A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of President Bush’s attempt to push a solution to the energy crisis on the rest of the country, his adviser, Ari Fleisher, made one of the most completely stupid statements I’ve ever been privileged to hear from a supposedly intelligent person.

“The president believes that (high-energy consumption) is an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.”

Say what? I would almost think he was joking, but I don’t see how anyone who advises our puppet of a president on matters of great national importance could possibly have such a rich sense of humor.

That leads me to believe he’s actually serious, which in turn draws me to the frightening conclusion that there are other unfortunates who agree with him.

So our lifestyle is blessed, huh?

I guess it’s been too long since I’ve been privy to the sanguine spiritual experience one can only find after a shopping spree in a cookie-cutter mall, followed by a quick run through a McDonald’s drive-through window after which one is forced to eat one’s Big Mac very carefully, so as to avoid spilling ketchup and mustard on the plush upholstery of one’s newly leased sport utility vehicle.

Of course this unparalleled intellectual diversion must be preceded by a stop at a nearby Shell station, where several gallons of premium petrol, packaged for our divine use and consumption by those OPEC people (I wonder how many people know what that stands for anyway?) are purchased to fuel our drive home to that sacred American utopia known as the suburbs. I suppose it is rather nice that there’s this whole demographic of U.S. citizens whose greatest worry when coming home at night is whether the scourges of the inner city have managed to infect their children yet.

Blessed indeed.

When one considers all the glorious cultural contributions American society has introduced to the rest of the world in the last few years (Starbucks, New Kids on the Block, Abercrombie & Fitch, all those wonderful Saturday Night Live movies featuring Will Farrell) it might be hard for us to believe every country isn’t queuing up to jump on our absurdly large bandwagon.

Hard to believe and even harder for many to understand. Now that the sun has set for good on the British Empire and the glory days of the Soviet Union are relegated to history and Tolstoy novels, there isn’t really anyone else with the unmatched potential for arrogance so nicely bestowed on the good old U.S. of A.

Only arrogance could prompt a statement as ridiculous as Fleisher’s, and only a surplus of self-importance could justify such an illogical premise. I know we’re the biggest kids on the block and all that, but last I heard the law of the playground didn’t govern international relations or energy consumption rights.

Throughout our proud history, the American people have suffered from two debilitating inadequacies: The inability to surrender any notion of superiority for the greater good and a stubborn refusal to consider actions in light of the ever-elusive big picture. I don’t know enough to decide if this is the fault of a capitalist system that encourages the strong to dominate the weak or just simply the result of years of political spin-doctoring and increasing complacency on the part of the citizenry, but it’s got to end.

We buy and buy and buy in hopes of furthering both our economic prosperity and material reputation among their peers, and proceed to discard without any thought of where the waste goes or whether there’s even a place to put it at all.

We build gargantuan homes and drive even bigger cars, without caring that they are contributing to the largest energy consumption of any country, developed or undeveloped, in the world.

According to the International Energy Agency Web site, North American carbon dioxide emissions will be 42 percent higher than the Kyoto targets by 2010. The gap would be 29 percent in the OECD Pacific region and 18 percent in Western Europe.

I can’t figure out what I’m more disheartened by. The thought that we will simply use our considerable economic prowess to trade our way to compliance with the Kyoto standards, or the nagging voice assuring me there’s no way we’ll even bother trying to adhere to the treaty we signed with supposedly good intentions.

We’ll probably just take our arrogance and our complete lack of concern for the environmental health of our planet and go play by ourselves.

Despite these alarming statistics, the Bush administration seems unwilling to cut the proverbial Gordian knot and get to the heart of the problem. We shouldn’t waste time defending our conspicuous consumption to ourselves or anybody else. We should begin the process of putting a stop to it.

Although it’s impossible for me to understand why anyone would want a house 50 times bigger than they need or a Ford Explorer that gets worse gas mileage than a piece of construction equipment (therefore I won’t be giving up dreams of anything), it’s up to my generation to demand a change in policy before the whole world turns its back on us and our monstrous selfishness and leaves us alone with our superiority complex.

Maria Del Zoppo, State News opinion editor, can be reached at delzoppo@msu.edu.