Change It MORE!

Rightly taken to task over the content of this most recent post, I’m going to engage in that grand old blog tradition of walkin’ it back a little, calling it clarification, and writing Hewitt-style “Fuck you, liberal cocksucker!” emails to anyone who has the future temerity to call it inconsistency.

Jim rightly points out that the tone, at very least, of that prior post makes it seem as if the realpolitickers are doing it all out of the goodness of their hearts, occupying foreign lands to sap a resource that the poor schmoes back home need desperately but don’t think about—that so-called realism, in other words, is realistic, at least insofar as it confronts the acquisition of vital resources for a nation of rubes living on fantasy, football, and a few thousand gallons of middle octane every year, the last of whose provenance they think of, if at all, only in the bumper-sticker terms of “Who put our oil under their sand?”—a mindset unfortunately amenable to foreign adventures in Crude Country, at least until the body count begins to rise.

I see on rereading that that’s pretty much the point I made, though not the point I wanted to make. Clumsy, hurried, and full of pique is no way to go through life, son, to paraphrase an old favorite. So, to revise:

There are two trends at work. The first is the American addiction to energy, particularly though not exclusively in the form of personal transportation. We’re a motoring people. We live far from our jobs. With the exception of a few, mostly coastal cities, even our major urban centers are unwalkable, unbussable, unsubwayable, even uncabbable. Even having done some work on urban development, I remain amazed at the total centrality of parking to any development scheme or real estate project. It is the primary consideration: before aesthetics, before traffic flow, before number of units or percentage of retail to residential space—parking.

To some degree, our car addiction is a natural working of the market, although the particular conditions of the market—namely super-cheap fuel—were clearly temporary, and inevitably so, in retrospect. Post-war America was affluent, gas was cheap, land was plentiful, and, of course, the cities were now full of scary brown people making political demands, so off went whitey to his cul-de-sac, his two-car garage, and his half an acre.

But to an equal if not greater degree, the reshaping of the American community to its auto-centric incarnation was one more example of planning gone awry. (Damn you, Eisenhower!) It was the government that built the interstate highway system, the arterial parkways and the bypasses that brought rural land, often former farmland, into the clutches of developers. It was agricultural conglomeration and government subsidy that undercut regional agriculture across the country, depressed rural land values, and made all those Rolling Hill Acres and Heritage Estates and whatever else available to be subdivided and parceled out to the formerly not-so and now newly credit-worthy refugees. These were not livable communities, really. Most of them didn’t—and don’t—even have sidewalks. It was government zoning laws and regulations, crafted in tandem with subsidy-hungry developers, that threw up impediments to mixed-use development and building, which helped grow the strip malls, the big box stores, the endless parking lots, the sprawling exurbs . . . It was, in other words, government intervention as much as private enterprise that created car-dependent America.

Motoring America runs on gas, and motoring America doesn’t like to pay world retail for its fuel.

Now the United States has been mucking around in the Middle East for the last half-century because of a powerful misperception that goes something like this: Arabs are crazy, violent, and probably prone to socialism. Give them a chance and they’ll go Red, and even if they don’t, they’ll use oil against us, jacking up the prices, demanding preferential treatment, impeding the natural global hegemony of this, the greatest nation in the country. Our government has long-praised and little-practiced the market economics it preaches. It is the delusion of our governors, the supposed realists, the dogged and true imperialists, that our access to energy, in particular our cheap access to energy, and certainly our exclusive access, should that every become necessary, depends on our control of the political destinies of Middle-Eastern states. No two-bit Ayatollahs are gonna milk the Great Satan at the pump; no tin-pot pan-Arabist; no neo-communists; no nobody.

Of course, our continual intervention in the hopes of preventing these impediments is the principle catalyst for their genesis. In reality, if we just left the poor bastards alone—or if we had left them alone, anyway—we’d probably be in decent shape. What, after all, is their incentive to deny the world’s wealthiest nation a product it desperately wants to buy? As Jim wrote: all you need to ensure access to a commodity is a functioning market.

It is, unfortunately, too late to put the coups and revolutions and invasions and interventions back in the bottle. That’s why it will be necessary to consider and to enact fundamental changes in the geographic organization of our communities. Oil production almost surely will decline, and even if not, fifty years of ill-considered meddling by an American government that mistakenly considered such meddling essential to its domestic economy has led inexorably to a situation where not even immediate and total disengagement would lead to a practicable trade environment. We’re fucked so far as that’s concerned, at least for the foreseeable future.

So long as we persist in our disproportionate consumption of energy, and so long as the delusion persists that we cannot secure access to energy without securing air-bases near the oil-fields—and who, honestly, thinks anyone in power will be disabused of that delusion anytime soon—adventurism and imperialism in the Middle East are unavoidable outcomes. I am not certain, needless to say, of the best manner to divest ourselves of oil dependency on a scale sufficient to affect our national foreign policy. I think that investing in urban development and urban real estate is a good way to start. I think that supporting regional agriculture as a consumer is also a good way to start. I think that so long as we depend on government investment in transportation infrastructure, we should advocate as forcefully as possible for public transportation infrastructure for several good reasons aside from reduced energy use. It’s cheaper to build. The cost of a single highway interchange could fund thirty miles of light rail. It’s less invasive to the natural geography of a community. Compare the impact of a light rail line, a new bus route, or a subway to that of a new highway. Because such development requires less land, it involves less eminent domain; it involves fewer neighborhoods carved up by six lanes and sound barriers. And, of course, public transit, if utilized, is less tax-dependent in the long-run because it self-subsidizes with fees and fares.

All of this is terribly small compared to the forces driving the American military around the world in search of . . . whatever. But nevertheless . . .