The Year That Never Was
By Peter Goodchild
13 December, 2010
Countercurrents.org
I’ve been rather fond of the year 2010. Especially the “010” bit. It looks like two rather blank eyeballs with a nose in the middle. I was thinking of calling it “The Year of Silence”, or “The Year of Disinformation”, or “the Year of Inanity”, but “The Year That Never Was” will have to do. The reason it never was is that I keep thinking of that schlocky old work-ethic aphorism about “lost: one golden moment,” or whatever it was.
So we lost one leaden year. Where did it go, he asked rhetorically. Well, part of the problem is that there were no issues to get excited about. There was still “peak oil” but only to some extent. Arguing about its existence was about as pointless as arguing about whether the Earth is a globe or a disk. I must admit that there were still a few tiffs over PO. I used to say that a teenager is someone who thinks it’s more important to have an opinion than to have an education, but that witticism was growing stale. I’m now inclined to say that a teenager is a bank robber who targets his parents’ life savings. Same difference. I’ll never forget the young man who once stuck his nose in the air and told me that he didn’t read old books, meaning anything more than five years old.
It may well be the case that extraterrestrials are trying to take over the Earth by fusing our brain cells. I must admit I haven’t come up with anything better.
Disinformation. Ah, yes. Al Gore says nothing about overpopulation, but he’s a self-proclaimed expert on inconvenient truths. Prince Charles also flies around in a private jet and likewise admonishes us about fossil fuels. Prince Charles is an Al Gore wannabe. When I was going to school in Canada, I was told that the British system of government is better than that of the United States because the former has the monarchy to give or not give royal assent to whatever schemes the carpetbaggers (politicians) come up with. Perhaps Charles hasn’t read that. Never mind. Several scholars over the years have come up with the theory that there is something like a genetic defect in all humans, since we have an irrational need to believe that the earthly monarch is the representative of the heavenly deity, and vice versa. Especially vice versa. That nonsense goes back for centuries. In the Middle Ages the peasant revolts would terminate in the appeal to the king, with the assumption that the king would dispense justice. At least the carpenters got a few days’ work out of it, putting up all those gallows.
It’s all part of what might be called the Official Untruth. We don’t have too many people, we just need to spend a few trillion dollars more on the development of solar-powered SUVs. There’s nothing terribly new about the Official Untruth. When Canada’s cod-fishing industry collapsed, the Official Untruth for a while was that the decline in fish was due to predation by seals. The government said it, so it had to be true. In the 1930s the Official Untruth was that hydrogen balloons would revolutionize transportation. All the embarrassing bits of history get erased by the next edition, as George Orwell told us. And instead of feeling like wasteful if resentful little shites for letting a trillion barrels of oil disappear in pointless journeys along Route 66, the Official Untruth of anthropogenic global warming makes us feel virtuous and positively heroic for preventing the world from turning into another Mars. And we know the untruth is true, because Wikipedia says so.
The only big issue was the Ultimate Taboo. I mean Ultimate Ultimate. No matter how deeply you plunge into taboos, there always seems to be one more. No, it’s not overpopulation. No, not religion. No, not sexual preferences. Yes, boys and girls, it’s Bank Accounts. In my whole life, I’ve never been told the amount in anyone’s bank account. Even the word “money” is a huge no-no. You have to call it funds, finances, revenues, income, expenses, whatever you like, but you don’t call it money. And once again I’m reminded of Barry Broadfoot’s lovely quotation from the 1930s: “Every newspaper across Canada and in the United States always played up the silver lining. . . . There were no such things as starvation, hunger marches, store front windows being kicked in. Yes, they were reported, but always these were called incidents and incited by ‘highly‑paid professional agitators.’” Practically all of my email pen-pals tell me they’re in dept up to their nostrils and about to go under for the last time. So how is it that there’s no one willing to talk about it in public? Because in the world of Madison Avenue, there are only two sins: old age and poverty.
What’s really odd is that for years people have been saying, “There goes Peter again, with all that doom and gloom.” What doom and gloom? All I’ve been saying is: “Do whatever you can to put some money aside, at least until inflation means you’ll need the proverbial wheelbarrow of it to buy a loaf of bread, and at the same time come to grips with the fact that growing vegetables takes more than digging a hole, pouring in a tablespoon of seed, and coming back three months later.” Or conversely: “There are few things in life more enjoyable than watching a row of seedlings poking their heads up in a well-tended garden.” That’s doom and gloom? If you say so.
Yes, yes, I know there is also some plain old common sense in not talking about one’s bank account. When you get to be a 61-year-old antique like me and can walk only 40 km a day in the desert, you realize that young ladies who are taking advantage of one of the three big Growth Industries (theft, scavenging, and prostitution) find themselves attracted to any old guy with a wallet. But that old guy has to watch his backside. If he makes it too obvious, he just gets them pissed off. Here in the Sultanate of Oman, I live in an apartment building that has its first floor occupied by a transvestite Filipino barber and a bunch of Chinese “massage parlor” women. When they found out what my salary was, the Filipino asked me to buy his camera for 50 rials so he could send the money home, and the Chinese madam offered to go to bed with me for 500 rials, which is 1,800 USD, or 6,300 Thai baht. A really beautiful woman in Bangkok would cost less than a twentieth of that for an entire night. I said no to both, so now they permanently won’t talk to me, and I have to go down the street to get my hair cut. The Indian guy does a much better job anyway. What’s my point? I dunno. If you want the best in financial advice, go to a Chinese procuress, but she may get confused if your business isn’t illegal.
I can name three or four bestselling authors who are writing about all this doom and gloom stuff. What they’re saying is that it’s possible that billions of people won’t actually be dying of hunger as the world’s petroleum supply goes into six-percent annual decline, because the shortfall can be made up with olive oil. An Italian Re-renaissance. I once joking said that we mustn’t forget that the new miracle energy may be ethanol from chicken manure (or is it methanol? I can never stay awake long enough to remember), and I got an angry letter from somebody stating that chicken-manure whatever in some countries has made a big contribution to local energy supplies. Forgive me. Which reminds me, I forgot to count how many solar-powered cars went down the road this morning. Solar power is certainly one of the bigger Official Untruths. It’s been around as a theory since the 1970s, and if you look on the Salvation Army bookshelves you can find an armload of books on the topic, wedged between Baba Ram Dass and Timothy Leary.
I can also name three or four (or three or four dozen) really good authors who will tell you that our species is in for a very big crash. Unfortunately their books were written over five years ago and are therefore “old books” in the eyes of my young friend. But which of the two groups of books are you going to find on the book-store shelves? George Orwell was right about many things, but he was wrong to intimate that mass prevarication is a carefully orchestrated production. All it takes is a bookseller’s spreadsheets on sales projections to create the intended effects, almost without conscious effort: the spewing out of dumb books for mentally lazy people who basically deserve to lose their money in that manner.
I could think of some other names for 2010, but I’m too angry to spit them out. I’m forgetting my own Alternative Golden Rule: Never get angry; it’s bad for your aim. Anyhow, it’s impossible to boil over, because once water reaches a certain temperature, it’s no longer boiling, it’s just steam. I’m losing my grip. When I was a kid, I always said “please” and “thank you” (maybe that’s why teachers were always smiling at me and shaking their heads), and I never took my bicycle over to the other side of town, where there were people who didn’t use such words. Then came the Internet, and I had to face a cruel world in which some people didn’t answer email but never got struck by lightning. In the year 2010 I broke my own code of ethics. I not only failed to answer one or two email messages (mainly about chicken manure), but I finally scribbled a list of half a dozen knuckleheads, and then went to the email program and clicked “Yes” to “Are you sure you want to delete email contact?” Yes, I’m sure. It’s either them or me. Or I.
I’ve been too long in the sands of Araby. Too many years of female students who tell me they’re madly in love with me and then turn their mobile phones to “record” to see if they can get a lonely old westerner to fall into the trap by which so many others have been blackmailed or fired. Never mind extraterrestrials; twenty years of virginity does to the human brain what 55 Celsius does to a car battery. Too many students who get me into a conversation that goes into the red zone (i.e. over five minutes) and use my conviviality as proof that I want to switch religions. Well, this is the world of the nanny state with a psychotic nanny, the world where everybody is happy because everything is free, and everyone is terribly depressed because life is one vast welfare scam. The world where the kitchen tap breaks off and falls into the sink when you get home thinking you can relax. The world where one minute of conversation with a clerk takes an hour because a dozen Omanis have individually stepped up beside you and the clerk has shifted his attention so subtly that you wish it had been recorded on closed-circuit television. Just chalk it up as their revenge against the British Empire.
Two more points. One is that “resource depletion and overpopulation” is something like a tautology-in-reverse. Population is population. Overpopulation is what happens when a population depletes its resources. The other point, far more important, is that the big taboo of population is more than that: it’s the converse of the big taboo of resource depletion. In a modern democracy, which essentially means “government by the brain-dead,” almost any politician is willing to sell off a zillion acres of any resource, because he knows that by doing so he will be supporting a few cheesy jobs so that local yokels can get off the welfare rolls. Yeah, yeah, I know: the foreign CEO is getting five million a year to take home with him. Why sell your birthright for a mess of pottage, when you can sell that of your children? Does that mean that democracy should be chucked out the window? Basically, yes. Basically, human groups of over a hundred are a dismal failure, and always have been, but certainly in a world where schoolchildren are only expected to write their names with an X. But the problem with being a Virtual Robinson Crusoe is that nobody’s listening anyway, so I’ll stop at this point.
Why do I call it “the Year That Never Was”? Because I’ve decided it wasn’t really a year at all. It was a Hole in Time. Somehow that makes me feel better.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus {at} live.com.
