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Those Panglossians around the USA awaiting something like an
election in Egypt are going to be disappointed. What's going on in the
streets of Cairo right now is an Egyptian election - minus the American-style
trappings of corporate grift, scripted "debates," and polling
places that make our elections so satisfying.
Many here in the dreamland of Happy Motoring
and Cheez Wiz are asking themselves why President Obama is waffling about the
obvious tides of "change" now lapping over the ancient Kingdom on
the Nile. How can he not believe in it? Why isn't Mr. O out there in
front with a bloody bandage around his head, cheerleading for the street
fighters? If you lay aside the subtleties, the answer is simple: nothing
beyond the status quo of recent years is good news for America.
For one thing, only people paid to
flap their gums on Larry Kudlow's nightly CNBC show, and children under nine
years old, believe that anything like "democracy and freedom" will
arise out of a street revolt in this region of the world. Sure, the opening
acts of an historic event like this bring on mass intoxication that the
Shining City or the Kingdom of Heaven or some other ideal disposition of
things is at hand. There may even be an intermezzo of civil factional
interplay, as we saw in Iran thirty years ago, with figures like Shapour
Bakhtiar, Mehdi Bazargan, and Abolhassan Banisadr revolving through the
turnstile of politics. It doesn't take long for the turnstile to turn into a
meat grinder, and it doesn't take much vision to see all the things that can
go wrong when that happens in that part of the world.
Before I go any further, I don't want to be
misunderstood by eager misunderstanders. In my view, President Mubarak
has about as much chance of sticking around his presidential palace another
fortnight as a bluebottle fly has of conducting the next Easter mass at the
Vatican. Mubarak's resistance to that message prompts one to wonder: what is
it with these old despots that they can't manage some sort of orderly timely
transition - even if they handpick the successor dude.? There must be a few
capable younger replacement despots in a country that large (around 80
million). Why does it always have to come to this?
For the answer to that abiding mystery I can
only commend you to the works of Gabriel García Márquez.
Who else really knows what winds of confusion blow through the minds of
old men in realms of power? But, on the "plus side," as they say in
American positive thinking circles, the old bastard did manage to keep the
peace for three decades at his end of things in the world's premier political
hot-spot. This is truly one of the unsung miracles of the age we're living
in. Of course, with Mubarak pulled down, all bets on this would be off.
At the moment, Nobel Peace Prize winner
Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a
seemingly rational, capable fellow of unquestioned gravitas is angling to
replace Mubarak. By declaring his intentions, ElBaradei has already crossed
some kind of line in the sand that, under less fateful circumstances, would
get his ass tossed in a crocodile pit faster than you could recite an
incantation from the Scroll of Thoth. But these are extraordinary
moments.
More troubling is ElBaradei's flirtation
with the Muslim Brotherhood, a venerable mostly underground opposition with a
not altogether trustworthy agenda where the USA, and the OECD West generally,
are concerned. Whatever the MB represents - and I don't think even the Arab
Desk nerds at the State Department are even quite sure - there's a fair
chance that it includes mischief like promoting a Sharia state, inciting
trouble through Hamas, supporting uprisings in other key Muslim nations, and
egging on new, unwelcome disorders in a region that the stability of the
world hinges on these days.
The key to all that is oil, of course, and
mainly the oil of Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah there is at least 86 years old
and in poor health. Crown Prince Sultan, his successor, isn't much
younger. If ever a country was ripe for a political flipping it is this shaky
kingdom. Everyone from the White House to Foggy Bottom to Langley, Virginia,
is probably messing his/her pants this week wondering how much longer the lid
can be kept on that joint.
To return to an earlier theme, what should
amaze us now in the unraveling of this region is how remarkable and long the
recent era of stability lasted. Meaning, most of all, how reliable those
tanker shipments of oil have been moving through the Straits of Hormuz and
the Suez Canal to their destinations in the lands of the Crusaders (and their
younger kin in the New World). To put it pretty starkly, the so-called developed
world can't keep its act together more than a week without that steady
mainline of Arabian oil, even though it doesn't represent most of the oil
traded in the world. The margins are too thin. There's no wiggle room,
really, especially for us, in our kingdom of freeways. We lose ten percent of
our oil supply and that's all she wrote for business as usual around here.
I'll put it even more starkly: we can't afford to let this shit get out of
hand for a New York minute.
But it's not really up to us, no matter how
many times Hillary Clinton says "uh," through her tightly pursed
lips. And Barack Obama is kicking back like everybody else watching things
beyond our control spin out on cable TV. Remember something else: these
uproars in the Middle East are only the first stirrings of political reaction
to a scarcity of key world resources, especially grain crops, which have
never been in such short supply in modern times. And the part of this problem
that isn't due to sheer population overshoot is almost certainly a result of
climate change - which many idiots in the US congress refuse to acknowledge
out of sheer obdurate stupidity.
A word or two about last week's State of the
Union speech. The platitudes were nearly too painful to bear: techno-magic and
a zillion engineering PhDs will keeps us at the zenith of historic
wonderfulness. Has anyone been to Youngstown, Ohio, recently? We're so full
of shit about ourselves, our true condition, and our prospects, that you can
see it through our eyeballs. I did, however, mutter a prayer of thanks that
Mr. Obama did not act out the mortifying ritual (first established by R.
Reagan) of introducing the various role models, heroes, and exemplars
installed up in the gallery. We have enough award shows in this country, and
it's the horror-inducing season for it - just as the world is flying apart at
the seams.
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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