Post about "Osama Bin Laden"

Scapegoating works well in America. Rove and Bush were such able masters of recasting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden as the cause of all our ills after 9/11, that they were able to drum up support for an unrelated war just by using them as a mantra.

But now we have new problems, one of our biggest is energy, and perhaps we can recast some Rovian tactics to motivate the Bush base. The left and the arugula-eating intellectuals don’t need any motivating, but the bubbas do, and I’ve got just the scapegoat.

The New Osama

Reddy Kilowatt.

Reddy was born way back in March of 1926 as the symbol of conspicuous energy consumption. There wasn’t a task he wasn’t suited for, nor a burden that couldn’t somehow be adapted for electrification. But then came the 1973 oil crisis, and the concept that “things work better electrically” dissolved in a sea of power bills peppered with fuel surcharges.

But Reddy, actually the mascot of the Alabama Power Company but licensed to local providers across the country, persevered. He’s still a trademark today with his own agent–Reddy Kilowatt Corp, a division of Northern States Power–to protect him. Maybe they can license him as scapegoat and sacrificial lamb.

Because Reddy Kilowatt is really a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the way we approach energy, from his adolescence when he tried to electrify everything, to adulthood as private pitchman for individual power companies that all own pieces of a national grid.

He’s been a spokesman for nuclear power, and has a history of preferring big centralized power generation using carbon fuels to localized power generation from renewable sources. This is a character to be hated and reviled, and if we can recast him as public enemy number 1, we might be able to appeal to the baser instincts of the baser base.

So let’s license Reddy and recast him as a terrorist. Someone whose ideas are dangerous, and who needs to be caught and executed at a federal level. Let’s just make sure we don’t convict him in one of the nine states that allow electrocution as a method of execution. You know he’d choose it if offered, there’s no guarantee it would kill him, and it would just plain send the wrong message.