The General Decline of Just About Everything
Sat Jul 19, 2008 at 02:59:19 PM PDT
I am getting old (57) and I have seen better times. Not in terms of my own finances, because truthfully I am about as prosperous as I've ever been, which is comfortably middle-class. I have been poor and this is better. Or in terms of my own mental health; I have been terminally depressed, and this is better. But in terms of the rest of the world, our own nation, I have seen things slide down hill. Of course, the global economy, not just our own, is in sorry shape, the dollar is depreciating, oil prices are going to the moon, inflation is rampant, there is turmoil in the Middle East. Still, having lived through the seventies, I feel like this is deja-vu all over again. We can survive this.
Other things are not so easy to fix. And I don't mean that flippantly.
When I think of the general decline of everything, I start with the tide pools by the beach by my grandmother's house in Newport Beach, California. Perhaps, because some of my earliest memories involve tide pools. They were wonderful places. There were sea anemones, starfish, little abalones, clams, mussels, barnacles, orange garibaldi, crabs, tiny little brightly-colored fish darting back and forth. They were marvelous places. I remember an old Japanese guy who shoved a coathanger into a crevice and came out with a little octopus. I was astounded, not that he caught the octopus but that he would consider eating it. Other people harvested the mussels from the rocks for food. We didn't eat them, of course. We broke them up and used them for fish bait.
Much, much later, my brother-in-law and I went to Baja California and hired a Mexican guy to take us out in his boat. While we were scuba diving, getting fresh scallops off the rocks, he was tearing apart west coast lobster and using it for fish bait. He wouldn't eat lobster, of course. To him it was a bug, an insect.
The tide pools still exist off Orange County, but there's not much left in them but hermit crabs. You can still find a fully functional tide pool (last I checked) like it used to be in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It's a museum piece that uses piped-in seawater and is mostly protected from people like you and me.
Recently, I had a discussion with my son (age 26) wherein I basically lamented the fact that things were falling apart and that his generation would bear the brunt. He thought that every older generation felt that things were falling apart. But I don't really think so. My grandparents lived through the Depression and felt things could only get better for their children. And they did. My parents lived through World War II and felt that things could only get better for their children. And they did. My generation lived through the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Movement, and we felt we were making things better for our children. And to some extent we did.
But we got too comfortable too quickly. Politically, the resurgent left-wing from the Roosevelt era faded with prosperity. The labor movement that really gave us the middle class in America and elsewhere fell prey to corruption among its own members and a corrosive right-wing ideology that derided it as a stalking horse for Communism. The antiwar movement that arose during the Sixties was never as strong as it was made out to be by its opponents. Peace and Love made way for mortgage payments and tuition. Absent the draft, as even Bush the lesser figured out, there was not a strong opposition in the U.S. to war. We have always been willing to beat up on furriners. Even the civil rights movement was, to some extent, a victim of its own success. Upscale blacks figured out that upscale people tended to be Republicans. And thus we have conservative black pundits.
At UC San Diego, when I was there, there was a professor emeritus named Herbert Marcuse (reknowned mainly as the mentor of Angela Davis). He wrote a book called One-Dimentional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Routledge Classics) It has been years since I read it (it is a very difficult read, dense German prose rendered yet more densely into English), but the take home message I recall is that revolution is very difficult in the United States because the society ultimately co-opts the revolutionary. He becomes part of the culture, is rewarded for his revolutionary ideas, gets a book deal, and forgets about the revolution. Looking back, I think that Herbert Marcuse was a prophet. Barack Obama is not a revolutionary, but even in opposing the neocon project for America, he is not presenting the stark contrast that he was a few months ago. So I wonder.
Getting back to my son, and my daughter, and my hoped for grandchildren, I don't believe that they will be able much longer to live the way that I have lived. Jumping in the car, driving from Tennessee to California and back, flying to Hawaii for a wedding, driving three hours for a week-end paddling trip down a remote river. These peripatetic motions expend precious resources. Worse, they drive up atmospheric carbon so that we are living at the breaking point between an irreversible slide into a global warming future that will make the past look not just like the Good Old Days, but more like an unbelievable Garden of Eden that couldn't possibly have existed.
Maybe the sacrosanct laws of supply and demand will save us, like some of more ecologically aware of conservatives expect. Like the cost of gas is going up just as required to prevent global warming, like the God of all Free Markets warrants.
But I don't believe it. Human beings are the most adaptable of species; hence our pre-eminence. We will gassify coal, or whatever, enough to keep on generating kilojoules to power our life-style, well not ours generally, but at least the life style of the rich, and more power to cool down their dwellings, while the rest of us fry. There is nothing I have seen in my life so far that would convince me that it won't go this way.
That capacity for revolution seems missing. We need it badly. Herbert Marcuse was right.
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