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Linda Whitlock

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From the RoundTable blog

I was in the process of writing this column when Gregg Lewis's commentary ("Waking from our collective dream," June 30) sent me scurrying to The New York Times to see if Paul Krugman really had called global warming skepticism treason.

Well, sort of. In his June 28 commentary, "Betraying the planet," Krugman said watching the "deniers" arguing against the Waxman-Markey bill was like "watching a form of treason -- treason against the planet."

To Krugman, the evidence for devastating climate change is so compelling the only reason deniers don't believe it is because they "don't like the political and policy implications." Hence, "they'll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial."

Seems Krugman knows what he knows, and those who don't know what he knows are traitors to the planet. Hmm. They shoot traitors, don't they?

The day after Krugman's column appeared, Kimberly Strassel wrote a very different commentary ("The climate change climate change," June 29) for The Wall Street Journal. Strassel claims that "far from shrinking," the list of those who don't know what Krugman knows, or at least aren't as sure of it as he is and as some of them once were, is "swelling."

With such conflicting information being published on a regular basis, about all an ordinary, scientifically untutored citizen can do is pick a side and hang on for the ride. Either way, disaster awaits.

Get it wrong one way and the environment self-destructs. Get it wrong the other way and the economy disintegrates. You pays your money and you takes your chance.

But even if the global warming crisis poses every bit as grave a threat to the environment as Krugman believes it does, it, along with the health care crisis and the economic crisis, pose an even graver threat to freedom. Krugman's intemperate remark about treason is as much evidence of that as the melting polar ice caps are of global warming.

Averting planet-threatening (or even nation-threatening) catastrophe requires extraordinary measures -- measures that won't work unless everybody goes along. Trouble is, dissenters and skeptics (traitors?) will always be among us. What then to do with the renegades who get in the way of our saving the world?

Shame them? Shut them up? Send them off to a re-education camp? Marginalize them? Institutionalize them? Charge them with treason? For sure, we'll have to do something to keep the rebels from gumming up the works and leading the faithful astray. OK. Maybe I am a little over the top here. I've been revisiting "1984" and "Brave New World" this summer, so it could be my imagination is running a little wild. But treason was Krugman's word, not mine.

Over the top or not, though, crises do present the temptation to curtail liberty, especially for those who believe they're on the side of the angels. The bigger the crisis, the greater the temptation.

The global warming crisis, for example, offers the government justification for regulating and monitoring everything energy-related, from the fuel in our cars to the electricity in our homes to the light bulbs in our sockets to the kinds of cars we drive.

The health care crisis justifies universal medical coverage, which, in turn, justifies controlling everything we eat or drink. And the economic crisis justifies higher taxes, nationalizing major industries and regulating salaries.

Between the three crises, nearly every important aspect of our lives can be construed as the government's concern and, so, worthy of regulation.

"Brave New World" and "1984" notwithstanding, if I had to choose the literary character I most identify with these days, it would probably be A.A. Milne's Eeyore from the Winnie the Pooh stories.

Like Eeyore, I'm a born pessimist -- or so my mom (and likely a few readers), would say. I, however, like to think of myself as a realist. But realist or pessimist, as we prepare to celebrate our country's 233rd birthday, I can't shake the feeling that our national experiment in personal liberty and self-rule is nearing its end. The devil, you see, is in the crises.

Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.