"You have fattened my head with oil." -- Psalm 23 I got caught in a traffic jam the other day because of some librul war protesters and I didn't even drive over them with my Escalade. Felt too sorry for them. It was a butt-cracking minus-ten degrees, with a helluva wind, but that's not why I pitied them. It was on account of their nylon/polyester/polyolefin parkas with Thinsulate stuffing, their polyurethane footwear and their synthetic rubber soles. They all held plastic cups filled with coffee shipped from Guatemala. Many wore little "glasses" (no glass there, polycarbonate). Hell, I even saw an old lady with a walker, probably harboring a plastic hip or two. The poor dupes were swimming in the oil they hated and didn't even know it. I'm stopped alongside some neo-hippy and his flock of chicks holding signs that say "No blood for oil" done in acrylic paint, so I ease down my window and say to him, "How'd you all get here?" The size and splendor of my ride fairly makes his nostrils twitch. I turn my heater on HI. "We drove all the way from Maine," he says. "In a horse and buggy?" I say. "That's pretty impressive." Now he looks at me like I got eyes on stalks. "Five of us crammed into my Dodge Neon." "Sounds like fun. You run it with ethanol or foot pedals?" By now several other English majors have pulled themselves away from their cell phones long enough to start gathering at my door like moths around a compact fluorescent bulb. "Bring the troops home!" one girl shrieks through expensive orthodontics. "The war is a lost cause!" "The war ain't over yet," I inform her, "and the troops are there to stay." Now they can scarcely believe they got a war supporter in their sights that don't look like a pile of chins stacked in front of a TV camera. I'm just snug, and warm, and right. The clichés start erupting from their mouths in huge, colorful chunks: "There were no weapons of mass destruction!" "No yellow cake, no aluminum tubes-" "There were no connections between Saddam and-" "Whoa, whoa," I say. "Don't tell me you actually bleeved that crap." "Hell no!" in unison. "And do you think the Preznit actually bleeved it?" "We all know he took us to war for oil!" "At least we agree on something. And that means the war ain't lost until that oil is lost." I don't think they can follow logic, for now they're just yapping at me like I've just stepped on a bag of puppies. If I stare at them long enough, I know they'll settle down, and they do. "Ever hear of the Green Zone, Camp Victory North, Camp Anaconda? Billions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of Amurrikans in place, plump oil fields nearby. And all of it just for you." "I don't support that shit!" The poor girl's eyes are gonna pop out of her skull, and I'm afraid she's about to get frostbite on her tongue. First, I shift my Escalade into DRIVE, pressing down on the brake; then I set my finger on my automatic window button. I wait till traffic clears ahead of me. "Ten years from now, when the oilfields in Texas and Mexico and Alaska have filled with water, and Canada can't dig tar out of the ground fast enough to suit you, and you're shooting out babies in some warm hospital somewhere while the rest of the world burns its furniture just to cook their neighbors' cats, you'll thank our Lord Jesus Christ for sending us a leader who had the foresight to know to take care of his own children first." I'll bet my exhaust never smelled so good to them.