Is this the end, or just the beginning of the end?

I don’t have much sympathy for the American people. I can guess I can be smug because the current pain at the gasoline pump doesn’t affect me all that much; I no longer have to drive to work, punch a time clock, drive home; I live in what is quite possibly one of the last pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in my city. When I do drive, I drive a 1997 Ford Ranger that has only recently turned over 45,000 miles: How many middle-aged white American males can say that.

So I must admit, that went watching a Today Show segment on the plight of a young white suburban couple, living in the Phoenix area (the husband in typical nonproductive employment, the wife a typical blond of the trophy variety and two point three children) and their struggle with rising gasoline prices, I felt not one whit of sympathy. Why should I. They were, after all, what is commonly accepted as the average white-suburban American couple. This youngish couple owned not one, but two SUVs. Oh, poor babies.

Well they, and millions like them, have made their bed so let them lie in it. I am sure the Today Show piece did not garner much sympathy from the brothers and sisters of inner city America either or the reservations in South Dakota for that matter. The price of gasoline and its effects on family income and budget has been a fact of life for the poorest citizens, and non-citizens, in this country since at least the original OPEC oil shock of 1973. The undereducated, or even adequately educated, poor of this nation’s inner cites, who thanks in large part to President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, have to travel to where the minimum-wage jobs are, in Suzy Snowflake’s suburb.

Poor Suzy Snowflake. Stuck in the suburban wilderness with one tank of gas, a credit card and a very hungry SUV.

And yet the establishment Democratic response is that something should be done for Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake or they will vote, if they vote at all, Republican in the fall elections. Their decision to live a parasitic lifestyle in the suburbs was not wholly their choice. They were influenced by bankers, realtors and maybe ever their parents that new houses can only be found farther and farther out in the country and that only out in the suburbs and exurbs will their children receive a “good” education (read very few Negroes.)

And what gave Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake the freedom to squat on formerly productive farmland? The automobile.

Let me quote a passage from Morris Berman’s “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire” where he draws on “The Car Culture by James Flink:

“What the private passenger car plugged into, in the United States, was the core value of individualism. The car promised to put the cost of an urban transportation system, not on the state. In fact, the combination of car and highway promised to preserve and enhance American individualism. Finally, the car offered something dear to the American ways of life: a technical as opposed to political solution to the problems of the nation---a panacea, as it were, for some of the country’s major ills. (Page 253)”

That, in essence, is at the heart of the American dilemma: the reliance on technology to overcome a political problem.

Nowhere in the current discussion of the current energy crisis, ostensibly unforeseen by government or industry (and if you believe that I have property in Florida I wish to sell you), is there any talk of any effort to fundamentally change the American way of doing things. No talk of high-speed passenger rail service, thereby getting Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake and the little Snowflakes off the Interstate Highway system for sort to intermediate range trips for business or pleasure. No talk of limiting the growth, sprawl if you will, of suburban or exurban areas, which would also have the salubrious effect of spurring development in the decaying inner cities. Of course, the sort of change I’m writing about would have been achieved with less pain and more cheaply had it been acted upon in the second Carter administration. But we all know that we Americans were too smart to fall for Jimmy Carter’s un-American vision.

So let the price of gasoline rise and rise and rise. I’ll continue to walk to the neighborhood grocery store. And, thanks to the observant interpretation of a little noticed provision of the 1978 Tax Revenue Act by tax consultant Ted Benna-- whose ideas were latched onto by Ronald Reagan’s handlers for the 1980 campaign that successfully unseated the hated Carter -- my individual retirement account, IRA, is waxing fat off Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake’s gasoline woes. I feel like a rich American pig. I’m a member of the investing class.

So I will continue to walk, and improve my health. And as the price of gasoline skyrockets, the deficit created in my IRA by the Enron-Arthur Anderson accounting and energy price gouging scandal of 2001 is now history. Isn’t capitalism grand?

But, as Karl Marx so presciently observed, capitalists will sell the robe for their own hanging. And so we do. So devoted are the vast majority of Americans to a bankrupt mythology based, not as real mythologies on a kernel of truth, but on fabrications of the entertainment and propaganda industries (real advertising and marketing), intended more to induce the American people to buy, buy, buy.

The mythology of the free market, the rugged individual and a shop-‘til-ya-drop economy has blinded we Americans from the disaster just over the horizon, and it is not from bloodthirsty terrorists. The real terrorists are in the boardrooms of all the major companies in my mutual fund account. They have painted America into a corner which they, and the rest of we hoi-polloi, cannot get out.