Paradise Lost

Everyone has heard the story from India of the six blind men and the elephant. Asked to study and describe it, one grabbed the trunk and said the elephant was like a snake; another laid hold of a foot and said it was like a tree, etc.

The crisis, or rather constellation of crises America now finds itself facing is like that: bigger than anything that's ever walked the earth, and so multi-faceted and complex that it can't be described in a single sentence. People who write about it generally limit themselves to only one facet of it, which is probably best since every aspect of our unfolding disaster deserves its own detailed analysis.

However on close consideration, I find there are two aspects, or rather two clusters of aspects of the crisis which are the most important, because they have a direct impact on America's prospects for continuing to function as a society, as an economic entity, and as a government. The first has to do with fossil fuels consumption, consumption in general, and environmental degradation. The second is the victory of militarism and establishment of military dictatorship as our form of government,the death of the American republic, and the fascist state's appropriation of all of American society's surplus wealth, both present and future.

The first constellation of topics is dealt with by James Howard Kunstler in his book "The Long Emergency," and also covered piecemeal on a weekly basis on his blog, Clusterfuck Nation (see right sidebar). Kunstler's emphasis on the consequences of rising petroleum prices and the carcinogenic proliferation of urban/suburban sprawl doesn't leave much room for analysis of the consequences of global warming, although he does devote a chapter to it in his book. The ambitious and well-informed reader will want to consult other sources to stay up to date on that aspect of the crisis.

The other topic head -- the disaster of triumphant militarism and its destruction of the Constitution, the American government, and the American economy, is comprehensively and masterfully exposed in "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" by Chalmers Johnson, a foreign policy academic, U.C. San Diego professor, and a former CIA consultant. This is the essential book for anyone who wants to know how close to utter self-destruction we now are, or how pathetically unequipped to impede the war machine's drunken careening toward the precipice.

Published in 2004, "Sorrows" is the most important book of the last decade, and possibly the most important of the last 50 years. Fortunately, Johnson is an outstanding writer as well as a tireless researcher, with a plain, down-to-earth style free of academic jargon, and a talent for organization that enables him to cast a bright light on all the dank and secret corners of the military-industrial complex's (the same one Eisenhower warned us about) subversion of the three-branch system of government, creating an executive dictatorship in its stead, and its theft of virtually all the excess wealth this country has produced since the end of World War II, a fortune so immense that the pharaohs and emperors of ancient times could never have dreamt of it.

Johnson unfortunately has no solutions, easy or otherwise, for this long-running disaster, which we are so late in acknowledging and so inadequately equipped to deal with. Without saying so directly, he serves notice that anyone hoping the Democratic Party might be able to ameliorate this mess is leaning on a broken stick. He cites a $30-billion, ten-year boondoggle involving the conversion of Boeing 767's to aerial tankers which would be used for refueling combat aircraft in flight, which wasn't even on the list of the Air Force's top 60 priorities. Who led the charge for this white elephant of a project? None other than those two left-wing, liberal Democratic senators from Washington state, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. In this case they lined up so perfectly with the m.o. of the Republican majority that House Speaker Dennis Hastert showed his approval of their bill by tacking on funds to lease four new 737's exclusively for congressional junkets and vacations.

"Such obvious indifference to how taxpayers' monies are spent," Johnson comments, "bordering on corruption, no longer attracts notice. It has become a standard feature..."

Other standard features Chalmers Johnson explores are the proliferation of military bases and secret torture facilities worldwide, the role of the CIA and other intelligence services in the functioning of a secret and largely off-the-books government, the increasing monitoring of "what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another," and the habit of excessive and probably illegal secrecy generally.

For a short version of the ideas Johnson elaborates in "Sorrows," see Tom Engelhardt's two-part interview with him at the web site "Working for Change," here and here.