Do you remember The China Syndrome, the 1979 flick starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, and Jack Lemmon, about a nuclear-power plant gone fahkahkt whose debut in theaters happened to precede by a matter of days the Three Mile Island nuclear-power-plant disaster, which released deadly radiation into the atmosphere for thousands of miles, killing off plants, animals, trees, bugs, vermin, and hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting Americans busily going about their lives unsuspectingly not suspecting a thing?

Well neither do I. But the synchronicity of those events, I believe, went a long way toward putting the kibosh on nuclear power in this country, opening the doors for decades of nice clean fossil-fuel emissions.

Well, now that the French have paved the way for President Obama to advocate the employment of domestic nuclear power, none other than China Syndrome star Michael Douglas has announced that he supports the president in this. (h/t Big Hollywood)

I wish these people would make up their minds. How am I supposed to know what to hate if these movie-star actor-types can’t stay the course for more than 30 years?

Personally I believe going nuclear is a mistake. Granted, all those alternative forms of energy – wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, thermal, thermals with the feet in them – couldn’t produce enough energy to fuel a haiku. But that may be a blessing in disguise, because fostering the notion that there is a relatively cheap and abundant supply of energy only motivates people to do things, and doing things is the No. 1 cause of all the world’s problems in the first place. Why O why can’t people just stay in their assigned spaces and sit quietly, hands folded?

If only we could encourage people to stop doing things, then our energy-consumption dilemma would solve itself and we wouldn’t have to take our cues from movie-star actor-types to begin with.

Nothing. It’s our only hope.