Peak Oil and Power Down

I’ve recently read Richard Heinberg’s books The Party’s Over and Power Down, which don’t pretend that a terminal energy crisis isn’t already upon us, and I’ve now moved on to the classic Small is Beautiful by EF Schumacher. Schumacher may be a bit of a rhetorical genius, plus he’s got a good bit of common sense and wisdom.

The reality of our situation, as I see it, is that we have been progressively and exponentially squandering–wasting!–the once-given geologic reserves of fossil fuels.  Not only is oil finite and destined to be exhausted by our ever-increasing energy demands; the economic precursors and descendents of that super-industrial fuel–coal and natural gas–are also finite. 

Renewable resources are certainly an option, but solar, wind, and tidal energy cannot begin to replace the vast energy glut we have been increasingly wallowing in during the period of industrial civilization.  Besides that, each of them–with the arguable exception of solar panels–comes with a rather heavy environmental price: farms of windmills pose the threat of slicing up mass numbers of birds, while both tidal and river dams threaten fish and other marine life.

Even if these negative environmental impacts were somehow mitigated or even completely done away with, indications are that we would need hundreds of thousands of square miles of wind and solar farms to create a workable amount of energy for civilization at its current scale–and even then, we would be operating at power levels much lower than we have become accustomed.

Nuclear power is just stupid, because at any level it creates radioactive waste that takes tens to hundreds of thousands of years to decay.  The costs of building nuclear power plants plus creating tombs in which to bury and monitor the waste are astronomical, from what I gather.

So to me it seems clear that we are all in for a rude awakening as we power down from our industrial binge.  What we need is a return to human-scale communities and technologies, and to work towards humanely decreasing population and getting right with the comparatively meager energy income we receive as a bounty from the sun. 

While turning off lights, minimizing computer and teevee usage, biking and walking are all noble steps that we can take as individuals, we need a concerted, concentrated effort from the highest levels of political organization to dismantle corporations and other large-scale energy consumers–which ironically means that we will have to ask governments to scale down their own bureaucratic bulks.  Finally, we should see the “War on Terror” for the corporate lie that it is, divest our resources from the military, and re-invest those resources (really, it’s all just debt anyway) into civil programs that will help grow local and regional economies in the best sense of that word–economies based on people, community agriculture, crafts, and necessary services–not the production and marketing of useless plastic crap. 

This is a radical prescription, and we need to seriously think about advocating and implementing strategies like these that people like Heinberg are suggesting, in the very near future.  Already we are in for a shocking, bumpy decline. The sooner we can get started in real, good work, the better off we will all be.

Peak Everything: It’s the End of the World As We Know It and I Feel Fine?

Psst.  Hey.  Didja know that oil, coal, and natural gas, three very key ingredients in Industrial Civilization and Life As We Know It, are–contrary to popular economic opinion–finite?  Which means that they will run out sooner or later?  Yup.  It’s true, sure as diabetic candy is sugar-free.  But wait, it gets better (if you like disturbing news) or worse (if you don’t): the end may be near–but not in quite the way of the Rapture and other apocalyptic fantasies of far-right Christian fundies.

Gasp!  What to do?  First, let’s look at the basic facts, y’all.  Oil, which Americans depend on to run their commutes to work and their drives to the grocery store and their jet skis and plane rides and lawnmowers and weedwackers and on and on, comes from oil reserves, deep pockets of sludge in the Earth that have been formed during large amounts of deep, geologic time.  This means that, while new oil may be forming right now, it’s gonna take at least a couple hundreds of thousands of years (low estimate) to hundreds of millions of years (high estimate) for it to be ready to be pulled out by industrial machinery and refined into petroleum products like gasoline, plastics, and cosmetics. 

According to many petroleum geologists and the school of peak oil thought, which has its origins in the work of M. King Hubbert during the mid-20th century, the discovery of oil fields in the world peaked in 1963 or 1964.¹  Discovery since then has been slowing and decreasing in magnitude.  The world has pretty much been exhaustively mapped in terms of oil fields.  Discovery is one important factor, but the consumer-end of peak oil comes with the peak of oil extraction.  Various predictions in the Hubbert school of thought place peak oil in the first decades of the 21st century.  Like the peak of discovery, the actual oil production peak will not be clearly evident until we have gotten over the hump, although current indications, including the skyrocketing price of gas at the pump and barrels of crude oil, are beginning to scream, “The peak is here!  The peak is here!”  Imagine a rollercoaster full of scared, anxious, and excited consumers poised at the top of a rickety decline, peering over the precipice and thinking how quick, disorienting, and abrupt the rush to the bottom will be.  That’s what people, if they have any sense, should be feeling about now–butterflies in the stomach, maybe about to lose the lunch, all of that.  Now instead, imagine that same rollercoaster full of people, but distracted by myspace, txt msgng, Desperate Housewives and American Idol, a very interesting and historic presidential election, the demonization of Arabs, the death of both George Carlin and Tim Russert, and the long-standing availability of just about any damn thing you can imagine.  That’s an accurate image of the citizenry of America poised at the peak of oil: obliviously suspended, tweaked on caffeine and gadgetry, and ridiculously unaware of how richly they have been living it up and how surprisingly little time is left for them to party like it’s 1984. 

 

Okay, Now that I’ve Crapped on Your Day-Trading Parade, What Next?

Relax a little bit.  Imagine a world where carbon emission standards have relaxed, not because Dubya has claimed his rightful place as the Great American Dictator, but because that amount of global and national policy-making is a thing of the past.  That may be the world in 2075.  Envision a cracked United States of America, splintered into regional enclaves like the Confederated Carolinas; the Banana and Pineapple Republic of Florida (with plans to invade Cuba, once the armored sailboats packed with catapults are up and running); the Apple Territories of Former Washington State; along with the Rainy, Drained Coffee Cup formerly known as Seattle; the Mormon Theocracy of Salt Lake; the Cannibalized Apple (formerly know as New York City); and the Fortified Authoritarian Stronghold of Presidential Power, District of Columbia.  

Given the weak state of mass transportation and the automobile-heavy infrastructure of the United States, such a future may not be as fantastical and absurd as it seems on this page.  Add to that the fact that the United States is now a net importer of food¹, and one may begin to see a grim, hungry picture of the possible decline of the American empire.

So in the mid-21st century, gasoline will be a luxury at 80.49⁹⁹ a gallon; coal mining will be a lucrative vocation and city centers will be choked with smog from the burning of that coal for electricity and heat; people will be abandoning cities for hard-scrabble prospecting on patches of land where they will grow potatoes and desperately pray for a small yield of coffee beans; squirrels will be endangered because of an insane surge of squirrel hunting, but no one will really know that they are endangered, because no one works in the animal rights, resource management, or environmental fields anymore because everyone is working time-and-a-half to keep their family and tribe fed.  Down the road from your trailer, the McKinney gang are burning cars for warmth. You take out your trash to the local dump, which is five hundred feet from your squeaky front door, and gets burned during the block party on every third Saturday of the month while people dance and bang on plastic trash cans, making a funky beat. Your ten-year-old son, who thankfully does not suffer from Polio, rejoices when the power comes on for a couple hours and he can play Super Mario Brothers II on that magical, vintage Nintendo you somehow managed to buy on e-Bay before the great internet crash during the blackouts of 2029. You spend the time of precious electricity mending and sewing new clothes together on your Singer sewing machine. During a prolonged energy glut, you can even make some extra jeans from old denim and terrycloth towels to barter at the local market. No one has much money anymore, but the Dickenson clan grows a mean tomato and sometimes, against all odds, has chickens to trade.

 

 

 

Stop! I Get the Apocalyptic Picture! What the Heck Can I Do?

Okay, okay, but I was having fun with that.

The first thing we should all do as individuals, I think, is conserve energy and reprioritize our daily lives by doing things like walking and biking, turning off lights when they are not in use, buying local and regional goods when we can, boycotting mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble, and growing our own food as much as possible. But individual conservation and change, while important and empowering, is not enough to meet the challenges of the coming post-cheap-energy era.

Somehow we must use our individual talents to organize radically new ways of living, producing, and consuming. Cooperation, which has not been a very strong point in the extremely rugged individualism championed by both American culture and its mutant offspring, corporate culture, must become the basis for our economic activity and livelihood. It may very well be a matter of survival and not mere quality of life.

Quality of life itself is going to be subject to massive and radical shifts, whether or not we cooperate with such shifting or not. While most Americans and complacent citizens of industrial cultures equate quality of life with commodities and efficiency–things as diverse as iPods, mass-market paperback books, microwaves, central air conditioning, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Desperate Housewives, and the speculative economics of stock markets–there is another, more sane way to measure quality of life. And this is where the post-cheap-energy era can be seen as the proverbial blessing in disguise (yet while accounting for food shortages, scarcity of medical care, and periods of wild inflation and deflation, of course).

How a Low-Energy Future Could Bludgeon Insatiable Consumerism into a Grateful Appreciation of What Is

One of the things I never could understand about or get with while living in America is the incredible striving for money that people are deeply engaged in.  Now, I understand that we all need money and food and shelter to live, but the typical American citizen wants more–always more, even when more has been gotten and gotten again.  Driven by advertising, the whip of production-and-consumption-driven state education, a strange religion of economic and afterlife rewards², the stereotypical American–and I am aware that this is a caricature that does not apply to you, reader–wears khakis or a suit for 8-10 hours a day while debasing him- or herself on the killing floor of corporate culture, living for the weekend and those weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly pay-offs: the paycheck.

Given my personal bias against this insanity, I can see a potential benefit of the coming post-cheap-energy reality: people may be forced from dehumanizing jobs and compelled to get back in touch with the Earth outside their suburban homes, to get to know their neighbors, to remember how to do basic things like grow food, make and repair clothes and shoes, ride horses, and maintain low-energy technologies like bicycles and water- and windmills.  People may indeed begin to cooperate with their neighbors.  They may actually develop some compassion for the human condition and poverty and animals and plants.  They may suddenly have very basic spiritual epiphanies like, “Damn, it’s amazing and miraculous to be alive on a planet that has water and breathable air and food to eat,” which may be followed by sensible thoughts like, “Gosh, that was really stupid how governments and people squandered all this nice natural stuff in favor of plastics, gasoline, fast food, and cheap stuff.”

Damn, This Article Makes me Feel Angry/Guilty/Depressed/Hopeless/etc.  Where’s the Hope?

Guilt is not a productive emotion usually, and I don’t advocate it.  Anger is sometimes necessary and can be empowering, but it can also be dangerous, destructive, and crippling.  Depression and hopelessness are bad options that don’t do much for anyone in the world.  They, like a proposed hydrogen economy, are net losers of energy.  

 What I would like to promote is the empowerment of individuals and communities to approach and solve the challenges of the post-cheap-energy age with creativity, compassion, love, and respect for the Earth.  I would also be a very happy person if my rambling, rambunctious thoughts on this digital page spark some a-ha moments in my readers, freeing some minds from some constraining boxes manufactured in the age of cheap energy.

 

The coming crisis is also an opportunity, as the Chinese are fond of reminding us, and as all crises are.  Humanity has had a fairly dismal track record for cooperation throughout our recorded, western-centric history.  Fortunately for us, there are surviving wisdom traditions that are community-based.  These are the indigenous people of the world, who have been struggling to survive for centuries under the technological “superiority ” of western and industrial civilizations.  We would be smart to be humble now and adopt some of those conservative, reverential, natural, and subsistence-oriented ways.  Doing so may ease the transition from an era of exuberance and abundant energy to the coming inevitable time of limited energy and environmental consequences, and would certainly allow us to appreciate the blessing of being alive in a profound, basic way.  Plus, indigenous people would probably breathe easier.  We all might.
 

1.  See The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg

2.  For an example of the economic entitlement and motivation of contemporary Christianity in America, see Bruce Wilkinson’s very stupid and selfish book The Prayer of Jabez.

The 08 Situation in Context

Some twenty-eight years ago, Reagan swept the White House and the country into a new era of speculative capitalism, from what I can tell.  I’m of a younger generation that was growing up under the influence of such a super-abundant, neo-liberal (I don’t think the policies of Reagan and the Bushes can be called conservative in any meaningful way), money-happy and financially optimistic–yet morally bankrupt–time and culture.  Jimmy Carter was a passing phenomenon during my toddler years and Reagan is the first president I really remember.  My parents dressed me in Coca-Cola tee shirts and later I wore hypercolor clothing of my own free will.  My childhood and adolescence were shaped not by family and relationships, but by popular music, television, video games, movies, comic books, and other artifacts of a grossly stylized popular culture.  Marshall McLuhan would probably have some interesting comments about the media that shaped my mind and psyche and the minds and psyche of my generation.  He would be googly-eyed and overstimulated with possible theories about the youth that are growing up under the military-industrial-entertainment complex of information overload in these opening years of the 21st century.

 

And now, in 2008, after years of blue blood and white-boy-collar money in the very White House, we have an opportunity to put a black man–an intelligent, thoughtful black man–into the white house.  This is an important moment.  Sure, I don’t completely trust Obama, him being a politician and all, but I am excited about the possibilities of an Obama presidency.  He’s interested in engaging in foreign policy and dialouging with so-called “enemies” like Iran and Cuba, which is HUGE.  He’s talking about revising and revitalizing transportation infrastructure, including rail transportation, which is HUGE.  His campaign has been funded largely not by special interests and lobbyists, but by a grassroots network of small donors and regional/local organizers (see How Obama Did It by Karen Tumulty in Time Magazine).

 

Could Dubya hatch a sinister strike on Iran in the remaining five months before the November elections?  I suppose anything is possible, but I have a hard time believing that given the climate of the country at this point in time that even an Idiot Hitler like Bush could succeed in another fear-stoking media campaign to start a third war before he leaves office.  Do I believe he has thought about it, has plans?  No doubt he’s thought about it.  But Dumb America is beginning to shake off the Bush virus, I think.  But maybe I’ve been infected by Obama-era “Hope,” and am just being a pushover.

 

Of course there’s peak oil.  I see this not as the apocalyptic catastrophe that some people are making it out to be, but as an exhausted sigh of relief.  We need to slow down.  The pace of industrial oil-rich life has been pummeling me since 1980, when I first began to form some sort of wishy-washy identity for myself.  All my life I’ve been running on a gasoline-powered treadmill, trying to keep up with an educational and occupational system that makes no sense and has no soul.  I welcome a breather and a slowing down of pace. 

 

People say food and gas are going to be real expensive?  I say they should be.  Good.  Jack ‘em up.  People spend way too much time and money on non-essential trivialities anyway.  Let’s all get back to the land together and sweat to grow food, even hunt.  Let’s indeed cut down on oil consumption before it all expires in one last popping oily bubble belch of desperation.  There are other sources of energy, after all–none of which, I am aware, are as cheap and convenent as the demon oil–but again, I think that is a good thing. 

 

Remember that crisis is always opportunity.  It doesn’t have to be a catastrophe or disaster.  Yes, we have population problems; however, the flip side of that is that we also have a larger population of intelligent, savvy engineers, developers, and other people who love challenges and tweaking with polymers, chemicals, fuels, and other wacky chemically transformed crap that I’d rather not even think about.  As peak oil becomes a more prominent topic in mainstream culture and news, the economy will shift to focus on the demand for new forms of energy–not necessarily just coal or nuclear power.

 

Same thing with food production.  When it becomes such a problem that not even the beer-guzzling, NASCAR-watching yokels getting their sound-bite news from Fox News can ignore it, the stupid economy will begin to bend to the necessities.  Until then, intelligent, compassionate people can work towards positive change in whatever way suits them best.

 

On an individual level, we all choose how we respond to the situations we find ourselves in.  To some extent, we can even pick those situations.  Personally, I live within my means, which are quite impoverished by the standard American standard.  I don’t really want for anything, though, except to someday actually own a piece of land and a small house.  Yes, the tanking of financial markets and the ongoing corruption in American politics makes that even more difficult, especially given my aversion to playing the American Dream Game.  But who knows?  It’s a modest goal, really, and not unachievable.  More important to me are my relationships with people and animals, and even more important than that is finding a personal balance within a seemingly insane political and cultural climate, then using that balance and whatever leverage I find at hand to shift the world in a more positive direction.  Being aware of corruption and the shit-stains of politics-as-usual as well at the militarization and policing of everyday “freedom” in America is important, but if I let it overwhelm me, I know that will just bring me down, which lowers my productivity and my chances for affecting the kind of change I want to see/be in the world.

 
Post-script post-it-note: Many thanks to my online pen-pal Jeff Barton for dialouging with me about the craptastic state of the union.  His doubts and incisive criticism of the American Presidency and institutions of government gave rise to this essay.

Screaming Wind Language II: Conscription Consumerism

The wind screams.  Gulls dive.  Surf surges and recedes, lapping time.

 

Meanwhile, in urbania, I am inside glass and plastic and brick and electromagnetic radiation permeates.  Songs are everywhere, and they’re nothing you haven’t heard before: Poison, bluegrass, Louis Armstrong, Three Doors Down.  A cabinet hangs on the wall, spilling and supporting a faux plant of waxy green plastic.  The clock is displayed prominently.  The studying girl wears earbuds to seal in her interior insulated world.  My coffee cools.  Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.  Annie Lenox, not Marilyn Manson.  Both.

 

In this experiment of living, the walls are painted a bumpy Canary Yellow.  Electric outlets and light switches plug us all in and turn us on.  Today the fraternities and sororities in this college town are outfitted in cloned clothing: each house displaying a baffling uniformity of commercialized expression.  These young men and women have proudly made themselves homogenized products.  They display themselves in outings downtown.  To them, I look exotic in my beard and flannel and cute red and blue skullcap.  They point me out to the group, snap pictures, and the tour continues on to the Next Whiskey Bar.

 

Stimulated by music, cheap food, and now coffee, what leaps of intellect will I make on the page today.  Fuck it.  The whole goal of writing, on some level, is to become a commodity.  In this commodity culture, ideas and art don’t reach anyone unless you sell them by striking oil at the right time, posing for the cameras and self-consciously appreciating your adoring fifteen minutes of fame.

 

I’m interested in eating bitter cherries.  They taste real to me and fill my belly full.  I eat greens and granola and beans and factory-processed cheese.  My menu selections are recorded by a cash register.  I go home and cook them until they are delicious.  Later, I will excrete my waste into a toilet and personally push the handle of the toilet down, delivering my waste through engineered networks of pipes.  Through this magical process my shit and piss mingles with the shit and piss of thousands.  What human eyes see that mess?  How is it processed?  Clean water is a miracle.

 

We are denying nature, you and I, whether we approve of that or not.  If we oppose the system, the Industry, we understand that they have put us all on private reservations modeled on the nuclear family unit.  We understand also that education in this system leads to conscription.  We recognize the inhuman horror of production and consumption, of salaries, of selling time for money.  You and I, my friends, truly miss what consumerist society is missing.  We feel that hole and feel the wind that whips and laments through it, confined to an unnatural space, a concrete canyon.

Thunder in the Mouth of June

I’ve just been informed that the chair I’m sitting on contains nuclear winters, radiation, the slaughter of millions of Japanese in the flash of artificial morning.  Pulverized, incinerated, transcendentalized death flows from my kitchen tap.  I bow at the altar of oppression when I turn on lights, lock my door, make a phone call, pay with a credit card, enjoy a movie, bank.  I can’t help it.  Loving my life, I perpetually reinforce my lively prison walls.

 

But don’t wanna be a good consumer.  Don’t want live within my custom-postered apartment of imprisonment.  Apartment: there’s a word: apart/ment.  You are set apart from me when we rent our separate apart/ments.  Don’t bother me with your action movies.  I set myself apart from you and your football games on big-screen television, from your whooping warcry video games.  Don’t come down here into my apart/ment.  You wouldn’t like the silence and unstoppered criticism in which I choose to spend my days.  You don’t want to taste my vegetarian meals or hear my ideas about the rot of industry.  Apart.  Partition.  These walls have been set between us by societal engineers for good reason.  You know that they know best and know what they are doing.  It’s all for the best.

 

But don’t wanna live apart.  I’m your inseparable, insufferable, suffering, sensitive little brother, living on beans and trickle-down wages.  I’ve been a good dog, I have.  Eaten from Master’s hand, wagged my tail at all the right white moments, salivated when they rang that bell.  I stood up and recited the pledge of allegiance with hand on my heart (but my heart stayed silent in protest, shunned).  I stunted my thoughts, followed lesson plans.  I danced to the static in that square way you requested, caught the buzz words and drank them down like Coca-Cola.

 

I found out that don’t refresh.

 

I learn to talk my own jive.  I tune out.  Tuning out, I open windows onto the desert of the real, invite weeds and oily rivers into my heart, which revives with wonder.  I bake my own bread, using the least toxic ingredients I can gather using the dollar bills I’ve been handed down.  I begin to refuse to cut my grass, my hair, my opinions, trusting my own eyes to open when I am rested, and not subjecting my profound dreams to the abuse of alarm clocks.

 

I’d like to take down a clock.  I’ll start by strangling the ones in my apart/ment, drowning them in timeless yet polluted bathwater.  I’ll play White Rabbit while I do it, touch the destructive sparks and taste deadly laughter that comes before dawn.  But I won’t clean up your mess.

 

The you in this address has committed genocide and crimes against planetary common sense and goodness.  This you has boxed up imaginations, intellects, and passions, then buried them under the foundations of sky-punching factories.  This you has policed and brutalized people of color, people who refuse to say that pledge of allegiance, and youth and children the world over.  The jails of this you are expansive and hungry, insatiable, black holes of cheap production and punishment.  This you mocks rehabilitation, mocks work, mocks life, shreds even a thought of justice, smothers and stifles love with authority.

 

We are not this you.  This you is not human.  This you is industry, is misguided progress, is expansion and Manifest Destiny, is the Divine Right of Kings.  It is enclosure and imprisonment; restlessness, panic, and insomnia; it is anxious about living, screaming that life is an abomination that must be squashed to be transcended.  It is inhuman and inhumane, lapping abstraction and vacancy and removal at the ankles of its high-maintenance idols.  The idols are colossal and defy destruction; more correctly, they have obtained a monopoly on destruction through purchase and violence, and will not hesitate to liquidate their shareholders’ assets in order to survive to consume one more day.  The open mouth gnashes, rends, destroys, never closes to rest or digest.

 

Advice to the living: sell your shares in the colossal idols.  Empty them out and resist; resisting, deny these automated authorities their next wasteful mouthful, their next meals, and the next and the next.  Forcefully seal their mouths.  Or forcefully feed the mouth the polluted pieces of itself.  The appetite of the profane, mechanized black hole, turned on itself, will cause an implosion: poof.

 

And the fertile valley of the real will begin to bear fruit after the mechanical winter.  Spring brings rain that rusts machines and renews living beings.

 

We are inescapably bound to our ecology.

 

Rediscover the rain dances.

Escape on a Jet Plane?

Detours curve, having been carved:

cities, the architecture of entitlement

neglecting the land and fruits.

Security snares with investment plans

and rat traps.  The four-part harmony

has long since gone flat.

 

Time to rock and roll.  Time for

the anger.  You push push push

you the robots with neckties engineered

stealing lives, thundering bomb drops and raids

considering only your futures, day trading,

accruing debts with no intention to pay,

 

Only rape, and an inhumane harvest of birth-

defected children, seen as potential energy—

Plug ‘em in!  And ride on into that holocaust

scarlet sunset, tinged with the dust of the new

West: human beings tied up with decimated remains

of lifeways and ancestors, tied up with rodeo ropes,

 

Allocated reservations and pittances. 

And the beat goes on.  Chop-chop, clop-clop,

we are all toxic, chop, kerplunk, ka-ching, here’s your change:

we are all toxic, chip-chop, tip-top, top shape, top shelf

as you exercise inside sterile walls with

electric gadgets buzzing, even then counting cash.

 

Ka-ching, kerbloom.  The Apocalypse is televised

redundantly in Apocalypse reality shows and

the soundtrack to higher returns is i-podded in.

Plod on, brave cyborg!  The collapse of your great

experimental investment in Nation-States awaits.

Tapas will be served in first class as you watch cities fall.

 

Progress

He sat in his house alone, pulling up floorboards. All around him, steam coursed through pipes, computers and televisions kept detailed time. The man was preoccupied. There was gold, oil under these floorboards-he knew it with the very denial and desperation that kept him moving. Tasteless coffee, bland and mildly warm, dripped from an IV into his arm. A network cable had been some time ago plugged into the top of his skull. The man’s glasses were filthy; his fingernails, hands, forearms flecked with blood. He hummed along to a lunatic jingle that was being pumped directly into his ears by wires, wires that led into a pocket of his slacks.

He was a self-sufficient man. But time had recently turned against him.

In the room behind him, the floor had been systematically destroyed: peeled back, hammered, drilled with industrial machines. The opening revealed an excavated pit, dug at places to thousands of feet. In a shallow corner, a bit of coal burned, providing warmth. Beyond the small glow, the land fell away and was filled with the specters of felled trees, dead trees, broken chain saws, thousands upon thousands of animal carcasses and rent bones, and of course the ubiquitous plastic and styrofoam containers that had once contained progress.

Ah, progress. But progress had choked, faltered, gone south, spoiled, was wintering somewhere, never to be seen again, leaving only this sour, seeping, steaming pit.

The man never looks back, continuing to dig now with his bare hands and hope, a grim and senile smile placed concretely on his skull, eyes wide, intent, searching the unfolding pits: It must be here, God. Progress, plastic–why have you forsaken me?

His body is only temporarily racked by sobs. Another man appears, as if from the sky, slaps him back into insensitivity. There is work to be done. The man sitting seems to sober, his eyes open and tearlessly clear. He resumes digging. That other man, the one who flashed in from the sky, was never here. The man in search of progress soldiers on.

Digging, he uncovers a corpse. It is unfamiliar, just a former person, burned beyond recognition and rotting. The man is buoyant and drags the corpse out of the pit.

Progress!

Taking the smoldering coals, the man lights the burnt and disfigured corpse on fire. It burns quickly, flaring powerfully, releasing mighty smoke. The man’s smile becomes keener, more cunning, and he hooks a hose just so to catch the burning smoke, to harness the fire. Several hoses–a whole system of hoses and pipes vacuum the flaring, flaming energy of the expendable body into the bowels of the house, filling the ribs of pipes, which hiss and swell, chortle, percolate, sweat steam. The televisions brighten; ones that had gone to static now broadcast news footage: attractive anchors with whitened teeth and skin, talking comforting lullabies in sing-song voices, singing reassuring hymns about stocks and progress.

For a moment, all is well, all is normal.

The floor is all but gone and the pipes are rumbling. The corpse snuffs out as the technology powers up and up. The house digests the energy of progress, then sighs.  Flatulence. Computer screens dim, televisions flicker cold.

 

Parecon: Posturing and Progressive Posing at the End of the World

I just read Michael Albert’s essay “What Are We For?” trying to get the broad overview of Parecon, and I have to ask, what are we for, indeed?  It’s odd.  When I read that title I thought it meant what are we for as in what are people for?  But it turns out Albert is asking what are we for as in what are we not against?  The assumption seems to be that “we” are a cohesive group of ideologues, and the question being asked is framed as: well, we know what we are all against, but what are the constructive principles of our ideology?  And boy howdy does Michael Albert have a plateful of constructive principles to dish up.

I have to say I found it boring, dry reading.  I can appreciate what he is trying to do, you know: lay out some broad concepts about how a large, integrated, humane economy might work.  But it strikes me as false and contrived, not organic enough.  Maybe that’s just a problem inherent with theories, and if the concepts are developed further and put into trial and practice, good things can result. 

But back to my question: what are people for?  Are we workers to be arranged in  a system?  I think that is what I find offensive about economics, and Parecon doesn’t seem to be an exception.  Screw economics.  People are not for economics.  People are for experiencing life, and fuck all the artificial constructs. 

Recently I’ve been reading about the peak oil phenomenon.  What might life be like after the oil crash, indeed?  Will Parecon or any global economic framework be meaningful then?  We all may very well be dealing with vast energy shortages and struggling to eat, struggling to keep communities running, and no doubt dealing with power-hungry motherfuckers who still don’t get the idea that humanity is a family with a need to work together.  As James Howard Kunstler suggests in his 2005 article in Rolling Stone, “our lives will become profoundly and intensely local.”  And they should be.

I recognize that Parecon is theoretically concerned with and based upon grass-roots, local, democratic cooperatives.  I appreciate that about it, but find its aspirations to replace the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization with a different set of names kind of silly.  I understand that they are to be different institutions, and I understand that they have regional and local best interests in mind.  What I don’t understand is why they should be necessary. 

I envision an organically patterned world of interdependent communities with enough sense and humanity to understand that cooperative effort and constructive, creative work are good for everyone.  This is probably incredibly naive and unrealistic, because the world is full of conniving, greedy assholes.  And I appreciate that Parecon wants to alleviate some of that greediness and asshole-ishness by implementing a hierarchal/non-hierarchical global structure.  But I don’t have any faith in that.

What I do have faith in may be impossible.  The only sensible possibility to me seems to be an organic one: an anarchy of interdependent individuals and communities that understand that it is in the best interest of us all to freely associate and cooperate.  There is no need for global top-down structures.  The past five thousand years of empire-building have driven that point home for me, at least.  There can be no arm twisting, no “regulatory institutions” and no “binding Code of Conduct,” because these things undermine self-determination.  We get all bunged up around codes of conducts and regulations, no matter how well-intentioned.  Parecon, practically instituted, would lead to simply another slew of nation-states governed by some high-minded global institutions that may be altruistic, but no less susceptible to corruption than the IMF itself.  What kind of people do you think would get involved with such global regulatory commissions as the snazzy, hip, and progressive International Asset Agency, Global Investment Agency, and World Trade Agency?  Even as shiny new (not merely reformed) institutions, the damn things would be populated by elitist ofays whose vision would be completely compromised by the global binoculars, telescopes, and blinders that they would have to constantly wear.  All the cool grass-roots organizations would be tiny little gps points on topographic globes viewed from these centralized command centers.  Or am I jumping to conclusions?  Would the bankers be out working the fields, too?  Which fields, on whose topographic map?

I’m tired of systems and ideologies.  I feel like I’d rather welcome the permanent blackouts of the collapsing capitalist economy, and take my chances with my neighbors as we are forced back to the land.  At least then, things will quiet down, and there won’t be so much asinine posturing and theorizing, elitism parading as the common good.

The Situation: Exiting the Circus of Nationalism

Terence McKenna once said that people in the western world need to stop consuming culture and begin to create culture-or words to that effect.¹  Our society is a consumer society.  We live less in a democracy and more in a capitalist state.  The Situationists² described the prevailing culture of their time as one of commodity and spectacle.  How much more true this must ring in our own time.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, U.S. president George W. Bush urged his citizenry to respond to the “terrorist threat” with violence and spending.  Both are old stories, old situations.  What is new, perhaps, is the overt blatancy of the utterances: “smoke ‘em out,” and, essentially, “work and go shopping.”           

Who are we in America?  Consumption-crazed cowboys, apparently.  The national spectacle became a bizarre b-movie reality: terror threats and alert systems, anthrax scares, patriotic consumerism, frighteningly passive business-as-usual.  This surreal scene seemed to thinking people utterly terrifying in its bland acceptance and banality.  Essentially what we had was a figurehead dictator making declarations of all-out war, lacing them with simplistic patriotic platitudes and prayers, and encouraging sheepish citizenry to remain penned-in and braced and angry towards some vaguely unknowable outside terrorist threat.  Abstraction: smoke out your externalized demons: those others out there.  Concrete illustration: demonize Osama bin Laden, channel the collective fear and terror into outrage and anger.  Having done that, the Nationalistic power-that-be were unrestrained to direct public hatred and fear where they would, like machine-gun bursts strafing the alien worlds of foreign countries, those who are not “us.”

“Two basic Situationist concepts are ‘commodity and ‘spectacle’.  Capitalism has made all of social relations commodity relations: The market rules all.  People are not only producers and consumers in the narrow economic sense, but the very structure of their daily lives is based on commodity relations.  Society ‘is consumed as a whole-the ensemble of social relationships and structures is the central product of the commodity economy.’  The spectacle, then, is the culture that springs from the commodity economy-the stage is set, the action unfolds, we applaud when we think we are happy, we yawn when we think we are bored, but we cannot leave the show, because there is not world outside the theater for us to go to.”
–Carol Ehrlich, “Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism”²

In her essay, penned sometime around 1977, Carol Ehrlich goes on to assert that “the societal stage has begun to crumble,” which leads to the possibility of the Situational “reinvention of everyday life.”

The crumbling which Ehrlich observed in 1977 is happening again now in 2008.  After seven intensely repressive years of fear, trauma, backwards movement, and deliberately incited loathing and hatred, the American people are waking up to the unreality of their situation.  Slowly recovering from cultural myopia, amnesia, and blindness, we find our parallels in our own cultural spectacles: somehow we find our situation resonant with the eerie and trippy films of a decade ago: The Truman Show, The Matrix.  Are we actors, character actors, programmed characters reacting to the constructed situations we find ourselves in?  Are there, indeed, hidden doors everywhere, glitches in the system to be exploited?  Why this heavy sense of déjà vu, of poignancy, this eerie and otherworldly sense of psychic disturbance, of indefinable cosmic connection?  Is it the spectacle of the New Age we are responding to?

If you thought The Matrix was spectacular and heady, citizen, you should watch eXistenZ.  The lines and scenarios blur.  Situation?  Spectacle?  Commodity?  The terms infect each other and bleed, oozing existential nightmares into a pit of swirling (un)realities.

I digress.  I don’t mean to suggest that we are all psychotics, deluded characters on a Hollywood set, all of us Being John Malkovich.  Yet we are in this matrix of product and consumption, looking for meaning in funhouse television mirrors.  Should we follow the white rabbit?  If we do, will we find ourselves in the bathtub in the body of Dr. Gonzo, terminally tripping, yelling for Raoul Duke to throw the radio into the water at the climax of the song?³

Boom.  Armageddon.

Which brings us back to the current spectacle: the War on/of Terror.  With the cradle of civilization, so-called, destitute and baking in steaming invisible clouds radiating depleted uranium, with Osama bin Laden-the devil, may I take this opportunity to remind you-abandoned and discarded in the rabid quest for scapegoats, vengeance, WMD, and-let’s not kid ourselves-oil-where do we go from here?  Fade out and cut scene to Iran?  No, no.  Don’t want that.

Situation:  leave Iraq.  Make reparations?
Situation:  question authority. 
Situation:  withdraw support from the spectacle of capitalism.
Situation:  live locally, conscious and aware.

Situation:  an election year!
2008.
The great multicultural hope fight: Obama versus Clinton.  Will the champion be the audacious African-American vanguard senator, or the blue blood feminist (really?) senator who stood by her unfaithful man?⁴  Goddamn!  What a spectacle!

Situation:  out in the stands, the cheap seats, the impoverished, uninsured blight that is now the birthright of every red-blooded American.  You put down your cigar, red-white-and-blue pom-poms, your popcorn box.  You tear off your war medals and campaign buttons, having had enough of the spectacle.  You focus on your work: your unique expression of being human in a dehumanized culture, your particular way of yearning for community, for culture, for creation.  Passionately, unencumbered by the noise pollution and popular fantasies that abound, you begin to cultivate the miraculous, multifaceted beings that are within you.  Gardens, worlds, microbes, interstellar imaginations all begin to unfurl from seeds.  Independence and a recognition of a simplified interdependence.  These new, constantly updated markets don’t serve you.  This federal freedom trip has been a crude racket, a poorly designed stage.

From outside the arena where politics-as-usual continue, you can see how artificial the stage has been: floodlights, jury-rigs, rickety beams, discarded cups and generic labels.  These people on the outside, who are they?  They seem like hell-bent pagan carnies, crafting graffiti on the outside structure, skateboarding away, laughing like unkempt hyenas.  One of them offers you a drink.

“Hey, Truman,” she says.

Conversations blossom around you; conversations of all colors. 

“Glad you could join us,” someone says, winking in and out of existence, a Cheshire cat.  In the distance, a clock melts.  A castle on a giant boulder floats.  Beyond those horizons, who knows?  In the sky, northern lights, fire rainbows.

Notes

1. Terence McKenna, psychedelic visionary and self-described ‘cunning linguist’, wrote such books as Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge; The Archaic Revival; and True Hallucinations.  The immediate reference can be found in this context: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ARIG-BQRATs, but also check out http://roychristopher.com/terence-mckenna-meets-the-machine-elves-of-hyperspace-struck-by-noetic-lightning  Also of interest is Terence’s rap and rave over the music of SpaceTime Continuum, caught on CD as Alien Dreamtime; transcript available here: http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/mckenna/alien.html, video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2395498051948678069
2. My understanding of the Situationists is second-hand and underdeveloped.  My limited knowledge of them comes from an essay by Carol Ehrlich, entitled “Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism,” in a small anthology by the name of Quiet Rumours: an Anarcha-Feminist anthology.  The entire anthology can be accessed online at http://www.anarcha.org/sallydarity/QuietRumoursIndex.htm
3. If you don’t know who these characters are, you should watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Like all of the other movies referenced in this essay, it is from one decade ago.
4. It would be very cool to see Cynthia McKinney in the White House.  Barack Obama will do in a pinch.  And we are definitely in a pinch, yo.

Winter Soldiers Open Dialogue, Hold Up Mirror

“The assumption is that obedience is normal-the president is king.”
–Hunter S. Thompson, in an interview and hashish session with Marty Beckerman¹

“And then September 11^th happened.  I began to hear new words like ‘towelhead,’ ‘camel jockey,’ and the most disturbing, ‘sand nigger.’  These words did not initially come from my fellow soldiers but from my superiors: my platoon sergeant, my company first sergeant, battalion commander.  All the way up the chain of command these terms-these viciously racist terms-were suddenly acceptable….  These are the words the American people used when they allowed this government to sanction Iraq.  This is something that many people forget, and you can’t forget.”
–Mike Prysner, speaking at the Winter Soldier Hearings²

How free am I?  The citizen of a federal government that imposes its will outside of its own borders, in the name of its own citizens and esteemed principles.  The federal government has taken my name-and yours-in vain!  That’s serious shit, citizen.  But I disassociate myself from that, call shenanigans on it, shout that I called it all quits years ago, in high school, when the absurdity of ticky-tacky American home suburban corporate business dreams presented itself as what it is: false, stale, lifeless, facsimile of an outdated fantasy.  Yet that somehow doesn’t make me any less accountable.

America is still riding moments of inflated triumph, fetishizing genocide and occupation as manifest destiny and foundations.  We don’t own the land we stand on, busying ourselves with wasting and spending, on endless hi-fi connections.  We treat life like a game of football: end zone, touchdown, extra points.  Achievement.  All the while, some unknowable magnetic cosmic force-the closest name we have for it is love-spins us all around the sun.  How arrogant we can be, with our building and wasting.

Yet we can also be brilliantly creative.  We can be courageous.  I am amazed by the resilience and integrity displayed over the weekend by the Winter Soldiers, the Iraq Veterans Against the War.  Their testimony breaks my heart once more (but who’s counting, anyway?) and gives me hope at the same time.  After being dehumanized, being programmed and indoctrinated by corporate/governmental/military powers-that-be to kill, hate, and destroy-against impossible odds all bent on using them as dehumanized bodies, tools for murder-these men and women are not destroyed; damaged yes.  But damaged, they struggle to reclaim their humanity.  It never left them, actually, but was subdued by dull drilling, loud insistences on the reality of the enemy, the conspiracy against America and life as we know it.  Their fear was tapped and they signed the contract to defend, not knowing that the signature sold them to do awful, incomprehensible things to other human beings.  They have shot civilians, tortured, interrogated, witnessed torture, torn down sovereign nations at the urging of their own nation.  The patriotic clamor was deafening, riling otherwise sensible people to bloodlust, duping 90% (more? less?) of the American population to demonize the “Other:”  terrorists, insurgents, ragheads, sand niggers.

And yet soldiers the world over are still doing horrifying things.  Our country’s soldiers.  United Nations peacekeeping soldiers.  African soldiers, Afghani and Iraqi militias.  When will we crucially understand that warfare is a self-inflicted wound, is suicide revisited over and over again in billions of instances?  Man shoots man.  Man shoots woman.  Woman shoots man.  Woman shoots woman.  Man shoots child.  Child shoots man.  Woman shoots child.  Child shoots woman.  Child shoots child.  Man tortures man.  Man tortures woman.  Woman tortures man.  Woman tortures woman.  A tortured child.  Everyone is a child.  And in all these variable instance of children indoctrinated or reacting to kill, ultimately it’s suicide.  Human kills human.  Self kills self.  There is no “Other” here.  Self-inflicted gunshot wound.  Self torture.

Why are we torturing ourselves?  For economics?  Reasons of state?  Vengeance?  To maintain our freedom?  To maintain order?  Can a killer ever be free?  Seems to me that murderers mostly still have a conscience.  The murder is revisited daily, hourly, always: the torture of conscience protesting against inhumanity, struggling to reclaim integrity, dignity, humanity.

“I tried to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame….  These were people, these were human beings….  We are told we are fighting terrorists.  The real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation.”
–Mike Prysner, speaking at the Winter Soldier Hearings²

“A year becomes a month, a month becomes a day, and a day becomes a second-a second that you repeat over and over and over again, not just for your tour, but for the rest of your life.”
–Geoff Millard, Winter Soldier Hearings²

In America, we must begin to see.  We must see what we are doing, what we justify and condone, what we are complicit in by simply being tax-paying citizens of America.  If America had integrity, the nation would be collectively cringing, mourning, asking forgiveness, praying for absolution, turning restlessly through the night.

Are we morally bankrupt?  Or are we, after all, human?  Iraq Veterans Against the War have held up mirrors, portraits and self-portraits, videos, commentaries, quotes, and transcripts of atrocities.  They are looking squarely at these images.  They are claiming responsibility and pushing their superiors to do the same.  They are asking us to look at them, knowing that they are us, and that the crimes that they have been forced to commit are our crimes, all of us living here in affluence and ignorance.  We cannot let them stand alone on trial and in protest.

Millions of Iraqis have died violently in the past five years alone.  We have stood by, worked our jobs, listened to the media-spun sanitized reports.  We have slept, ignored and invalidated their suffering, taken vacations, even cheered as our president and congress cut budgets, rights-both civil and human-and funneled incomprehensible exponents of unreal, unminted, intangible cash to create tanks, drones, planes, missiles, bombs, bases, barriers, battleships, guns, weapons of mass destruction.  All this we have been either willingly or unwillingly complicit in, while government officials, media, and each other have urged us to “support our troops.”

Here we have it: the troops are not being supported.  The VA hospitals are cut, corrupted, underfunded, horrible insults to soldiers who have been maimed, amputated, psychologically traumatized, and disfigured.³  These same troops have shot children, mothers, fathers, for us.  This is how the federal government protects us: by destroying life, stripping liberties, burning the cradle of civilization, all the while brazenly and incomprehensibly promoting these actions as civil, necessary, altruistic, as a defense and promotion of freedom.

Yes, we have been duped.  More correctly, we haven’t been paying attention; haven’t been doing our jobs as citizens of a democracy; more bluntly: we’ve been stupid.  We have repeatedly refused to entertain the possibility that war is wrong.  We can no longer refuse to face ourselves: our fear, our guilt, our greed, our sense of entitlement, our hatred, our complicity and stupidity, our misplaced deference to authority and power, our meek acceptance of lies and distortions.  We have not behaved as people who believe in democracy.  We have not displayed any value for freedom, much less human life.  While we’ve busily and obediently hunkered down, shoulders to the grindstone, affirming our allegiance to capitalism, convenience, packaging, and sound bites, we’ve missed the point of the destruction of the World Trade Centers:

Economics is not worth the wasting of lives.

Notes

1. “My Chat (and Hash-Smoking Session) with Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Journalism Legend” by Marty Beckerman: http://www.getunderground.com/underground/features/article.cfm?Article_ID=1073
2. Winter Soldier, March 14^th-16^th, 2008: video: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/79865/
3. See “Military Doctors Withholding Treatment from Soldiers with Mental Health Problems” by Maggie Mahar http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/77867/