AGE HYPOCRISY

Gore: I'm Old, So The Fun's Over

HE was just another good 'ol boy from Texas, talking about happy memories
from his youth.

Of course, the remembering eventually turned to a practice that holds fond
memories for a lot of us Texas boys - shooting at cans with our favorite
firearms.

But that's where the similarities stop. This 'ol boy was Tommy Lee Jones,
whiskey-voiced star of "The Fugitive," "Coal Miner's Daughter" and plenty of
other films.

And he wasn't whittlin' and spittin' while sittin' on the tailgate of a
pickup parked under a pecan tree: He was remembering his college days with
Al Gore in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I can't stand Al Gore and people like him.

Of course, I can't leave it at that. So let me explain what I'm talking
about.

Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, are excellent examples of a phenomenon that's
relatively new to the United States - baby boomers who had plenty of fun
when they were young, but don't want anybody else to follow in their
footsteps.

Take Jones' target-shooting story, for example. He and Al obviously burned
up some ammunition in their aimless youths. But Al dern sure doesn't want me
to share in that fun. He's promised to continue Bill Clinton's gun-control
efforts, and I've got every reason to believe him.

OK, OK - maybe they were just plinkin' at cans with a .22-caliber rifle.
Surely Tennessee Al won't take our .22s, too - he just wants to get rid of
those nasty old assault rifles and cheap handguns.

I ain't believing that for a second. A .22 in the hands of someone who knows
how to use it can be just as dangerous as an AR-15 in the hands of a
loony-tune postal worker.

Once upon a time, for example, the mob actually preferred to use .22s for
executions, because the bullets enter the skull but don't come out the other
side. Instead, they bounce around in the brain pan, scrambling everything
up, without leaving messy exit wounds - perfect for the Mafia's needs.

So gun-control advocates might not covet your .22s yet, but they'll have to
do something to keep the donations flowing after they take away all the
other firearms. After all, drugs are already illegal, but that doesn't stop
organizations such as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America from raking in
millions of dollars each year.

Which segues nicely into my next point. Al and Tipper both admit they used
drugs, especially marijuana, when they were young. But both of them would
like to send you to prison for doing the same thing.

Oh, but we didn't realize marijuana was so harmful when we were young. And
besides - and here's the baby boomers' catch-all excuse for everything - it
was the '60s, man.

Don't you believe it. Al and Tipper grew up in an era when marijuana was
still widely believed to be the "devil's weed" - an instant ticket to
ax-murdering craziness. In contrast, much of today's scientific evidence
suggests that marijuana is less dangerous than addictive legal drugs such as
alcohol and tobacco.

But it was the era of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Everybody was doing it.

Yeah, rock 'n' roll. Tipper even played drums in a rock band. But guess what
she did in the '80s, when she was all grown up and respectable? That's
right: She tried her hardest to ban rock music she found offensive,
apparently forgetting that the Rolling Stones tackled all the taboo subjects
- - Satan, drugs, sex, bisexuality and murder - in her heyday of the '60s,
long before Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a dove.

I've never heard Al or Tipper talking about sex. But if they were rolling
with the drug flow when they were in college, they probably tried out a
little of that free love and sexual revolution stuff everyone was talking
about (by the way, thanks for the AIDS and the crack-cocaine revolutions,
too, ya dirty hippies).

Now, of course, they're personally opposed to abortion, although they
support a woman's right to choose. And neither of them would ever approve of
handing out condoms to high-school kids who are having sex, anyway.

I once worked with an aging hippie who, in the '80s, traded in his Mao cap
and Volkswagen van for a three-piece suit and a sedan made by a big American
corporation that supported the Vietnam War.

He'd talk fondly about gulping LSD and getting naked at a Jefferson Airplane
concert, and the way he and his buddies took control of their college campus
during anti-war protests.

Meanwhile, he voted Reagan - the man who escalated Nixon's war on drugs and
sent U.S. troops into Grenada - while railing against the sexual talk and
action he saw on TV and in the movies.

I'm not advocating free love or drugs or not taking care of the nation's
military business. I don't want to smoke off a big spliff and wade into an
orgy.

But that man's hypocrisy irritated me to no end. It's almost as if he were
saying, "Oh, yeah, I had my fun - but now that I'm done, I don't want
anybody else getting away with anything."

That's one thing I liked about Bill Clinton: He never got up on a moral high
horse. As a matter of fact, he acted like someone forgot to tell him the
sexual revolution was over.

Gore, on the other hand, has been careful to keep his moral distance from
Clinton. But you know he likes to reminisce about the old days - and about
more than shooting cans.

Yeah, Tipper and I had our fun, but now that I'm president, I've got to keep
this great nation from sinking into a swamp of decaying values. Say, did I
ever tell you about the time we dropped acid and ripped the clothes off the
guitarist for Creedence Clearwater Revival?