That's the difference.

Having stupidly missed seeing Al Gore when he came to UBC, I did finally see his movie last night. It was quite an experience. The audience for the early show was fairly small but very, very enthusiastic. At the end of the film, the whole audience applauded and pretty much everyone stuck around for the Melissa Etheridge and the closing credits -- not a typical moviegoing experience by any means.

Basically, I came away rather baffled by the common complaint that the movie looks like a piece of campaign propoganda. It really doesn't. Yes, it was clearly made by Gore's friends, and they swallow the personal details of his exposition and aren't interested in challenging him on his own history. The one real "huh?" moment of the film for me was Gore's passing reference to passing carbon tax in 1993, something the Clinton Admin was unable in the end to push through the senate, ending up with only a small gas tax, a similar measure which Gore had tried, as a senator, to eliminate from the Bush tax hike just a few years earlier in favour of a higher top rate for millionaires.

Brutal personal-political honest this isn't. But the fudging, the political gloss, is, in a way, important in itself.

First, there's the matter of the science. Majikthise had a great summary of film's substantive content a week ago. Basically, I came out understanding the basics of climate change science better, far better, than I went in: not just the process of global warming, but what's melting and where, what the controversial issues in the literature are, how the sea currents and heat redistribution cycle of the oceans work. Contra Gregg Easterbrooks' sneering take on Gore as "Ask Mr. Science", Gore doesn't affect to be some sort of technical expert. On the contrary, he's a pure popularizer. His presentation isn't supposed to convey only ideas a brainiac could digest. The fact that the facts of carbon buildup and its consequences are accessible doesn't mean that they're widely accessed. Most people don't understand the issues and Gore wants to change that. Going in, I thought I understood more about global warming science than it turns out I did.

But Gore also says a lot, implicitly, about politics. And what makes the movie so upbeat isn't the we-can-overcome-this-challenge ending so much as its message about public service, public issue advocacy. It's easy to obsess over the gloss, like we do over polticians' motivations, tastes, performances, rhetoric. Gore and his presenters don't back down from any of it. He gives us the sister dead from lung cancer, the black and white family photographs, Katherine Harris in rouge, lists of dubious (and some less dubious) accomplishments. The point isn't that it's tasteful or entirely honest or appropriate. The point is it doesn't matter if it is or not. We -- liberals, pundits, all of us who claim to care seriously about politics -- get hung up on this crap at our own peril. There are, in the end, those politicians who think we need to take steps to stop Greenland from melting and there are those politicians who don't, who are in hoc to the interest groups that insist that they don't. Gore is, of course, a bit of an extreme example on the wonkitude scale. His issue-obsession makes him a better activist than politician. But, then, he was also as periodically cynical and poll-tested and bought-off and controversial within his own party as the rest of them. Frankly, he almost certainly would be again were he to run another campaign (he won't). But he's still a walking symbol of what democratic politics ought to be about, maybe even could be if we'd let it.

The really scary thing about Gore is that he's probably smart enough to understand this message completely and enjoy the schadenfreude implicit in it at least a little. More power to him, frankly.