Disgraced, racist, former senator George Allen does not agree that American is addicted to foreign oil. He has a different perspective, which he explained today to Laura Ingraham’s ridiculous radio audience:
ALLEN: I love that statement, America is addicted to oil. What an elitist point of view. Americans are not addicted to oil. Americans are addicted to freedom — the freedom and liberty to move where and when we want.
It occurs to me that Allen’s statement packs much more truth than he knows or intended…because it has been the elitists in this country who have been on a perpetual safari to explore, lock-down, and profit from, foreign oil fields since the automobile made such enterprises lucrative. Would this country care one bit what goes on in Saudi Arabia or Iran or Libya or Iraq, if they didn’t have oil? Would the people of those countries care one bit about America if we had not been traipsing all over their area of the world and propping up one dictator only to pull down another? For centuries prior to the arrival of the internal combustion engine, Europe managed to ignore most of the Middle East, with only periodic outbursts of longing to see and control the lands described in the Holy Bible.
When George Allen talks about America’s “addict[ion] to freedom — the freedom and liberty to move where and when we want,” he could easily be talking about the freedom and liberty to move into Kuwait or Bahrain or Baku or Khartoum and begin pumping for oil. He could be talking about the freedom and liberty to fly a tomahawk-armed aerial drone into any resource-rich nation’s sovereign air space and blow bad guys to bits. He could be talking about the freedom and liberty to send special-ops snatch teams into the streets of Amman or Karachi or Milan to kidnap critics and render them up for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.
But that’s not what George Allen meant. He meant that Joe and Jane Six-Pack have an addiction to packing the family unit into a Sports Utility Vehicle and trekking them across the magnificent U.S.-Interstate Highway system to visit Yellowstone Park or the Grand Canyon or Disney World or the Outer Banks or Cape Cod or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. That’s our Kerouacian birthright…right? In my day we called it a station wagon, but every summer my parents packed me in the car and took me to some magnificent corner of this country. I don’t deny that I’d like to be able to do the same one day if I ever have any children.
But I don’t pretend that the cost of such vacations doesn’t become prohibitive when gasoline costs over three dollars a gallon. This is a big country. What Big Oil (and their lobbyists, the Republican Party) want to do is convince me that…if only…they are allowed to drill, baby, drill, and invade, baby, invade, and occupy for a 100 years, baby, yeah, that I’ll be able to afford those long vacations again.
They don’t really want me to make too strong of a connection. They don’t want, for example, for me to see the war in Iraq as a war for a cheaper vacation to Las Vegas. Except, actually, they do want me to see it that way. They just don’t me seeing it too clearly that way. They want to mix in all kinds of feelings of patriotism and expanding freedom and opposing tyranny and apple pie. The real elites just want carte blanche to tap into the federal treasury for contracts and into the Armed Forces for armed backup.
America’s real addiction is to its unblemished image of itself. That’s what Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove and John McCain and Exxon/Mobil hammer on everyday. That’s why they always say critics ‘hate America’. That’s why George Allen makes a distinction that makes no logical difference, but makes all the emotive difference in the world. We’re not addicted to oil, we’re just addicted to being able to afford to use as much of it as we want. We’re addicted to liberty and freedom and mobility.
Yes. And we are addicted to it so much that we’ll fall for any deceit that allows our elites to set up a world system where America absolutely has to have military bases in 180 countries so that our vacations are affordable. The inevitable blowback in terrorism? All the more reason to bloat our national security budgets and increase our capabilities.
I don’t want to refight the battles of the post-war era. The Soviet Union needed to be contained, Europe needed to be rebuilt, and energy sources needed to be developed and protected. But we need to be forward-looking now. We can’t continue on this fossil-fuel based path and we can’t pay any cost to remain the sole hegemon. If we want our values to prevail over the totalitarian tendencies of China and Russia, and over the resurgent strains of fundamentalism, we must recognize the problem that our addiction to foreign oil presents and work to fix the problem now.
George Allen inadvertently said something profound.
