We Learn Nothing Page 11

  I also couldn’t help but notice that peak oil was something of a godsend to the frustrated revolutionary. Peak oil would be so just—a long-overdue, well-deserved comeuppance for global capitalism, an economic system predicated on infinite expansion finally crumpling against the limits of a finite planet, destroyed by its own delusions. And it’s easy to imagine that a collapse would neatly cleave the Gordian knot of our society, clearing the ground for some vaguely imagined, more perfect future. Utopian fiction from H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come to James Howard Kunstler’s peak-oil novel World Made By Hand (which depicts the postindustrial era as “an enlightened nineteenth century”) often relies on some handy cataclysm to set the stage for the writer’s own Potemkin paradise. It’s an abdication of authorial imagination in the face of the messy present, the insoluble problem of the world.

  And peak oil conveniently threatens the very power structures for which Ken has always had such passionate loathing. He mistrusted any form of institutional authority, from the government to corporate capitalism to the family. He boycotted a biopic about Queen Elizabeth because it glorified monarchy, and brushed aside my halfhearted arguments about historical context: “It was a brutal, oppressive system, and plenty of people living at the time knew it and said so.” I remember an argument in which Harold and I tried to convince him that children needed parental supervision and rule, at least up to a certain age, if only to keep them from crossing the street against the lights. Ken obstinately insisted this was a myth used to justify patriarchal oppression. I couldn’t help but wonder whether, beneath his pro forma claims to be as appalled as anyone at the prospect of our civilization’s self-destruction, there was not a secret parricidal satisfaction.

  But it’s easy to dismiss anyone’s argument with armchair psychoanalysis. Rebecca Solnit challenges our culture’s presumption “that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a transference of the real sources of passion.”7 And I mistrust the relief that this line of thinking affords me. Clearly I’m eager to believe that Ken just has an ideological axe to grind, or some neurotic personal investment in peak oil, because if he is deluded, and all I have to worry about is a friend going crazy, it means I can go back to scheming various longshot seductions and wondering whether the Captain America movie will be any good instead of putting solar panels on my cabin and learning how to garden, at which I have always sucked.

  It’s comforting, for this reason, that so many peak-oil theory supporters seem to be outsiders—the people with the least invested in the status quo and the ones who might most like to see it in a shambles. But if some imminent threat to the sociopolitical order were to come along, it would only make sense that the people who’d been vigilantly watching for one for so long would be the first to see it. We regard those guys who patrol beaches with metal detectors as amusing eccentrics, but if there are any lost Bulova watches or gold doubloons buried out there, it’s going to be one of them who finds them. Ken’s contempt for authority, his disdain for emotion, and his humorlessness on this issue may give him greater clarity than the rest of us. We think of color blindness as a defect, but it enables those afflicted with it to see through camouflage.

  So even though Ken may have some, yes, idiosyncratic opinions on certain subjects and plenty of personal motive to misread reality, he remains one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. And if he’s correct, his behavior is completely appropriate. Imagine that you were a time traveler at a nightclub in Weimar Germany; could you really bring yourself to make conversation, enjoy yourself, and avoid tedious and potentially touchy political issues? Wouldn’t you, at some point late in the evening, corner someone you really liked and advise them, in all seriousness, to forget about their involvement in the local Communist Party or Dadaist cabaret and save up, borrow, or steal enough money for a one-way ticket to Stockholm or New York? (Ken would insist he has no extraordinary prescience; he’s just examined the same data that’s available to anyone and come to the unavoidable conclusion.) The way he acts is exactly how you’d hope to behave in such a situation: struggling to control your increasing impatience and maintain a reasonable demeanor, but refusing, no matter how bored or annoyed everyone around you gets, to stop trying to convince your friends to listen to you. It might well make you preachy and mad if you’d learned that everyone you knew was in imminent mortal peril and you tried to warn them and they all kept twirling their fingers at their temples when they thought your back was turned. Ken’s been a lot more tenacious and selfless than I would be in his place. The first time anyone made fun of me I’d say fine and imagine turning them away from my cabin with a shotgun when they came begging for a can of cat food.

  It’s funny—we all grow up on a diet of stories about the lone voice of reason trying to warn everyone about some imminent calamity, from Noah to Jor-El, and instinctively side with this hero and despise the ignorant ovine masses who jeer him or try to silence him. And yet whenever such a person appears in real life, our reflex is to join in with the mobs of scoffers and call them alarmists, hysterics, conspiracy freaks, and doomsayers. Nietzsche wrote, “One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.”8 Or, as The Dude put it: “You’re not wrong, Walter—you’re just an asshole.”9 Less quotable, and often overlooked, is Walter’s response: “Okay, then.” The Walters of the world don’t mind being assholes; what matters to them is being right. Visionaries, prophets, and revolutionaries aren’t concerned with good manners, being nice, fitting in; what they’re concerned with, passionately, singly, often monomaniacally, is the truth. “It’s popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people,” as Rebecca Solnit says, “but agents of change are often obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding.”10

  Which makes them bad dinner guests, and a drag at parties. They are the dreaded Political Bore—didactic, hectoring, and humorless, that guy who, once set off on his obsessive pet topic, can’t be diverted from it or made to shut up. You try to look thoughtful and interested and nod occasionally so that he thinks he’s winning you over when what you’re really doing is waiting for him to pause long enough between clauses for you to make an excuse about getting another beer so you can get the hell away from him. One email Ken sent me in response to my request to come visit his farm in Golden City to write about his life there—an email whose upshot was “no”—ran to 3,800 words. When printed out, it came to nine single-spaced pages. There was nothing unreasonable in this email; what’s unreasonable is sending someone a nine-page-long email. But this was the sort of thing you couldn’t explain to Ken. My position on peak oil was never that Ken was wrong; my position was, Please shut up.

  But boredom is seldom as uncomplicated as a simple lack of interest; it’s more often a numbing cover for something deeper. It may be that we all got so sleepy and irritable whenever Ken started talking about peak oil because We Couldn’t Handle the Shit Ken Was Laying Down. Maybe I prefer not to think about it for the same reason it’s easy to convince myself that that noise in my car’s driveshaft, or the twinge in my molar, is probably nothing and will soon go away. If Ken is wrong, I get to feel superior and sorry for him; if he’s right, it means I have to be afraid.

  Peak oil is an awkward topic. In trying to explain it to acquaintances, I always feel like I’m bringing up pedophilia or clitoridectomies. It’s a buzzkill to say things like “mass starvation” or “die-off in the billions” when people are trying to enjoy their beers. But Ken isn’t especially interested in sparing anyone’s sensibilities. Beneath his studied politeness there is an uncompromising, hard-assed morality. He once introduced me to a lovely Chinese cartoonist, a professional political satirist who nonetheless parroted the party line when Ken questioned her about Tibet: the Tibetans were a very primitive people before the Chinese arrived, she explained, living in unsanitary co
nditions, illiterate, practicing slavery. The Chinese had made many improvements in their standard of living, building infrastructure and schools. The Tibetans should be grateful to them. I watched as Ken gently interrogated her: “Do you think the Tibetans would say the same things that you’re telling me?” he asked. “Do the Tibetans want the Chinese there?” She was not fluent in English and I had to watch as she mentally translated all this and got first confused, then increasingly guarded and defensive. I suppose she was as unused to hearing her state propaganda challenged as most pretty girls are to being told that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Eventually she retreated into a surly, petulant silence and Ken finally relented, laughing and telling her, in the overly enunciated voice Americans use with foreigners, “Melei, you’ve lasted much longer without getting angry at me than most people ever do.” She wasn’t laughing.

  As the audience to this exchange, I could only cringe in admiration. I am much too polite to confront a guest in this country about her government’s policies, and too gallant and lecherous to risk offending a pretty girl. But Ken was right: the Chinese don’t belong in Tibet. It’s not their fucking country. This conversation serves as a useful mirror for observing my own reactions to Ken. Like most mirrors, it is not flattering. I can’t help but wonder whether, in my exasperation with Ken’s impolitic style, I’m not reacting with the same angry defensiveness as that cartoonist at having my comfy ideological assumptions challenged—because he’s making me look at aspects of my life I’d prefer to leave unexamined. In other words, What’s my Tibet?

  My final break with Ken came the morning after Election Day, 2008. I had volunteered for the Obama campaign, going door-to-door in public housing projects to register voters and make sure people went to the polls. I lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, an historically black neighborhood that became one of the epicenters of celebration in America when Obama won that night. People were dancing in the streets. Again and again you heard people saying into their cell phones, “There’s a brother in the White House.” Black guys in pimped-out rides were honking in solidarity at me just because I was wearing an Obama button. DeKalb Avenue was filled with celebrants; cars were surrounded and trapped as if in a flood. A large black policeman waded into the street, gamely trying to get everyone to disperse so traffic could get through, when suddenly someone lunged at him and hugged him. The crowd converged on him—suddenly everyone was hugging him, a massive pileup of love. He started laughing. Neighborhood matrons who’d been born long before the civil rights movement were standing on their front steps taking it all in, slowly shaking their heads.

  The next morning, as I was waking up in a new world, trying to come to grips with disorienting emotions like national pride and faith in my fellow men, I received an email from Ken informing me that anyone who was excited or hopeful about Obama’s election was a “simpleton” because no one individual or policy initiative could alter the irrefutable scientific facts of . . . you-know-what.

  In retrospect, I think that Ken’s focus had become so exclusive, his sources of information so insular, and his community so closed that he could no longer imagine the emotional context into which he was dispatching his message. But that morning it was hard to read it as anything other than a gratuitous Fuck You greeting card, like showing up at a funeral just to let the assembled mourners know the deceased was a son of a bitch and you for one are glad to be rid of him. I wrote Ken back and told him flatly that I’d had it; I never wanted to hear anything he had to say about peak oil again. He politely agreed to abide by my ban and asked me to let him know if there were any other topics that were off-limits. The flattening effect of email made it impossible for me to tell whether this affectless reply was Aspergerian cluelessness or passive-aggressive bullshit, but by then I didn’t care anymore. It turns out that our internal resources are not infinite, either, and can be depleted to the point of exhaustion.

  None of this actually has any bearing on the facts of peak oil. Some matters of empirical fact are independent of our ideology or biases, one of them being how much petroleum is left on the planet. Ken may indeed have some personal stake in the phenomenon of peak oil, but peak oil has no reciprocal relationship to Ken. The facts are just out there being placidly factual, unconcerned with Ken’s or my or anyone else’s feelings about them. Some people blamed the Black Death on witches, some on physicians for meddling with the will of God. In fact it was caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, a bacterium transmitted by fleas, and it killed a third of Europe.

  So what you probably want to know is: what’s the verdict on peak oil? Can we just call Ken and his cohort a bunch of crackpots and go back to thinking about social media and the Tea Party and the sexy teen vampire craze (all subjects, as of this writing, widely considered interesting and significant by the U.S. media)? Or should we be pricing cheap land in the country, buying up canned goods and tools, and learning to, like, till the soil? Is it really possible that the coming century—maybe even the next decade—will see the collapse of the global economy, world wars, and the deaths of billions? Is this idiot glittering din that we call our culture just a last frantic saturnalia on the lip of an abyss?

  A better question might be: why are you asking me? As I may have mentioned, I never got around to reading up on the subject. There is a reason you’re reading my essay on this topic and not one of Ken’s articles: who wouldn’t rather read—or write—an essay about rhetoric and belief systems and a friendship’s end than an article informing you that you and your children are probably going to die of starvation or cold unless you abandon the life you’re living right now and take radically inconvenient action? But there’s also a reason you really ought to be listening to Ken instead of me: I don’t know what I’m talking about, and Ken does. I’m trying to hold your interest and amuse you; Ken wants to save your life.

  He was always trying to find some way to bring his political message more directly to a bigger audience—hence his giving up academia for filmmaking, and filmmaking for direct activism. He was indisputably a great teacher, but he tried to turn life into school. The problem is that most of us hated school. His fallacy was much the same as progressivism’s: the assumption that if he could just explain the facts clearly, build a convincing enough argument, eventually everyone would come around to his conclusion. But people aren’t interested in lectures; they want to hear stories. Which is why the right holds the demagogic advantage over the left in America; they tell a simpler, more satisfying story. And it’s one reason I’ve told Ken’s story here. I fear he’ll see this essay as a betrayal, the former pupil taking a shot at his overbearing mentor (talk about parricidal motives), but what it’s ended up being is an attempt, in my own emotional, intellectually lazy way, to carry on his agenda. I am still working for Ken.

  Ken was painfully aware, as he watched his family and friends abandon him, of his own failings as a messenger. The same faculties that granted him his glimpse of the truth rendered him an unfit bearer of it. Prometheus didn’t get a ticker-tape parade, either, you’ll recall. The last time I heard from him was after he’d attended another peak-oil conference and sent out a mass email to impress upon his friends, once again, that peak oil was a real and imminent threat that would soon disrupt all our lives. I didn’t reply. Later that same week, Procter & Gamble announced it would be raising food prices across the board to absorb increasing transportation costs.

  I won’t pretend to miss Ken’s harangues about oil, but I do miss our old conversations, that sense of belonging to an elite intellectual underground—a salon—of taking myself seriously, thinking hard, and talking about things that mattered. I still wish I could email him to recommend films whose political subtexts he’d appreciate. When I recently drew a cartoon of the young newlywed royals being guillotined, I thought to myself, Ken will like this. I owe him more than I can say. The last and saddest lesson I learned from him is that most of us are motivated not by reason or even self-interest, but something more like middle s
chool politics. In making up my own mind on the issue of peak oil, the most relevant question turned out to be not Does the evidence support this theory? or even Is Ken trustworthy? but Would I rather live in the peak-oil compound with Ken or die in the food riots with Harold? Harold and I have made our choice, if only by default; we’ve cast our fate with the doomed. He and I have agreed that, while our fellow Americans are looting Costco and we’re barricaded in our favorite Baltimore bar, we’re going to call Ken up and demand: Why didn’t you warn us? It ought to be worth one last laugh. Maybe the vindication of apocalypse will have put him in a mellow and generous enough mood that even Ken will see the funny side. “I am resigned to being the butt of the joke,” he wrote me once. “Until the punchline.”

  PEAK OIL RESOURCES

  http://energybulletin.net/primer.php

  http://aspo-usa.com/

  The Referendum

  An editor once called me because he wanted to commission an article about our cultural fixation on arrested adolescence. “Of course,” he said dryly, “I thought of you.” I gladly accepted the assignment, which sounded potentially interesting and paid well, but hours later I found myself brooding on our conversation, thinking: Wait a minute, man—what do you mean, “Of course you thought of me”? I should mention that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, brewed pineapple beer, and been pantsless together in several nonsexual contexts. He is now a respectable person, editor of a national magazine, a homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: was there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of feckless man-child instead of seeing me as the accomplished figure I am—a cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, a man who’s been in a committed relationship for seventeen years with the same cat? The same guy who broke my collarbone in a plastic light-saber fight now considers me the expert on arrested adolescence?