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A quickening of
events pulses through lands where for so long time stood still, and the oil -
what's left of it - lies locked for the moment beneath hot sands - woe upon
all ye soccer moms! - while Colonel Gadhafi ponders
the Mussolini option - that is, to be hoisted up a lamp-post on a high-C
piano wire until his head bursts like a rotten pomegranate. Then the good
folk of Libya can fight amongst themselves for the swag, loot, and ka-chingling oil revenues he left behind.
Meanwhile,
Hillary Clinton scowls on the sidelines knowing how bad it would look if US
marines actually hit the shores of Tripoli (and perhaps how fruitless it
might turn out to be). And Italian grandmothers across the Mediterranean
wonder why there's no gas to fire up the orecchiette
con cime di rapa.
The fluxes of springtime run cruelly across the sands of Araby, clear into Persia where the ayatollahs' vizeers toy with uranium centrifuges and thirty million
young people wonder how long they will allow bearded ignoramuses to tell them
how to pull their pants on in the morning. Along about now, I wouldn't feel
secure standing next to somebody lighting a cigarette in that part of the
world.
Pretty soon we're going to find out just how fragile things are
in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, there at the heart of things oily. Last week,
King Abdullah wobbled out of his intensive care unit to spread a little
surplus cash around the surging population, but let's remember that their
share of the oil "welfare" has been going down steadily in recent
years - a simple matter of numbers really. Putting aside even the common
folk, a thousand princes from dozens of different tribes pace restively in
the background awaiting the struggle that must follow King Abdullah's overdue
transmigration to the farther shore. All along the western coast of the
Persian Gulf and down toward the Horn of Africa, dark forces stir. Fuses
sputter in Kingdoms from Bahrain to the Yemen.
Also last week, Wikileaks released papers
signifying that Saudi Arabia's oil reserves were quite a bit less than they
had claimed. It was basically an old story,
one that the late Matthew Simmons had published in 2005
just from poring over reams of production data from the Saudi oil fields. The
difference in the Wikileaks story was that this
time a Saudi Arabian oil ministry official confirmed the story. You can bet
they are going to have problems keeping the flow rate up. They can sell off
some stored inventory for a few weeks, but after that the world will know the
truth: Saudi Arabia is in depletion and the oil markets will never be the
same.
It hardly made an impression on a US public preoccupied with comings
and goings of Charlie Sheen. President Obama wants to pretend that
American life-on-wheels will just keep rolling along. He hasn't so much as
hinted to the US public that the time approaches when gasoline will have to
be rationed either by high prices or odd-and-even licenses plates or some
other method. Charming fellow that he is, his fecklessness in the face of
disintegrating oil markets will go down in history as something like
Nero's musical solo while Rome burned down.
While these matters work toward deeper complication, Europe
faces imminent rollovers of debt that can no longer be rolled over, and
upcoming elections in Ireland and Germany that will begin to resolve an
every-country-for-itself outcome for the debt follies of the EMU - and
especially the big European banks, which may find themselves getting
"haircuts" clear down to their jugular veins. Birds will be flipped
to bond-holders and austerity will end up sounding like a kinder-and-gentler
version of the gnarliness that really ends up
happening.
By the way, for years I've proposed that the time would come when some
of the European nations would not be able to depend entirely on the USA doing
its dirty work in the Middle East to keep the oil flowing out. That time is
now here. The café layabouts of Italy, the flaneurs of France, and the bratwurst-devourers of
Germany may now have to militarize and get into the action in places where
American boys have been bleeding out in the sand for decades. The truth is, we could stand some reinforcements. Something that
smells an awful lot like World War Three is shaping up around the Mediterranean
and spilling over toward the Indian Ocean. German cruisers are already out
there plying the seas off North Africa while the ghost of Erwin Rommel
scratches his head on the gritty shores of Tobruk.
Nobody knows how anybody is going to pay for World War Three, but
perhaps it is in the nature of an historic crack-up blow-off that the
accumulated treasure of generations just gets vacuumed out of every vault and
hidey-hole to keep the pyre burning - fire being nature's preferred
dry-cleaning agent. The fate of a few quadrillion credit default swaps
contracts may end up as tomorrow's Flying Dutchman, a haunting enigma plying
the vapors of eternity, sure to frighten juveniles of the marmoset-like
humanoid creatures who succeed us up the evolutionary ladder.
Apparently nature likes to take its creations to the cleaners every so
often, to clear the dross and detritus away. This is perfectly
understandable, though one might prefer it happened to some other generation.
The Baby Boomers were so effusive over the World War Two cohort because we
probably thought we would never have to go through something like that
ourselves. The Boomers expected nothing worse than a sequence of diminishing
golf scores and blander meals as their horizons moved past assisted living to
the final meet-up with God. Now, it turns out, we get to watch our
grandchildren fight over the table scraps of the American Dream - such as it
was: Chevies, burgers, reality TV, and all
the mortgage obligations you could cram in the kitchen drawer.
It's coming on springtime and things are breaking loose all over the
place. I give Saudi Arabia three weeks before it starts to blow up. And even
Iran might get the fever. Plan on a staycation
this summer and start thinking about that garden because it's not altogether
certain that we'll keep up the conveyer belt of Little Debbie Snack Cakes and
other staples of the American table into the supernarkets
when diesel fuel hit $10 a gallon and the truckers stay home to watch the Kardashian girls. I'm already
getting hungry.
James
Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the
post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
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