Al Gore: Modern Politics' Movie Star

For the organizers of Al Gore's one and only gig in Northern California promoting his new book, it was a little like that children's classic, "A Fish Out of Water," in which a boy overfeeds his goldfish and it grows and grows, outswelling its bowl, then a vase, then a bathtub.

Authors tour the country constantly, hawking their books. You see the fliers in bookshop windows. At night, in a space cleared for the purpose, you see that spectacle: three or four rows of folding chairs arranged to face the podium where a hopeful figure poses, looking so alone, scanning the empty seats while pretending not to. Bookstore owners have told me that attendance at author events has dwindled lately. Some stores around the San Francisco Bay Area, long hailed as America's second-biggest reading hub, have stopped hosting readings altogether.

Even so, planners at Book Passage -- an independent store in tiny Marin County -- expected a decent turnout for Gore. Ambitiously, they decided to charge for tickets to Wednesday night's event and co-sponsor it with Dominican University, a small, nearby Catholic school, and stage it in its 850-seat auditorium. A few weeks in advance, the forthcoming lecture was announced rather quietly on Book Passage's website and on a Dominican site. Within two days, the auditorium was sold out. The waiting list was hundreds long. Stunned, the planners chose yet another venue, the sprawling 2,000-seat Marin Civic Center. Tickets went back on sale. Two days later, the Civic Center was sold out too -- at forty bucks a pop, for what was scheduled to be a 20-minute talk. Again, the waiting list extended over the horizon.

Movie-star proportions, clearly. But Al Gore is modern politics' movie star, not in the metaphorical sense.

Like parts of Los Angeles, Marin County is one of those places whose residents would rather die than admit that they're awestruck by celebrity. It's the sort of semirural, estate-dotted sward to which rockstars and rebels-who-got-rich retire, and according to Forbes, it includes one of the five most expensive zip codes in the country.

And it turned out in droves for Gore.

The title of his new book, "The Assault on Reason" (Penguin Press, 2007, $25.95) is really just another way of phrasing the title of his previous book, "An Inconvenient Truth" (Rodale Books, 2006, $21.95), which accompanies the film of the same name which, of course, vaulted Gore to literal movie-stardom. Though "The Assault on Reason" is meant to allude to lies told by lying governmental liars about everything from uranium enrichment to wiretaps to emergency preparedness and "An Inconvenient Truth" concerns climate change. Both titles rail against violence done to some clear, intrinsic, real-world factuality, which -- as Gore said on Wednesday evening, patting his black-suited chest, "resonates in the human heart."

He would speak feelingly that night about "ripples" marring the media that "make the surface distorted" so that "the clarity of vision is ruined." One clear thing, he would tell the crowd, is "the 99 percent certainty that we're facing the greatest threat" imaginable in climate change. "Yet our leaders are dilly-dallying" about it. "How dare they?" he demanded, to thunderous applause.

But that was later.

I took public transit from San Francisco to the Marin Civic Center not by choice but by necessity, as I neither drive nor own a car (which I guess, since I could, since I actually have a license, is a choice). For others it would have been a choice, even a novelty. Braving the clamor and buying a ticket to see the world's most outspoken climate-awareness advocate, you might muse about the best way to reach and depart the lecture hall. You just might. In that same fist-to-forehead way you might rethink hosting an AA meeting at a bar, or hanging paper Halloween skulls at a funeral, which this kind of was. If you believe Gore -- who that night would describe evidence of impending ecological doom as being "so clear, it's so massive, it's so obvious" -- then the prospect of joining those rush-hour throngs behind the wheel might be -- well, even more embarrassing than looking starstruck.