Katrina on Steroids

Last night I went to Powells to hear James Howard Kunstler read from his newest book, World Made by Hand. Basically I wanted to go because I’d never met him in person and I’d just seen his film, End of Suburbia at the Baghdad Theater this weekend. He used to write for Rolling Stone, and now has written numerous books, most notably The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. His blog, Clusterfuck Nation, is a must-read.

Why am I writing about James Kunstler here today? Because it seems to me that most middle-class Americans (the only class that’s arguably in a position to rise up and change the status quo) are utterly docile and locked into the only system of daily life they’ve always known: a life of incessant driving and pampered convenience. With upcoming elections, with climate change biting the world’s ass, with the global economic meltdown, with eternal resource wars looming on the near horizon, with oil (currently) at nearly $120 per barrel (over $4 per gallon) and mounting food shortages spiking in many countries where the threat of bloody revolutions and mass starvation are all too real, we are all facing an unprecedented disaster on a global scale.

In America, people have even begun to torch their houses as they go into foreclosure, and wide-spread housing blight has begun to infect suburban areas all over the nation–people fleeing their mortgages and vandals ripping copper and other valuable metals and materials from the houses for money. Median home prices are now a little over $200,000, an 8 percent drop over last year. All of this is a huge warning sign for cities nationwide.

Some analysts insist the astronomical hike in oil prices is about the euphoria in commodities or the fall of the dollar, or the bombing of pipelines or whatever. But what they refuse say is that what we’re seeing is the end of cheap, sweet, crude oil. Stations are going down while oil corporations are making billions in profits. Oil companies have known this end was coming since the 1950s and 1960s. So they’ve kept everything hush-hush so they could swoop in for the kill and vacuum as much profit as they can while they still can. And now the remaining oil fields are all on the edge of non-productivity. There are no new oil discoveries.

What Kunstler has shown in The End of Suburbia and The Long Emergency is that much of the trouble we’re facing in our daily lives has come about because of the explosion of cheap oil back in the 1940s and 1950s, where Americans thought “the good life” would never end. They increasingly abandoned the cities to go live a more “rural” life in the suburbs. And the only way they could do this was because of the glut of cheap oil, which vomited hundreds of millions of tract houses/developed real estate, vehicles, miles of interstate highways, roads, and shopping malls over our farmlands and open space. This lifestyle has been, for the past 50 years, car dependent.

It never ceases to amaze me when I listen to people go on about how such growth is going to continue and threaten to choke out the last breath of life on the planet. What these people don’t understand is that this lifestyle is all going to come to an end. And it’s going to go out with a whimper, not a bang.

Here are some of Kunstler’s comments last night, paraphrased of course, and a little haphazard because I took them from scribbles in my notebook, which address this conundrum.

It’s insane to think we can continue to be car dependent. We have to be willing to make different arrangements regardless of the combinations and delusions we’re accustomed to. It means no more Wal-Marts, no more interstate highways. It means you can forget the “alternative solutions” such as hydrogen, nuclear power, or dark matter. There is this techno-grandiosity–the infatuation with technology and the notion that technology will somehow fix technology. This just ain’t gonna to happen, Johnson. We’re staring down the barrel of global disaster that no rescue remedy can fix. Whatever you do, don’t get behind new technology, for to do so is only to prolong the disaster.

Suburbia is the greatest mis-allocation of resources in the history of the planet. It will not last, even though 50 percent of Americans live there. Those who dream of a “green” world want solutions. But there are no solutions. There are only intelligent responses to this disaster.

Look around. You know it like you know your name. This complex system of daily life is cracking up. Which is actually interesting to everyone except those who want to preserve it. The prospects for creating wealth are going to change. There will be no more industrial growth precisely for the reason that financial instruments for financial growth are, like so many other institutions, losing their legitimacy. These instruments are created by swindle and don’t produce value, rather $2-3 trillion generated by these instruments has gone into a black hole, never to be seen again. Vanished.

The amount of fear brought on by these financial institutions has generated insane behavior. The only intelligent response to this insanity is downscaling and localizing our lives. The problem is that inertia in place is tremendous and is a huge drag on our ability to make intelligent responses. What are we to do if our shipment of cheese doodles doesn’t come in?

The airline industry is also falling to pieces. The problem is that there is no rail service. Our airports are clogged with planes headed for destinations five hundred miles or so away. This is the ideal distance for railway trips, now that gasoline is prohibitively expensive. But no one is talking about it, least of all the idiot politicians who are vying to “lead” the country.

Americans are now exceedingly demoralized. We have no idea how to re-organize our local economies and interdependency. Everyone is sleepwalking off the edge. Forget upscale bicycles. The raw materials for their upkeep (rubber and alloys) will be entirely too expensive in the near future.

History isn’t symmetrical. Things fall apart messily. In addition, “functioning” adults are behaving like children. “When you wish upon a star” is Disney’s anthem to a generation of “adults” in America. And advertising has led us to believe we can get something for nothing. It’s become an ironclad religion now: Wishing for what you want will get you something for nothing. This may be true for a child, but it has no place in an adult’s reality. In fact, this mindset is exceedingly dangerous. But a majority of Americans have been infected by it.

We can no longer trust government to get things done for us. That’s abundantly clear. So stop wringing your hands about Bush and his cronies, about the electoral process and who’s going to be elected, because whomever ends up elected, fraudulently or not, cannot and will not begin to address the problems we the people face. We know this because of their campaign rhetoric. Even if they did offer “solutions,” they are lying. Solutions are pure fantasy.

The bottom line is that this situation of global disaster isn’t for crybabies. It’s for ordinary people willing to roll up their sleeves and make intelligent responses without any help from government agencies. Think Katrina on steroids.