Did weather watchers see Hurricane Irma go 'the full Teresa Mannion'?
HURRICANE Irma was unprecedented in at least one respect — it was the first weather disaster in human history to be viewed not just as a matter of meteorology, but of ideology.
Indeed such is the culture war in which we are embroiled at present, on a global scale, it is hard to think of anything that lacks this element of hostility — no, this hatred — between the “liberal” and “conservative” points of view. But a hurricane certainly dramatises it in a special way.
Rush Limbaugh called it early, when he announced that he would not be doing his radio show from Palm Beach as usual, because he had effectively been ordered out of his home, and that the whole hurricane business was being hyped up to “advance this climate change agenda”.
He would perhaps have noted the sense of, shall we say, anticipation with which “liberals” had received the news that Irma might even be on course to take out Trump’s own golf resort at Mar a Lago — oh, the irony, that the great climate change denier might see his beloved home track washed away by what can only be described as climate change.
And so, despite early indications that the storm was destroying large lumps of the Caribbean, “conservatives” scoffed.
What in another era might simply have been a big wind, was now building into a kind of a decisive battle in the culture war. If Florida went down, and went down big, apparently due to climate change, the “liberals” could claim a major victory. Perhaps even a decisive one. And, frankly, if the State of Florida had to be completely destroyed for that to happen, perhaps the world was prepared to pay that price, for the greater good of humankind.
I watched it on CNN, partly because I am a “liberal”, but mainly because we can’t get Fox News any more in these parts, so we had to presume that they would be issuing dark warnings about Irma being an elitist conspiracy — a mainstream media operation which was designed not just to sell this socialist line about global warming, but also to crank up the interference of the hated federal government to full force.
Yes, to the “conservative”, this was looking like the perfect “snowflake” storm, with rugged Floridians being ordered out of their homes by busybodies from the federal government, ruthlessly seizing this opportunity to score a propaganda victory for the far left.
So we watched this storm, as we watch all these things these days, to see if our worldview would be confirmed, or challenged — and if it was challenged, we would simply ignore it. The “conservative” Ann Coulter even had to be rebuked by General Kelly in the White House when she tweeted a sarcastic hurricane update about “light rain in Miami: people dying of boredom”.
And, sure enough, there were times when the CNN reporters were seriously struggling with the conditions, when it really did look like Irmageddon, or “the full Teresa Mannion” as it is known in the weather trade.
Indeed, there was one chap standing beside a marina, with the wind blowing so hard his efforts just to stay standing make him look exactly like a fellow with 14 pints on him, trying to remember where he lives.
But for the “conservatives” this would not be enough. They would have needed to see CNN’s top man Chris Cuomo actually being blown away, blasted half way across the Caribbean, to buy this “liberal” line about Irma. And they did not see this, which naturally disappointed them at a certain level, but which reassured them that they were right about this stuff all along — that more people would die on the streets of Miami on a regular Saturday night, than were being washed away by Irma.