Beau (Faux) Geste 
By Martin Harris

Quite a few French phrases have become well-recognized English-usage descriptions: pied-a-terre, for the urban apartment occasionally used (for deliciously nefarious purposes, of course) by the usually-country-estate-dwelling gentry; RSVP (repondez s’il vous plait) or please reply) used on written invitations; and nouveau riche, for the unrefined (as seen by "old money" families) behavior of the ill-mannered newly-wealthy. And there’s beau geste, the seemingly noble but actually futile (or, worse, for show only) action, made famous in the 1939 P.C. Wren novel of the same name, describing an upper-class English youth of the same (nick)name who, with his brothers, joins the French Foreign Legion after a mysterious jewel robbery at home. Beau dies on the ramparts of  the Saharan Fort Zinderneuf during a Tuareg attack, while his brother returns home to tell the tale and explain the noble basis for flight.

In my admittedly primitive taxonomy, there are three categories of geste: (1) the noble action, exemplified by the gentlemen who stood back while the ladies and children occupied the lifeboat seats of the sinking Titanic;  (2) the futile action, exemplified by Beau Geste himself as the French tried and failed to hold onto Saharan desert, which they would lose anyway only 23 years after Wren’s writing;  and (3) the cynical action, exemplified by the infantry captain who loudly volunteers to lead his company in a frontal assault, secure in the expectation that his battalion or regimental CO will veto his theatrical proposal. In this beau (faux) geste category are two recent political posturings which the actors themselves hope and expect will fail: one, at the national level, involves gentry-left California politicians going before the cameras to demand acres of solar panels be erected on land they also demand be saved untouched for endangered species; and the other, at the State level, involves nearly an infantry squad of  gentry-left Vermont politicians solemnly promising their gubernatorial-ambitions supporters that they will shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, knowing full well that it can’t be done without inflicting a possibly lethal burden on the already-troubled State economy. 

Like the captain who doesn’t really want to lead an assault, and like the gubernatorial candidates who don’t really want to succeed at shutting down Vermont Yankee, California Senator Diane Feinstein doesn’t really want her State to go solar. Even though she helped plan "California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy" she simultaneously doesn’t want any part of "13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the [million-acre Mohave Desert] region" to be actually –ugh—built, and has introduced legislation in DC to prevent it. That’s not unlike her DC colleague, the recently deceased Senator Ted Kennedy, who was a vocal advocate of wind-farms except for any that he and his friends could see on Nantucket Sound from their Nantucket/ Martha’s Vineyard/ Hyannisport compounds’ front lawns. The New York Times story from which the above quotes are taken illustrates a couple of rare shortfalls in such legislative beau (faux) geste maneuvers, in that their bluffs were called, and they were forced to become painfully visible on both sides of the issue. Usually, they’re more successful, like the infantry captain, in insuring the quiet failure of their noisy proposal.

Thus, I’d guess ( but can’t statistically substantiate or document) the shut-it-down promise-makers running for the Vermont Governorship want to be seen opposing license renewal for Vermont Yankee but don’t actually want to succeed in their ostensible campaign. Ideally, they’d like to be able to report back to their tie-dyed, compost-throwing, local-vore supporters that "golly gee, we tried really, really hard, but those evil corporate interests bought a different and unhappy result which we’ll just have to live with, for a short while. And, by the way, do you fully appreciate how successful we’ve just been in keeping your power bills from rising?" Their underlying presumption, of course, is that their shut-it-down supporters are too far onto the left side of the IQ bell curve to understand the nexus between keeping the plant open and keeping the ratepayer costs from rising, or that they’re far enough onto the right side of the IQ bell curve to be able to hold two fundamentally oppositional concepts in their minds simultaneously: shut it down for the plant, keep it operational for continued cheap power: cognitive dissonance. 

For an exemplar of that unique skill, they need look no further back than the Ellen Goodman opinion columns in the Boston Globe, wherein, back in the ‘90’s, she advocated for the removal of hydro-electric power dams from Maine’s Kennebec River, so that the salmon could once again range romantically free to their ancient headwaters spawning grounds. Simultaneously, she argued, just because it would have to replace the lost power with higher-priced spot-market purchases would be no justification for Maine Power to impose any increase in ratepayer charges. Such Vermont Golden Domers as Peter Shumlin, I fully accept, are equally or even more highly skilled in such c-d posings.

As are the Entergy folks in  New Orleans, who, I suspect, have come to experience "buyer’s remorse" for their 2002 purchase of Vermont Yankee, which decision has exposed them to the "we’re smarter than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission" mindset of its Vermont regulators and activists. I’d guess that the company’s recent 18% (down from 50% now sold in-State) power contract proposal is actually a message to just those beau (faux) geste tormentors, a fairly un-subtle warning that the threatened in-State power-shut-off might well happen, not by politician action within Vermont, but by producer sale of 100% of the VY power to buyers outside Vermont. 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights