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Lesson of the Macondo: Blowout preventers don't prevent blowouts.
This comes as a shock to people attuned to the on-schedule arrival of
techno-miracles. Now, all the acronym-studded invocations of techno-mastery
by men wearing interesting hats will not avail to put the schnitz
on an epic horror show in the Gulf of Mexico.
President Obama's speech to the nation a week ago was designed as a kind of
blowout preventer for the legitimacy of the federal government. It did little
to stop the hemorrhaging of confidence in political leadership. A
nation foundering in a crippled vessel in the horse latitudes of collective
purpose on a sea of red ink looks to its captain - who puffs a few platitudes
into the tattered sails and retreats belowdecks to
pace and stew. This is a society truly lost at sea, where even the friendly
dolphins are turning belly-up and the dying seabirds stare accusingly under
their cloaks of crude oil. The feeling grows that we can't do anything right.
Will someone please turn off the TV?
In
2008, the voters turned to a lanky newcomer from Illinois to rescue itself from just the sort of technocrat jerkoffs who had run the nation into a ditch with their
invocations of "mission accomplished" and "Good job,
Brownie." Change was in the air. Alas, consistent with the apparent fact
that history rhymes but doesn't repeat, Barack Obama proved
to be the reincarnation of Millard Fillmore, not Abe Lincoln. Sometimes
history works in free verse and this stanza was off by a few syllables. It
turns out that change was exactly the one thing not really in the air.
America does not want change, except from the cash register at WalMart.
The last time America faced a convulsion as profound as the present one was
the late 1850s. The internal contradiction of slavery was driving the nation
crazy. The Whig party had been running things for a couple of decades. The
Whigs were the party of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. They tried everything
possible to finesse the expansion of US territory around the inflammatory
issue of slavery. Fillmore came along just in time for the Compromise of
1850, which was intended to settle things and did absolutely nothing to
settle things. By the time the election of 1852 happened, Both Webster and
Clay were old men preparing to meet their maker and the Whig party absolutely
fell apart. Scroll forward a few years and we're in the slaughterhouse of The
Civil War.
A
hundred and sixty years later now, and the USA faces a new and very different
set of internal contradictions. We've ramped up a living arrangement that has
no future, just as slavery had no future. We're uncomfortable with the
mandates of reality, which is trying to tell us we have to live differently.
The American people don't want to hear this. The president doesn't want to
tell them. It's possible that he is not tuned into the reality radio station
that is broadcasting its mandates. You'd think the Macondo
Blowout horror show was coming across loud and clear.
Right after President Obama gave his vapid speech last week, he
traveled to Ohio to brag about how much federal stimulus money was going into
"shovel-ready" highway projects there. I sincerely believe that the
last thing we need right now in this country is more and better highways. Every
president since Jimmy Carter has acknowledged that there's a problem with our
extreme oil dependency, but none of them have made the short leap to
understand that we have a more fundamental problem with car dependency.
Someone paying attention to the mandates of reality would get the choo-choo trains running from Dayton to Columbus to
Cincinnati to Cleveland - and he would tell General Motors to get into the
business of making railroad cars so we don't have to import them from Canada.
Reality is telling us to downscale and get different fast. Quit doing
everything possible to prop up the drive-in false utopia and all its
accessories. Get local. Tighten up. We have no intention of doing that. The
idiocy that passes as informed opinion wants the US money managers to kick
out the jambs handing out more money created out of thin air to promote a
fantasy called "recovery." To what purpose? To keep the tailgate
parties going down at the Nascar ovals? Over at The
New York Times Monday morning, the fatuous Paul Krugman
says that "stinting on spending now threatens the economic
recovery." Earth to Krugman: we're mismanaging
contraction. Further expansion is just not in the cards right now for the
human race. We don't need more people on the planet and we don't have the
means to accommodate them. There will be no 'recovery" to
"growth" - especially by means of pumping more oil into the system.
There is no techno-miracle alt-fuel panoply waiting in the wings to take over
from oil. And there is no research-and-development program that will make it
happen, no matter how many acronym-studded incantations we drone out.
I
admit that contraction is a hard reality - but so is the recognition that we
don't get to live forever, something every child begins to grapple with
around age seven. The inability to face comprehensive contraction will only
insure that its side effects are more debilitating.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked
as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write
books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of
the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller
places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here
: The Long
Emergency .
You can get more from James Howard Kunstler -
including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at
his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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