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Saturday
Lagniappe
Cheap
Oil Is Over: Kiss the Gas-Guzzling NASCAR Era Good-Bye
"Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences
of Motorized Recreation"
(Chelsea Green, 2007).
By
James Howard Kunstler
A
suburban nation of snowmobilers, dirt bikers and NASCAR races
-- all of it was made possible by the one-time blessing of
cheap oil.
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).
Painting
by James Howard Kunstler
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.
Route
50, Wilton, NY, on a Fall Afternoon
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
an American author, social critic, and blogger who is perhaps
best known for his book
The Geography of Nowhere, a history of suburbia and urban
development in the United States. He is prominently featured
in the peak oil documentary, The End of Suburbia, widely
circulated on the internet. In his most recent non-fiction
book, The Long Emergency (2005), he argues that declining
oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized
society and force Americans to live in localized, agrarian
communities (www.kunstler.com).
Petroleumworld does not necessarily
share these views
Editor's
Note: This commentary is
excerpted from an essay by James Howard Kunstler published
in the book Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of
Motorized Recreation (Chelsea Green, 2007), posted by
Chelsea Green Publishing, on alternet.org, March 11, 2008
(www.alternet.org/environment/79282/?page=3 ).
Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our
readers.
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