[cryout-multi][cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/2″]
BS ‘n’ About…
Oil Contradictions
It has to be about the oil. It is the most valuable physical commodity in the world and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. Half the countries in the world seem to have it, the other half seem to want it, and everyone seems willing to die for it. The developing world has to have it and the industrial world grinds to a halt without it. It has to be about the oil.
But it can’t be about the oil. If the stuff’s so scarce and valuable, how come they’re building Hummers for the masses and wrapping every trinket and bauble in six layers of plastic? If it were about the oil, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to pick a fight with Venezuela? Or Mexico? Invade Scotland or something? Build cars that get decent gas mileage? Is our God-given right to keep every light in the house on reason enough for our government to have gotten us involved up to our eyeballs in the Armageddon that is the Middle East? No. It can’t be about the oil.
Yet ask the average American on the street for a one word answer as to why we’re in Iraq, or why we conducted our last adventure, or why we’ll conduct our next, and chances are the answer you’ll get is ‘oil’. It has been the driving force behind most of our foreign policy and environmental excesses for decades. It chose our friends for us. And our enemies. It didn’t hurt that it was an easy boogeyman to conjure for the American people, reflected as it was in the dials of the nearest gas pump.
Oil has become the sleeping bear lying over in America’s corner. Politicians can’t openly use it as the excuse for their latest foreign policy misadventure, but they can openly assume that we’ll assume it is the reason behind whatever reason they feed us. They are asking us to jump to conclusions and we’re asking how high. But what if oil isn’t the answer? And if it isn’t, what is?
Even the flag-wavingest of us don’t buy wholeheartedly into the rah-rah, kum-bay-ah, free the people and protect the homeland hooey. Americans are way too jaded for that. We’ve come to accept half-truths and expect underlying profit motives for everything. But we assumed it was the oil. Again, what if it isn’t. And if it isn’t, what is?
We are most assuredly up to our eyeballs in the Middle East for a reason. And it sure as heck isn’t your and my right to keep the AC at sixty degrees. That’s so Industrial Age. America is a capitalist Information Age society with capitalist Information Age appetites. America, for all her rhetoric and patriotic songs, is no longer the standard bearer for democracy and the will of the people. We are the standard bearer for dog-eat-dog free market capitalism. It’s what we do.
In much the same way the Industrial Age needed oil to keep its factories running, the Information Age requires new markets to keep its stock indexes rising. The real profit in Iraq isn’t in the oilfields. It’s in the number of Starbucks franchises we can build in Baghdad.
Capitalism is the most voracious social system yet devised by man, one which was designed to work when information rode on horseback and it took three years for an investment to sail around the world and back. But it breaks down at the instantaneous speeds of the Information Age. In the three centuries since it was drawn up by my namesake, Adam, it and the eternal, unaccountable business entities it spawns have taken on and gobbled up virtually every ideology, faith, and culture on the planet. It funded the Age of Empires, then felled it. It propped up the Monarchies then funded their demise. It made possible the war excesses of the 20th Century, conquering Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and much of International Communism along the way. It weakened the Church’s Millennia long hold on the hearts of the people. It has taken firm hold in China. Now it takes on Islam.
Less than a lifetime ago, America was filled with unique, family-owned businesses and seemingly every town had a flavor all its own. We are not very far away from having every town in the world look the same, decked out in some franchised, Fortune 500 assault on the senses.
It’s not about the oil anymore. The stakes are much higher than that. It’s about conquest, economic warfare at its most refined. When looked at in light of the social changes it has brought about in our own country, and others under the capitalist umbrella, is it any wonder that the still fairly devout Muslim world doesn’t want it infecting their way of life?
Family, faith, tradition, and culture seem to pay heavy prices when capitalism comes to town. Do we really want the Fortune 500 conquering the world to build us a sanitized Disneyland version of home no matter where we go? Kansas City is already starting to look like Charlotte which looks a whole lot like Spokane. Do we really want Timbuktu looking like Rio, which looks a whole lot like Paris? Gas stations, burger joints, and chain hotels?
Capitalism is out to conquer the world, uniting it under the banner of Dow Jones. Should it succeed there will be no going back. Once nations, regions, and peoples lose touch with the historical roots and cultural identity that made them unique, they won’t find them again outside of museums. We will have broken completely with our past.
Our involvement in the Middle East is nothing less than an all out clash between two conflicting ways of thought. Islam is the last major ideology standing in the way of a one world economic system. Should capitalism succeed in conquering the world we might even see a peace of sorts. We wouldn’t have been bombing Iraq if they’d had the good sense to have their fair share of Ford dealerships, Coke machines, and Hilfiger outlet stores, now would we? As for whether this is actually a good thing? Well. That’s a story for another day.
- [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [/cryout-multi]