Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth? I just heard a story on All Things Considered discussing this new documentary featuring Al Gore's global warming lecture-like riff. ATC's host Michele Norris set the stage for opposing Gore's “showmanship” to the “truth” or “science” of his lecture. Certainly, Gore’s presentation has a stylistic or performative element; some people have even wondered where this Al Gore was during the 2000 presidential campaign. But why must the performative be separated from the factual? Doesn’t this precisely reduplicate the misleading binary that has been with us at least since Plato?

Here’s an example from the film and NPR’s analysis. At one point in the documentary (and in his lecture), Gore displays a graph that horizontally spans his stage. It also vertically (the temperature/carbon dioxide axis) ascends above Gore’s head, and so to illustrate a point, he has to use an “elevator.” Norris and NPR's two “in-house experts”--film critic Bob Mondello and science correspondent Richard Harris--exchange the following:

Mondello: “...he's making a point that's so dramatic at that moment, that I thought, well, okay, this is one of those places where movies really work because it allows you to make something visual....”

Norris: “But did he walk right up to the edge, though, when he got on that mechanical lift? ...There was a bit of showmanship in that.”

On All Things Considered today, Jay Keyser noted how much Frost's "Mending Wall" has to say about the current (absurd) controversy over how big a wall to build between the US and Mexico. I'm beat to the punch because he says almost all that needs to be said here. But notice the supreme irony that every wall built (as Keyser says) as a "barrier" "to keep out the unwanted," that is to oppose (or fantasize the possibility of non-) integration with the Other, has been torn down. Or rendered meaningless. Thus, opposition (this time, happily: for those we oppose) in fact serves to engender its own futility.