blasphemy. This reminded me of my youth in the very Catholic Québec of the 1960s. Yet, the religion of that time was less untouchable than today’s green religion. Moreover, the Catholic God gave eternal life, while Mother Earth only promises mould and worms. Another interesting book is Luc Ferry’s, The New Ecological Order, translated from the original Le nouvel ordre écologique (Paris: Grasset, 1992). The author (who was later to become minister of Youth, Education and Research in one of Jacques Chirac’s governments) explains the medieval roots of the environmentalists’ personification of nature. He also looks for contemporary roots. “It is not by chance, then,” he writes, “that the Nazi regime, and Hitler personally, are responsible for the two most detailed legislations regarding the protection of nature and animals in the history of humanity.” It is in this perspective that the Nazis limited hunting in 1934. If enough people adopt my resolution, we have a chance to see, in 2008, bumper stickers asking, “Have you hugged your kids and kicked a tree today?” Tree kicking would contribute to protect your kids from a Brave New World dominated by the state’s green shirts enforcing the green religion.