98 degree picture

The environment. Education. The United Nations. Militant Islam. Immigration. Longtime journalist Alan Caruba takes up these subjects and more in his new book Warning Signs: The Good News Is That the Bad News Is Wrong (Merril Press, Bellevue, Wash.).

Caruba relishes exposing what he sees as hoaxes perpetrated daily in the name of science. He laments the pervasive ignorance being created by an educational system that he regards as woefully inadequate and growing worse.

Others have talked about these problems. What Caruba brings to the table is his exceptional common sense, coupled with wit and thoroughness of research that make memorable his writing and his frequent appearances on talk radio.

He's the founder of two great media spoofs, the Boring Institute and the National Anxiety Center, where he airs his concerns about America's future by satirizing such embarrassments as our fascination with celebrities and the tendency of broadcast and print media to see everything that--happening in this country--whether it's global warming, smoking tobacco or eating fast food--as leading to imminent death and disaster.

The National Anxiety Center's Website (www.anxietycenter.com) gets more than a half-million hits per month, Caruba tells INSIGHT. His weekly column, "Warning Signs," is excerpted on more than 30 news and opinion Internet sites. Sales of Caruba's three pocket guides--on immigration, militant Islam and the United Nations, plus his poster, "The Earth Is Fine!" debunking environmental hoaxes--help underwrite the cost of the Anxiety Center.

Caruba is a great raconteur INSIGHT interviewed him at his home in Maplewood, N.J., where he has lived for 60 years. We sat entertained as he tom marvelous stories about his days as a young man in the Army at Fort Benning, Ga., a Yankee surrounded by guys from Louisiana and Tennessee.

On the wall of his study is a large poster with the main guidelines for good and accurate journalism printed in big letters: "WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, HOW and WHY." Caruba explains: "It reminds me what a journalist's job really is."

INSIGHT: You're one of those folks who moved to conservatism from being a card-carrying liberal. How did that conversion take place?

Alan Caruba: Oh I was liberal! My parents lived through the Great Depression and, as far as they were concerned, FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] could walk on water. For them, the advent of the United Nations held the promise of an end to future wars. They were seriously liberal.

For easily half my life, I never questioned any liberal point of view. I looked upon conservatives in very much the way they were painted throughout the fifties and sixties--nutcases--until I began to reach some degree of personal maturity. Then much of what the conservatives were saying began to make a lot of sense.

My personal conversion began in the seventies when I was doing public-relations work for some leading chemical manufacturers, particularly manufacturers of pesticides. It became obvious to me that if you take away the pesticides you get ever more pests. And when you have that, you have ever more disease and destruction of property, which is what pests are about.

It struck me that the environmental attack on all forms of pesticides and herbicides was irrational. It just didn't make any sense. As I questioned the environmentalists and why they were attacking these beneficial chemicals my circle of alarm about what they were saying began to expand.

What are they talking about, for example, when they talk about global warming? There is no global warming. There are no meteorological statistics that indicate any warming for the last 50 years. It was the matrix of lies, lie upon lie upon lie, that forced me to abandon former liberal beliefs and move further into what I understood to be conservative thinking.

Also, I was a gun enthusiast and still am. I could not understand why there was this massive effort literally to take guns away from people to whom the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.

What's interesting is that my mother, who passed away last year at the age of 98, came around to my point of view. She registered as a Republican after spending her entire life as a Democrat.

Q: The Democratic Party does seem to leave former supporters behind when it moves leftward, doesn't it?

A: It bothered me for many years that the Democratic Party was so devoted to a strategy of "tax and spend." Then it became clear to me that the Democrats had been taken over by the environmentalists. And they're virtually owned by the National Education Association. There no longer is any moderation in the party. It's not the "big tent" any more, it's a party led by people like [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.]. You just cannot get more radically left than that. A big chunk of the members of Congress are members of the far-left Progressive Caucus. They call themselves "progressives," but it's quite frightening to see how many of those elected to Congress as moderates are really on the extreme left.

Q: Don't you resent that they've appropriated the word "progressive," as though the rest of us are against progress in all its forms?

A: One of the great devices of the far left is deliberately to mislead people with language. For instance, the environmental movement is entirely a process of deception. You can present radical environmentalists with 20 contrary research studies on a topic and they will dismiss them out of hand because they don't fit their political agenda.

Environmentalism is used to deceive people into thinking the Earth is in big, serious trouble. I always remind people that it's been around for 4.5 billion years and seems to be doing just fine, but try to tell that to Chicken Little. Environmentalism is all about controlling people's lives and especially the economy. The environmentalists have a long record in the United States of attacking the timber industry, agriculture, mining, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. It doesn't matter.

Of course their primary target is property rights. Without property rights, you don't have capitalism. It ceases to exist. I never have seen an environmentalist proposal that wasn't aimed at harming some element of the economy, both of the United States and internationally.

Q: How did your Boring Institute come into existence?

A: That came out of years and years of being a P.R. [public-relations] guy. It was November 1984, and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was coming up. It struck me--I'm victimized by these odd thoughts from time to time--that the parade looks the same every year. Each year, it's indistinguishable from that of the year before. So I sat down and wrote a news release claiming the parade was, in fact, a 10-year-old videotape, and circulated it just before the event.

Of course, I realized that a news release from Al Caruba might not be as impressive as one from some learned think tank such as, say, the Boring Institute. So I founded the Boring Institute, having gained experience by working for the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

I faxed the release to all the wire services--and every one of them grabbed it! Overnight I went from someone who hadn't had a microphone in his hand since the 1950s, when I was studying radio, TV and film production, to sitting in front of many a microphone. It was 1984, and I'd suddenly become a think-tank guru.

I did a ton of radio, all tongue in cheek, saying, "Our research pretty much proves that the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is a massive hoax. The city is in fact dead empty and nothing is going on there, let alone a parade."

Q: And the Boring Institute was born!

A: That was in November, so I began thinking, "What else can we do?" The most obvious thing was that in December, every year, without fail, you get the lists of the 10 best and the 10 worst, who's hot and who's not.

These lists are moronic at best, but people love lists, and particularly newspaper people love lists. You give them a list of 10 of anything, they will print it. So in December 1984, I came up with the first list of the Most Boring Celebrities of the Year. It was based on overexposure, meaning that even if we like these people, by the end of the year we couldn't stand them. We are sick of them.

Q: What about your National Anxiety Center? When did you bring that into existence?

A: In 1990. It was a personal response to decades of newspaper headlines and radio-TV chatter to the effect that the Earth is doomed and we all are dying from everything we eat, drink or breathe.

As a veteran business and science writer, I knew that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and that life expectancy in America and around the world has reached new heights due to scientific and technological advances.