Rudi Giuliani and Soylent Green

Last week I was home, minding my own business and watching television on my battered 30-year-old 18-inch Zenith. I am sure its color screen was delightfully novel to its original owners, but it has seen better days. I refuse to have cable and so must content myself with occasionally having to get up and fuck with the TV since all the control knobs have shorts. This defect causes my set to gradually de-adjust itself int0 unintelligible static. I am contemplating acquiring a newer TV since we stand at the threshold to the digital age and I recently learned that I'd get more channels if I scrapped my CRT-dinosaur. I don't know how the hell this works, but apparently local PBS broadcasts four channels at once on the same signal now. I can't get this at home, but my sister can since her TV is several decades newer. Who ever heard of channel 4.2? I'm jest happy when the planets align correctly, WKET comes in good, and I can watch Kentucky cultural productions like a how to demo on catching and eating wild snapping turtles. God bless PBS.

Anyways, there I was curled up with my uber-clumsy 75-lb. Labrador who thinks he's a lapdog watching Rudi Giuliani extol the virtues of the GOP's presidential candidate. As an avowed liberal I watched this spectacle expecting to eventually become upset, but I wanted to be informed. I watch Trinity Broadcasting Network with much the same attitude sometimes. It's good to occasionally check in with the surreality that passes for real reality in America, but once I get my fill of End-Of-Days/France-is-in-league-with-Satan sermons I have to change the channel.

So there was Rudi giving the speech we all saw. I was confused at first about how being a Community Organizer is a laughable offense in politics. But then as the evening wended on I got really depressed. At some point the matter of Oil was introduced and the audience began - apparently spontaneously - chanting 'Drill Baby Drill!". That was my limit. The spectacle of a huge crowd of politically active Americans chanting to drill for more oil was tragic beyond belief to me. I couldn't help but search mentally for a parallel in world history. Perhaps someone shooting the last wild passenger pigeon? (We have a morbid little shrine for these extinct birds in the Cincinnati Zoo.) Perhaps the trainloads of bloodthirsty sportsmen gunning down herds of buffalo and leaving them to rot in the sun out on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century? Neither of those is grandiose enough in scale. Perhaps the haughtiness of the soon-to-be-deposed nobles of the Indian subcontinent, confidently ignoring the gathering cloud of British gunships on their horizon. The felling of the last tree on Easter Island, just before the people there descended into starvation-and-cannibalism hell.

The recent film 'There Will Be Blood' is based on noted lefty/famous author Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel 'Oil!' and serves as an object-lesson in the inherent evil destruction that oil speculation was born in. How timely. And we get Daniel Day Lewis playing a megolomaniacal psychopath as only he can. Bravo.

At any rate drilling for more oil is non-solution to any of America's myriad current environmental, economic, and international political woes. I took a physical geography class at UC from the director of the local EPA and I vividly recall him articulating in a lecture how the pleaded-for drilling of oil in ANWAR would only create a small jump in the overall declining stocks of the all-important sticky black goo. He showed us a big graph depicting the long, slow, inevitable decline in global oil production that we are now collectively desperately avoiding the acknowledgement of. If we raped ANWAR it would only make a small bump in the long downward arc. There is no hope for more oil, in the long run. As we all learned in elementary school there renewable and non-renewable resources. Do we all remember which one oil is? Good class, how 'bout trees? Coal? What about water? Finite is finite. Period. And now India is about to enter the car-happy bliss America has lived in for a half-century. China will be next. (I wonder if India will have drive-in everything like we did in the 50's. Imagine Bollywood monster flicks playing out over a drive-in theater full of chrome-laden convertibles that smells like curry and marsala instead of popcorn and spilled Pepsi.)

The fact that drilling for oil became a sort of mantra at a national political convention in 2008 America speaks volumes about the course America is on, and our megalomania about our perceived place in the world. I have no idea how the American public can possibly be misled enough to seriously think that focusing on more oil production makes any sense! Actually I do know (note the title of this blog and my post below about 'Deer Hunting with Jesus') - it is just counter-intellectual.

Our future involves less and less oil, whether we like it or not. This 'Drill Baby Drill' crap is insane. We had better get our asses in gear and figure out what we are gonna do when the shit hits the fan and we run out. Hummers and huge SUV's are probably not a smart move right now. Neither is ignoring the coming apocalypse of mushrooming energy needs and dwindling supplies. Did anyone else see the film 'Soylent Green'?

I read in the Wall Street Journal last week that Chrysler's sales are down some 30-odd-percent. Ford and GM are hurting too. The entire model we have based our prosperity on - endless economic expansion, suburbia, ubiquitous automobilia- is a house of cards. The end of cheap oil will necessitate change. If we vote in the 'Drill Baby Drill' crowd we are voting to not only eat our seed corn, but burn down our houses too. In his book Collapse Jared Diamond likens our plight to the doomed Viking colonists of Greenland, clinging schizophrenically to a value system that didn't work because they weren't in Norway anymore.

I feel like I am on a sinking ship sometimes in America. The RNC reinforced that creeping sensation for me. Empires usually end badly and messily - note the widespread starvation that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, or at the very least the massive recession that Britain soldiered through after all their colonies demanded self-rule. I am torn between contemplating a future in which I live in survival mode somewhere in the mountains, and one in which I simply say "Screw it" to America and decamp for sunnier environs with better health care, education, and fewer stupid greedy white people.

All of this is also inspired by New York Times journalist Tom Friedman's recent rant on NPR's Fresh Air. In his interview Friedman compares the U.S. to Denmark. According to him, when we elected Reagan in 1981 he axed subsidies for the then-fledgling U.S. solar industry. All the firms went bankrupt and all the technology ended up in Denmark - which is now far, far ahead of us in generating renewable energy. A timely cautionary tale indeed.

I pray for political and environmental sanity in this country. But as a student of history I expect shit like Boss Tweed, Huey Long, Teapot Dome, the Trail of Tears, and Haliburton to screw us all.