It’s said that there was little panic aboard the Titanic as it sank, and likewise among the crowds in the endless descending stairwells of the World Trade Center towers on 9-11. The Hollywood image of fleeing screaming crowds in a panic is largely fiction; the reality seems to be that the great majority of people caught in a disaster go into almost a shocked, benumbed state, as one can remember from news footage of ash-covered accountants streaming north that warm September day, or more recently of victims of Hurricane Katrina making their way into civic arenas converted into mass shelters and clinics across the nation. Our brothers and sisters with that glazed look in their eyes, who just keep moving one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other…
Historically, the same seems to apply to great nations as they collapse – there are not riots or civil wars, by and large; instead, the populace keeps going to work each day, just trying to hang on – physically and spiritually – as they deal with the price increases, the snafus that seems to spring up in services that were formerly provided routinely and taken as a given in a great nation, the increasing international problems. Leaders find themselves dealing with an intractable, unpopular war; former allies who now avert their gaze when they enter a room. There are energy supply problems, and natural disasters that formerly would have been addressed readily by a collective rolling up of the sleeves and going to work side by side; a search for scapegoats, and for ideological purity as the zealous desperately attempt to implement their programs even as they suspect their power is slipping away; mutual disdain between rich and poor, urban and rural, devout and freethinking as the sense of a common national unity slips away – “You expect me to sit at a table and make common cause with those people?”
This is a well-worn historical path, and many would say America is well along it today. While we ask ourselves if the collapse can be prevented, the truth may well be that the collapse is right here, right now, right among us. We may already be swept up in the flow of the might river of history, but do not yet fully realize it, as the tabletop we’re personally floating on has not yet capsized. If this is what it looks like as empires collapse, then study it well. For your grandchildren, should you be so lucky as to come out on the far side of the floodwaters relatively unscathed, will someday ask you around the fireplace “How did it happen?” “How could it happen?” “What were you seeing, feeling, thinking at the time?” And most poignantly, “Could it have been prevented?” “Can we keep it from happening again?”
The answer to the last question, history tells us, is “no,” but no one wants to tell children that, to crush the hopeful dreams of youth so necessary for the rebuilding to come, and so we will lie and say that “We didn’t get it quite right; it’s up to you to learn from our mistakes.” And they will, for a time, as a new nation somewhere rises to greatness, until after many generations of growth and success and struggle and challenges overcome they also forget that they are mere men, not the elect of god, and repeat the cycle. We may not even be able to face up to it ourselves yet.
These rather sobering thoughts come to me after wandering over to Salon.com today and reading Michelle Goldberg’s essay “Decline and Fall,” in which she reviews Kevin Phillip’s new book “American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century,” and puts its observations on current American culture into wider perspective, drawing on observers from the historian Barbara Tuchman to the peak-oil prophet of doom James Kunstler, to former federal reserve chairman Paul Volker:
As former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker wrote last April in the Washington Post, under the placid surface of the seemingly steady American economy, “there are disturbing trends: huge imbalances, disequilibria, risks — call them what you will. Altogether the circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot. What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do much about it.”
Goldberg notes that this judgment is both sad and ironic coming from Phillips, who served as a political analyst for Richard Nixon and who in 1969 predicted much of what we have since seen come to pass, in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority.” He’s over his Kool-Aid, is mad as hell with the Bushes (he’s already penned a book on that topic), and here takes the broader perspective of viewing the great American SUV in context as the wheels fall off. You may not agree with the policy proposals of a conservative that’s come to his senses, but you have to give him credit for facing painful truths rather than returning to the punchbowl for another hypnotic draught.
I’d also recommend reading the comments to Goldberg’s article; while there are one or two freeperesque letters there, most are thought-provoking riffs off the main theme in their own right.
Of course, all that gloom is if Phillip’s scenario is the one we actually follow. Speaking from personal experience – and as Mrs. K.P. has never let me forget – in the early 1980’s I was one of those folks expecting the collapse to come then, under Reagan, and we certainly managed to dodge the bullet for a generation – at the expense of the Soviet Union, which collapsed first. Mrs. K.P. was quite shocked when my old college roommate passed though Kansas City to visit us and our six-month-old firstborn in 1985. He was moving back east from California, and among the items he was traveling with were a shotgun, shell reloading equipment, a motorcycle, and a cloth drawstring sack full of Carson City silver dollars, which he handed me to take into the house without warning me what it was, and just about dislocated my shoulder! My approach to the impending collapse was more hobbit-like: we planted a massive garden and spent the summer furiously canning vegetables and making jellies from various wild fruit growing near our little bungalow. (Aside, for future reference: wild plums make the most marvelous jam!)
Given my prognostication track record, I’m certainly not one to venture a prediction as to how all this will play out. We have massive challenges facing the nation even if both houses of congress and the presidency were to be taken by Democrats, and I’m not convinced, collectively, that they get it. It’s going to take a generation to solve the problems we’re facing now, and that’s if the zealots all crawl back under their rocks and let us get to work in peace. As I don’t expect that to happen, the situation may indeed have reached a tipping point. I recently spent a Saturday at the local used bookstore, perusing the volumes on organic gardening – pesticides will be unavailable or unaffordable, even if I wanted to use them (which I don’t), as they’re derived from petroleum – on planting fruit trees, on canning. I’d gotten rid of a lot of those kind of things in the `90’s, and now have to quietly recollect them. Mrs. K.P.’s reaction is along the lines of “Oh, not all that again! We survived Reagan-Bush Sr.” I still haven’t gotten rid of the books and printouts on immigration to Canada, either, although the way things are going BushCo may implode before we need to head for the border after all. Or not.
Funny how we all keep going to our jobs and living our day to day lives, and just making little changes just in case, just in case, putting one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other…