Can you spell FREE publicity...
Neil Young greets fans before participating in a news conference emphasizing the need for Congress to pass the Farm Bill
September 9, 2013 in Washington, DC.
Neil Young, as all those with ear buds on long flights can attest, once was a miner.
Years ago, he sung of how he tried to pick-axe and dig his way to a “Heart of Gold.”
Well, of course, that mine was always a horizon away. The sound of the real, here-and-now extraction of the earth’s resources is something he finds far less melodious. We know this because of what he said this week, at an American news conference, about Alberta’s oil sands and the city that sits at the heart of Canada’s petro-production infrastructure: “The fact is, Fort McMurray, [Alta.] looks like Hiroshima … a wasteland.”
What does he mean here? Does he really mean that he sees Fort McMurray and its citizens as somehow equivalent to the result of a war-ending atomic detonation and the instantaneous killing of tens of thousands?
Only a mind-yodelling vacuous lyricist could dredge up this tasteless analogy — comparing a Canadian city and its inhabitants with a radioactive ruin.
How superior Neil Young must feel. How high on the cloud of his own inflated esteem. How much better he is than the people of Fort McMurray, the workers and their families, how much better than those who keep the oil companies operating, do the building, handle the great equipment.
What would he say of the Hibernia oil field off Newfoundland, I wonder — another petro-hell? Is Hibernia his Dresden?
Mr. Young has a very high opinion of his moral standing, and there must be no end of industrial projects all over the world that do not rise to his standards of environmental aesthetics. So why he focused on Fort McMurray, in particular?
Could it be because Fort McMurray is so easy a target? Easy because it has become a central symbol in the fundraising campaigns of green groups — the Greenpeace troupe, the Sierra Club eremites, and every other eco-gloom salesman in the world.
Mr. Young is a celebrity, an expert on where the spotlight is trained. He knows where the publicity gold-seam can best be found and mined.
Neil Young’s life is as oil-soaked and as oil-ripe as that of any of the rest of us then. He lives in cloistered fame because of the society fuelled by oil that supports him. There’s quite a bit of hypocrisy, it turns out, in Neil Young’s heart of gold.
National Post
Years ago, he sung of how he tried to pick-axe and dig his way to a “Heart of Gold.”
Well, of course, that mine was always a horizon away. The sound of the real, here-and-now extraction of the earth’s resources is something he finds far less melodious. We know this because of what he said this week, at an American news conference, about Alberta’s oil sands and the city that sits at the heart of Canada’s petro-production infrastructure: “The fact is, Fort McMurray, [Alta.] looks like Hiroshima … a wasteland.”
What does he mean here? Does he really mean that he sees Fort McMurray and its citizens as somehow equivalent to the result of a war-ending atomic detonation and the instantaneous killing of tens of thousands?
Only a mind-yodelling vacuous lyricist could dredge up this tasteless analogy — comparing a Canadian city and its inhabitants with a radioactive ruin.
How superior Neil Young must feel. How high on the cloud of his own inflated esteem. How much better he is than the people of Fort McMurray, the workers and their families, how much better than those who keep the oil companies operating, do the building, handle the great equipment.
What would he say of the Hibernia oil field off Newfoundland, I wonder — another petro-hell? Is Hibernia his Dresden?
Mr. Young has a very high opinion of his moral standing, and there must be no end of industrial projects all over the world that do not rise to his standards of environmental aesthetics. So why he focused on Fort McMurray, in particular?
Could it be because Fort McMurray is so easy a target? Easy because it has become a central symbol in the fundraising campaigns of green groups — the Greenpeace troupe, the Sierra Club eremites, and every other eco-gloom salesman in the world.
Mr. Young is a celebrity, an expert on where the spotlight is trained. He knows where the publicity gold-seam can best be found and mined.
North American entertainment is a farm for millionaires because modern technology, and the energy that powers it, comes for places such as Fort McMurrayA man who cannot distinguish the nuclear bombing of city from a worksite is plainly in need of rest and instruction. Mr. Young may imagine otherwise, but he is more of a beneficiary of a world built on oil than most people. His wealth and fame and the industry he occupies are all, at bottom, dependent on the industry, invention, technology and energy that comes from oil. North American entertainment is a farm for millionaires because modern technology, and the energy that powers it, comes for places such as Fort McMurray.
Neil Young’s life is as oil-soaked and as oil-ripe as that of any of the rest of us then. He lives in cloistered fame because of the society fuelled by oil that supports him. There’s quite a bit of hypocrisy, it turns out, in Neil Young’s heart of gold.
National Post
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