Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics

Chapter 4: CURBING RUNAWAY APPETITES IN AMERICAN DOMESTIC POLICY: Oil and Other Carbons

65 4 CURBING RUNAWAY APPETITES IN AMERICAN DOMESTIC POLICY Oil and Other Carbons In the course of Rome’s decline the wide-eyed Saint Augustine saw Carthage and the imperial city as a “cauldron of illicit loves.”1 In his account of the waning middle ages, the historian Johan Huizinga reported on the carnival appetites that raged in continental Europe .2 In response to the “snarl of the abyss” beneath the late 1930s, the poet W. H. Auden supplied a somewhat more proper English image for escape: His countrymen enjoyed a “jolly picnic on the heath / Of the agreeable.”3 Following 9/11, Auden’s characteristically modest British metaphor yielded to a more colorful fantasy on the American scene. The president of the United States counseled the nation, “Get down to DisneyWorld in Florida. . . . Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”4 The president’s advice seemed odd if the threat to America was as great as the president painted it, and it seemed unjust because the full burden of defense would fall entirely on volunteer soldiers. However, President George W. Bush appealed to something deep and abiding in his sense of the American character. Get grounded in your basic appetites, he seemed to say: “Enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.” What better way to remind people of the world out there to be enjoyed than a pilgrimage to DisneyWorld, a dream world, to be sure, but one not entirely removed from the American dream with which we connect daily by shopping. 66 Chapter 4 On September 18, 2001, the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, spelled out the hard foreign policy implications of this advice for furthering the new order of the ages: “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live or we must change the way they live, and we choose the latter.”5 Changing the way they lived meant war, at first against al-Qaeda and Afghanistan and soon thereafter against Iraq, with the intent of transforming the Middle East and the Islamic world. Meanwhile, however, the American way of life, driven by its appetites, would remain unchanged. Its dreams would suffer no let or limit by taxes, trade deficits, national debt, regulations, mortgages, credit card debt, or national needs for new schools, bridges, light rails, sea walls, or flood controls. Not even the ruination of one of the country’s oldest cities by flood in Hurricane Katrina in 2005 halted the picnic on the heath of the agreeable.The sky fell again with the collapse of the financial system in yet another September, in 2008, and oil poisoned the underside of the country in the spring of 2010 with the breaching of the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing has more profoundly affected the way we live in the last one hundred years in the United States of America than oil.6 It has supplied the energy that drives the American way of life from cars to careers to food on the table in a home of one’s own. This chapter considers our dependency on oil as it has coursed through our appetites.The focus on oil is not arbitrary or driven by the headlines issuing from the catastrophe in the Gulf. The great empires in the modern world—which have lasted up to 120 or 130 years each—have depended upon a primary supply of energy to power them. They have tended to decline when they have depleted or failed to replace competitively their great energy source. The United States is now ninety to one hundred years into its depletion of oil. I dedicate this chapter to the owner of the Ford Agency in Cleveland , Ohio, back in the late 1950s. When I expressed worries about the miles per gallon achieved by the eight-cylinder station wagon, which I was circling with the thought of buying, he conceded that the car was a “little thirsty,” an admission that subtly challenged whether I was man enough to meet its needs. I bought it. 67 Curbing Runaway Appetites in American Domestic Policy THE ADDICTION TO OIL During the Republican Convention of 2008 the chant of “Drill, Baby, Drill” ran through the delegates as a reaction to gasoline prices of four dollars a gallon. Purportedly, drilling for oil both offshore and on the Alaskan tundra would lower prices...