The Quick Collapse and Other Melodies

There is dread in the air. It has a tangible, almost olfactory quality. Moreover, I am getting keener, more adept at detecting the necrotic notes that are now emanating out from the economy. Of late it seems as there are times when every market murmur contains a sleight-of-hand contrived to mask fiscal reality. The United States’ once formidable manufacturing base has – along with the silent generation who fed smelting furnaces – largely, ‘gone-fishing.’ The common-sensical notion that people actually need to make things has been swapped for a mise en abîme paper chase of dodgy debt repackaging. The telltale rot is everywhere if you care to look. On July 11th, oil futures rose to $147.27 a barrel. A month and a half earlier, the price of rice had doubled over a seven-month period (prompting Sam’s Club and Costco to impose restrictions on bulk sales.) For peakniks, they were halycon days: editorials and op-ed articles that spoke of about peak oil’s ‘new-found credibility ’ were everywhere (proof, surely, that the mallards were lining up, once and for all.)

Yes, the shit was inching towards the fan like a determined brown caterpillar. Watching it, loping along, I caught myself engaging in a mute mantra: “Go on buddy,” I would intone. “Only another few inches to go, you can do it!”

Then, just as it seemed as the entire megalopolis of cards was about to tumble, a great load of nothing came to pass; nothing insofar as some Executive Branch fairy godperson wove his /her magic wand and all normalcy was seemingly ‘restored’. The bear in the market had been tranquilized by a well-aimed dart sticking out of its hairy hock and all clamoring had quietened to a mundane hum (at which point the cud-chewing could return, to wit, the interminable buzzing about the new iphone 3G, the dulcet-toned merits of bamboo flooring and the internecine machinations of Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance…)

The tragic thing though, is that I got left behind in this whole process. Resembling a gnarled, steroidal body-builder, I am left flexing, pumped to high-heaven. With endorphins and adrenaline coursing through my tissues, I feel like King Lear, roaring at the tempestuous cumulonimbi. I holler, “Hold on a mo. What about the collapse of the Western Banking Paradigm? What about the transition to a Korten-esque Earth community, people? What gives?”

To make matters worse, by the end of July, the media did a tail-spin. As the price of light sweet crude contracted, Peak oil luminaries were send back to their respective wildernesses. They were crack-pot Cassandras after all! These happenings only added to my psychic immobility. To make matters worse, the sheeple felt vindicated. Through their latte foam moustaches, the ripostes came thick and fast:

“So, what happened to the $200 a barrel oil then, Nostradamus?”
“See this Venti Moccacino? Paid in Canadian dollars. No Ameros here, padre!”

It took a while, but eventually I, too, began to settle. I now view these times as interolating plateaux marked by subtle deflationary flutterings in my chest; the bodily re-grouping after an expenditure of nervous energy. However, for some less fortunate than I, these cyclical, undulating energies may presage an almost bipolar shift. Collapse watching is an enervating and often exhausting sport, pock-marked by an emotional to-ing and fro-ing at the best of times. To be aware of resource depletion and the unsustainability of the corporatist market model can open a door to an awareness and, simultaneously, a vulnerability that can be extremely hard to bear.

There are those who love me who tell me I should go on a news fast. That too much time spent visiting Life After The Oil Crash will only further addle my brain. Maybe they are onto something, yet I suspect it is only half the story. The truth is, if I am addicted to anything, it is my recreational fantasy that civilization may, suddenly, go to Hades-in-a-handbag. I kid you not: when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went under, I actually broke out the popcorn!

Consequently, I am slowly beginning to realize how much emotional capital I have invested in a fast crash scenario. The way I see it, I would much rather eat the quarter-pound turd burger right off the bat. If society is going to haemorrhage, I suspect it may be prudent that we begin bracing for it now - not next year and definitely not in 2012.

As a fast crash aficionado, I end up comforting myself with the fact that most of the peak oil mavens are on the home team, so to speak. There is an assuaging quality to a rapid dismantlement insofar as we would be cast, largely, as bystanders (or rubberneckers.) In this sense, a fast crash may, paradoxically, ask less of us in the very short term. Despite my erstwhile art student longing for a Situationiste spectacle on a continental scale, a fast crash, is still a plausible prognostication. In a global postmodern society businesses are highly networked and, as such, susceptible to viral coding and other chaotic phenomena. I am reminded of the permaculturist and author, Robin Wheeler, who circumscribes the world economy brilliantly as being “[…] a big, tippy bag of wrestling cats [.]”

Conversely, there are those who maintain that societal collapse may not happen quite so soon, that we may be facing a rather more drawn out societal erosion. According to Oregon Arch-Druid and blogger John Michael Greer, we may be a facing societal winding-down, an ultra long prelude to The Long Emergency that may well play out over one or two hundred years. In a nod to David Korten, he calls it the Long Unraveling of the Industrial Age. He adds a quasi-Jungian twist in his insistence that the western psyche has a tendency to project two narratives into the ether, twin mythologies regarding our future destiny: ‘the narrative of the apocalypse’ and the ‘narrative of inevitable progress.’ Both are popular in his estimation as:

“[…] They push the necessity and the costs of change onto somebody else: the “they” who are expected to think of something just in time to keep progress on track, for example, or the supposedly faceless billions who are expected to hurry up and die en masse so that the flag of some future utopia can be pitched atop their graves.”

I find his reasoning lucid and rather unsensationalist - quite the opposite to the average doomer’s “wig out/bug-out” mentality. He offers up an idea as to why some of us may find comfort in a fast crash: namely, the cessation of quotidian clock-watching and card punching. When civilization crashes and all the “others” die-off, it will finally be our time to shine. Make no bones about it, first-order-of-the-day: we will tell the man to fuck off, once-and-for-all. Then we will step up to the plate - like some manner of Victor Mature hero - and make yurts. And squirrel jerky.

Conversely, until this precipitous moment arrives, we can all still take a wii.

In the final analysis, those who are intimately familiar with the labyrinthine complexities of civil and business infrastructure are precisely those voices we should be attending most closely - folks like Matthew Simmons and Michael C. Ruppert, who have transitioned, outwardly, from dealing with the ruling elites or “T.P.T.B.” Also, ‘collapse watchers’ like Dmitry Orlov have a lot to offer insofar as they are able to regale us with primary source testimony and practical insight à propos previous historical incidences of societal failure.

Personally, I am weary of the emotional highs and lows, the whole teetering nature of the zeitgeist. It weighs heavily on my shoulders. I am beleaguered by the oft-encountered, little spoken of ‘peak oil’ yoke (the pressure of which has been known to exacerbate personality disorders, wreck marriages and divide families.) I want the current paradigm to fail because I am hurting so.

One last thing. If by chance you should witness my raging against the aforementioned tempest, stop and listen. You will hear me yelling “enough is enough, already. Collapse, godammit, collapse!” You will see for yourself that I have had more than enough of this chimps tea party that is patriarchal civilization, this cult of thanatos.

I do not want its ‘so-called’ technological progress, its Back-to-School sales, its depleted uranium-tipped ordnance, its fish gene ‘enhanced’ tomatoes, its 700-billion dollar Wall Street bailout. If the price of gasoline, natural gas and distillates are going to go through the roof (as predicted) then a part of me longs for someone to hurry it along and put a firecracker up its ass. Ultimately, I only have one personal meta-narrative, an amalgam of the two that John Michael Greer spoke of above. I court the myth of the ‘progressive apocalypse,’ a much-needed societal rites-of-passage for us all.