As I lay asleep in bed last night, during a hellacious ice storm, some turkey came whizzing down the street and smashed my car. I am parked on the street because we have no driveway, no parking lot, and I have no choice. So, wham! tore the whole left front panel off and bent the door so it won’t open.
As I write this, the iceballs are still coming down, still coating the enormous piles of snow all over the place. But the first thing I heard on the news this morning was Al Gore saying all this snow and ice is the result of… Global Warming!
As a fantasy writer, I am sensitive to fantasy being used as a basis for public policy. Despite the demonstrated fact that Warmist “scientists” have been repeatedly caught lying, cheating, fudging their figures, destroying evidence, presenting World Wildlife Fund press releases as peer-reviewed scientific papers, and demanding that the government silence or even jail their critics, they just will not let this drop. Confronted by the most severe winter in most people’s memory, they insist the cold weather is caused by warming. One is reminded of Judge Judy snapping at some witness who is BS-ing her, “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me that it’s raining!”
Meanwhile, Harry Reid is trying to tell us that NOT spending a couple trillion dollars on Obamacare is somehow going to increase the deficit. My leg is getting wetter and wetter.
Here we see, at last, where fantasy ends and actual delusion begins. When we craft a fantasy, we assume the reader will take it for granted that what he’s reading isn’t real. We appeal to his willing suspension of disbelief, realizing that it’s only a temporary suspension. Our fantasy book or movie is thus a metaphor, and understood as such by all the rational members of our audience.
On second thought, “delusion” may not be the right word for what Gore and Reid are subject to. The term “compulsive lying” is probably more accurate.
Compulsive liars don’t know the difference between reality and fiction; they’ve lost the ability to discern the difference. As they don’t know from whence the weather comes, they are incapable of extrapolating from a blizzard to more of the same unless they heed the warning signs from the Creator of weather. Don’t feel sorry for them. They no longer have sense enough to want to know.
Welcome, Dorothy! I can’t improve on what you’ve said, so I will only add, “Amen.”