End of Suburbia...

As a follow to my last post on the various links between economy, religion and space--particularly suburban space--I thought I just might bring you a picture from my neighborhood.




Yes, there are a couple of oil wells down the street from me and, yes, Virginia, they blow up. So, according to the Whittier Daily News, "One of the workers, a 49-year- old man, suffered second- and third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body. He was taken to a local hospital and later transferred to a burn center in Sherman Oaks."

I guess that's another argument for driving your car on vegetable oil, huh?

To get back to the larger point, the fire I saw bellowing from the well the other day reminded me of the real economy of the suburban "dream," which is built on fire and oil. Usually we are able to hide it, usually we ignore its costs (wars, pollution, etc.). What are those costs? As I was driving in to work, I saw yet again one of those magnetic ribbon car stickers with the American Flag on it and the words "The Price of Freedom." Well, if people really knew what the "price of freedom" was, they would understand that the real price of that oil burning in their--my!!!--backyard.

So, I decided to do a little calculation, just for fun. (Don't laugh, I'm not an economist or a mathematician).

According to Nationmaster we use 19.7 million barrels of crude per day in the United States. That comes out to 7.19 billion barrels per year. According to the Energy Department, "One barrel (42 gallons) of crude oil , when refined, produces approximately 19.9 gallons of finished motor gasoline." That means about 47% of a barrel of oil is use for gasoline. That means we burn about 3.3 billion "barrels" of gas, or 138.6 billion gallons.

So, now let's trot on over to Cost of War.

So far we have spent at least 171 billion dollars on the war, and that's not counting our annual defense bugdet.

So, let's just calculate this over a two year period (171/2) to make things simple (March 2003-March 2005).

138.6 billion gallons of gas per year / 85.5 billion dollars per year in Iraq= .61 cents per gallon surcharge per year.

So, we should add at least 61 cents per gallon to our gas to pay just for this war. This is just a rough calculation, of course, and I'm not counting increased disability payments, family services, manpower lost in many communities, harm to families, on-going mental health issues....

And, yet, the economic-religious-political triumvirate of the Right marches on, self-reinforcing, self-centered, hell-bent on securing power at home and abroad--no matter how disengenuous their leaders are, now matter how many fabrications proffer to the media.

And now a link to: End of Suburbia

Fast Food Nation--THE MOVIE

Hmmm... I wonder what this will be like?

This from the CBC:

LOS ANGELES - Director Richard Linklater, the filmmaker behind Dazed and Confused, is set to make a big-screen version of the book Fast Food Nation.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/05/20/Arts/ffnation050520.html

How Chain Restaurants Win the War

The connection between space and psyche are well-known, but little are they employed (by the mainstream media) to help us understand the predicament of America. This month's Harper's deserves widespread dissemination. Its portrait of the modern-day conservative movement and religion is insightful and scary without casting its characters as moronic. What they are, and this is what is scary, is different. Their otherness comes through and every page. What becomes apparent is that this difference is played out over and over again, not only in their beliefs, but in their economic choices. The authors could not have captured the strange marriage of religiosity, economy, politics and human feeling that feeds the Religious Right any more accurately. Take the following passage:

...[Linda] opened her eyes and explained the process she had undergone to reach her refined state. She called it "spiritual restoration." Anyone can do it, she promised, "even a gay activist." Linda had seen with her own eyes the sex demons that make homosexuals rebel against God, and she said they are gruesome; but she did not name them, for she would not "give demons glory." They are all the same, she said. "It's radicalism."

She reached across the table and touched my hand. "I have to tell you, the spiritual battle is very real." We are surrounded by demons, she explained, reciting lessons she had learned in her small-group studies at New Life. The demons are cold, they need bodies, the long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against. "Molested," suggested. The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by sin--a murder, a homosexual act--and a demon will leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.

It is not so much the large populations, with their uneasy mix of sinner and saved, that make Christian conservatives leery of urban areas. Even downtown Colorado Springs, presumably as godly as any big town in America, struck the New Lifers as unclean. Whenever I asked where to eat, they would warn me away from downtowns neat little grid of cafés and ethnic joints. Stick to Academy, they'd tell me, referring to the vein of superstores and prepackaged eateries--P.F. Chang's, California Pizza Kitchen, et al.--that bypasses the city. Downtown, they said, is "confusing."

What is fascinating and brilliant about Jeff Sharlett's "Soldiers of Christ" (Harper's May 2005) is that he brings out the elisions of belief and action at the most automatic of levels. It is not the "mission" and the overt behaviors that is most revealing of the right-wing religious movement, it's the nearly invisible shift in behavior that define them. The fear of a demon entering one's body renders downtowns "dangerous" while consuming processed food from a corporate entity is considered "normal," "safe," "good." The economic spaces of division are the echoes of a hyper-fundamentalist religion. The the need to eat is coupled with, on one hand, the desire to remain "pure" and, on the other, the fear of the other's race, gender or sexuality.

While one might argue that religion and food have often looked to each other for definition--strict Kosher practices, for example--what is most interesting and historically contradictory about the Religious Right's iteration of this practice is that the content and preparation of food remain unimportant. What is important is where one eats and with whom, and the food itself is neither pure nor impure, save drugs or alcohol. Fundamentalist Christian food practice is not about the body or the incorporation of belief systems in food (the substance), but, rather, it focuses on an implicit "corporate cleansing" of food. (This is radical. If one looks at Jewish Kosher practices, Sharia or Transubstantiation--the Catholic practice of Communion--ingesting or refusing specific foods is tightly wound with absorbing something more than the food itself, such as the body of Christ.) Fundamentalist Christians must embrace the chain restaurant not only as a "neutral" food substance, but as a spatial embodiment of its racism. Moreover, "Corporate Cleansing" (processing) of food is an extension of power, of dominion; it is a reminder that humans, master of plants and beasts, retain control and have no moral obligation to think about sustainability, the environment, or other terms that would imply humans' less-than-central role on the planet.

Dear Day to Day

Here's what I sent to NPR this morning.


Dear Day to Day: I have no problem that Jonathan Last did not like Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. In fact, I agree. The wooden acting, the hackneyed dialogue and the silly plot are, at best, irritating. However, his review made me, well, uncomfortable. I understand that Mr. Last found the transformation of Darth Vader more interesting than the a light-saber-weilding-pseudo-philosophizing Yoda. However, we should separate falling in love with the character from falling in love with what that character means. Mr. Last's review, which lauds the Empire's order, strength and ability to effectively suppress those that disagree with it is, quite simply, praise for fascism and despotism--yes, the same fascism and despostism that can be associated with Hitler and Mussolini. While I hesitiate to convict by association, Mr. Last's employment at the Weekly Standard only reinforces the idea that his review of Star Wars III was a thinly-veiled piece of propaganda that could have emerged from his magazine. Take for example "The Case for American Empire" in which the Weekly Standard's Max Boot argues that "The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role" (10/15/2001, Volume 007, Issue 05). Mr. Last's review was not about the politics in George Lucas' movie, but rather those of today and his own vision of political utopia--one where "messy" civil liberties are less important than order, one where the inherent disorder of any democratic republic (read filibuster) make it somehow less desirable than goose-stepping our way to a well-organized, smoothly operating and, ultimately, despotic empire.

Fertilizer

The London Observer, November 18, 1822:

It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Euope into the port of Hull. The neighborhood of Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and all of the places where, during the late bloody war, the principle battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse on which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granularly state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands. (War is a force that gives us meaning 31)

I'm now wondering about Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Guatemala... Wars

Gingerbread Hearts anyone? (Don't get it? Read Hedges' book.)

I am sure, in America, we are consuming more mint tea, more couscous, more hummus than ever before. Is the fruit of trade, of open-mindedness, goodwill? No, it is the ancient way of the cannibals, their desire to incorporate the other and the other's power into one's own body in order to grow stronger.

Chris Hedges

I'm just reading Chris Hedges' book, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and just wanted to post some quotes:

War is a crusade. President George W. Bush is not shy about warning other nations that they stand with the United States in the war on terrorismor will be counted with those that defy us. This too is jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. (4)

I don't know why I'm quoting that. It's so well-known, so repeated, almost cliché, but, still, it is so true and so important. He goes on to tell of war's narcotic effects, its thrills, its sense of purpose--the very one it conveys to societies--like ours--that fall under its spell. "Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose" (2).

I am often amazed, as I drive down the street, as I purchase food, gas, clothes and other things we call necessities, at how the spell of war and of capital flowing through me and endowing me with something I don't intrinsically have. War is the ultimate form of branding: live or die, win or lose, right or wrong. Our brutish, wanna-be dictator that we call The President is sucessfully branding himself and pulling all into his manichean system in which our daily actions allow us to portray ourselves as patriotic ("Let's buy a car!" "Support our troops!") because of what we say, wear or worship. But, don't worry. We still have our imagination, right?

"It’s a strange thing when a letter from the school principal arrives on lime green and aqua stationery. Stranger still when the postmark is Burbank, California, and the return address reads “Imagineer That!” But it was real. The communique trumpeted “Disney Channel is coming to our school to help spark our creativity”—in a pre-packaged 90-minute assembly.

“Imagineer That! The Creativity Adventure” is designed to “help empower students to unleash their creative powers.” It folds “an imagination skills building workshop” and a sighting of Disney Channel star Ricky Ullman into the middle-school day, and follows up with a celebratory evening “wrap party.” Full participation is guaranteed by a chance to win a family vacation to (where else?) Walt Disney World. The principal described this hoopla as “a fantastic opportunity.”

(From In These Times)