Professor Tolkien was well-known for his irritation at those who called the Ring of Power a metaphor. “It's a ring, dammit,” he might have said, “A bloody ring that grants the wearer power over everybody else. It's not nuclear weapons or communist propaganda. It's a ring, you idiots.”
As much as I respect his literary achievement and long to wander the hills of the Shire, I'm going to go there. Sort of.
Yesterday I read an article on the havoc low oil prices are causing in the economies of oil export-dependent nations. (Here, and here are other related articles.) Today, I turned on the DVD player in front of the cross-trainer and watched the numerous ending scenes of LotR while working out. The thought struck me as the tower of Barad-Dur tumbled to the ground. Let's just call Oil a metaphor for the Ring of Power.
A bit of history first:
The heroic efforts of our brave men notwithstanding, we won WWII because we had oil and they did not. The Japanese were winning the Battle of Leyte until the admiral realized that he needed to leave immediately or his ships would run out of fuel on the way home, leaving them sitting ducks for our bombers. The Nazi Panzers literally ran out of gas as Hitler devoted all his remaining fuel to carrying Jews to the camps. Neither Japan, nor Germany, nor, to the best of my knowledge, Italy have oil beneath their territories, thus the push into places that do. I'm not saying that the war was unnecessary, just that our vast oil reserves gave us the ability to keep going and prevent them from accessing other nations’ oil while they stalled out
When the war ended, the US controlled 60% of the world's known oil reserves. Many reasons exist for American dominance in the post-war period: the destruction in most industrialized nations, leaving us the last manufacturer standing; the goodwill engendered by the Marshall Plan; the fear of communism, now that we and Stalin no longer had a common enemy; but our oil reserves allowed us to project military power on a global scale.
That changed in the 1960's when oil companies, doing what they are in business to do, discovered oil all over the place. The oily Ring of Power grew to vast proportions. As our percentage of global oil reserves shrank, American dominance of the oil industry became threatened. The business model used to maintain control over it involved bribery of Third World elites, an extension of the colonial model of doing business.
The Shah of Iran became our hand-picked oil patch enforcer in 1953. By the early 1970s that regime tottered. Knowing that the American people, averse to foreign entanglements after Vietnam, wouldn't fund yet another foreign war, Henry Kissinger advised President Nixon to fund the Mideast military buildup by encouraging OPEC to raise prices. The Oil Embargo resulted, with prices shooting up afterwards. The resulting profits fattened military budgets in the Mideast, produces a windfall for the oil companies to compensate them for the Arabs nationalizing their assets, and planted the seeds for the current conflict. It's ironic that the 1953 issue that set off the chain of events leading to the current mess was Prime Minister Mossadeq's desire to nationalize Iran's oil company. Twenty years later, we allowed, nay, encouraged it. The ground had shifted. We found a new strongman to police the neighborhood, a guy named Saddam Hussein.
In 1975, Kissinger devised a plan (published in the Weekly Standard under the byline Miles Ignotius) outlining just how we would dominate the Mideast oil patch for the next century, and acknowledging that the American people would require an event of “the magnitude of Pearl Harbor” to motivate them to support it. Twenty-six years later, that event happened, on September 11, 2001, and the plan proceeded.
We shifted from proxy rule to military intervention, and now the paradigm is shifting again.
The first part of the new shift results from the enormous cost of maintaining the current order, particularly since those who benefit most from it appear to be averse to paying the tab under the business rubric, “Consolidate profit and externalize cost.”
This second reason is new technology: “Demand reduction,” due to solar and wind generation coming on line. This has profound implications. First, as noted in the article I cited above, nations whose economies depend heavily on oil are tottering. They've made promises, and they can't keep them. Their biggest promises, to their most demanding clients, are to their elites, and the second group of beneficiaries are the subsidized poor. This sets up the nobles vs peasants dynamic where everybody strives to maintain their lifestyle. At stake for the elites, not just that new yacht or palace or the number of servants on the payroll, but the baksheesh needed to maintain their thugs' loyalty. At stake for the peasants, possible starvation. Or as the bumper sticker says, “The world can no longer afford the rich.”
The effect on American politics will be fascinating to watch. If you look closely, you'll see that the Republican Party is not so much the party of business as the party of the Oil Business. Those politicians most wedded to climate denial, to subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies, and to removing environmental protections, appear to be those with the most funding from the oil industry. So what happens when those at the top of the oil business calculate that they can make more money by investing in those new technologies than by sticking with the old?
This could get interesting. I have a fantasy of James Inhofe giving a speech on the Senate floor on the need for massive Federal investment in solar technology, specifically ExxonMobilSolar. What will happen when the Koch brothers, the buggy whip makers of our age, figure out that they may just have to take a tax loss on their billions of dollars of oil infrastructure and evolve? Understand that I'm not holding my breath. Sauron didn't swear fealty to King Aragorn, after all.
So oil, like Tolkien's Ring of Power, grants power over others, from the Captains of the Oil Industry buying domestic and foreign politicians to the decision of when and where to go to war. Like the Ring of Power, its influence is ultimately destructive, favoring some economies and destroying others, poisoning the environment where it is extracted and transported, and ultimately, over time, turning this Earth into Mordor.
Unlike the Ring of the Trilogy, we can't just throw it into Mount Doom. Its sorcery extends deep into the fabric of our daily lives. We heat our homes, transport ourselves and our goods, grow our food with its magical powers. Hell, the computer I'm writing this on is mostly made of oil. All I can do is quote my refrigerator magnet. “No one can do everything. Everyone can do something.”
We are all Frodo.