Warning: Vulgar Slang Here–“Pissant”

At left is a brief excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.  Vonnegut doesn’t have quite the appeal to me that he held in my teens, but I still admire his sardonic wit, his observations that people are both stupid and cruel, and thus the conclusion that our lives are essentially absurd.

Now, on to the subject of pissants, especially as they apply to environmental sustainability.  I frequently find myself talking to people who use talking points they’ve picked up from Fox News to try to “make me feel like a boob,” to use the author’s words. 

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone told me:

• Renewable energy: is expensive or viable only with subsidies, or nonviable because of the intermittent nature of solar and wind, or is destroying the Earth because its equipment is toxic and can’t be recycled.

• Electric transportation: simply moves the emissions from the tail pipe to the power plant, or requires materials whose mining is ruining the Earth and enslaving its children.

• All these efforts are based on the mitigation of climate change which is: a hoax, or greatly exaggerated, or based on junk science, or still under debate by scientists, or unproblematic for at least the next 100 years, or addressable with yet-to-be developed technology.

• Of course, all of this is part of a socialist/anticapitalist agenda, and is favored by people who hate America.

• Fossil fuels, by contrast, are: much cleaner than is commonly understood, vitally necessary indefinitely into the future, getting cleaner due to carbon capture and sequestration, a requirement of U.S. energy independence.

Obviously, I don’t voluntarily have conversations with pissants, but sometimes such discussions are unavoidable due to social convention, where walking away or saying, “Sorry, but I don’t talk to idiots” would not be acceptable. I’ve also done 40 or 50 radio shows, where callers from hell, apparently unscreened, come at me like charging rhinos.

In such cases, I’m normally able to find some aspect of what they heard on Fox News (or whatever) that has a grain of truth to it, and grant them that.  Then I go on to explain, “But this is a far more complicated subject, and, on balance, what you’ve been told is a deliberately misleading attempt to discredit something that the ultra-right wing hates–for reasons I can’t understand.  Here’s the truth…..”

The problem is that pissants are, by definition, very poor listeners.  They’re not trying to learn something; they’re too busy thinking of their next rebuttal. The whole exercise really is a waste of time, and is to be avoided wherever possible.