We Learn Nothing Read online

  Escape from Pony Island

  I’m forfeiting a friendship by writing this. It’s a friendship that is effectively dead already, historical rather than active, but my concern is less with salvaging the relationship than it is to avoid hurting any further someone who feels himself to have been turned on and mocked by too many people already. But I know that no matter how empathetic or fair I try to be, Ken will read anything I write about him as a betrayal.

  I know exactly what Ken thinks I ought to say about him, because when I told him I was thinking of writing about him he wrote a paragraph about himself and sent it to me. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t simply say something like this,” he said. There was something obscurely troubling about this; it seemed like making up a nickname for yourself or telling people that this is your new theme song and urging them to hear it in their heads from now on whenever you appear. He seemed increasingly unable to tolerate any perception of himself that diverged from his own.

  I won’t reproduce that paragraph here because Ken has since explicitly forbidden me to quote anything he’s ever written. But it told the story of someone who became interested in a certain scientific debate, researched it extensively, and came to some alarming conclusions to which he tried to alert the people he cared for most. There was nothing inaccurate or dishonest in his description, but it used neutral euphemisms like “shared his reasoning” to describe what had seemed to me more like a campaign of strident and relentless proselytizing. For me, the last few years of my friendship with Ken had been like trying to remain friends with someone who’d undergone a Damascene religious conversion or married someone insane (analogies Ken would dispute at length). It meant having to accept something to which you’re indifferent at best as an important new part of your friend’s life, something to which they expect you to display an enthusiasm commensurate to their own. You couldn’t say, “Hm, sounds interesting, I’ll have to look into it,” and move on to the next subject. There was no other subject. Ken spent years of his life and tens of thousands of words trying to persuade me and his other friends that our civilization was on the brink of collapse—a global catastrophe exponentially more enormous than the two world wars and all the pogroms and purges, epidemics and famines of the twentieth century combined. He staked so much on this certainty—switched jobs, sold his house, moved himself and his wife halfway across the country, alienated friends and family—that not to take it seriously was not to take him seriously. It was an impasse that ended with my giving up on a friendship I had once considered indispensable.

  Here’s how I would tell the story.

  I used to refer to Ken as “the smartest person I know,” and I don’t think I’m the only person who ever called him that. As Michael Herr once wrote of Stanley Kubrick, “his elevator goes all the way to the roof.” I’d met him more than twenty years ago, when I was his teaching assistant, and even after we were no longer instructor and TA I always felt as if he were the mentor and I the student. Just trying to keep up with him made me feel smarter. Spending time with him was not like spending time with most of my friends, a lazy relief from life, hanging out for hours drinking beers and thinking up funny things to say; it was an intellectual workout, hard and exhilarating, more like reading Conrad or listening to a Beethoven quartet. The conversation might’ve been recondite and wide-ranging, but it was never idle. You were not wasting time. And if that sense of seriousness and purpose occasionally felt like an imposition, it also turned out to be something for which I’d secretly been starved.

  I never saw him meet anyone he didn’t question in depth about their lives, their vocations and interests. They’d be self-conscious at first, but then become increasingly animated, trying to articulate answers to questions no one had ever cared enough to ask them before. It was hard to tell whether he was genuinely interested in people or if he was simply voracious for information, and regarded everyone he met as a new resource. Whatever the case, having someone pay attention to you with that kind of active intelligence made you feel as if your thoughts and experiences were valuable. Ken was someone to whom you wanted to bring your half-formed ideas and knottiest dilemmas. He was such an engaged listener, and so generous with his insight, that it could take quite a while before you noticed that you didn’t know anything about his personal life at all.

  Ten years after I’d been his TA, I reconnected with Ken when our friend Harold, who’d also taught with us, moved into the area. Ken told Harold and me that he wanted to organize an intellectual salon—a circle of brilliant, creative, and attractive people who would gather to discuss art and politics and ideas, collaborate and inspire each other. These people never showed up and the salon remained just the three of us, but for a few years our regular get-togethers were an important part of my life. Ken hosted long weekends at his house outside Philadelphia, for which occasions he always prepared good food—it was the first time I’d ever had coq au vin—and loaded up on music and films and piles of beautiful books from the library—it was through Ken that I first heard Steve Reich’s tape-loop piece “Come Out,” watched the original version of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, and saw a collection of drawings by the French surrealist Roland Topor. We went on day trips to New Haven to see a Francis Bacon exhibit at the English Museum and an S&M, Starr Report–era version of Measure for Measure at the Yale Repertory, and to New York City to see Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. And once a year we went on a long weekend retreat to Jane’s Island near Chincoteague, which Harold and I referred to as Pony Island.

  Ken would engage us in (or, sometimes, subject us to) long Socratic dialogues about politics, ethics, and art—I remember one, over venison steak, in which he challenged us to defend the taboo against incest, which left us sputtering in some uneasy state halfway between bemusement and horror, unable to articulate any arguments more compelling than the risk of inbreeding and anecdotal evidence of trauma. We finally fell back on the classic rhetorical fallacy, For fuck’s sake, Ken. Moral philosopher Jonathan Haidt asks similar questions of his students in an exercise he calls “moral dumbfounding,” to palpate the difference between reasoned judgment and visceral reaction. Understanding the distinction between the two is useful in clarifying ethical questions; simply discounting the latter, however, will get you stoned to death in the town square. In retrospect, Ken’s straight-faced inquiry about such a touchy subject seems symptomatic of his overvaluation of pure rationality, a kind of emotional color blindness that would hinder his efforts, later on, to convince us of something just as hard to accept but far less hypothetical.

  Ken was always a generous host and caterer, and he’d introduce us to great art and engage us in interesting conversation, but he always had an agenda, and eventually he would make us do work. After breakfast on Pony Island he’d ask us what we wanted to do, and we’d answer honestly that we’d be happy just to sit around the cabin drinking whiskey all day, and then the pretext of free will would collapse and Ken would haul us off our asses to go on a long hike, fueling us with a thermos of coffee, and subtly turn the conversation toward our next project.

  It was talking to Ken for hundreds of hours about a film that he and Harold and I had all gone to see together that ultimately led to the critical essay that would become my first national publication. Ken prompted me to start thinking about the movie as sociological instead of psychological, political rather than personal—a film about wealth and power, not love or sex. In working on that essay we had detailed back-and-forths over fine distinctions of diction, connotation, and etymology that honed my prose. (I offered him a coauthor credit on the published piece, but he demurred.) It was also Ken who first pointed out to me the political implications of my early, absurdist cartoons. When he asked me whether I’d ever considered doing any overtly political work, I squirmed and resisted, complaining that political art had always seemed unavoidably humorless and didactic to me, and that it was depressingly perishable. I would later squander almost a decade of my productive life drawing ca
rtoons about the Bush administration. He’d made me take my own work seriously, an unwelcome responsibility and a great gift.

  It was in his expectations of how his ideas would be received by the world that Ken’s perceptions diverged most radically from reality. He proposed that he and Harold and I go on a speaking tour to promote our film criticism, as if writers of critical essays ever went on press junkets. He urged me to prepare sound bite– length statements for the media attention we would soon receive for a parody of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, about the Clinton impeachment hearings, that he’d written and gotten me to illustrate. Having spent several years self-publishing mini-comics, I knew exactly what would happen when we released this book: nothing at all. I’d always thought of publishing comics or zines as like radioing messages into interstellar space—more a gesture of faith than anything else—but Ken had apparently expected the effect of our booklet, which we’d personally distributed throughout the U.S. Capitol building, to be explosive. I would recall this odd naïveté years later during his campaign to convince us to take immediate action against the imminent fall of civilization.

  He next proposed creating a comic book series called The Host, featuring superheroes based on the world’s major religions, to be marketed to a conservative Christian readership. It was, I think, a pop cultural Trojan horse to sneak politically radical ideology into the evangelical market. My immediate response was 1) that fundamentalists would never accept a story with a pluralistic/polytheistic premise, and 2) no way. Forget it. I had just come off The Rape of the Dress business, which had involved quite a lot of unpaid illustration work, and could tell that Ken was trying to sucker us into another intensive months-long project. And yet somehow, without ever quite agreeing to, we ended up working on it anyway. Ken often said of himself that he was essentially libertarian in his outlook, but Harold and I suspected that, like many libertarians, he was an authoritarian at heart. (People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist most fiercely within themselves.) Which is why our seminars so often trailed off into lectures, and why we found ourselves working for, rather than with, him on projects we’d initially refused to do.

  Ken could never accept that Harold and I were authentic slovens. He must’ve felt, at times, like Lex Luthor trying to take over the world with henchmen like Otis. Once, during the short-lived Host project, he left the house to run some errands and charged us with outlining the plot of the first issue before he came back. Left to our own devices, Harold and I ate an entire bag of potato chips, helped ourselves to Ken’s whiskey, and scanned his cable channels for nudity. We did manage, before he returned, to come up with the cartoon idea “Silly Negro—Trix Are for White People!” and I drew a preparatory sketch of The Veil (our Islamic superheroine) administering a blow job to a figure in a medieval plague mask. Ken seemed disappointed.

  What Ken never understood was that the only thing Harold and I really excelled at was fucking around—coming up with idiotic ideas and filthy daydreams, projects like the pornographic version of The Cat in the Hat, the whitesploitation film Kung-Fu Honky, and our manifesto Beyond Pants, all of which served the sole artistic goal of cracking ourselves up. Ken was far more ambitious and disciplined than either of us, which is why we only ever accomplished anything under his impetus, but I think he also needed to harness our inspired stupidity to get any creative work done. Because the essence of creativity is fucking around; art is that which is done for the hell of it. And Ken was not a fundamentally playful person. His own artistic efforts were reverse-engineered to illustrate his political ideas; he once wrote a twelve-page script for a short film with an appended backstory/explanation/statement of intent that was at least twice as long as the screenplay itself. He and I both loved the novelty band the Upper Crust, but for different reasons: I just liked the fact that they dressed up in eighteenth-century foppery, but Ken believed they were subversively advocating revolution.

  It was over such fissures in our beliefs about art and politics, imperceptible on the surface but penetrating to the core, that our little salon broke up. Ken indentured Harold and me into working with him on another critical essay that didn’t interest me personally. I felt less like a collaborator on this one than an unpaid ghostwriter. In places his thesis seemed stretched a little thin. Things got testy. Ken had written voluminous notes on the film, which I’d read over and marked up; next to one of his more abstruse digressions I’d written: What the everlovin’ fuck? Ken was not amused. He called me intellectually lazy. I finally told him I felt he was projecting his own ideological agenda onto a film that had little to do with it. He burst out that a film is nothing more than a strip of celluloid with images printed on it, and there’s nothing “in” it other than whatever we impute to it. I realized then that we had never been talking about the same things at all.

  This personal history is worth sharing because it all bears on our reaction when Ken came to us with an extraordinary claim: that the world we knew was about to end, and that we should join him in preparing for it.

  Ken first mentioned peak oil to me when I was at a comics convention near his house in 2005. We were having lunch at an outdoor table when Ken asked me for my interpretation of the motives behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. It is some testament to Ken’s influence on my subsequent understanding of that war that I now find it hard to recall what my theories were at the time. Like a lot of Americans, I had no idea why our government had decided to invade Iraq; all I knew was that they had clearly been determined to do it since before 9/11 and that it obviously had little to do with the four or five filmy casus belli they’d run up the flagpole. My best speculation was to read it as a one-man psychodrama played out on the world stage: our commander in chief had always felt inferior to his baseball star/war hero/ex-president father, and wanted to both avenge and best him in a contest against Dad’s old nemesis. Ken nodded in a pantomime of thoughtful listening, restated my opinion back to me in a fair paraphrase, and then began to outline his own “alternative explanation”: oil.

  This was typical of Ken’s rhetorical strategy: a Socratic dialogue in which, as with the original Socrates, you are invited to offer your own opinion and quickly exposed as an ignoramus, whereupon he begins to explain the correct answer, putting forth whole systems of thought in long, well-organized paragraphs while you, relegated now to the role of chastened flunky, occasionally relieve his discourse with a dutiful “I do not know, Ken,” or “Surely it must be so.” Oppressive as I found this conversational style, I have to admit that Ken was right; in retrospect, it’s obvious that the war in Iraq was over oil. Former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan admitted as much, with offhanded candor, in his memoir The Age of Turbulence.1 It was a crude gambit in a twenty-first-century version of the Great Game with the entire globe as Risk board, a last savage scramble for the planet’s rapidly evaporating petroleum supply. In the face of an imminent global energy crisis, the Chinese were investing heavily in the infrastructure for wind and solar power while the United States’ best idea was to use its lumbering military brawn to seize the last major reservoir of the previous century’s dirty, guttering fuel.

  The term peak oil refers to the crest of the bell curve of petroleum production on this planet. After that point the supply of oil will only become scarcer and the price will (with occasional fluctuations) only rise, until the cost of extracting and refining it will exceed any potential profit. After which there won’t be any more. When precisely this peak will occur is debatable; a lot of people believe we’re already well past it. The biggest oil reserves on earth have been tapped; no significant new ones are being discovered. The most accessible and chilling analogy I’ve heard is that the situation is like being at a party where there’s only one six-pack, we’ve already drunk four of the six beers, and it’s after closing time.

  So let’s say we run out of oil. So we’ll just switch over to wind and solar, right? We’ll all ride around in monorails and zeppelins and tell
our grandkids the Oil Age was too noisy and smelled bad anyway. Well, no, peak-oil theorists argue: no other single energy source, nor any combination of them, can come anywhere close to generating the levels of energy our current civilization demands. And the means of producing other forms of energy all require oil, from digging coal mines to building nuclear plants. Also, almost everything in our society is made with petroleum, from aspirin, toothpaste, and tape to eyeglasses, refrigerants, and anesthetics. And food. This is the truly scary part. Global food production—the agricultural equipment, the fertilizers, preservation, and, of course, distribution of food—is completely dependent on petroleum. It’s no puzzle to biologists what happens to any population when its food supply is radically reduced. When it happens to animals it’s called a die-off. But the implications of this equation in human terms are so unimaginably ghastly that most people would prefer to believe it’s impossible rather than think about it at all. I keep remembering something the novelist Cormac McCarthy said in an interview: “If you were to take thoughtful people on, say, January first, 1900, and tell them what the twentieth century was going to look like, they’d say, ‘Are you shitting me?’”2