Rhinocrisy

I’ve spent the morning getting mad about Al Gore.

It seems that soon after Al received his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research released a report about his profligate consumption:

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

Now, this is an absurd amount of power. Reportedly Al Gore’s house is 10,000 square feet (data not shown), which is maybe twice or three times the size of my house, depending on how you reckon things. I live in a northern clime, so presumably our consumption in this eight-person household should be much greater than in Tennessee. So I’m not clear what, exactly, Gore might be doing to burn so much power, and that makes me suspect there’s a little more to this story. But, be that as it may…

This story was widely reported with great glee across the blogospore, with many pointing out that since Mr. Gore was such an unmitigated tool, he was in no position to tell them what to do.

[Pause for dramatic sigh.]

This blog is called “Rhinocrisy”, for reasons of fancy more than anything else. But it behooves us to reflect for a moment on our sister-word, hypocrisy. The moment will be brief, and we will use it to say only this: hypocrisy is not important.

We’ve had precious little reflection on hypocrisy, here. I have always firmly believed that one bears responsibility for one’s own behavior. I attribute this to my Hindu upbringing, which inculcated in me the idea of “dharma”, which Spike Lee translated quite well: do the right thing. That’s all. So it doesn’t matter whether someone else says one thing and does another, or whether you yourself can’t reconcile your speech and actions. The balance of your sins is determined simply by whether you did the right thing, plain and simple. Whether or not Al Gore is a sinner has no bearing on your own sin, or on your right to sin. The Dude said it clearly two thousand years ago:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

So, when we speak of “rhinocrisy”, we mean to say: failure to do the right thing.