The news from nowhere-ville
June 4th, 2008I thought that I should elaborate on my earlier somewhat cryptic reference to Clayton (Contra Costa County, California) as “spooky.”
For the last couple of years I’ve been paralyzed, in a state of shock at the sheer hubris, the awful ugliness of post 9-11 America. The country has suffered a paroxysm of jingoistic fervor and of vile nationalism that has served to obfuscate not only why the US was attacked, but the road out of its dilemma.
It is as if the vibrant dissent to the world’s biggest military apparatus prior to 9-11 was for naught. Forgotten was the ugly history of US foreign intervention, that Hussein of Iraq was merely one of an unseemly coterie that did the bidding of US corporate interests under veil of fighting “communists.” Even now, as evidenced by presidential candidate Barack Obama’s repudiation of his minister’s statement that the World Trade Center attacks were “chickens coming home to roost” (I prefer Chalmers Johnson’s term: blowback), the US polity has yet to fully come to grips with its culpability for 9-11. 9-11 was a fundamentally revolutionary act in nature, it was a repudiation of capitalism (that is, capitalism in its 20th century form: corporate-state militarism) and its adjunct, US military dominion. The US military had been cast by its supporters as the noble bulwark against “communism”, and though now the enemy has been magically transformed into “terrorism”, the true goal of such overwhelming military force remains global domination of resources. To wit: Iraq.
So I can’t help but pass through the seemingly bucolic landscapes of places like Clayton and not feel both the military cost of making them possible and the improbability of their future viability. And having some affection for the US Constitution of 1787, and for democracy in general, landscapes filled with security infrastructure, nationalistic icons, giant automobiles, and … well, dare I say? … copiously irrigated lawns … make me, to put it mildly, uneasy. (By using the phrase “security infrastructure”, I intend to refer broadly to the “gated community”, inward looking, profoundly anti-civic nature of Clayton and most suburban landscapes)
James Howard Kunstler is typically evocative of the American early 21st century zeitgeist in his recent description, which I’ll take the liberty of quoting at length:
Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.
We’re at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are paralyzed with fear about what’s next. This may actually be a deeper fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the world’s biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we didn’t have in 1933 was cash money.
The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital — though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared.
This is why I find places like Clayton to be spooky. The very placidness of this landscape belies the violence which created it. Clayton is near to an ideal, fictive American landscape in its cartoon-like lush irrigation set amidst the parched, golden hills of the Coast Range. Nevertheless, it is, to me, a gravely flawed landscape.
I cringe at having to attempt to explain any of this to people who hang American flags on their privacy fences, and who have filled their carports with giant, gaudy gas guzzlers; but most of all, who have chosen, as evidenced by the landscape they’ve created for themselves, at some level reject civic life.
July 27th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Dear craniata.net
You write:
“The US military … the true goal of such overwhelming military force remains global domination of resources.”
Okay. I accept your premise that the purpose of the US military is to assure US global domination of resources. But isn’t that a good thing for the citizens of the United States?
If not the US, who would you prefer to have “global domination of resources”? China? Russia? Iran?
Would you like to see the US denied access to oil and other vital resources?
What do you think would happen in this country if our access to foreign oil was eliminated? (Remember that T. Boone Pickens tells us that 70% of our oil supply comes from foreign sources).
And I guess I should ask, are you are a U.S. citizen? Or are you a foreigner? It is not clear from your posting.
FYI, I am a U.S. citizen who is glad that our supply of oil and other vital resources is not dominated by a hostile country. And I think that if our access to foreign oil was eliminated it would result in a catastrophic economic decline that would make the Great Depression look like boom-times. There could even be blood in the streets.
Enjoy the good times while you can!
Regards,
Guillermo
August 1st, 2008 at 4:41 am
Guillermo,
In the short term, one might suppose that perpetuating the “non-negotiable” American way of life (Dick Cheney’s words) would benefit Americans. If, however, thwarting the aspirations of 90% or more of the human race by wantonly devouring the world’s oil results in any more resentment than Americans have so far experienced, then it might not be so beneficial.
An aside: you’ve grouped those who would presumably “dominate” resources, should the US abdicate hegemony, in such a dichotomous fashion as to imply that such a formulation is the only way in which we might conceive of this situation; that is, it’s either “us” or “them.” I would submit that this is a narrow — even paranoid — way of viewing the world. Russia is a supplier of oil as well as a rival, China and the US are intimately entangled economically, people do not necessarily mirror their governments’ imperatives or views; the list of complicating entanglements is long. Nor is the world simply aligned with and against a single entity, national or otherwise. It is also clear that such an antagonistic approach to the world is no longer possible (or at least wise), for nuclear weapons have changed the great game irrevocably.
Yes, the US must reduce its oil imports dramatically, though there’s no need for this to happen voluntarily. The sad fact of excessive past consumption has ensured that depletion is upon us. Hopefully the US is up to the challenge.
I should also add that I think we should worry less about how we’ve arrived at this point; that there is a presentist cast to much discourse about US oil use, because from the perspective of 1900 or 1950 we simply didn’t have enough knowledge of either geology or economies to have known how rapidly we would move through the resource. Nevertheless, now we are at the brink of the peaking of oil production globally, and we do have a good idea of how much is left, so we need to begin to act accordingly.
Thanks kindly for your comment,
Robert