March 1, 2004
     I'm always amazed at how America is gripped by the Oscar race,. But it especially interested me this year because the movie that got the most awards -- The Lord of the Rings, Part III -- was such an utterly empty spectacle devoid of narrative coherence. In that sense, I suppose, it perfectly represented the current state of American life. But the casual observer is left with the frightening thought: am I the only one who notices this?
      I happened to be in California most of last week, though not anywhere near the Oscar-rama. I was in Monterey at a conference called TED (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) that is attended by an impressive array of Internet billionaires, media biggies, venture capitalists, and corporate leaders. I was one of the speakers, and the crowd seemed chagrined by my assertion that America was unlikely to be rescued by technology from the oil-and-gas depletion problems that loom ahead. Our business leaders believe that anything is possible if you wish hard enough -- the philosophy of Jiminy Cricket.
      One of the other speakers in the four-day event was a gentleman who has spent forty years developing a "skycar," a kind of George Jetson style vertical takeoff vehicle. He symbolized our current national mood perfectly. Near the end of his presentation, he literally declared that we could solve all the problems of our congested urbs by making it possible for folks to commute from even greater distances than they do now.
      Meanwhile, I couldn't help but reflect on the future prospects for California. Poor Monterey has become just another parking lot (with nice water views). The nearly fifty mile stretch running from San Francisco airport to quite a way below Silicon Valley (San Jose) is a shocking wilderness of freeway ramps, sodium vapor lamps, and crummy garden apartments built like packing crates. The region seems destined to complete and utter dysfunction as soon as this country suffers even the first mild tremors of the coming oil shocks. If Californians think that life is tough now under Schwarzenegger, they haven't seen anything. I advised everbody I talked to who lived there to get out while the getting is possible. They all regarded me as crazy.

February 17, 2004
     I confess a deep loathing for NASCAR and what it represents: the worship of destructive technology. It is easy to understand how the NASCAR religion arose in Southern culture. These were big states -- you could fit eleven Connecticuts in Georgia -- and things were far apart. Until after the Second World War, the region was an agricultural backwater. A fair number of the denizens of this region, white and black, were peasants tied to the soil, in one way or another.
      The techno-wonders of the 20th century changed all that, chiefly cars, electrification, and air-conditioning. The car in the South especially represented liberation from the suffocating ties of locality and of community -- and much more intensely than in the North, in which the city itself was the medium of liberation.
     Southerners are therefore still celebrating the obliteration of locality and community and they are doing a bang-up job. Southern towns, with a few exceptions like Savannah and Charleston, are little more than parking lots with fried meat concessions. Many of them actually look like the place where NASCAR is held. Hyper-turbo-mega suburbia has been the destination of this Southern techno-worship culture, and that culture is now at its height, with a yahoo southern president standing tall for it. In their gross sentimentality, these yahoos can't tell the difference between an entropy sink and "country livin'."
      I cringe to imagine what will happen down there on the shady slope of the global oil production story. Take away the cheap oil and the NASCAR folks of the Southern USA are going to be a very desperate bunch, desperately angry, too, at having lost their 'entitlements' to air-kooling, big hair, and the mighty roar of their engines. Since a love of violence is also an adjunct of the NASCAR religion, they will probably be too busy fighting among themselves over the table scraps of the 20th century to make life even harder for us here in the northeast.
      Some notes on the now-stale story of Janet Jackson at the superbowl. This nation of puritans was scandalized at the sight of Janet's tit, but I suppose they would have been comfortable with the spectacle of mimed ass-fucking that preceded it, had not the tit itself been flashed. Also, if there are any psychologists out there among readers, I would like to know why rap performers (e.g. Nelly) cannot seem to keep their hands off their dicks while performing. What's your theory?
      My theory is that the "consumer" culture of our nation has been virtually taken over by pornography. Sex is the last remaining resource after all other currency has been squandered. People with nothing can still enjoy sex. The average American adult is now in hock $8,000 in credit card debt. We're at the tipping point where Americans can't buy any more stuff, and even stand to lose the stuff they've foolishly acquired by false pretenses. So in order to keep the "consumption" racket going, the sex that has always been latent in advertising is now blatant in the way that pornography is blatant. This is the kind of nation we have become.

February 4, 2004
      And so now the presumed Democratic front runner, John Kerry, is morphing into the presumed nominee. But this odor of presumption, it seems to me, is what John Kerry has emanated since his prep school days, when he apparently first started thinking of himself as presidential material. I have to wonder what his fate would be had he been born with the body and voice of Dennis Kucinich.
      And this is what bothers me about Kerry: he seems all height and stentorian timbre and little else. He's a schematic diagram of what a candidate ought to be, not a real candidate. He's succeeded over the past month mainly by not saying anything substantial. This is so painfully obvious because, beyond his physical stature and bassoon-like voice, he doesn't even seem to have anything you could call style. He impresses me as an empty vessel in LL Bean casuals.
      Yet the dark mood of the Democratic voters in these primaries demands somebody 'electable' (read: 'not a nut.') I don't really believe that the 'Dean Scream' undid Howard, at least not in itself. It only emphasized a different tactical catastrophe: that he had finished so poorly in the Iowa caucauses themselves after being annointed by Al Gore, a bunch of big labor unions, plus Time and Newsweek. I think the reason he lost was that his 'message,' his bundle of issues and ideas, weren't quite galvanizing enough. Most of all, the media and Dean's own supporters might have misjudged the public's feelings about the Iraq War. Despite all the WMD flim-flam stories, even a lot of Democrats believed that the war was necessary for a variety of reasons, and that being against the war just wasn't enough to prod them to vote for Dean. In addition, he might not have been telegenic enough, so John Kerry won the Abe-Lincoln-look-a-like contest. Kerry is the Democrats cartoon Lincoln. Maybe that's what a cartoon republic deserves.
     I grant it is even possible that Kerry can beat George W. Bush in November. The so-called economy (really a cheap loan and mortgage generating machine based on hallucinated money) could whirl down the drain any moment, and the job loss situation is becoming a veritable bloodbath. Even an empty suit could win citing the economic carnage that has already occurred.
     But none of the Democrats, Dean included, are addressing the truly Big Issues facing this nation: how we are going to live in post cheap oil world; how to begin the awful and tremendous process of re-forming (literally) the way we do agriculture, trade, and manufacturing; how we are going to deal with the dysfunction and huge economic losses represented by the futureless infrastructures of suburbia; and how we are going to rebuild communities shattered by corporate venality and the loss of social-and-occupational niches.
     None of the candidates will go near these issues because they're too scary. The dwellers in suburbia (more than half the public) doesn't want to hear that their chief investment is a swindle and that their lifestyle choice has no future. The house-builders certainly don't want to hear that. Nor do the car dealers. (Note, when Eisenhower won the 1952 election, Adlai Stevenson sagely quipped, "The New Dealers have been replaced by the car dealers.")
      The public doesn't believe that the cheap oil fiesta is actually coming to an end (they've supposedly heard it too many times). The public is utterly complicit in the predicament in which they find themselves. The public wanted the drive-in utopia and the public is stuck with it. And the public has been using the racket of destructive and futureless suburban development as the engine of the economy for more than a decade, and they like it that way -- until the moment comes when there are no vocational niches left to occupy and the whole country finds itself up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up.
      That's really where we're at, and the truth would only provoke an extravaganza of finger-pointing and righteousness that would make the Vietnam era look like the golden age. Whoever gets elected or reelected is going to preside over a king-hell clusterfuck of economic destruction and social upheaval. Who knows what it might bring out in a Kerry. Or a Bush.

January 22 2004
       The "Dean Scream!" It's everywhere.
       Howard sure was bizarrely exuberant the night of his third-place finish in Iowa. Perhaps he was celebrating his return to underdog status -- arguably a valuable asset. I'm convinced that the candidate had knocked back a few drinks that night -- the tension must have been out of this world, and it was, after all, around ten o'clock -- and what we saw, I think, was a guy with half-a-load on (maybe even more than half a load) blowing off a lot of steam. I kind of wonder, though, if Howard is going to survive that moment. (No doubt Karl Rove had his video recorder on for it.)
      Especially with John Edwards looking in comparison like Jesus in his post-caucus appearance. I mean it, Edwards has perfected the Jesus hand gesture -- arms spread, both hands out and open, like on a zillion plastic figurines all over the world. I wonder if this is something they teach you in law school (Courtroom Conduct 202, "Working the Jury"). Anyway, Edwards comes off as slick and calm and composed. He even looks pretty darn smart. I wonder if he's not the Seabiscuit here.
     Then there is the winner in Iowa. John Kerry. He had given me the willies for a long time. Last night, I had drinks with a journalist friend whose wife had been a speechwriter for an earlier Kerry senate race against Massachussetts governor Bill Weld. My friend said his wife came to deeply dislike Kerry and eventually concluded that he was an utterly empty suit. This captures my feeling about him. He seems grandiose and insubstantial.
     Now we move onto New Hampshire which I imagine will be Joe Lieberman's exit cue. Though he is my Hebrew homie, I just don't like the guy very much. Maybe its the sound of his voice: a low-pitched whine, that makes me cringe. There are a lot more Jewish guys out there who are cooler and smart, too. I know because I grew up with a lot of them. By comparison, Joe is a sort of schlemiel.
     I expect Dennis Kucinich will hang in there even after another drubbing in New Hampshire because he knows he ain't gonna win and he's in there to get his points across -- and some of them are good ones.
     This past week, I detect the first genuine stirrings of vocal discontent among the middle-middle class. The outsourcings have now become outrageous and a lot of fucked-over white-collar citizens are beginning to publicize their discontent with our suicidal global giveaway economy. I haven't seen any of the major candidates really pick up the ball on that. It's tied to Bush's immigration policy proposals insofar that it is clear the current White House gang is determined to sell out labor at all levels of society. But do the Democrats have the courage to get behind a coherent strong borders policy? I don't see any sign of that. They're afraid of being branded as "racists."
      The Republican right ain't so happy with Bush's immigration proposals either. Last night, the wicked Tom Delay (R-Texas) actually made an interesting point on CNN. He said any "guest labor" coming into the US "should apply for a visa from their country of origin" -- not after jumping the Rio Grande -- and that they should not be permitted to bring their families. I grant you, generally Delay is a dangerous right-wing jerk-off, but this was actually an intelligent policy idea compared to what Bush is selling.

January 12, 2004
      With the United States facing a permanent natural gas shortfall and a global oil crunch, and with no other means to run the hyper-turbo-warehouse-on-wheels WalMart economy that we have allowed to insidiously evolve around us, it is astounding that President Bush now wants to re-start the space exploration program, to send men back to the moon and beyond. Nothing could be more emblematic of yesterday's tomorrow. Instead we need to prepare for the real tomorrow.
      Here is a list of things that America needs much more than a reenactment of our bygone exploits in space.
      -- An up-to-date and comprehensive passenger rail system.
      -- Reconstruction of interurban light rail lines connecting smaller towns to larger cities.
      -- A single-payer national health care system.
      -- Many thousands of new, smaller schools to replace the gigantic suburban factory schools and decrepitating inner city factory schools.
      -- Two divisions of the Army deployed to secure our border with Mexico.
      -- A comprehensive agricultural reform program including support for local, small-scale farming, local value-added production of farm products, community gardens, and agricultural education.
      -- A federal department of de-suburbanization to help states and counties cope with the enormous problems we will soon face with our misallocated resources.

January 9, 2004
      If CNN is any indication of the nation's mood, then George W. Bush has made a spectacular blunder with his cynical policy initiative to patriate millions of illegal aliens under the guise of "immigration reform." Not only did he fail to fool most of the public about the true purpose of this amnesty-in-disguise program, but he also seems to have finally roused another previously silent, sleepwalking group of fucked-over citizens, the recently outsourced white-collar professionals whose jobs have hemorrhaged to India, Ireland, and other nations whose citizens can speak English pretty well and are willing to work for a fraction of what Americans used to get.
     The past two nights, Lou Dobbs of CNN, usually mild-tempered and self-possessed, was nearly beside himself with amazed fury as he interviewed the varied shills and apologists in government who seek to privatize the profits and socialize the costs of illegal immigration. He couldn't fucking believe what they were telling him: e.g. that millionsof Mexicans were needed here to do jobs that Americans won't do. Anybody notice how many Mexican sheetrockers have been flooding into the Carolinas to finish off the McHouses that Americans are going into terminal debt to buy? A lot of Americans would gladly work to hang sheetrock, but they would expect decent wages consistent with what other specialists get paid in the building trades, including some basic health insurance. The Mexican sheetrockers will work for a fraction of that, off the books, and when they get sick, they go to the emergency room of the local hospital and the cost of doctoring them is passed on to someone like me with $3000-deductable health insurance who ends up getting obscenely overcharged by my hospital for the fifteen-minute use of a minor surgery room for a colonoscopy. All right, I rant a bit.
       Unfortunately, the Democrats show no signs of picking up on the issue and running with it in the right direction. They do not want to enforce the existing immigration laws or protect our borders. In fact, most of the Democrats talk as if the idea of a border amounted to an act of political oppression. (Note, for example, the policy of National Public Radio to refer to illegal aliens as "undocumented workers." This semantic twist makes it appear as though some mere bureaucratic error distinguishes non-citizens from citizens. In fact, under the US immigration statutes, the official term is illegal aliens).
       It will be interesting to see if the furor persists, or if the public falls back into its accustomed narcoleptic stupor. Personally, I think something has started with this that isn't going to die down and go away, especially the collateral issue of the outsourcing of American employment. Near the end of one broadcast, Lou Dobbs scrolled down the screen a roster of US corporations who had recently sent thousands upon thousands of good professional jobs overseas. Dobbs ruefully remarked that it seemed as though every major corporation in the country had sent its whole accounting department or its programming department to another country. He was aghast with what his researchers had come up with. The corporations have been doing this stealthily like children stealing from Daddy's coin jug thinking that nobody will ever notice. Except now the jar is empty and Dad is out of a job, and he could use seven dollars in quarters to buy enough gas to drive thirty miles to interview for a job in a telemarketing boiler room that pays one-quarter of what he used to get in the accounting department of Acme Enterprises.
       These issues -- illegal immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs -- are intertwined, and President Bush (and his Rasputin, Karl Rove) may have ventured across a dangerous political border of their own in selling out their own citizens for the benefit of obscenely overpaid corporate executives. I hope the public will now take a closer look at the incumbant's own documentation.

January 6, 2004
     It fascinates me to see so many educated people, technocrats, social progressives, and political thinkers struggle with the idea of how we are going to run transportation in the future. The general theme is that we're going to continue the current pattern, only with different fuels and different engines.
      Yesterday I ran into a friend at Kinkos. She and her husband have a small land-use planning firm here in Saratoga. She was there xeroxing plans for mitigating a suburban development proposal outside of Rochester. She happened to mention that her husband had just bought a 'hybrid' car, and wasn't this a wonderful progressive choice. Another fellow has been corresponding with me by e-mail about his plan to -- as I understand it -- erect some new kind of monorail system all over the US. Yet another guy whose paper I was just reading called for "huge investments in new transportation technologies."
     I say this stuff fascinates me because it overlooks the most obvious outcome of the global oil clusterfuck to come: the future will not be about how to go places in a machine, it will be about staying where you are.
     So many people, including a lot of intelligent people who ought to know better, seem to think that we're going to find new and innovative ways to keep running what we are running and going where we're going. I don't think it is going to happen that way. I think the future is going to be much more about living locally. We'll discover after the fact that the massive whir of cheap long-distance transport that permitted everything from 12,000-mile vacations to 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines was made possible by cheap oil and that there is, in fact, no substitute.
      I don't say these things to be mean or to set myself apart, but because it would be better if my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens prepared themselves for the real future rather than a delusional continuation of what they are used to.

December 22, 2003
      Frank Capra's 1946 movie It's a Wonderful Life has become the totemic American Christmas story over the last couple of decades. It was a box-office flop when it came out, but constant holiday-time TV exposure since then turned it into the classic it has now become. It has replaced Dicken's A Christmas Carol with an updated and more accessible American mythology. But a close examination shows that it contains strange, paradoxical, and disturbing messages for our time.
      The movie was made just after our nation's triumphal victory over manifest evil in World War Two, but it carries a heavy undertone of the Great Depression that preceeded the war. Indeed the story takes place from early in the 20th century to the middle of it and, in a way, can be viewed as a comprehensive social history of America's industrial high tide.
      To greatly simplify it, the story concerns the denizens of Bedford Falls, New York, a provincial main street town, and one George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), who grows up to preside over a little Savings & Loan Association (a kind of bank that no longer exists thanks to the scandals of the 1980s). Over the years, George struggles with his family-owned bank, tries to help his neighbors, raises a family with wife Mary (Donna Reed), and eventually endures a great personal crisis of conscience and self-worth, from which he is rescued by an angel. In the end, the world is made right and Christmas carols ring out as the credits roll.
       Oddly, George Bailey's greatest accomplishment in the movie is shown to be the development of Bedford Falls' first suburb, Bailey Park, with a scene of much patriotic hoopla when the first unit is sold to the owner of a local restaurant, Mr. Martini, an immigrant. I say odd because of how innocently clueless our collective imagination was about the consequences of that seemingly benign transaction. Like vicious nano-bots, the little units of suburban America metastisized over the following fifty years to consume and defeat all the small towns like Bedford Falls in America, and all the rich local social and economic networks that the movie celebrates, including George's bank and Mr. Martini's family-owned restaurant.
      Along similar lines is the sequence in which George Bailey is shown, by the angel who saves him from a suicide attempt, how Bedford Falls would have turned out if George had never been born. The town is renamed Pottersville, after the movie's villain, a greedy rival banker played by Lionel Barrymore. How striking and odd, though, what a wonderful town Pottersville actually appears to be, compared to the real horror of what happened to American towns in the late 20th century. In fact, Pottersville looks like the kind of tourist town that demoralized suburbanites now flock to for country weekends. Standing on Pottersville's lively Main Street, George sees the sidewalks full of people. Some of them are carousing drunks. Some of the businesses are gin-mills, with hints of prostitution and all the other usual quaint human vices of an earlier day (including many that are now part of mainstream American culture). But the catch is that Pottersville is actually portrayed as a town brimming with life and activity! Only the content is considered bad -- too many gin mills and loose women, not enough soda fountains. As we really know, the many Bedford Falls of our nation have uniformly become hollowed-out ghost towns with no life and no activity. And the George Baileys of our world went on to become the WalMart moguls and real estate tycoons who sold out their towns and ultimately destroyed them.
      So, it really provokes me to wonder what Americans are thinking when they see this beautifully-crafted but deeply paradoxical movie. Do we notice what it is we really have lost? And how insidious the process was?

December 16, 2003,
     Now that Saddam Hussein is cooling his heels in a locked and padded room somewhere, the hysteria has gone up among my fellow registered Democrats who can't really get a grip on a coherent anti-war message.
     The political progressives keep yelling their mantra that No Weapons of Mass Destruction Were Found in Iraq as if that actually proves anything. To me it seems self-evidently shallow. The fact that none were found cannot mean that we had no reason to go in and search for them in the first place. There was legitimate cause for concern that Saddam Hussein, a most unreliable fellow, possessed fissionable material and bio-weapons agents, anthrax, smallpox, et cetera, and the UN inspections were sufficiently inadequate so that Saddam could run a shell game around the UN team indefinitely.
       After US forces went in on the ground, there was always a possibility that WMDs would not be found. Saddam Hussein had many months to off-load any suspicious material somewhere else, including another country, or even sell it to freelance Jihadistas. Perhaps he never had any WMDs. In any case, we didn't know, and it was an important enough threat to American security to find out one way or the other, which we had to do live and in person on the ground. The progressives now yammering seem to think that in 2003 an impregnable America was not vulnerable to the malice of foreigners, no matter what kind of arsenal they might have. This seems transparently stupid in light of September 11, 2001.
     So the US armed forces did go in and we have searched Iraq and we can now feel reasonably secure that there are no WMDs there, and certainly none under the control of a rogue such as Saddam Hussein, now deposed and in captivity.
     There were other reasons to invade Iraq just as compelling as the WMD concern. As a tactical matter, it was necessary to divide in half an Islamic world becoming dangerously pugnacious and united against America. The Iraq invasion accomplished that, with Iran, Pakistan, the former Soviet states, and Indonesia on one side, and Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Lybia, and Algeria on the other side -- and a major US military police station now in the middle. Strategically this was necessary to prevent the entire Islamic world from shutting down America's oil imports. It could easily have happened. Our access could still be interrupted or compromised, but is not as likely to be completely shut down overnight. Our presence in Iraq now is a caution against forces who might seek to make Saudi Arabia a more unstable place, or try to take it over. We are close by, and we will kick their asses if they try.
      Now I know for a fact that my fellow Democrats here in upstate New York are fiercely dependent on their Suburu wagons and Toyota Landcruisers. This behavior is now second nature here, just like everywhere else in America (except, perhaps, Macinac Island, Michigan). I wonder, do my neighbors ever ask themselves where the gasoline comes from? And under what terms we get it? And what assures that we continue to get it, reliably, at low prices?  I wonder how rapidly my fellow registered Democrats would transform themselves into hawks if they had to wait on a gas line for two and half hours and the price shot up to $3.55 a gallon. I daresay even Dennis Kucinich depends on a car and would react with righteous indignation if he had to wait on line and pay more. I've got news for you: the Iraq invasion and occupation is part of the price we are all paying to continue to get reliable supplies of cheap gasoline so we can all drive to the WalMart and buy products (on credit cards) made by 40-cent-an-hour Chinese factory slaves. Unless, you're ready to give up that behavior and make some serious changes in your mode of living, then I don't think you have a legitimate complaint about our Iraq adventure.
      Of course, I'm for drastically reforming the American way of life, at least the aspect of it that is based on extreme oil dependency, excessive motoring, the exploitation of foreign workers, the destruction of local communities, and irresponsible financial behavior, both individual and collective.
      So I'd ask my fellow registered Democrats to drop the WMD mantra. It makes you look stupid and craven. Find some other angle for understanding our predicament. Support local economies against WalMart, join the New Urbanist movement in favor of traditional towns, fight to reform zoning codes that promote suburban sprawl in your locality. Buy a distressed property in an existing town and fix it up. Help support public transit. Write a letter to your congressman insisting on a revived US passenger rail network. There's a lot you can do that is not stupid and pointless.
      

December 9, 2003,    
Americans mortgage their houses and run up credit card bills so they can buy Chinese-made goods and make believe that they are wealthy; while the Chinese make believe that they can grow an economy by selling things to people who can't pay for them.
                                               -- Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning

    The end-of-year stock market boomlet is really an amazing perversity considering that the dollar is plummeting against the Euro (to $1.30 so far this week) which is to say the most meaningful currency in the world not itself pegged to the dollar. Who's buying this instant asset inflation? How stupid, desperate, or dishonest are American finance professionals?
    One thing for sure, the Federal Reserve is fucked (and by extension, all of us). Without raising interest rates why would any foreign nationals continue to buy American debt, in particular US Treasury bonds (and support the ongoing trade deficit)? The interest rate on the British pound is even higher right now. But then, if the Fed raises interest rates to keep moving those treasuries, what happens to all those recent purchasers of McHouses with adjustable mortgages? What happens is: they're fucked too. Their monthly payments on everything from the McMortgage to their heroic credit card debt goes up, up, and away. And since the US economy is based on the the creation and accessorizing of suburban sprawl, what then happens to the so-called economy? It gets fucked and so do we.
     But anyone seeking to understand the extraordinary cluelessness of the educated elite in this country need look no further than the the New York Times, our newspaper of record. Last Sunday, a pitiful story ran in the front news section about the little town of Bryan, Ohio, where the town's leading company, Ohio Art, which had produced the childrens' Etch-a-Sketch toy in Bryan for forty years, shut its factory. The mayor had an Etch-a-Sketch pictured on his calling card. Every year, a giant Etch-a-Sketch was set up in front of City Hall as part of the Christmas display. This year, Ohio Art moved more than a hundred manufacturing jobs to China, where workers are paid 24 cents an hour and compelled to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week without overtime. Chinese factory workers don't have much leverage. There's no shortage of labor there, and the country is still essentially a police state, despite the 'new economy' patina.
      In the same issue of the Sunday New York Times, in the Week in Review section, was a front-page story titled "Is WalMart good for America?" The whole question was idiotically reduced to the question of pricing and market share vis-a-vis other chains. No mention was made of the fantastic destruction of middle-class social capital and of local community civic infrastructure by the onslaught of predatory Big Box swarm organisms the past 30 years. No mention was made of the desolation of American towns, or the loss of occupational niches, or social roles. Or of the stupendous massacre of the American landscape. No mention was made of foreign labor conditions that Americans would never tolerate in our own country. And the conclusion of the article seemed to be that whatever the unmentioned pernicious externalities might be, Americans probably are better off being able to buy cheap hair dryers. Better off than what?
      I have to conclude that the American elite universities that provide the graduates hired by the New York Times are unable to teach their students how to think anymore.

November 25, 2003

Guest Column: Colonialism & Iraq
By Daniel G. Jennings

     One of the major criticisms that the leftists like to level against American efforts in Iraq and by inference in Afghanistan is that these activities constitute "colonialism" and "racism." I myself have been accused of believing in the nonsense of Western cultural superiority and the White Man's burden by anti-war left-wingers. These allegations are, of course, nonsense because racially-based colonialism is a thing of history. The American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute something new and altogether different.
     The colonialism practiced by the British, French and other European empires in the 19th and 20th centuries was based upon the ideas that Western Europeans were culturally, racially and morally superior to non-Europeans. The American intervention and nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan are based upon the idea that the Afghans and Iraqis are capable of the same kind of democratic government and modern society as Americans Europeans. In other words, that the Iraqis and Afghans are equal to the Americans and Europeans. Yet although it is morally preferable to the old colonialism (at least by modern standards) this new colonialism can be just as destructive as a brief glance at history shows.
     The problem with the old European colonial empires was that they placed little or no faith in the non-white subjects under their rule. They believed that the Africans, Indians etc. were incapable of self-government or of creating a modern society. This meant that education, government administration, administration of the legal system, business, engineering, military command and other important functions were left purely in European hands. When the Europeans pulled out and went home most of the former colonies quickly fell into chaos because there were no natives capable of running the governmental and technological infrastructure needed to support a modern society.
     The problem with the new American colonial empire is that it places too much faith in the natives. We American apparently believe that all the Iraqi, Vietnamese, or Afghan needs is a few books on government and some freedom of action to build a modern society. Worse, we believe that native elites often composed of ignorant gangsters or feudal thugs are capable of creating a modern civilization when they are not. Thus Americans get shocked when Haiti falls into chaos or South Vietnam falls to Communist armies the moment American soldiers leave. The danger is that Americans will believe that one native who wears a nice suit and can quote John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln can solve his nation's problems.
     The leftists who rail against colonialism and racism are fighting a dead enemy. The ideologies upon which the old colonialism was based -- white superiority, European superiority, and racism -- are as discredited and as dead as Communism. A revival of traditional colonialism is about as likely as a resurrection of absolute monarchy.
It must be pointed out here that the leftists who rant and rave about the imaginary American colonialism are some of the most outspoken defenders of a vicious new brand of home-grown colonialism that has enslaved much of the developing world. When the European colonial empires collapsed (more because of the exhaustion of their money and resources in World War II than a rejection of exploitation on moral grounds) power in their former possessions fell into the hands of two groups. First local intellectual elites usually a small minority of college educated natives who had taken the beliefs of Western Marxist-Leninists to heart, and secondly various gangster elements often composed of the remains of the colonial armies or anti-colonial guerrilla forces.
     Like the pigs in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" who acted just like they farmer they had overthrown, these post colonial elites live and act much like the colonialists did. Like the colonialists they treat the average people of their countries as a resource to be exploited, view the natural resources of their nations as commodities to be sold for quick cash, and regard dissent as an act of treason to be punished by any means possible. We've seen this pattern repeated in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia in particular), Africa (Robert Mugwabe in Zimbabwe), Vietnam, Indonesia, the former Soviet Union and even Cuba.
    The western media have been shocked by the decision of the people of the nation of Georgia to drive out their enlightened leader Edward Schevernaze (once Gorbachev's foreign minister). Schevernaze, a charlatan in a nice suit, had presided over a vicious regime of gangsterism and corruption. Western intellectuals remembering his role in Gorbachev's enlightened glasnost regime lionized Schevernaze. Now they are shocked that he has been driven out by the Georgian people.
      Yes there is a danger of colonialism in Iraq and Afghanistan but it isn't the revival of the old fashioned racist colonialism that is the problem. It is the danger of the imposition of the newfangled colonialism; the rule by proxy through smooth operators in fancy suits and two bit gangsters in comic opera uniforms, that has devastated so many other countries.  The US invented colonialism-by-proxy in the Phillippines and Latin America, for, unlike their European cousins, Americans prefer to rule by proxy and manipulation rather than direct administration. The leftists who are demanding immediate sovereignty for Iraq are sadly enough dooming that nation to the very thing they are trying to fight: colonialism.

November 12, 2003
      The condition of Midwestern cities never fails to astound me. This time, an endowed lecture by the Johnson's Wax company took me to Racine, Wisconsin, about 20 miles south of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan. The town looked like a provincial Soviet backwater as imagined by cartoonist R. Crumb. Outside of a miniscule historic district where a few grand old 19th century mansions stood on a bluff above the lakeshore, there was hardly a single object or building in the town that was not aggressively hidious. The newest buildings were among the worst.
       My hotel was a case in point. The six year old Radisson had been built down by the lakeshore on filled land next to a marina. It was tucked behind a gigantic parking structure and the street approach to the main entrance took you right past the hotel dumpster and an electric company switching box the size of an SUV. The hotel itself was a jive-plastic packing crate in the spirit of a hypertrophied McMansion, complete with vinyl siding. To get to the hotel restaurant from the lobby, you literally had to pass through the laundry room annex. And once inside the restaurant, to get from the dining room to the bar you had to go through the waiter's pantry. I'm not kidding. This is how things are done in the Midwest.
      The landscape itself, apart from the grandeur of the lake, is rather flat, bleak and featureless. But there was a tiny remnant of the old farming economy and its obsolete accessories visible around the outskirts, and you tell from seeing the old farms that the problem out there was not the landscape. The problem is the things that the locals have built there throughout the 20th century and particularly after World War Two. I think the following explanation works:
     After the war, the US economy was the only advanced industrial one in the world that was wholly intact and financially solvent. Europe was a mess. Germany was flattened. Even the victors, Britain and France, were virtually bankrupt. And Russia, of course, was on a socioeconomic planet of its own (not a very nice one). America's industrial base was all there, humming away, ready to be reprogrammed from munitions, bombers, and tanks to consumer goods. This was promptly accomplished and places like Racine, Wisconsin, benefited hugely. We could sell anything we made to the other people of the world and even lend them money to buy it.
      In particular, the American working class benefited. The 1950s and 60s saw factory workers rise from their former lumpenprole status to an amazing level of middle class prosperity, and in vast numbers. Their reward for winning the war was the American Dream of a single family house in the suburbs and as many cars as they could ever want. Cheap gasoline sealed the deal. So, what you see in a place like Racine is a landscape filled with little industrial box dwellings for a class of people who had no previous experience with things valued by any criteria besides industrial efficiency, and the things they built for themselves show it. They had a positive genius for ugly houses and they were diabolically inventive in finding endless variations for expressing industrial efficiency.
      As the 1970s and 80s came along, they further accessorized their world with all the hyper-car-oriented commercial infrastucture intended to replace their existing downtown -- the strip malls, the fry-pits, the stand-alone mega-stores, and all the other entropic architectural garbage of the time. The old center of town was left to rot. It was never very nice to begin with by world standards but they managed to make it downright pitiful. Then in the 1990s, with globalization and the final surge to the global oil production peak, Racine began to shrivel and sink from the orgy of industrial outsourcing.
      The Johnson company still remains. They've dominated the town the way the Bolsheviks dominated Bellarus for generations. They have a company headquarters designed by the great Midwestern hater of cities, Frank Lloyd Wright, and naturally it was done in the form of a suburban "campus," which is to say a development pattern that will not have much of a future. It's no worse than any other suburban office "complex" but it isn't any better either. Otherwise, the Johnson's mark on the city is remarkably paltry. They built a new downtown Main Street building recently -- designed by the "green building" guru Bill McDonough, a green glass and steel monstrosity that is no doubt highly energy efficient (efficiency once again exalted beyond all other values). But it appears to not contain any ground floor retail. The locals insisted there was a store and a restaurant inside, but there was no signage to indicate it -- perhaps signage is too vulgar for the "green" spirit.
      I gave my lecture on civic design in an auditorium that had been the Johnson's Wax pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair -- and which was afterward taken apart and shipped back to company headquarters. It looked like one of the flying saucers from the old science fiction flick The Day the Earth Stood Still. The audience was mostly middle-aged and older. I suppose they were the very people who acquiesced in the destruction of their town. I was hard on them. They were suffering, like other people all over the country, from living in punishing and hideous environments. But it was my sad duty to tell them that they were entirely responsible for creating them, that it was their own low standards and incapicity to value anything beyond efficiency that had left Racine in its current miserable condition.
      After my talk, a middle-aged guy came up to argue with me that we will never in the conceivable future live without the benefit of automobiles, and generally on the same mass basis as today. He was aflame with hopes for the fuel cell and the promised hydrogen economy. I politely disagreed with him but he was one of these pests who turn up at a lecture who just want to harrass you like a mad dog.
     I feel bad about places like Racine and the people who live there. They are completely unprepared for the future. They seem to believe, with the faith of little children, that the world as we know it today will go on forever. A tragic view of the human condition is beyond their powers to imagine -- and that is precisely what will cause things to end tragically for them.