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The
exquisite morbidity of the BP oil spill has concentrated the collective
national mind like few other events in this ongoing long emergency. How many
times a day does it occur to you -- perhaps while sitting in traffic, or oogling some girl in a nearby cubicle, or cruising the
freezer stacks in the supermarket -- that one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico
that crude is just blasting away into the deep blue sea? Anyway, it troubles
my hours. But what if it hadn't happened? What if the nation's attention was
not fixed on the "fierce urgency" of this disaster and we were left
with all the tiresome familiar problems of politics and economy?
After the financial storms of May, people in the knife-and-fork-using nations
may feel that all our troubles with money have been sorted out and settled.
Greece had an apoplexy and Europe somehow survived -- at least so far. Spain
fell to its knees and apparently remains there, in mid-aria, waiting for
an orchestra to strike up the next measure. Portugal is trying to hide in
plain sight, like a beach-goer who has lost
swimsuit in the surf. Hungary choked on something last week and was left
sitting at the table with its face in a plate of goulash. Iceland has been
put on, well, on ice after stiffing its British account holders. The Brits
have discovered that they have enough money to run their country in the style
of Edward the Confessor. France is weeping over all the Spanish,
Greek, and Portuguese bad paper in its bank vaults. Italy, having become a wholly-owned
subsidiary of Silvio Berlusconi, is eating a sparse
lunch under the grape arbors. The Baltic states are sinking into a
northern peat bog of penury.... And Germany remains upright, wondering how it
can wiggle out of this sad-ass collective of fazed cookies.
June so far is a strange ebb tide of of events
relating to the world's money, but when the water goes out like that, you
know it's sure to return before long, and the peaceful mud-flats of June may
vanish under a summer tsunami. I know I'm not alone in the creepy feeling
that really nothing has been sorted out and the world is waiting to get
hammered six days to Sunday by the consequences of living too large for too
long. The markets have been stranded, too, gyrating on the peculiar life-support
of robot-traders -- since all the humans have packed up and left the scene
for higher ground. The corporate creaming-off of anything not nailed down in
America continues apace, with the cream ending up as icing on the petit fours
passed around the twilight lawns of East Hampton.
President Obama may be lucky that he has something he can pretend to be
decisive about in the BP oil spill. It's allowed him to completely avoid
taking a public stand on crucial parts of the financial reform legislation
working its way through congress like a stinking bolus. For instance, where
does Mr. Obama stand on the reform of credit default swap activities? This
dark realm of swindling has come close to choking the American money system
to death -- and might yet do the job -- but the president hasn't offered up a
word of leadership on it. My guess is that the gestures of reform will leave
reform completely unfinished by the time the high water of events starts
rushing back in. All the structural fault-lines will remain as even more
decay sets in and new cracks appear. Something is gonna give
this summer.
It
all comes down to one thing: the world is mismanaging contraction.
The world will not solve the problems of massive over-complexity with
more complexity. But scaling down is apparently not an option, though it will
happen whether we participate or not. The USA is like Herman Melville's
Bartleby the Scrivener who, when asked to do anything, replied,
"I prefer not to." His preference led him to a pauper's grave.
The future attempts to regulate undersea oil drilling will send many
companies to do their thing in other parts of the world where nobody gives a
shit what you do offshore as long as you pony up the royalties to the grifters in charge onshore. America is going to lose a
whole lot more of its own oil production. Smaller companies may shut down
altogether from the cost of complying with new safety rules and an inability
to get insurance. The oil from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico was how we
hoped we would offset the ongoing depletions in Alaska. We're going to have
to import even more oil than the two-thirds-plus we already depend
on. One thing President Obama -- nor anyone else with an audience or a
constituency -- will speak a word about is our massive, incessant purposeless
motoring.
Pretty soon, the oil missing from the Gulf will leave a message at the
7-Eleven stops in Dallas and Chattanooga, and before the year is out the
cardboard signs that say "Out Of Gas" may hang on the pumps. A great
hue and cry will rise out of the Nascar ovals and
righteous lady politicians with decoupaged hair-doos will invoke the New World Order and the Book of
Revelation in their rise to power. Reasonable men with moderate views will
dither on the sidelines, afraid to offend one faction or another.
Sometime this summer that ebb tide of events is going to reverse and we'll
have more to contend with than just the shrieking wildlife suffocating in
orange gunk, and the ruined spawning grounds of the shrimp, and the lost
livelihoods of the sportfishing charter guides, and
the tarball covered beaches and devalued real
estate. We decided to de-complexify the hard way,
the way that brings about as much pain and disorder as possible until we
discover that the long emergency beats a path straight into a world made by
hand.
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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