Oil Prices Will Eventually Change Everything Drastically
Mar 9th, 2010 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Politics
I was plying the interstate highways of New England this weekend — there is no sane way to get from Albany, New York, to the vicinity of Middletown, Connecticut, by public transit — marveling at the vistas of normality all around me: the freeway lanes with their orderly streams of happy motorists, the chain stores floating like islands on the gray undulating landscape, the corporate towers of Springfield, Mass, and then Hartford, gleaming in the persistent pre-spring sunshine, as though they physically represented the wished-for dynamism of economies in recovery. “I see dead people…” said the kid in that horror movie. I see dying ways of life.
There was no denying the spectacular weather for us long-suffering northeasterners. A week ago, it was like living in a banana daiquiri around here. Now, it was sixty-two degrees in East Haddam, CT, along a very beautiful stretch of the Connecticut River somehow miraculously unmarred by the usual mutilations of industry or recreation. On a few hillsides facing south, daffodils were already up with blossom heads ready to pop. The mind could go two ways: into the past, when wooden sailing craft were built in yards along the river; or into the future, when it would be easy to imagine wooden sailing craft being built there again, only twenty miles or so from the great sheltered mini-sea of Long Island Sound.
Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line.
It had been one of those eventless weeks when the world pretended to be a settled place. The collapse of Greece seemed like little more than a passing case of geo-financial heartburn. The 36,000-odd newly-unemployed were spun magically into a feel-good story for public consumption, and the stock markets ratified it by levitating over a hundred points. The news media was preoccupied with the Great Question of whether the first woman film director would win a prize, thus settling all accounts in the age-old gender war, and the health care reform bill lumbered around the congressional offices like a zombie in search of a silver bullet that might send it back to the comforts of the tomb.
All in all, it was the sort of quiescent string of days that makes someone like me nervous. I can’t help imagining what it was like in the spring of 1860, for instance, when so many terrible questions of polity hung over the country, and hundreds of thousands of young men still walked behind their plows or stood at their counting desks or turned their wrenches in the exciting new industries — not knowing that destiny was busy preparing a ditch somewhere to receive their shattered corpses in places as-yet-unknown called Spotsylvania, Shiloh, and Cold Harbor. Or else my mind projects to the spring of 1939, when men dressed in neckties and hats sat in a ballpark watching Joe DiMaggio and Charlie Keller play “pepper” in the pregame sunshine, and nobody much thought about the coming beaches of Normandy and the canebrakes of the Solomon Islands.
Everything we know about it seems to indicate that human beings happily go along with the program — whatever the program is — until all of a sudden they can’t, and then they don’t. It’s like the quote oft-repeated these days (because it’s so apt for these times) by surly old Ernest Hemingway about how the man in a story went broke: slowly, and then all at once. In the background of last week’s reassuring torpor, one ominous little signal flashed perhaps dimly in all that sunshine: the price of oil broke above $81-a-barrel. Of course in that range it becomes impossible for the staggering monster of our so-called “consumer” economy to enter the much-wished-for nirvana of “recovery” — where the orgies of spending on houses and cars and electronic entertainment machines will resume like the force of nature it is presumed to be. Over $80-a-barrel and we’re in the zone where what’s left of this economy cracks and crumbles a little bit more each day, lurching forward to that moment when something life-changing occurs all at once.
I gave a talk down in Connecticut to a roomful of people who are still pretty much preoccupied with such questions as how to fight the landing of the next WalMart UFO, or how best to entice tourists to purchase objets-d’art, or serve up weekend entertainments along with fine dining and accommodations. Meanwhile, I’m thinking: how many of you might be grubbing around the woods six months from now for enough acorns and mushrooms to make something resembling soup…? It’s an extreme fantasy, I know, but it dogs me. Elsewhere in this big nation, I imagine a laid-off engineer — a genial, capable fellow, once valued by his former employer — tinkering in his Ohio basement with a device designed to blow up the headquarters of the health insurance company that has just denied his wife treatment for cancer of some organ or other. Or my mind ventures into the rank “function room” of a Holiday Inn outside Indianapolis, where Tea Party recruits meet over chicken nuggets to discuss the New World Order, and the Bilderberg conspiracy, and the suspicious numbers of Jews in the bonus-padded upper echelons of the Wall Street banks, and what might be done about that.
On the trip back to upstate New York, my eyes couldn’t fix on anything in the landscape that seemed even remotely permanent. Even the massiveness of all that steel and concrete deployed in everything from the glass towers to the highway toll booths seemed insubstantial. I could easily envisage the Mass Pike empty of cars with mulleins and sumacs popping through fissures in the pavement, and sheets of aluminum on the vacant Big Box stores flapping rhythmically in the wind, and something entirely new going on in the hills and valleys along the way, where people labored to bring forth new life.
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
Whiskey & Gunpowder
March 9, 2010
James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler is perhaps best known for The Long Emergency, which predicted the financial meltdown and the implications of the peak oil problem. The Geography of Nowhere , about the fiasco of suburbia, is a campus cult classic among the architecture and urban planning students. It was followed by a sequel, Home From Nowhere and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition . Mr. Kunstler has also authored 10 novels including World Made By Hand, a story set in America's post-oil future. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly.
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Come on up to Maine, the grass will be peeking up through the cracks in the potholed dying roads soon,
While the legislature scrambles to increase taxes to make up for the huge shortfalls in revenue.
We drove to Parris island, SC to get our second Marine, a daughter, back for 10 days. How do you think we wonder about the future and the brain trust in government?
What a beautiful land we have. The country is more beautiful than any city. Check out rural Pennsylvania sometime, just avoid the turnpikes. The Hillbillies there are the best this side of Virginia.
On Kitco yesterday, I read a senior financial advisor spouting rookie survivor/prepper advise .
I guess the future is so bright we all need shades.
As always, Mr. Kunstler’s opinion of his fellow men is uplifting.
For thirty years I have restored old wood burning ranges for daily use in the home. It was usually for nostalgia or occasional use. No more. I am seeing customers that are almost universally fearful of the US government and preparing for a very unsettled future. They are preparing for a time without fuel, or money, or outside help. there are lots more of these folks than you would think and they are everywhere
Mr. Kunstler’s engaging if dark prose has followed his 30+ year thoughtful investigation of social choices skillfully engineered by economic interests in the US (and globally). His voice is among a handfull of Casandras who try to be careful in supporting their assertions with reasoned “chain of causation” descriptions. What sets them apart from those who would just use folk’s fears to direct their hysteria at choice targets, is that their rationales provide insights with the potential for staged response to events – that is empowereing.
They (The Powers That Be) don’t want problems solved. If they solved the problems, they couldn’t campaing for solutions.
If you want a solution, here is mine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv2lslMy-L8
Dear William: You have clearly put a great deal of effort into designing a solution, and you presented it very well. Unfortunately, it is my idea of an unmitigated hell, being stuffed into a hive and light-railroaded to business locations. True, you allowed for nuts like me who can’t stand cities even if we would be required to farm or ranch to justify our antisocial behavior. I can only suppose that you do not have children, for just one simple problem. This is not 1948 and mothers do not have the luxury of strolling to public parks wearing high heels, dresses, and hats, to watch their children play before going to their perfectly-kept apartments so that dinner is ready when the sole breadwinner gets off his light rail ride. Unless such a system were designed and built in one fell–very fell–swoop, the number of separate tracks would grow exponentially…and not everyone wants to shop in the same stores. My dairy goats have their choice of being in the barn or in their smaller goat house close to me. When the weather is nice they frequently stay outside at night. They delight in getting into the yard so that they can clamber on the wood pile and see if I can be coaxed out to play. The moral is that not even goats want to be shut up in all the time, and one of our horses goes stall-crazy if confined. I cannot imagine anything soul-destroying than being penned like Mr. Sanderson’s chickens, even if my keepers allowed me to borrow a vehicle occasionally to go for a long drive to the untouchable land. You left out a Japanese solution: rent-a-pet, perfect for those who do not have strong houses or real access to yards. Oh…my…I know you’re trying, but think of the noise, the cooking smells, life in a hotel without maid service…No, thank you.
The US cultural change required to implement William’s approach would take 50+ years; in my estimation. The question of who would own and maintain all of these massive multi-family buildings would be a significant issue. “What you don’t own, you don’t respect”. From my own background; research what happened to the “High Rise low income apartment buildings” in St Louis in the 1960′s or 70′s(?). Within 10 years they became slums and so broken down, they had to be torn down. Unfortunately, our culture does not easily change and absent a “significant” inpacting event, we will be like the frog placed in a pot of cold water and the heat turned on, he will sit in the pot until boiled to death. Our culture is dying and there are so many problems that they all cannot be effectively addressed. Any one of the major problems could bring us “down”. If you really want to be afraid, review the future population statistics. The non-muslim population is not reproducing itself whereas the muslim’s are averaging 8 kids to the non-muslim’s 2.1, so they are going to be the major cultural group before 2050.
O.K. Smartass, At what point did I say EVERYONE had to live in Highrises?
Oh, and what is your solution? Hmmmm?
Given your hostility, no wonder you are so anti-social.
And again, do you have a better idea?
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
Instead of complaining about someone else’s idea, come up with a better one yourself.
Asshole.
Dear William: Who could not be swayed by your eloquent defense of your goals? Such civility, such gentility, a pure appeal to logic…You did not say that everyone “has” to live in highrises; you “merely” proposed pulling down existing cities to build high rises (with what funding? How do you plan to make factories and businesses relocate to central complexes?) and return the sacred land to pristine semi-wilderness. I LIVE my solution, which is leaving others to make their own decisions and being blissfully happy raising cattle, goats, chickens, pigs, and crops. If I choose to play the piano at midnight I disturb no one; I am never obliged to listen to neighbors arguing or taking showers at five a.m. I am a homeowner’s association of one with precisely two rules: do not throw your cigarette butts down in my pastures and do not shoot anything which belongs on the place without my permission. I appreciate your urge to gaze upon wide, open vistas since I share it and I agree that any who want to should certainly have the opportunity (if they can pay for it and if it exists) to stuff themselves into people hives and leave the driving to the state. A major difference between us (other than our ideas of speech appropriate for mixed company) is that I do not regard imposing my ideas of the good life on others. Perhaps you would like the agreement Statists will give you: “Yes, of course the peasants should be crammed into tenements and not allowed to pick the flowers, but the rest of us shall have our daschas and sleighs.”
You leave ol’ Kunstler alone, now, William. He’s one more gifted but deeply conflicted Jewish-American, pretending (quite artfully) to an Olympian view of man and his condition, but crudely dismissing anyone who criticizes Israel’s policies as an anti-semite. When and if he ever has the moral courage to be as sagely objective towards the promised land as he is towards America, he’ll have catharsis, then peace, and we’ll be short an entertaining word-cobbler.
Ernie…did I ever tell you I adore you?! I’ll throw in a little thought to help Mr. Kunstler: God never said the Jews stopped being His favorite people!
I fear you have misunderstood the eloquent and exquisitely polite William. I don’t think he intended to express his opinion of James Howard; I infer he is a tiny bit annoyed with my reaction to his people pens surrounded by verdant swards of mostly untouchable land. (I, at least, watched his presentation on YouTube. All of it.) The SPAM filter ate my reply to his, and mine didn’t even contain any unladylike language. William, that is what comes of expressing yourself so imprecisely. For those of you who did not trouble yourselves to watch, he favors replacing cities with clumps of 15 tier apartment buildings, approx 2000 feet cages, connected to business and commercial plazas by light rail. Gee, just think of all the traffic accidents that might prevent…but fear not! He proposes we ride electric bicycles occasionally and on special occasions be allowed to borrow vehicles (ride-share, of course) to go look at the untouched forests. We can have our groceries delivered by Fed-Ex. “Caves of Steel.” Imagine living our whole lives crammed up around other people, never any serenity or freedom from their incessant noises, arguments, and odors. I’d rather be a hermit living in a cave…so long as I had e-mail! The problem with the mass transit, walkable cities, and vast apartment malls theories is that they fail totally to understand what Americans want, which is our own land, separate living spaces, and private transportation. We’re going to fight for those to the last ditch, and some of us will live in ditches before we submit to being stuffed permanently into cattleyards.
Ah now you know why nothing wll change,simply read the post above.Lol seems Willam must be a politician the way he attacks those who disagree,but then again its simply the mind set of the American public at large,,,,
Ah now you know why nothing can change, simply read the post above. Lol seems people always have immense appreciation for their own viewpoint and intelligence, but can’t put together a coherent comment in response to others. “Seems William must be a politician the way he attacks those who disagree, but then again its simply the mind set of the American public at large,,,,”. Omg back to 10 grade English composition with you lol stfu.
Do you suppose William took tenth grade English composition? Even in the abysmal modern day school system I can’t suppose fourth-graders are allowed to commit such expressions to paper. “Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood,” but there is much to be said for correct punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure, as well. Above all else one should strive to convey one’s message clearly. All in all, I am probably happier not knowing what William thought he was saying, and I don’t know what “STFU” means, either. Please don’t tell me if it isn’t anything you can imagine me using!
Amid all the hot language, I’d like to offer a calm thought on ‘modern English usage’ (think Fowler) concerning Mr. Kunstler’s too British (read: tosh) use of “envisage”. Fowler did his logical best to smother this nonsensical usage, but lesser educated tosh pretentiousness won out anyway. Which doesn’t make such usage correct. A visage is a face, we all know that, don’t we? And a vision is something seen. Now, if we envisage something, then we’re putting a face on it, right? So why go on using envisage when you mean envision? Ok, right, I know why.
Hi Ms. Brady Traynham! Double dose of adoration back at you, 1. For saying what I’m thinking and 2. for being able to express it with style. See you at the last bastion!
Dear Barry: Welcome to the crew. I’m a firm believer in semantics (in the sense of the right word for the job, not Korzybski). I am against being pompous and abstruse, other than for sataric purposes. What grates on me is using “decimate” to mean “inflict enormous losses upon,” far less “wiped out,” when it means one out of ten. And those who put an article before “myriad” need to realize that you cannot have “a many of stars.” There are myriad stars in the sky and myriad fishes in the sea. Period. Sloppy diction imperils thinking, and “diction” means choice of words, not accent. There, now, we feel better. Cordially, Linda
Ernie, you wretch, comes the deluge get yourself over here and join the crew, and you KNOW how much I detest being addressed as “Ms.” I am known variously as Mrs. Traynham (for formal meetings), Commissioner Traynham (as a courtesy), Linda, Mom-Mom, Stinky Mum, Madre, Miss Linda, and Aunt Linda, so you pick one of those out (or make up your own affectionate appellation, perhaps “moon of my delight, or Colonel) but don’t y’all go insultin’ respectable South’n ladies with that “Ms.” claptrap! We already have honorifics, and don’t need any liberal nonsense. Besides, “Miz” and “Mizrez” are usages found only very far in the back woods. Empress. Yeah. I could like that one. Hugs, Linda