Re: Snowmobile, riding lawn mower, a car for everyone in the family, dune buggies, RV's, boats: Kiss it goodbye -- era of oil is over

On Mar 11, 5:42 pm, "Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names"
<PopUlist...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cheap Oil Is Over: Kiss the Gas-Guzzling NASCAR Era Good-Bye
By James Howard Kunstler, Chelsea Green Publishing
Posted on March 11, 2008, Printed on March 11, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/79282/
The following is excerpted from an essay by James Howard Kunstler
published in the book Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of
Motorized Recreation (Chelsea Green, 2007).

The tendency for symbolic behavior in human beings is impressive. We
are naturally and unself-consciously metaphorical beings, especially
as our technological culture has evolved, and we have developed more
and bigger prosthetic extensions of our powers. By the 1960s, when
America's industrial "smokestack" economy was at its zenith, cigarette
smoking was at its peak, too. Forty percent of the adult population
smoked, each smoker behaving like a little factory, expelling the by-
products of combustion at all hours of the day and night. It was
practically required as a mark of adulthood. It was at least an
entitlement. You could smoke on the job and in the college classroom.
You could smoke in the doctor's waiting room. You could smoke in your
seat on an airplane -- a little ashtray was provided right there in
the armrest -- and nobody was allowed to complain about it. Every
middle-class household had ashtrays deployed on the coffee table, even
if the members were themselves nonsmokers.

In those days, smoking was more central to socializing than sharing
food. TV broadcasting was largely supported by tobacco advertising.
Smoking denied the character of movie stars: Humphrey Bogart expressed
the entire range of human emotions in the way he handled his beloved
Chesterfields, and eventually they killed him. In the middle of Times
Square, a mechanized billboard with a hole in it blew "smoke rings" of
steam out over the masses on the sidewalk. The adult population had
plumes of smoke coming out of its collective mouth and nostrils the
way that our society had smoke coming out of its cities and mill
valleys. Notice how cigarette smoking has waned in lockstep with the
decline of American smokestack industry.

Along similar lines today, it's compelling to see how NASCAR auto
racing has risen to the level of a mania in early 21st century
America, as the nation has reached its absolute zenith of automobile
use. Even as the world approached the all-time global oil production
peak -- with its ominous portents for social relations in this country
-- Americans rallied obliviously to the weekend proving grounds of the
stock-car gods. NASCAR has eclipsed baseball, football and basketball
in popularity among spectator sports. Of course, in real life, such as
it was in America, driving automobiles had come to occupy a huge
amount of the public's time, day in and day out. Many adults were
spending a good two hours a day commuting to work and back.

They were spending more time alone in their cars than with their
spouses and children. NASCAR was the apotheosis of the same kind of
cars that Americans drove to work. The competition vehicles were
called stock cars, after all, because they were, theoretically, just
souped-up versions of the same models that anyone could find in stock
at an ordinary car dealership: Fords, Pontiacs, Chryslers and so on --
unlike the Formula One race cars favored in Europe, which were
specially designed just for sport (hence the quaint term sports car
from the 20th century).

What's more, the American economy was now mostly based on creating and
maintaining the enormous infrastructures of motoring, as in suburbia,
just as it had previously centered on the infrastructures of
industrial production. So, the masses merely shifted their symbolic
behavior focus from an emphasis on expelling smoke to an emphasis on
watching souped-up ordinary cars move symbolically around in circles.
Or more precisely, ovals, which, from the grandstand, was sort of like
sitting on a freeway overpass for five hours watching traffic. The
NASCAR racetracks evolved from county fair dirt tracks with a few
rickety bleachers to gargantuan stadiums with luxury sky boxes
accommodating more than a hundred thousand spectators. It was
significant, too, that the NASCAR subculture arose in the South, the
old Dixie states, where the automobile had had tremendous social
transformative power in the previous half century. Prior to the Second
World War, Dixie had been an agricultural backwater with few cities of
consequence, peopled by (among other groups) a dominant Caucasian
peasantry called "rednecks" (because of the effects of the sun on
exposed pale skin in the dusty crop rows).

States like Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama were huge. You could
fit eleven Connecticuts in Alabama and have room for Rhode Island and
Delaware. Unless they lived right along the railroad line, the folks
down on the farm were pretty much stuck in place. The automobile
liberated the redneck peasantry from the oppression of geography as
emancipation had liberated the black peasantry from the legalities of
chattel ownership.

In fact, the effect of the car was arguably much greater, since blacks
continued to exist in economic quasi-serfdom despite the putative
change in their legal status. The car and all its manifold benefits
hoisted poor rednecks into a middle-class existence that had seemed
like a distant fairytale previously, something only seen in the
magazine pages they had used to wallpaper the rooms of their "cracker
cottages" (their own typological term for such a dwelling). They
became truckers and car dealers and car repairmen and the owners of
fried food franchise shacks out on the highway. They made good wages
and some became rich. Once a broad money base was established, they
excelled at suburban development because rural land was so cheap, and
there was so much of it. They worshiped the car more than they
worshiped Jesus. The economy of the South was utterly transformed
after the Second World War and the new economy was mostly about the
car.

Cheap gasoline along with cheap air conditioning made the South
livable for people who had a choice about where to make their homes.
Cheap air conditioning in particular made city life possible in a
region that had lagged hopelessly behind the states of the Old Union
-- to the degree that Dixie had not a single city substantial enough
for a major league baseball team prior to the 1960s. But the cities
that arose in Dixie after the war were not like cities elsewhere in
physical form.

Orlando, Houston, Charlotte and places like them had gone from being
smaller than Buffalo, N.Y., to becoming immense crypto-urbations of
ring freeways, radial commercial highway strips and far-flung housing
subdivisions around tiny withered peanuts of prewar traditional
downtown cores. Houston by the year 2000 was not a city in the
traditional sense of being composed of neighborhoods and districts;
rather, it was an assemblage of single-use zoning wastelands: the
shopping wasteland, the medical-services wasteland, the university
wasteland, the cul-de-sac house wasteland and so on, dominated by
massive overlays of automobile infrastructure.

The economy of the "New South," as it liked to call itself in the late
20th century, was more about the making of suburban sprawl than the
corporations that were lured down from the north to the Carolinas,
Tennessee and Georgia for the cheap labor available. After all, the
factories themselves eventually closed up shop as globalism made even
cheaper labor in distant nations more attractive to corporate
enterprise; but the sprawl remained, along with the office parks,
where obscenely paid top executives now ran things, while the once-
mighty working classes slid into a new kind of trailer-trash penury.

And that is where things stand today with the region and the nation it
is still attached to, sleepwalking into the early years of a permanent
global fossil fuel crisis that will once again transform the nation in
ways we can only sketchily imagine. Into the first decade of the new
century, the New South has begun to be viewed as so successful
compared to failing regions like the Midwest rust belt, coastal New
England, and even California (in its latter stages of being America's
all-purpose shit magnet) that the behavior emanating from Dixie became
paradigmatic for the nation as a whole. It was infectious. These days,
the working and sub-working classes from Maine to Minnesota follow
country music as avidly as the folks down in Spartanburg, S.C.

They favor the kind of military leisurewear -- especially camouflage
gear, with patches and insignia -- that come straight from a region
that is demographically overrepresented in the armed forces and sets
the styles for all of lumpen America. They adopt locutions originating
in the southland, the "y-offglide" (or the confederate a), for
example, in which words like my became mah. They put "Git 'er Done"
decals on their pickup bumpers, name their sons Buddy, and cry
"booyah" when overcome by excitement. They revel in the romance of
rearms to such a pathological degree that hardly a year goes by when
some disgruntled employee in the United States doesn't lug a duffel
bag with his own arsenal into a place of business and blow away two or
three annoying co-workers in a rapture of scripted conditioning
straight out of the Hollywood studios.

Some lumpen motoring activities have regional characteristics of their
own that don't migrate well. Snowmobile culture arose in the northern
states around 1970, when the take-home pay of people performing low-
skill jobs reached its all-time high. A machine formerly used as a
rescue vehicle at ski areas and a maintenance tool on ranches was
marketed as a winter toy for grownups in its own right. This was
clearly something that was not going to be as popular in Arkansas as
in Minnesota. In fact, as this relatively new snowmobile subculture
evolved, it became less about the machines themselves and more about
drinking with friends in the outdoors -- an unfortunate combination as
anyone who reads the newspaper in what's left of small-town America
can see in the Monday police blotters when snowmobilers with six
Budweisers under their belts decapitate themselves running through
fence lines at 50 miles an hour. When they are actually on board the
vehicles, usually en train with buddies, and not running into
unforgiving objects or rolling fatally down ravines, the disturbance
to the peace of the rural places they traverse is self-evident and
horrible.

All-terrain vehicles, or ATVs, those clumsy three- and four-wheeled
motorbikes, were most popular proportionately in the American West,
where hunters were able to extend their range to the vast back country
of federal lands and get their meat home with the assistance of a
gasoline engine. Likewise, the dune buggy originated in California for
the simple reason that desert terrain was adjacent to the populous Los
Angeles basin. While it has persisted in its limited milieu, dune-
buggy culture never quite recovered socially from its association with
the murderous doings of Charles Manson and his "family." The dirt-bike
phenomenon also came out of California but evolved quickly from an off-
road work and play vehicle to the dirt-bike tracks of competitive
racing, where it gave young men a way to channel surplus testosterone
by winning trophies (and cash). Ironically, wilderness trail areas
around the suburbs have lately been taken over by nonmotorized
mountain bikes, which are causing plenty of destruction in their own
right. The jet ski, or "personal watercraft" (in the military lingo
beloved by the lower orders because it makes things seem more
technically complex and hence magical), is perhaps the most baroque
and arguably the last in the line of such dedicated leisure vehicles,
being in essence a boat with hardly any storage capacity on which one
can do little else besides move at great speed over water while
soaking wet. Fishing from such a craft is awkward. Even drinking on
them presents problems, especially where the bulky favored beverage of
the sporting masses, beer, is concerned.

The abuse of public lands during this long fiesta of off-roading has
led to a crisis of ethics and law. As of this writing, of the 262
million acres under the federal Bureau of Land Management, 93 percent
is open to off-road riding machines. Of 155 national forests, only two
are off-limits to off-roaders.

Regulation of snowmobiles, ATVs and dirt bikes on public lands has
consistently failed in the face of lobbying by corporations who make
these toys and of the peremptory claims of "rights" by those who use
them. Whenever attempted -- for instance, an effort to limit access to
snowmobiles in Yellowstone by the Clinton administration -- the rules
have been defeated in short order. In a nation of outsourced blue-
collar jobs, shrinking incomes, vanishing medical insurance, rising
fuel and heating costs, and net-zero personal savings, the anxiety
level of the struggling classes has to be appeased politically, and
one way to minimize the current cost of that anxiety is to charge it
off to posterity and the public interest.

Where does this leave us as we enter the new period of history I have
several times alluded to: the post-cheap-oil world and eventually a
world altogether without recoverable fossil fuels? You could say up a
cul-de-sac in a rusted GMC Denali without a fill-up. Or you could say,
more to the point, in a society that will have to get its thrills and
satisfactions in other ways, involving fewer prosthetic projections of
our will to power. The will to power itself will probably be subdued
by something more elemental: a will to stay warm, clean, and well-
nourished in the era of post-oil-and-gas hardship and turbulence we
are entering, which I have taken to calling the "Long Emergency."

In this new era, coming soon to a 21st century region near you, the
formerly industrial nations will have a great deal of trouble keeping
the lights on, getting around and feeding their people. Vocational
niches by the hundreds will vanish, while the need to make up for a
failing industrial agriculture, with all its oil and gas inputs, will
require a revived agricultural working class in substantial numbers.
This is, in effect, a peasantry, and the word itself obviously carries
unappetizing overtones, especially among those who used to be certain
that the perfectibility of both human nature and human society were at
hand. It all seemed that way, I suppose, in the early 1960s, when the
United Auto Workers was setting up vacation camps along the Michigan
lakes, and President Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon before
the decade ended, and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction
kept a sort of peace among the great military powers, and Dad drove
home from the Pontiac showroom with a new GTO, which his son, Buddy,
used to cruise the strip on Friday nights while "Born to Be Wild" rang
out of the radio and into the warm, soporifc San Fernando night.

All over. All over but the keening for our soon-to-be-lost machine
world. We'll have to find new satisfactions now looking inward and
reaching out with our limbs to those around us to discover what they
are finding inward and outward about themselves. We'll certainly find
music there, and dancing, and perhaps some fighting, and we will still
have the means to make bases and balls and sticks for hitting them,
and gloves for catching them, and twilight evenings in the meadow to
play in. Amid a great stillness. With the moon rising.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books, including "World
Made by Hand," a novel set in the post-peak oil future. Read more of
his work at Kunstler.com.

© 2008 Chelsea Green Publishing All rights reserved.
View this story online at:http://www.alternet.org/story/79282/

You get in front on my V-10,10 MPG Excursion with your Honda Hybrid
and I'll squash it like a cockroach!!
.

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