Hearts of Darkness

Having a huge Earth Hour party tonight. Workers installing laser light show equipment. Busing in hundreds of guests.

— Pat Sajak (@patsajak) March 29, 2014

Funny, I don’t recall seeing anything about Earth Hour until today, when I was reading this thread on Pat Sajak at Twitchy.

As Pat quipped today, “Big shout-out to my agent. I’m booked for Monday’s Piers Morgan show on CNN.” Like Morgan’s talk show, I had sort of assumed that at least in America, Earth Hour was cancelled by the hairshirt left because they’re seething over Obamacare’s failure. Why remind voters, as you cancel their health plans, and ban their light bulbs, that you’d like to cancel their electricity as well, in an effort to further reprimitivize the world back to the stone age — or North Korea, to repeat myself. It doesn’t sound like favorable publicity in a rough election year for the left. But “Lighting Out for the Territory,” Mark Steyn looks back at the better days for the left, when hearts of darkness seemed to be everywhere:

My favorite Earth Hour of recent years was spent in London in March 2011. At the appointed hour, I sauntered down Piccadilly, but that brilliant thoroughfare was dark and all but deserted, because so-called “anarchists” (an odd term for pro-government welfare-funded thugs) had cheerfully spent the afternoon firing fireworks into knots of startled shoppers (including young children) who hadn’t expected the coppers to lose control quite so easily, and smashing windows not just of the Ritz but off humdrum sandwich chains, before proceeding to Trafalgar Square, where they set fires, lobbed bottles and desecrated my old pal Boris Johnson’s 2012 Olympic Clock.

Was this London’s all-time greatest “Earth Hour” or what? Massive disruption of commercial activity (doubtless heartening to the famously anti-consumerist eco-Prince of Wales) and normally glittering storefronts darkened except for the reflected glow of burning garbage. If Earth Hour is indeed a celebration of “ignorance, poverty and backwardness“, then all three made great strides in London that day.

Light ’em up!

No word yet how many monitors and TV sets Al Gore will have on tonight, as he celebrates another month of mammoth royalty checks from oil-rich Qater, after thumbing his nose at his fellow eco-pagans. But like Al, “We usually celebrate an Hour of Power to counter this pathetic caper,” Tim Blair writes, “but at this point, with Earth Hour shunned even by its friends, such a celebration seems almost cruel. Earth Hour is now the Johnny No Mates of global climate activism, and we should pity it.”

Related: “Death to Nonbelievers!” The Photoshop in this post by Power Line’s Steve Hayward is a riot, but as always, satire is always outpaced by reality. “Osama bin Laden embraces his inner Al Gore,” a headline at the Washington Post noted in the fall of 2010, a few months before OBL got to meet Gaia personally.

Update: Epic Facepalm Alert, courtesy of the Brampton Ontario fire department Twitter feed: