Takin' care of business, Cousin Eddie style.

National Lampoon’s “Vacation” series from Warner Brothers Pictures is vintage comedy that only National Lampoon could create.*   Perhaps the best (certainly the most memorable) caricature in the Vacation saga is   Cousin Eddie Johnson (played by Randy Quaid), a big, loveable, rough, simple, uncultured, unlucky bastard who bungles his way through life blissfully unaware that he is unaware of anything.  In Christmas Vacation ** Cousin Eddie arrives unannounced at the Griswold’s suburban home in a vintage (okay, old, beat up) motorhome, and comedy ensues.  Early on Christmas morning Chevy Chase’s character, Clark Griswold, steps out to get the paper and is soon joined on the front porch by his lovely wife Ellen, played by Beverly D’Angelo.

Ellen: What are you looking at?
Clark: Oh, the silent majesty of a winter’s morn… the clean, cool chill of the holiday air… an asshole in his bathrobe, emptying a chemical toilet into my sewer…
[Eddie, in the driveway, is draining the RV's toilet]
Eddie: Shitter was full.
Clark: Ah, yeah. You checked our shitters, honey?
Ellen: Clark, please. He doesn’t know any better.
Clark: He oughta know it’s illegal. That’s a storm sewer. If it fills with gas, I pity the person who lights a match within ten yards of it.

Classic!  Hilarious!

Who’s got the remote?  Fast forward 21 years.

In 2010 Cousin Eddie has become just a little bitter.  He’s become convinced by the boys he drinks beers with, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News that a bunch of “over-educated idiots” somehow ended up running things.  Their thinking is that these eggheads have implemented a bunch of stupid rules and laws based on “science” that are really just designed to keep him and people like him down, over-tax Real Americans, kill business, and to teach his kids and grand-kids to be liberal eggheads, too.

So Eddie joins the Tea Party, a group of people just like him (except for all the oil millionaires, Wall Street Bankers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and the like.) to fight for the Founding Father’s Ideals – like lowering taxes in order to starve the evil federal government, privatizing education, breaking unions, relaxing regulations for the banking, energy and manufacturing sectors and instead relying on the honorable men and women in these industries practicing “personal responsibility” and “doing the right thing.”  These are all principles that Eddie has supported his entire life, he just needed Rupert Murdoch to come along and point that out to him.

Not only did Eddie join the Tea Party, they convinced him he was just the man to run for public office in these dark times, bankrolled his campaign, and he got his-self elected to public office!  Actually, a whole bunch of Eddies got elected to state and federal office in 2010.  At first they were worried that writing legislation would be a lot like homework, but to their happy surprise they found that they can just copy legislation already written by the smart people at the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.  (Hey!  Whata ya know?  It IS just like homework!)

The Nation’s John Nichols writes in a piece called “ALEC Exposed“,

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to “develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,” ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.

Among the primary targets of the new Eddies in Michigan and at the federal level is removing cumbersome environmental regulations that slow the speed of development and new construction or major renovation for roads, factories, mines, oil and gas wells, pipelines, and other power transmission corridors.

However,  The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), The Clean Air Act of 1970 (CAA), and the Clean Water Act of 1972 (CWA) were all adopted, in large part, to slow the speed of new construction or major renovation for roads, factories, mines, oil and gas wells, pipelines, and other power transmission corridors!  That was one of the primary  goals of environmental regulation.  To turn off the bulldozers and  provide adequate  time for regulators, concerned citizens, neighbors, and other interested parties to comment and study the potential impacts – both planned and unforeseen – of the proposed work in a logical, organized way so that a sound recommendation could be made to permitting entities and political units BEFORE the whatsit is built.  These laws were passed after the Love Canal toxic waste dump was exposed, the Santa Barbara oil spill was daily TV for weeks in 1969,  Lake Erie was declared dead, some rivers caught on fire (including Detroit’s Rouge River),  and our national symbol nearly became extinct in the lower 48.  These events and more like them made it pretty clear to nearly all Americans that if we left environmental review and enforcement up to the individual states, local political pressure would trump the common good and the situation would continue status quo.

Just for fun, here’s a quote from Fred L. Hartley, then president of the Union Oil Co., who owned and operated the well that blew-out off of the California coast coating miles of California beaches with tar and killing seals, dolphins, whales, birds, and assorted marine life.

“I don’t like to call it a disaster, because there has been no loss of human life.  I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds.” 

Isn’t that cute?  But it is illustrative of the mind set then.  There was man, and there was nature.  If nature got in man’s way, nature had to go.  Unfortunately, “They’re baaack!”

Right now a very worrisome series of events are taking place, seemingly in concert.  These include the US House of Representatives passing H.R. 2018 – The Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011, by a 239-184 vote.  (Just 16 Democrats supported the bill, and only 13 Republicans voted against it.)  H.R. 2018 would gut the Clean Water Act and, as the EPA said in their analysis of H.R. 2018, “The bill would overturn almost 40 years of Federal legislation by preventing EPA from protecting public health and water quality.”  You can read the details yourself in the Library of Congress site on-line here.

In Michigan Senate Bill 272 was passed along party lines in May.  If this becomes law it would require, in part, that no state rule shall be more stringent than an applicable federal rule, and that agencies adopting rules that might cost small business money should exempt small businesses from the rule.  Does this mean that if a giant corporation wanted to get rid of a thousand drums of toxic sludge it could farm the job out to a small business who could then just pour the drums out into a stream, because as a small business they are not regulated?

Yeah, I don’t know either.

The combined impact of these laws would be disastrous for Michigan and the Great Lakes.  If the federal EPA is not allowed to enforce the CWA or force states to do so, and the state agencies in Michigan are prohibited from doing anything more stringent than that, what happens to the people and natural resources of Michigan and the entire Great Lakes region?

If the Eddies get their way, we’re all headed back to 1969.

* “Lampoon” as a verb means to ridicule or make fun of, and is the opposite of “applaud,” approve,” praise” or “support. ” As a noun it means parody or satire, both of which require that you have to start with something real that we understand in order for the lampoon to work.  (See Swift, Jonaton.  A Modest Proposal)

** Christmas Vacation.  Dir. Jeremiah S. Chechik. Perf. Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo and Randy Quaid. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1989.