The Elephant

October 25, 2004,
Indignant readers e-mail me regularly to say that John Kerry can't be expected to tell voters the truth about our national predicament because the public would only resent him for it. Of course, this condescending attitude assumes that the public is so childish that they hardly deserve the right to vote in the first place.

The "truth" is the proverbial elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Namely, that our suicidal addiction to easy motoring and the sick dependence on Middle East oil that it entails will soon plunge American society into an unprecedented crisis. The price of a barrel of oil has shot up by one-third since the political conventions wrapped up. That ought to, at least, be a clue that something odd is happening in the world.

That "something" is the geological, not political, fact of the global oil production peak. How to account for the public's lack of interest in it, and the candidates' lack of leadership in bringing it to their attention?

Personally, I'm allergic to conspiracy theories. The information about the global oil peak is simply too easy to get. Nobody's trying to hide it. It just doesn't register on the public. Well, here are a couple of social psychology explanations for the public's cluelessness. One is Sergey Borovik's apt term: "outside context problem." Peak oil, and its awful implications about the end of easy living, are too surreal for the public to process. Mention of the issue causes instant cognitive dissonance, or static in the brain. Suburban life and all its habits are too deeply established as normal for Americans to imagine any other way of existence. The collective investment in all the freeways, housing subdivisions, office parks, and strip malls is too massive for the public to imagine having to give up on. This failure of imagination is related to another condition identified by Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis, as the "consensus trance" -- which means that the collective agreement about what reality consists of is so powerful that it resists, even repels, any challenge to its validity. Okay, but how to explain our leaders apparent cluelessness?

It is a matter of public record that George W. Bush has been briefed more than twice by Matthew Simmons, the foremost investment banker of the oil industry, who has been campaigning tirelessly for four years to bring the facts of peak oil (and natural gas) to public attention. Bush cannot fail to know that something momentous is up, something that will completely change the terms of everyday life in America.

But his faith in technological salvation must be equal to his Christian zeal -- he is reported by worried aides to be found on his knees praying incessently in the oval office, and to carry a bible with him around the White House. However, if he is a truly pious Pentecostal Christian, then he most likely subscribes to the"End Times" scenario of its doctrine, which states that very shortly all believers will be hoisted rapturously en masse to the side of Jesus's golden throne while the Earth roasts in a fiery apocalypse. All of which would suggest that the future down here doesn't mean anything to him.

John Kerry's cluelessness, and his pandering to the status quo ("Buy an SUV! Great for the economy!") is impossible to explain. Could the US government be so inept that Senators are not briefed on vital information? What could be more vital than a global condition that would destroy industrial economies and modern life as we have known it? Does Senator Kerry dismiss the peak oil issue as a "kook theory?" If so, he is poorly advised. Is he too cynical or cowardly to challenge the public's consensus trance? That's what leaders are for. If he wins the election, will he continue to pander to the public's cluelessness as the price of oil ratchets up to $60 a barrel?

Kerry could have, by the way, made a major committment to restoring America's passenger rail service without even having to engage the peak oil issue.

It is hard not to conclude that Kerry is either a twit or a scoundrel.

I take the point, however, that a twit / scoundrel may still be a better choice than a Christian fanatic who completely discounts the future of life on Earth.

What a sorry people we have become to have given ourselves such a choice.

Comments

[Rodrigo]

>>[Bush] is reported by worried aides to be found on his knees praying incessently in the oval office, and to carry a bible with him around the White House.<<

Got a source or cite for this?

Tnx

[sammy]

BBC reporter Justin Webb said, "Nobody spends more time on his knees than George W. Bush. The Bush administration hums to the sound of prayer. Prayer meetings take place day and night. It’s not uncommon to see White House functionaries hurrying down corridors carrying Bibles."

Just google "bush" "prayer" "on his knees"--the results will surprise you, or maybe just scare you.

[Omri]

Someone needs to sneak Bush a Bible with a bookmark in Genesis and Joseph's preparations for the Seven Lean Years.

[Kevin Carson]

So Bush spends a lot of time on his knees making a humming sound. Um, does that necessarily mean he's *praying*?

Seriously, though--I don't think the only alternatives are conspiracy theory and a lazy public. Michael Parenti and Alex Carey aren't conspiracy theorists. Neither was Gramsci. It's simply human nature that most people don't have a lot of time and energy left over for vigorous independent research, after dealing with their primary concerns of family, work, friends and neighbors. They will rely heavily on what C. Wright Mills called the "cultural apparatus" for their view of the outside world--and in any society, that apparatus reflects the world-view and interests of the ruling class.

That limited energy also means that the people who actually run the machinery of the state and the large corporation (for whom policy issues *are* everyday life, their bread and butter) will always have an advantage in attention, information, and agenda control over those they allegedly "represent" on the outside. To put it another way, centralized organizations simply cannot be democratically responsible. They will always be hijacked by a ruling class.

[aj]

I confess to being one of the people that commented that neither candidate could really bring the topic up on the campaign trail. But don't you make essentially the same argument -- the resulting cognitive dissonance would cause people's heads to spin? Look at how many people can't get around the simple facts that Saddam, while being a very very wicked tyrant, wasn't actively helping Al Qaeda. And that there were no WMDs. And that there is massively documented evidence of election fraud both in 2000 and today on the part of the Republicans. Too much cognitive dissonance there, so what happens when you tell'em there will be little to no oil when their kids are our age?

Well, the people who *are* reporting on Peak Oil are -- you guessed it -- bloggers. Meteor Blades, who writes for the extremely popular DailyKos.com, writes about it all the time. A search on Daypop, a search engine for weblogs, lists at least 72 key articles about it and Technorati lists a further dozen or so.

Awareness is pretty high, because once you start down the path of 'why are we in Iraq?', securing oil supplies comes up pretty quickly.

Some mainstream media has already picked this up: the cover of National Geographic isn't a bad start. Now if The Economist did a story on it...that would be great.

As we've seen during the election campaign, bloggers can swing the focus of the mainstream media, especially when it comes to media under-reporting or bias on a given topic.

Instead of wringing our hands about it, why not organize a cybercampaign to let the media know that we, the public, think this topic is deadly serious and warrants ongoing coverage, especially in relation to foreign policy and the domestic economy.

A good place to start would be to use Meetup.com to organize like-minded people, both locally and nationally; they already have an Oil Awareness topic group. DryDipstick.com, an offshoot of Global Public Media, is a good metadirectory on Peak Oil issues and a great place to send journalists for research. And while relatively lo-tech, PetitionOnline.com is a great tool to gather signatures.