More about Warren (UPDATED)

So, I hadn't realized this, but via a Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, I learn that we've spent most of our history without an invocation nor a benediction. FDR added both at his inauguration in 1933 and, sadly, they've been part of the program ever since.

This factoid makes me even angrier than I was before.

While I grant that Obama is elected to be the president of all the people, not just the people who voted for him - something the current occupant just never got through his thick skull - I still say Rick Warren is quite simply a bridge too far. I have read a lot in the last few days about this issue, both pro and con, and I still come down where I was before: Rick Warren is the wrong choice, a walking, talking insult to the spirit of inclusion Obama has spent so much time and energy creating.

I hate quoting myself, but I must raise a question I asked back in September in the wake of the McCain campaign's mud-slinging: why are we always the ones who must suck it up?

Why am I and my fellow progressives, liberals & Democrats expected to take the high road every single time? Why is the onus on us to make nice and maintain civility while the other side gets to wreck and rob the place with impunity, spewing hate and flinging poo like a monkey? Why are we supposed to just sit there and take it? It is almost as though they know these people are over-grown children and, like children, we grown-ups are required to be patient and tolerant while they go through some adult version of the terrible twos, except sustained and culture-wide.

So, once again, The Left is expected to sit down, shut up and take one for the team, to just be grateful for the fucking-over not being worse than it otherwise would have been. The emotional retards on the other end of the spectrum once again have to be pandered-to, because they will otherwise get their widdle feelers hurt and take their toys home to pout. I just don't recall seeing a reciprocal show of respect when the other side stole the last two elections. I just remember a lot of crowing and chest-thumping about "mandates."

I find the inclusion of Rick Warren to be sickening because the most favorable spin I can put on it is to think that maybe he wants to insure the largest possible audience for the launching of his bold new direction in government and putting Warren at the beginning of the program is the least odious way to get and keep the eyes and ears of a large group of people who would otherwise range from the curiously skeptical to the overtly hostile. Warren, with his genial demeanor and Hawaiian shirts, projects an approachable warmth (however manufactured and shallow it may be) that his predecessors Robertson and Falwell lack and maybe that is a factor for Obama as well, though I must say that even with all of that in mind I still don't think this is what we who worked his campaign and gave him money had in mind.

The intolerant learn nothing when tolerated; for them it just means the suckers on the other side didn't have the guts to let their hate win the day.

Because I think the thing all the Obama defenders lose sight of amid this whole brouhaha is that we've been here before. Democrats have been sucking up to the Reich-Wing since Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun slithered into Washington on a tide of racial fear-mongering and cultural resentment. It has never, ever, provided any long-term benefit for the Democrats except to encourage the poo-flinging monkeys to fling even more poo. "Triangulating Bill" Clinton tried and tried and tried to accomodate a burgeoning and ascendant Political Right, in fact he was the finest Republican president we ever had, and all he ever got was impeached for his efforts.

I think some of this has to do with the old saw about a liberal being someone who won't take his own side in an argument. As liberals, we think surely some common ground can be found on any issue since we generally try to see other sides of arguments. Righties think god is on their side and the devil is in any opposition. In such a formulation, how can we ever find the middle? We can't because there isn't one. As Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday:

Ultimately, the reason politics is unavoidably "divisive" is because people have really divergent and irreconcilable views on passion-provoking controversies. That's what politics is. It's what it always has been. At some point, Obama either will or won't repeal DOMA and don't-ask-don't-tell; he either will or won't rescind Bush's anti-abortion regulations and appoint new Supreme Court Justices likely to re-affirm Roe; he either will or won't close Gitmo; he either will or won't withdraw from Iraq; he either will or won't investigate Bush war crimes; he either will or won't deliver on his promises to unions, etc. People feel very strongly -- and very differently -- about those issues.

And besides, at the end of the day, being an unapologetic atheist, I have to agree with (...a-hem...) Christopher Hitchens when he writes:

As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. If he likes, he can oppose the idea of marriage for Americans who are homosexual. That's a policy question on which people may and will disagree. However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors.

This quite simply cannot stand.

[...]

A president may by all means use his office to gain re-election, to shore up his existing base, or to attract a new one. But the day of his inauguration is not one of the days on which he should be doing that. It is an event that belongs principally to the voters and to their descendants, who are called to see that a long tradition of peaceful transition is cheerfully upheld, even in those years when the outcome is disputed.

So, Obama promises us a new politics. With the Rick Warren selection, Obama reveals himself as an epic genius with a secret plan so grand no mere mortal can guess it, or else he is either more of a cynical operator than we thought or more gullible and stupid than he seems.

I'm not sure I like any of those options. I know, I know, he's still the far better option and he's going to give us what we want on Iraq, Gitmo, minority rights, energy policy, environmental policy, labor policy, and he projects competence and tolerance while single-handedly changing the image America projects to the world, blah-blah-blah, but right now, I'm angry and I choose to stay that way until he gives me a reason not to be.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

UPDATE:
From the marvelously poisonous pen of Jillian over at Sadly, No:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been completely nauseated by the Sensible Liberal. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Left’s greatest stumbling block is not the Republican party or the Freepers of the world, but the moderate Democrat, who is more devoted to “winning” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension, often called “inclusion” or “getting along”, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who says “I agree with the goal you seek, but I also understand the point of view of people who think you are little more than crazed pedophiles”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s full citizenship; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the fag to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Lots of ideas bouncing around in my head right now, the result (as usual) of things I've been reading and watching, which all seem to converge in strange ways.

Allow me to explain.

I've railed time and again about how much of a diseased cur Richard M. Nixon was and how his terrible legacy haunts our republic in body, mind and spirit. Today, in the wake of the Blagojevich freakshow, driftglass re-runs Hunter S. Thompson's awesome eulogy of Nixon, someone Blago evidently admires. Here's a taste:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

…

He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

…

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

…

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

So Nixon's toxic legacy pervades the smoldering wreckage of our once great nation lying all around us now, a slow-motion disaster we've watched happen since the ascension of the snake-oil salesman from California, which tracks with my recent conclusion of the elegaic HBO series "The Wire." Saint Ronnie bequeathed unto us the constitution-shredding War on Drugs, and that war has ruined our cities, as intended. "The Wire" is, over five seasons, a kind of extended autopsy of the remnants of Baltimore, Maryland. The clash between police and the inner-city drug trade are the jumping-off point for an unflinching examination of the whole city's degeneration, from the corruption and violence in the police department to the lasting damage of generations of neglect of the city's poor and helpless to the ugly wheeling and dealing in her courts to those trying to survive amid a ruined industrial base or her failing schools to the "sausage-making" of big-city politics to the leveraged soul of it's once-proud newspaper, the home of H.L. Mencken: The Baltimore Sun, while never shrinking from the fundamental issues of race and class that lie at the secret heart of the American war on her cities. No American city, between five seasons of "The Wire" and seven of "Homicide: Life on the Streets," has ever been more thoroughly magisterially depicted warts and all. Baltimore is a perfect symbol for everything America has done wrong with her cities since World War Two.

We've never been a nation of cities. From our birth over two centuries ago, America has been conflicted about the role of cities in the life of a nation, from the epic struggle between Jefferson and Hamilton to define us as agrarian and rural or industrial and urban right up to today, with our red states and blue states. You know, patriots versus latte-sippers.

Not for us is the idea that a nation's great cities embody the soul of its people: Paris, London, Moscow, Prague, Rome, New Delhi, Athens, Cairo, Tokyo. Each city is evocative of its host nation, and it is no accident that each is the seat of government.

What else is Washington D.C. but a sort of grand college campus structured around the seasonal influx and evacuation of an ever-changing cast of characters with an ever-changing set of agendas - few of which circumscribe the ongoing needs of The District, apart from the bureacrats who are eternal. What else is New York City - the largest city in the world that is not also some seat of government - but a sprawling laboratory built for the sole and unrestrained purpose of making money, all other arenas of achievement pursued within its five boroughs however florid or grandiose springing from that initial formative commandment. We were never to be what Paris or London or Rome were in their respective hey-days, the unquestioned beating heart of The Empire where all things French or English or, well, Roman were legislated, elevated, celebrated and defended above all others. Had New York remained the nation's capital, perhaps we would have an American Paris or an American London, but History has left such an epic metropolis only to our dreams.

Where shall a traveler look to see the distilled essence of our country? Our regional differences belie any such simple answer, which gets to the heart of the continuing conflict in Washington D.C.. Washington may be our capital city, named after our greatest general, but it is a bloodlessly administrative beehive jealous that the very names of Boston and Philadelphia seem embued with the symbolism of our Glorious Revolution, while New York and Los Angeles (Hollywood) are our cultural megaphones to the world and Las Vegas is our national id made manifest in the scorching western desert.

Where shall a traveler look? The answer is, I think, nowhere and that gets to the core of not only our problems in Washington but to the core of our uniquely American condition. The fact that Baltimore has been allowed to fail is of a piece with the failure of Detroit or Buffalo or Pittsburgh or the attempted shivving of New York City in the 1970's. Digby calls it tribalism, and I think that is a fair assessment of what we of late call Red State/Blue State because it isn't just regionalism or race or class or religion or musical preference, although all of those are factors. It is about some manner of amorphous cultural identity, of tendencies, of elective affinities. The most vocal of the proponents of this form of social identification can't rightly say what or whom is in any of these groups, but they sure as shit can tell you who and what isn't. Right now, we are organized along the lines of the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, though the clutural cleavages embodied in that formulation date back to before the Revolution, and though we can't fully and objectively list the pre-req's for membership in either tribe, the grounds for rejection are easily intuited: Pat Robertson is not in the Blue Tribe and Barbra Streisand is not in the Red.

The most sickening part of all this stupidity for me is that is so fucking artificial. I don't mean the underlying chasms in our culture - those are there and they are real and often dangerous, perhaps mortally - but the pervasiveness and intensity of the divides are wholly artifical. Which brings me back to Nixon. It is all about the ginned-up controversies and manufactured wedge-issues that drove that goddamned Southern Strategy.

After Barry Goldwater damaged the foundations of our American consensus in '64, Nixon slithered into power through the widening cracks, a one-man wedge-issue utterly without conscience in exploiting the nastiest corners of the American psyche to get and keep votes in a decade that amounted to one long, sustained national family screaming match. His tactics nor his ruthless application of them were not new, but his success their use and the failure to adequately punish all bad actors upon discovery of the scope of his crimes has made everything since fruit of the poisonous tree. The GOP hegemony that lasted from November of 1968 until November of 2006 was built on Nixonian lies, muscle, manpower and mythology. No matter how important the Frost/Nixon interviews may have seemed at the time and ever since - now in the form of a hit Broadway play and new Ron Howard movie! - the fact that Nixon was not sent to prison like the common criminal he was, followed by all of his knowledgable co-conspirators, all on the pretext of protecting the dignity of the office and putting the past behind us for the good of the nation, allowed the Nixon cancer to metastasize until it has now spread throughout and consumed our whole body politic. Two days ago, Darth "The Big Dick" Cheney, unreconstructed Nixonite toady, has essentially dared President-elect Obama and the Democratic Congress to prosecute him for war crimes. We all know he won't and they won't and that is, in some perverse way, the more perfect coda than even Sarah "Moose-alini" Palin here at the bitter end of Nixon's GOP: the bad guys got all the money and rode off into the sunset while flipping the bird, roll credits.

And they did it with those artificial cultural issues, the chips on regional shoulders, the demonization of "Blue" places like cities, rife as they are with crime and negros and all those queers and snooty liberals and their dangerous "ideas". Baltimore as depicted in "The Wire" is perfect as neither a northern city punished by the toothless goobers for being on the winning side of The Civil War, nor a southern city (Maryland was a slave state, but did not secede) re-born as a sprawling, shiny, disorganized Sun Belt suburban metro-area non-city wasteland. It is merely an old, dirty, failing city - more of a overlarge town, really - choked to death by the ascension of a cultural hostility to the very idea of people gathering in cities. If my reference to our War Between the States seems too much of an historical call-back, I remind you that the great William Faulkner of Mississippi, a slave state that seceded if I recall correctly, once wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

As a final point, our civil war has also been very much on my mind these days because I am re-watching Ken Burns' transcendant "The Civil War," a documentary so well made that it ceases to be a mere historical documentary and instead rises to the level of art. In so watching this magisterial work, I am reminded of our last president from Illinois and the challenges he faced. Digby recently touched on this, almost spooky in the timing as I began re-watching "The Civil War" on the same day she wrote about some Southern "partriots" who continue to deny that Lincoln was a great president and instead still consider him a hypocritical dictator and criminal. I leave the final analysis to Digby:

Yesterday, today and tomorrow:

Where Lincoln is concerned, no such schism exists. He is "considered by both historians and ordinary Americans to have been the greatest American president," says the taxpayer-supported website of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Oh, really? Tell that to Bragdon Bowling, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He won't be lighting any candles for Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12.

"Lincoln is responsible for the devastation of the founding principles of our country, and you can lay 600,000 bodies at his feet, the casualties of a totally unnecessary war," Bowling told me. As for the bicentennial, "It's just a continuation of the Lincoln myth-making paid for with public dollars."

Bowling sounds like an outlier crank, but south of the Mason-Dixon line his views aren't particularly radical. His anti-Lincoln line springs partly from popular culture, and partly from academic scholarship. In the marketplace of ideas the Lincoln-o-phobes lack the throw weight of, say, David Herbert Donald (of Lincoln, Mass.) or Doris Kearns Goodwin. But they are there, for those who want to hear them.

What's their beef? They view Lincoln as a cynical, self-serving politician with no particular aversion to slavery, who precipitated the Civil War, sorry - the War Against Southern Independence - to keep his Republican party in the White House. "It was all about power," Bowling observed at an anti-Lincoln rally in Richmond in 2003. "All so Lincoln and his friends could consolidate their power to tell other people how to live their lives."

Former University of South Carolina historian Clyde Wilson particularly objects to the beatification of the 16th president as a genial, all-knowing Christ figure trapped in a bloody hecatomb not of his own making. Writing on the website of the Abbeville Institute, a think tank for revisionist Southern scholarship, Wilson calls Lincoln "the tender-hearted leader who authorized ruthless terrorism against women and children, refused generous offers of prisoner exchange while declaring medicine a contraband of war, accepted Grant's costly policy of losing three men for every one Confederate killed, was not above keeping his own son out of harm's way, and invited his own fate by clandestinely organizing the attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis."

Wilson sent me a copy of a forthcoming anti-Lincoln article, timed to coincide with the bicentennial. Inter alia, it reserves particular scorn for Boston, whose citizens, Wilson believes, fanned the flames of war to ensure the economic hegemony of the industrial North over the agrarian South. Yankee hypocrisy is a favorite target: "New England shippers got rich in the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil right up to The War and Bostonians owned slave sugar plantations in Cuba even after The War," he writes.

Wilson even assails Ms. Julia Ward Howe of Mt. Vernon Street, for the "bigotry and blasphemy" of her composition, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." "She subsumes Christ to her secular vengeance and conquest," he explained to me. That's a little rich, I'd say.

I always find it fascinating that the people who want to reach into your bedrooms, hospital rooms and wombs, are always upset about some phantom liberal who supposedly wants to tell them how to live. But it seems to be based upon this odd idea that goes all the way back to the civil war that if a fellow American is not in 100% agreement that they are trying to inflict their "values" on others.

Gay marriage is a good example. Nobody says that people must be gay and must marry others of the same sex. But these people simply can't live and let live. The mere fact that others don't believe as they do is seen as a threat and they seek to stop it. And they always do it while excoriating the other side for "seeking power."

(And the irony of excoriating Lincoln for spilling the blood of hundreds of thousands for immoral reasons in an unnecessary war for the benefit of rich hypocrites who made money arming the enemy is just too rich...)

I don't know that there are very many of these anti-Lincoln cranks out there. But the underlying philosophy is quite pervasive among conservatives, even if they don't trace it to Lincoln and the civil war. I recall another conservative from a few years back who also seemed to believe that the Democrats were only interested in power for its own sake:

By "the left" I'm including almost the entire Democratic Party, you can count the exceptions on your fingers, you can name them, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman...The whole mainstream of the party is engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America, what they care about is not winning the war on terror...I don't think they care about the danger to us as Americans or the danger to people in other countries. They care about power.

That's right. Everyone in the Democratic party was engaged in an effort to betray America because they only care about power. Just like Lincoln and the northerners. I suspect that projection is the foundation of this ongoing sense of conservative victimization. They have to quiet the voices in their own heads by shutting up those who disagree with them.

One final, monstrous smash-and-grab

What else to say?

How else to characterize it?

The bailout, which is SOOOO last week I know, is (as Mr. Sideshow wrote a couple of weeks ago), long before Hank "The Donald Rumsfeld of Economics" Paulson's "Give-Me-All-The-Money-And-Don't-Fucking-Ask-Me-Any-Questions-Or-The-Economy-Gets-It" three-page plan was scuttled in The House - the People's Chamber - by the "Tru-Believers" in the Rethugli-bot coalition (before being rescued by The Senate - The Plutocrat's Chamber) because - weaned on the poison milk of the Reagan Revolution as they are - they never understood that all that free-market rhetoric was just so much malarky spread by the Ruling Class to get their signature pet policies package-dealt with all those the Culture War rostrums that get the shrieking wingnut brigades nice and agitated for the end result of election victories that translate via Abramoff and Delay and the like into more money in the pockets of the Monied Class. The poor dears, those useful tools, willing pawns in a game they are too stupid or stubborn to understand (h/t to Lance Mannion):

One final, monstrous smash-and-grab raid on the treasury before they leave office

That about sums up the entire Bush Administration, don't it? W has been the very culmination of that vaunted "Reagan Revolution." He is the distilled essence of all that is ugly, greedy, simplistic, violent and mendacious in the entire intellectual (if that's even an appropriate word for this willfully ignorant bunch of hate-spewing know-nothings) underpinnings of the modern GOP.

We can all see that now as Grandpa McSimpson gets snarling and ugly at the uppity n*gger who dares challenge his white priviledge, as he sics Ms. Spunky McBeauty-Queen on him like some racist Alabama cop in a black & white newsreel from 1965 would sic a German Shephard on a black man who didn't know his place, but this time with lipstick. Sarah Palin is a racist. And the crowds who attend her speeches are, too.

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Because McCain was never radical enough for the fruitloops who run the GOP, he has been kept away from the heavy machinery. Only now, after the entire Rethugli-goon ascendancy of the last 30 years has been revealed to be the massive power and money grab that it was way back when Nixon Went A-Courtin' the racists in Old Dixieland, when the press let Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun's senile brain just make shit up and they smiled and called it cute, when all our Defenders of the First Amendment marched lockstep into the panty-sniffing abyss to tsk-tsk about dalliances as the cackling wingnut gremlins of the rightwing impeached a lawfully elected and popular president of the opposing party just for spite and then pivoted 180º to poo-poo the so-called howling moonbat liberals and other assorted Dirty Fucking Hippies who didn't think that maybe launcing headlong into a land war in the Heart of Arabia for the sake of cheap oil - while lead by a shifltless moron the shitkickers in fly-over country wanted to have a beer with - was necessarily the wisest and (as that shiftless moron's corrupt daddy would sputter) "prudent" action to take in the wake of an attack by men who had arisen from the educated middle class of a different country who was ostensibly one of our allies and whose iron-fisted ruling family is a well-known and well-documented friend to the entire clan of that aforementioned shiftless moron who would lead that kamikaze charge.

Only now, after Junior has wrecked the whole machine, run it aground, burned up the pistons and ripped out the radio (in case he can hock it on his way back to Crawford), have they let McSnarl have the keys.

Do what you can with it, Grumpy. Vroom, vroom.

Coming up for air...

So much has happened. Sorry for the long, looooong pause between posts. Work has started to overwhelm my schedule. No relief in sight, at least for another month+, but I wanted to take the time to make the following observations:

Regarding New Orleans and Hurricane Gustav:

New Orleans is in a geological bowl. Recall that after Karina the water needed to be pumped out because it will never, ever drain on its own. New Orleans is several feet below sea level and that will never get any better since it doesn't rest on "land" as we in the rest of the country understand it. The whole city essentially sits on water-saturated river mud of varying densities and a building will slowly sink under its own weight on that kind of surface, so it only gets worse over time.

Making things worse still is that the Gulf of Mexico is also a gigantic geologic bowl into which the Mississippi River has been pouring sediment for millions of years and thus is itself sinking into the Earth's crust, pulling down the edges of the Gulf with it. Texas has slip faults as far inland as Austin as a result. So the bedrock on which the mud NOLA is sinking into is also itself sinking.

And, third, the Army Corps of Engineers has, since WW2, diked and dammed and leveed the shit out of the river to control flooding, which has had two major negative results: 1.) the protective fresh-water swamps around the city, which soak up storm energy and act as a natural buffer between the salt-water Gulf and the fresh-water inland lakes and streams, are not being replenished with the silt from the Mississippi's once annual floods and thus are eroding at an ever accelerating rate as salt-water from the Gulf kills the fresh-water ecology that maintains the swamp and 2.) the River is dumping silt and sediment farther out into the Gulf than it has ever in geologic history which means it is not replenishing the deep-sea mud "shelf" that shores up the Louisiana coast-line, which also accelerates the erosion process.

As bad as this scenario seems, all of the above assumes everything will simply continue as it always has. If you also factor in Global Climate Change and the accompanying rise in sea level plus the increasing intensity of storms as a result of a warmer ocean, New Orleans doesn't have a prayer. Katrina wasn't The Big One. Katrina was the shot across the bow. It is not a matter of if New Orleans will ever get a direct hit from a Category 5, it is simply a matter of when.

Sadly, I think this jewel of our civic firmament should be abandoned. It was always more of a frontier outpost akin to something on the banks of the Congo or the Amazon than to a proper city anyway - a commercial enterprise that once served a specific economic purpose and now survives simply because it has survived up to now.

Regarding McCain, Gustav & Palin:

I think, as much as it pains me to say it, that McCain and the Rethuglicans are in the right to modify their convention plans. Their reasons for doing it, however, are suspect and deplorable. One, they are doing to it neutralize the baggage the entire GOP establishment carries from the aftermath of Katrina - no "Heckuva job, Brownie" moments this time around. Two, we all know that W will once again allow McSame to step in, act all bossy (like he did a few weeks ago during the Russia/Georgia dust-up) and more or less appear to rubes and nitwits who constitute the bulk of the GOP voting bloc to already be running things as part of that appear-to-be-winning-by-acting-like-a-winner strategy. Also, this is akin in their minds to the idea from any dictatorship (and we know W and the Rethugli-goons do love them some dictatorishness) where the party and the government are seperate, but nevertheless function as one. Think of the Communists in Soviet Russia or the Nazis in WW2 Germany. The government in both cases (and anywhere a country suffers under one-party rule) was kept separate from the party for appearances sake, but was still completely subservient to the dictates of the party.

We're not fully a dictatorship yet in this country, but the police state tactics currently underway in Minnesota (h/t Mr. the Broadway Carl) are in keeping with our slide into fascism. I was in NYC in 2004 for the GOP convention and I remember how much the NYPD, already something of a violent occupying force in this city on a good day, turned into full-riot-gear and machine-guns-and-dogs enforcement mode. This devolution will only accelerate as the actual mechanisms of government and law enforcement are increasingly populated by like-minded people who gleefully and proudly cleave ever tighter to an ever more authoritarian political party. The US Attorney scandal is part of this same seizing of the reigns of power, a politicization of the actual structures of law-enforcement, wherein political opponents are jailed simply for dissent in the name of law & order (Siegelman anyone?), just like a third-world banana republic (which I think they want to turn this country into anyway). This is the country we've become thanks to the thugs, goons, know-nothings and nitwits who constitute America's modern Republican Party

We should henceforce call them Banana Republicans.

In that way, McCain isn't so much a "maverick" really. On the contrary, he's a natural to now take the helm at the GOP. The GOP has been on a relentless march to authoritarian power since the racist Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic party for friendlier territory in Nixonland. One of the weapons in their arsenal during this march has been our collective national memory of the Vietnam War, which they have labored hard to re-shape in the intervening decades, building up a Dolchstoßlegende mythology around it - we could have won, "if only...".

Finally, after all this time, they get a Vietnam vet at the head of their ticket. Not only that, but in fact they get one of the ones who actually believes we could have won that immoral imperial occupation were it not for all the pointy-headed liberals and bleeding-heart war doves and dirty fucking hippies and Jane Fonda, just as the polarizing power of "the Vietnam experience" - when used as a red, white & blue code word to condemn all the purported excesses of the 1960's in the cultural battles of the last four decades - has finally started to fade. Sad, really, and sad that Vietnam vets are getting too old to even seek the job anymore. Just got one in under the wire, I suppose.

Whatever.

Vietnam has been the GOP's cudgel to beat the Democrats into meek submission for 40 fucking years. In so doing, they have successfully shifted the center of gravity in American politics oh-so-slowly to the right, ever more militaristic, authoritarian and plutocratic, to the point that even though our military budget is larger than all the other nations on the planet combined, nobody deemed "serious" in either party would even consider raising the slightest objection to that kind of spending on the machinery of death - if only on fiscal grounds, much less moral. The Dems have let it happen, sure, but the cultural turmoil of the 1960's that so upset the Establishment and the good (white) people of Main Street America and sent the whole herd flailing and fainting into the greasy hands of Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun in the 1980's simply don't matter anymore. The Boomers are dying off and the college campus battles they carried from their youth all the way into retirement are finally dying off with them. It is a new century and the GOP's bullying and beating of anyone to the left of Pinochet stops right here, right now, laid at Johm McSame's mangled feet with a toe-tag marked "I was a POW."

If anyone had any doubt about this dawning of a new age, Obama's speech last week should have sufficed to awaken them. More on that in a moment.

In the meantime, I will make the following prediction: Sarah Palin will drop out before the election. She will get him through the convention, shore up his Dominionist credentials with the drooling Jesus freaks, score him a few free points with the PUMA's on the other side of the aisle, then she will cite family concerns, drop out and go away. The Man Called Petraeus will retire from the Army and join the ticket with McCain sometime in early October. That will be the October Surprise, 2008-style.

Regarding The Speech, Barack Obama and What It All Means:

What can I say that hasn't already been said? Electric. Intergalactic. Dazzling. Wish I'd been there.

It is the most amazing political speech I have ever seen and will likely ever see, even if I live to be 103 (a lady in my building died this weekend at the age of 103, so that number sorta jumped out at me). The tone of the speech generally conveyed the idea that this Democrat is not going to take it from those guys anymore.

I loved it.

I dearly wish he could become our next president, but I don't think the plutocrats will let him have it. America has a way of robbing us of those who really give us sincere hope and no one has lifted our hopes like this since the men cut down by assassin's bullets during those hated 1960's. Remember, Stalin once said that it is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes. This one will be "close" in "key" districts in "key" states, but will ultimately, somehow, magically break for McCain. If it starts to look like Florida 2000 again, Obama will be persuaded (like I'm certain Kerry was in 2004) to bow out gracefully or else. Obama seems tough enough to test the "or else" which I fear will not be pretty.

I hope I'm wrong, but eight years of this criminal enterprise known as the "Bush Administration" has kept a lid on so many putrid kettles of K-Street fish that a government run by an opposition party intent on shining a light on every cockroach in Washington can simply never be allowed to happen. Ever. Too much money at stake, to say nothing of jail time.

But even if all that doesn't happen and the McCain/Petraeus ticket is somehow allowed to lose, the Cheney Administration will likely launch a war with Iran sometime in December or early January, just to make sure that either the Obama Administration is hamstrung by a national emergency from its first day in office or to construct a pretext for suspending the results of the election until the emergency has passed - sort of like those guys in Gitmo held until the war is over, except that we've declared war on an idea "terrorism" and not a state or government who can surrender, ergo: endless war. Sorry, Abdulluh.

Hell, even if they do manage to steal it for McCain/Petraeus, Cheney will still probably launch a war with Iran to keep McCain toeing the party line (for there is nothing like a fresh, shiny new war to keep the press jingoistic and the public stoked, dude), McCain will cite age-related health reasons early in 2009 and resign and we'll have General Petraeus as our Commander in Chief before next summer. I expect him to deliver his first address as C-in-C in full general's regalia so that we can finally end this charade that we are a free country and the Pentagon can assume it's regularly scheduled take-over of our government.

Regarding that Big Picture:

Which brings me to where I think we are now. We are at the end of history, or at least so many over-lapping sine waves of historical ontology all converging down into one huge conclusion that it will seem like the end of history. The battles of the 1960's are ended, yes, and the wave that crested with the Reagan Revolution and broke on shore with the Bush EPIC FAIL has mercifully receded to reveal the form of that skinny kid from Chicago. But what kind of country is Obama going to lead (if he is allowed to take office)? A country so exhausted that it cannot revive one of it's major cities nor extricate itself from an intractable resource war half a planet away. We have the smell of death about us, like the British did when the Zulus kicked their ass 100 years ago. When Roosevelt took office, despite the Depression, he took the reigns of a nation still rich in natural and intellectual and human and economic resources that only needed to be nudged into motion again. Granted, it took a war (and the widespread implementation of an oil-based economy) to fully revive the American economy, but there was something there to be revived. What about now? We are saturated with pollution and exhausted of spirit with crashing natural stocks of fish and game, forests that are dying of thirst and burning up due to climate change, a crumbling national infrastructure starved of funding for decades due to an ideological fetish for privatization. Where would a President Obama find the means to rejuvenate a country so bereft of resources on a dying planet?

But yet another subsiding wave of history is what driftglass recently called "The Negrological Constant." Our struggle with racism is far from over - to wit, a clearly qualified, energetic, charismatic young man like Barack Obama is nevertheless neck-in-neck with a gaffe-prone fuddy-duddy who can't even keep his own opinions straight from week to week, much less actual facts and still the pundits are positively mystified that Obama can't close the deal. Whatever could it be, I wonder? What could possibly make some people think twice about voting for someone like Barack Hussein Obama? You know, someone smart and funny and, uh, smart? What is it? What IS it? I dunno. It's a mystery. Must be Obama's fault, somehow. I'm just not sure what it could be.

At any rate, the fact that a black man has finally risen to the candidacy of a major political party says a lot about the continuing power of the racist meme as it wends its way through our collective national consciousness because it took so damned long to actually happen. Were it not for the fucking Electoral College, lo these many years, I don't think politicians would have been as able or as prone or as eager to play the race card to appeal to the rubes and crackers and redneck fuckwits in the third-world shit-hole known as the American South and we could have possibly seen a black man at the top of a ticket sooner than a century and a half after we fought a war to free his ancestors.

Possibly. But maybe not.

We have been amid the last gasp of that way of politicking since the Dixiecrats stampeded to the Party of Nixon. Viewed as the lancing of a boil, we have lived the expulsion of the puss and disease in the form of forty years of coded hate speech that has kept a dying GOP in power as they collapse into a minor regional party centered in the South. Well, you gotta dance with them's what brung ya. The fact that the best the GOP could do this time is Candidate John McCain (and the twittering chorus of disbelief in the ranks at his ascension) says a lot about how shallow their bench is these days. As a party, they represent the end of an era of history that began when the Virginia colonists traded with a Dutch ship for the first African slaves in America in 1619 and ought to have ended when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but in fact can only be said to have ended once "right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." A President Obama could one day be seen as just such an historical marker.

Another wave of history is the End of Oil, which drove America's post-WW2 prosperity. But I have argued before that the End of Oil also represents the end of the western dominance of the world. That era began when the first explorers left Europe 600 years ago and began to colonize the world, and specifically the New World, in the name of Christian civilization - which was always and without exception merely an ecumenical pretext for robbing the locals blind. European prosperity - the glamour of Paris, the industrial might of Britain, the soaring beauty of Spanish cathedrals, the refined culture of the Dutch and the Italians and the Germans, et al, was financed by and can be traced directly to the literally tens of thousands of shiploads of gold stolen from the Americas. All those sailing ships shooting at each other in the pirate movies the kids are all watching these days were fighting over stolen gold. America paid for the Europe we so admire today.

So much of our history is embroiled in that Grand Crime. America itself was founded in the genocidal middle of it, which I think blinds us to our place in it. We began as a commercial proposition - the fancy words and high-falutin' philosophy got added later. From the legacy of slavery to rampant corporatism to the echoes of Manifest Destiny we hear in the rhetoric of America as Global Policeman, we are the product of our national DNA. We were born in a whirl of racism, violence and abject greed (with a facade of brittle piety to make it all the more cloying), have never really stopped, and every time we've tried to be honest and come to grips with our origins in some kind of nationwide reckoning, we've usually erupted into a violent cultural spasm that has on more than one occasion devolved into an open shooting war.

In his own way, for better or worse, Obama represents the end of that longer era as well, at least some manner of sea change. Whatever's on the other side, I hope we can get there in one piece.

I'll be on again, off again for a while but I hope I've given you something to talk and think about. Please feel free to comment. In fact, I'm not proud - I'm begging you to comment.

Unicorn Farts

izzy o'rainey asks a very good question in response to my post about walkable cities:

What's your timetable for the Star Trek world where I don't have to work for money and can live in a dense-but-totally-biodegradable neighborhood with recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts?

(keep in mind that part of my job is pulling your leg)

Well, it seems to me when I think about Star Trek that whatever else may be said about the lack of conflict in the storylines or the relative androgyny of their creepily-sterile world, my biggest complaint would be that their world seems to take a staggeringly vast amount of energy to run. Which is why the geeks who dream up the technology for the show had to invent a virtually bottomless type of fantasy energy called dilithium to run all the warp drives and "Shh" doors and tri-corders and such. That world isn't running on black gold, that's for sure. And soon enough, neither will ours.

As I look into my crystal ball, I see oil only getting more extravagantly expensive in the coming years. I don't just mean gasoline for our cars. Expensive, depleting oil will drive up the cost of everything since petroleum is used to make, process, transport, heat, cool and otherwise store pretty much everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell throughout our days. Since so much of our national infrastructure is invested in an oil-based economy, from shopping malls to corner gas stations, our cities will shrink by necessity and what remains on the perimeter (the current-day suburbs) will remain a fairly rich source of partially processed materials to be scavenged for the retooling of the older center cities for decades into the next phase of human history - the post-petroleum future we once thought would look like 2001 (until we actually got there, when it started to look more like Road Warrior).

My guess, and this is only a guess, is that in ten years the scope of the catastrophe will be obvious to even the most obtuse, pro-Reagan, Limbaugh-loving nitwit - who will naturally blame it on Al Gore and the dirty fucking hippies anyway and who will also naturally deny ever having thought Global Warming and Peak Oil were hoaxes - but none of that will change the fact that only the wealthy will continue to own and operate motor vehicles and the very wealthy will actually be able to fly anywhere.

The very wealthy, that is, and the United States military - who will likely use up the very last drops of oil on earth to drive a tank into a ramshackle village somewhere in Iowa to put down a rebellion on behalf of the wealthy overlords who will be nervous about the threat of food riots by the serfs on their land. Although I think that scenario is several decades away, we are nevetheless in Iraq to secure an oil supply for the Pentagon, not for the average American car owner. Fighter jets gotta fly and tanks gotta make tracks and neither can run on re-used french fry grease or unicorn farts.

So, what I was saying in my earlier post was, more or less, that we will have these changes forced upon us. Some places are better positioned to weather the changes than others. If a place was fairly prosperous in the pre-car era, chances are that it may have enough legacy architecture and infrastructure to re-tool and adapt. 19th-Century cities have "good bones" upon which oil-free prosperity can be built. If not, then not. Phoenix, for example, will be unlivable in the post-petroleum future because they can't grow enough food locally to feed themselves, nor have enough electricity without oil to run the air-conditioners and water-pumps needed to keep the place habitable.

In other words, I don't think we're going to find a better, more eco-friendly way to run the world we live in now. Why would we want to? This world needs to change and we had a chance to get ahead of the curve three decades ago, but it was more profitable for the plutocratic class to double-down and stick future generations with the bill and it was more fun for the trogs to make fun of Jimmy Carter to the sound of a revving big-bore engine than to, you know, pitch-in and make a better future by conserving. Conserving is for suckers, nerds and wimps and who wants to be one of those?

Maybe if we'd invested in research when we had a chance, by now we'd have those recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts.

Or maybe dilithium.

GOPieta

Infrequent blogging recently (very busy now with more to come) but this tidbit from driftglass analyzing the collective Village freak-out over Wes Clarke's perfectly reasonable comment on Johm McSame's willingness to use his ex-POW-status as mighty shield against any manner of questioning of any kind ever for all time until the end of history (authoritarianism is just such a knee-jerk impulse for all those droves of Rethugli-bot sheep that McBush is a natural - why do they hate him so?) was too intergalacticly awesome to go un-noted:

For seven years, the cowards, crazies and chickenhawks of the GOP have carried out their crimes and betrayals by scampering behind a series of blinds. Like insurgents caching weapons in a mosque and then crying “Infidel!” at anyone who tries to drive them out, the Republican Party set up their filthy, fascist sniper’s nest inside the death and terror of 9/11 and used the shadow of that tragedy to shield their treason from public view.

[...]

...at long last, they are starting to find Senator McSame attractive: the thrilling prospect that his years as a POW will offer the GOP one, last safe-house into which they can crawl and from which they can operate their despicable enterprises in relative safety for a just little bit longer.

Writing that sharp and darkly poetic makes me wonder why I even bother blogging when just reading driftglass first will save a click or two. Please, just go read the whole thing.

Let this picture inspire you:

Without Historical Precedent

I, like anyone over the age of 30, have an indelible memory of the Damocles Sword of nuclear annihilation. For all of us in this age group, the end of the world was always nigh. While global thermo-nuclear war was always a very real possibility, in part, it was also just so much hype generated by Saint Ronnie and his national security minions to keep the rubes pissed at all the squishy liberals who thought perhaps that even pretending to be a smidge too eager to blow up the rest of the world just to spook the Ruskies into capitulation was a tad extreme. For Saint Ronnie and his Coterie of Sycophants, those pissed off rubes translated into votes for his toadies, which in turn poured dollars into the pockets of his military/industrial-complex bosom buddies. It was a win-win, really, if you were above a certain tax bracket.

Of course, post hoc/ergo propter hoc, the cackling gremlins who cooked up this fiction about Mighty Ronnie standing astride the world ultimately came to believe their own hype when the USSR folded just a few years after Saint Ronnie left his marbles on the floor of the Oval Office. That delusional and deliberately ignorant reading of history took on epic and mythical power during the 1990's, becoming a kind of manufactured conventional wisdom, a widely believed and accepted general principle that was part of the background information for any discussion of foreign policy, presidential politics or recent world history.

As this deliberate fiction curdled into policy prescriptions written by quacks at heavily-subsidized Reich-wing think-tanks during the reign of the impediment to American Global Hegemony (and adulterer) Bill Clinton, the older neo-cons forgot to impart to the new generation that it had all been a con game to bamboozle the shit-kickers, but that American power did have limits, Realpolitik was still in effect and we had deep vulnerabilities best kept hidden. We were not invincible, nor had we ever really been, but the bedtime story of The Triumph of the Virtuous and Godly United States Over The Wicked and Godless Soviet Union metasasized into an kind of instructive origin tale.

These comforting illusions were pierced rather spectacularly on September 11th, 2001, but unfortunately the people in charge of formulating a response had been politically weened on the poison milk of American Imperium. For them, We The (Chosen) People of the US of Fuckin' A could pretty much do whatever the fuck we wanted, wherever the fuck we wanted, to whomever we fucking wanted, for as long as we fucking wanted and no one in the world could do fuck all about it.

This ugly, 11-year, chest-thumping power trip culminated in the Invade Iraq chorus heard relentlessly following 9/11, 'cuz Saint Ronnie took down the whole goddam Soviet Union by himself, dude! Boo-YA!

All of which was only the military aspect of a pervasive disinformation campaign.

I bring up this little history lesson for two reasons. First, something in me, perhaps at a molecular level, is just used to idea of living with the dread of imminent obliteration, it is programmed into me at a machine code level. I remember duck-and-cover drills. That feeling subsided for a while during the Clinton years, of course, but being in New York City on 9/11 pushed that reset button hard, and now that familiar old dread lies coiled in its usual place down there in my gut (this time with a good reason - the world really, truly, actually is coming to an end). And second, because I believe that once again the rubes and shit-kickers are about to have their illusions pierced or, more correctly, are having their illusions pierced now. Perhaps even shattered. Utterly. And the people responsible for the informational snow job will only suffer in proportion with the rest of us, though that suffering could become - in a phrase - without historical precedent.

I say without historical precedent because today I read the following:

A report from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia makes clear that, despite recent heavy rains in the eastern Australian breadbasket, years of above normal rainfall would be needed "to remove the very long-term [water] deficits" in the region. The report then adds this ominous note: "The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to 10 years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change."

Think a bit about that phrase -- "without historical precedent." Except when it comes to technological invention, it hasn't been much part of our lives these last many centuries. Without historical precedent. Brace yourselves, it's about to become a commonplace in our vocabulary. The southeastern United States, for instance, was, for the last couple of years, locked in a drought -- which is finally easing -- "without historical precedent." In other words, there was nothing (repeat, nothing) in the historical record that provided a guide to what might happen next.

Now, it's true that the industrial revolution, which led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at historically unprecedented rates, was also, in a sense, "without historical precedent"; but most natural events -- unlike, say, the present staggering ice melt in the Arctic -- have been precedented (if I can manufacture such a word). They have been part of the historical record. That era -- the era of history -- is now, however, threatening to give way to a period capable of outrunning history itself, of outrunning us.

Of outrunning us. What an ominous phrase, fraught with images of Frankenstein's monster and Mickey Mouse in the wizard's workshop. Outrunning. Us.

Gulp.

You see, people who actually know things have known that our patterns of consumption and land use are not sustainable, not by a long shot, and versed as they are in disciplines like math and statistics, they could plug the numbers into a chart or graph and see that something had to give. Since the 1970's. In other words, people who ought to know have known our petroleum-driven world was a problem for a long time, but in the decaying citadel of what has only recently come to be called "Red State America," these people have been gleefully dismissed as just a bunch of elites, prissy egg-heads and sissi-fied "One World" liberals who want take away all the things that make America great: Big Cars, open roads and vast, sprawling shopping malls. Oh, and guns, but that's just a piece of ancillary paranoia.

It has sure been fun for these people, these last 30 years or so, flipping the proverbial bird to all those (phantom) dirty fucking hippies who wanted to make all of us live on communal farms, eat granola and ride bicycles everywhere. Yeesh. All those Chicken Littles who tried to put limits on things because just because the oil might run out. Or the atmosphere might get polluted. Don't restrict me, dude. Screw you and your spotted owls. Carter was wrong. There is no energy crisis, you wimp. Saint Ronnie said it was morning again in America, that we're free to consume and drive and eat red meat and he vanquished those godless commies so he must be right, right?

Not right.

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

No, not right at all. Wendell Barry, gentleman farmer and famous Kentucky poet, in "Faustian Economics" in this month's Harper's (behind a subscription firewall - sorry) wrote of those hateful, hateful limits:

"Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine.

[...]

“. . . It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served.”

Different ways of saying the same thing, really. America is not exempt from the same historical pitfalls that befell other nations, even if Jesus is a Republican. Libraries full of doctoral theses have been written about the reasons, but for me they boil down an unfortunate historical convergence, some 200 years ago, of young-nation exuberance coinciding with and ultimately driving a mechanization of industry that fed on the vast and seemingly inexhaustible resources of a virtually untapped and - as luck, divine providence and reckless genocide would have it - largely uninhabited continent, all of which ultimately led to a perception of limitlessness.

Go west, young man, indeed.

It is this perception, this belief, this Religion that infuses our thinking of limitlessness more than any other single thing from all sides with a faith that scientists will "come up with something." Afterall, they always have, right? It is commonplace these days, and I hear it even from the smartest people who should fucking know better, that the egg-heads will invent something because the Magic Hand of the Free Market will force a solution, presumably in the form of some Michael Jordon-style fade-away 3-pointer jumpshot at the buzzer, but by some nerd in a labcoat having an Edison-style "Eureka!" moment. Then once again American ingenuity will save the day and we can keep on driving our SUV's to Wal-Mart for more cheap crap from China. Boo-YA!

To which I reply: to what end? Are we to keep consuming, chewing up farmland and paving over forests and spewing CO2 and dumping plastic crap in the oceans and blighting entire ecosystems just so we can have ever bigger vehicles and bigger yards and use up even more of the planet's resources? And on and on until the planet becomes a used-up husk? A smoldering cinder drifting inert through space? Where is that logical limit? A certain Englishman thought he found it 210 years ago:

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."

Mechanization, people have argued in the intervening decades, and petroleum-based technologies have rendered Malthus' calculations moot. I think we can all agree that now that assumption has been a mistake. Everything comes with a price and for decades the darker-skinned peoples of the southern hemisphere have been paying it for the prosperity of the lighter-skinned peoples of the northern hemisphere. For them, the 20th Century has been one long lesson in the limits of modern technology, as lesson we are only now beginning to learn in the north. We are learning the hard way that we cannot consume the world and discard it with impunity forever. Everything has limits. Especially this planet, the only one we'll ever get.

I find great irony in a global object lesson in "no free lunch" on a large scale. Our domestic proponents of that creed cling to it in a socio-economic defense of the systemic inequalities of the American Way Of Life, with no understanding that the very way of life they "defend" is most responsible for the mess we're in now precisely because a piper must always be paid somewhere, sometime. It is all about limits.

$4/gal. gasoline will take the optimistic wind out of anyone's sails. Get ready for $8. And $10. What little of that shiny American optimism which some may desperately cling to now will likely evaporate completely in the face of such prices.

From the time of another economic depression (eventually to be less Great than the one we're staring down the barrel of right now), I am reminded of this aching lament from F. Scott Fitzgerald about New York City upon his first ascent into the Empire State Building:

Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

Which echoes for me the sentiments behind the image that gave birth to the modern environmental movement, an image from a trip to the top of the world which, like Fitzgerald's experience writ large, reminded the whole of humanity for one all-too-brief moment that this vessel, this fragile blue thing, is the only planet we'll ever have, Spaceship Earth:

Al Gore is Fat

I was working on a big, long post about Peak Oil and the end of modern civilization when I came across this post from Tim F. over at Balloon Juice. In it, he sorta nails down the growing sense of unease I feel about where we are as a nation, vis a vis the (completely foreseeable & utterly predictable) energy crisis:

I don’t feel particularly smug when I stand next to my Honda Fit watching some SUV owner near tears as she puts more than $100 of gas into a car she doesn’t need. It just feels sad to think about how long it’s been since it became obvious to anyone who cared to look that we won’t be able to scare off problems like fuel scarcity and climate change by closing our eyes and wishing.

That lead time was an opportunity to make changes. Some would have been painful and some merely sensible, but it would prevent huge numbers of honest Americans get caught with their pants down. Instead we blew it out the tailpipe of cars that average 15 MPG. Now, instead of a planned transition, we get to see what happens when stubborn denial meets inescapable change. It’s simply unsustainable to live in suburban car country with a negative equity on the house, $6-7 gas (wait until you see what that does to property values in outlying suburbs) and expensive SUVs that nobody wants. The saddest thing for me was that most who will get fucked the worst had no idea this was coming. There was that one guy who warned us, but he had a snooty laugh.

I hope those guys with W stickers on the Hummer parked in front of mcmansions that the bank owns enjoyed their beer

But Al Gore is a nerd who sighs too much and Jimmy Carter looks like a wimp in his sweater.

Go Ronbo!!!

More on this topic to come.