—DIOGENES
The world is a vampire.
—SMASHING PUMPKINS
You may find it odd that we’d start a book about the American nightmare with a chapter on the rest of the world. You reveal your own ignorance. The great thing about having an empire is that no matter where you are on earth, you’re home! And you can’t really understand America’s internal rot—its inflamed, wriggling bowels—unless you understand its role as a brutal, stupid, and self-owning empire.
But just how did America grow from a small-time, mom-and-pop plantation into a gigantic, ruthlessly efficient multinational? After some initial growing pains, the United States debuted some innovative imperial pilot programs like Cuba and Hawaii in the late nineteenth century. But it wasn’t until after World War II that we truly inherited Great Britain’s mantle as the international point man for capital. America would soon end up invading/sabotaging/destroying literally most of the countries in the world in pursuit of maximum synergy.
The US emerged from World War II as the Chad of nations. (The Nation of Chad did not come into existence until 1960.) Our rival Nazi Germany had collapsed after it overleveraged risky investments in Eastern European “living space,” while Japan—once an aggressive competitor to America—was defeated due to a certain killer app developed in a cutting-edge incubator in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Not only were our enemies out of the game, but our British, French, and Dutch colleagues were all bankrupt, leaving America ready to expand our portfolio and pick up these assets from declining empires for pennies on the dollar.
To manage this sprawling enterprise, we reorganized our top talent into a streamlined corporate structure. The newly formed Defense Department was put in charge of human resources; the International Monetary Fund handled accounting, using the Bretton Woods bookkeeping system; the CIA headed up marketing, underwriting radio spots in Eastern Europe and some truly groundbreaking abstract advertisements by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock; and for R & D, we poached a team of bright young go-getters from a foundering competitor via Operation Paper Clip, one of the most successful headhunting projects in the pre-LinkedIn era.
Just as the modern economy consolidates hundreds or thousands of diverse firms into a handful of huge, pulsating conglomerates, America rode a wave of mergers and acquisitions to global monopoly. We got serious about vertical integration and started using our newfound economic and military muscle to close some really impressive deals in markets like Britain, West Germany, Japan, and—after deleting about a million people from the budget—Korea.
Korea was the first serious PowerPoint presentation of the Cold War, a showdown between us and the oppressive regulatory apparatus known as the Soviet Union. It was where we first proved our commitment to the two principles of our company philosophy: a) Kill civilians to maintain US hegemony, and b) Prop up dictators to maintain control of valuable territory. It’s a simple process known as subcontracting, and it came in handy every time we needed to farm out the hard work of opening markets and killing Communists. During the Korean War, for example, Syngman Rhee was our guy; a dapper, well-dressed player who ordered thousands of extrajudicial killings and had a dick like a billy club. And long after him, people tend to forget, South Korea was governed by a series of alternating military and civilian dictators. Korea set the standard: we’ll do anything on behalf of anyone, especially on behalf of ourselves; that’s the American promise.
So straight out of the gate, the Cold War was emphatically not about democracy versus totalitarianism. In Korea and in every subsequent proxy war, it was about capitalism versus threat to capitalism.
For a while, things hummed along nicely: by 1953, after the stuffy, uncreative Mohammad Mosaddeq decided to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, we paid Iranian bodybuilders to help install the pro-American Shah; in 1954, we acquired Guatemala through some corporate espionage; in 1965, we handed over an electronic mailing list of known Communists to our business partner Indonesia, which resulted in some serious housecleaning; and also in 1965, we occupied the Dominican Republic to bail out its pro-American CEO. Inevitably, however, the day arrived when public relations took a serious hit. The problem was Vietnam, a once-promising leveraged buyout from our faltering competitor, France.
The whole thing started when the US decided to cancel a national Vietnamese election scheduled for 1956 and set up by the Geneva Accords. America saw this mess of red tape for what it was and had the South Vietnamese call it off. That, rather than whatever slogan John McCain has tattooed on his scaled thigh, is what started the entire war. At the time it seemed like a great investment. Even after assuming the previous company’s liabilities (by the end of its run, America was funding about 80 percent of the French war in Indochina), these assets were going at fire-sale prices! Much like in Korea, we ended up outsourcing the management to a series of dictators: Ngo Dinh Diem, Big Minh, Nguyễn Khánh, etc. But despite our best efforts, we failed; the attempted hostile takeover killed something in the neighborhood of 3–4 million Vietnamese, and that’s not even counting the spillover in Laos and Cambodia.
It was a lesson for some, but not all, of America’s board members: the ideal business relationship may not be direct, messy, bloody conflict but instead a tranquil affiliation between contractor and subcontractor, a junior who acts on the whim of the parent yet still serves its own interests in the region. Corporate should intervene only if a bigger problem arises, such as uppity trade unions demanding labor laws or casual Fridays getting out of hand. Other people drew a different lesson: every time a colonial overlord is forced by their declining economic standing to pull out of a country and leave a vacuum of power, that vacuum will almost certainly be filled by an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist movement.
You might be saying to yourself, Hey, Professor Atheist Jew Libtard, put down the birth control pills and burning flag for one second and take the patriotic view: we were fighting a war to the death against Communism. If we hadn’t propped up our dictators, wouldn’t they have propped up their dictators and won?
Here’s a two-tiered answer. First, who cares? Pick your dictatorship: Would you rather have lived in Fidel Castro’s Cuba or in any one of the US’s many military junta police states? Second, America was usually targeting not just strongman regimes but democratic mass movements. And there was never a situation in which any American gain in yardage was a clear win against hegemonic Communism, because the Communist Bloc was already fragmented by the mid 1960s (not to mention the added players in the Third Way/Non-Aligned Movement, a crunchy co-op founded by Nehru, Tito, Sukarno, Nasser, and Nkrumah).
How many times did we act not against Communism but against anything remotely subverting capitalism? United Fruit in Latin America? Iran? Democratically elected Chilean socialist Salvador Allende? In none of those cases were the Soviets to be seen. (In fact, Allende was a complete pushover who decided to ignore some choice advice Castro gave him right before the coup: put guns in the hands of the workers, because they’re coming to kill you. Allende’s response—“No, democratic norms are important”—explains why his regime lasted a full fifteen minutes, while Fidel lived another nine hundred years.) In fact, America was so interested in fighting the evils of Communism that it propped up fucking Pol Pot—AFTER the Killing Fields! Yes, the genocide in Cambodia was stopped by the Communists running North Vietnam, who drove Pol Pot out of power. But because the North Vietnamese were card-carrying Reds, America backed a Khmer Rouge comeback tour and sent SAS guys to train them in the jungles and lay mines that are still around today and probably just atomized some poor soul as you read this paragraph. Yet Pol Pot ends up in the Black Book of Communism.
But such are the trade-offs inherent in running a business—and what a business we had. Funding wasn’t a problem, seeing as the US was a preeminent manufacturing base, the workhouse of the free world. With the Marshall Plan and a pivot toward Asia, we were throwing cash and goods everywhere, stabilizing our postwar partners in a new global order (and securing some profits for industry, if you want to be pedantic about it). Also, with the Bretton Woods system that established the US dollar as the reserve currency of world trade, America entered the postwar era as the ultimate arbiter and guarantor of global capitalism. This meant that the we could afford to spend billions rebuilding the European economy (and keeping the Communists from taking power) while brokering peace between labor and capital at home. In exchange for chilling out on the worker militancy and purging Communists from any leadership positions, organized labor was promised a bigger percentage of the profits generated by America’s unipolar industrial might.
After a half century of gridlock, we finally got the upper hand against our big governmental rival in Russia. The breakthrough came in the late 1980s after the Soviets tried to regulate small businesses in Afghanistan. Seizing the opportunity to innovate, we created a new platform for warfare that empowered independent contractors known as Mujahideen, who were looking to thrive in the gig economy. The inflexible bureaucracy of the Red Army, bogged down by licenses and worker benefits, simply couldn’t compete. The beauty of our strategy lay in its simplicity: We could spend almost unlimited sums of money and create a whole slew of new jobs for self-motivated freelancers with very little screening or oversight. Sure, this led to our fair share of PR setbacks, including one-star reviews for unreliable contractors like Mohamed Atta, but that came further down the line.
Then, in 1989, Ronald Reagan finally ended Communism by boldly declaring, “Mother, where are my jelly beans?” shitting himself, and karate-chopping the Berlin Wall exactly four times. (The combined pressures of falling oil prices, the invasion of Afghanistan, nationalist movements, and the internal contradictions of the Soviet system may also have played a role.) With collapse on the horizon, Mikhail Gorbachev was stuck with a serious crisis. Thankfully for everyone, the West was eager to lend a helping hand. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to free the East from the tyranny of planned economies and government jobs. Thanks to the ambition and corruption of Boris Yeltsin, US policymakers, and the chaos god Loki, the Soviet Union splintered into dozens of new, independent start-ups, while America and her allies carried out an aggressive strategy for the acquisition of Eastern Europe’s state assets.
Yeltsin woke up on a snowmobile in 1999 with no memory of the previous ten years. When he got back to his office in the Kremlin, his staff informed him that he’d sold off all Russia’s resources to pirates, mob bosses, and Western corporate interests. (Damning, to be sure, but don’t act like you haven’t done worse while drunk.) Yeltsin facilitated a “shock therapy” economic liberalization program, otherwise known as private equity, assisted by American whiz kids like Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers. It led to the largest drop in peacetime life expectancy of the twentieth century. But they got McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, so it’s a wash. Why live past fifty-five when you’ve already fulfilled your greatest dreams?
Somehow, an epic deal like “consumer goods in exchange for the privatization of your entire economy” wasn’t good enough for many Russians, and Yeltsin faced a difficult reelection campaign in 1996. A Communist Party candidate threatened to return Russia to the Bad Old Days of guaranteed employment, free housing, and low infant mortality rates. Luckily, some American lanyards (and a few billion dollars from oligarchs and Western interests) helped swing the election for Yeltsin. He repaid the good faith of his country’s citizens (and the loans of his benefactors) with more privatization, eventually handing power to former KGB officer and competitive CrossFitter Vladimir Putin.
Putin proceeded to turn Russia into a supercharged version of America, with all the bigotry, inequality, and sham-democracy that went along with it. When Putin’s new souped-up national-capitalist aggro-state sought to reclaim the sphere of influence it had lost after the fall of Communism, was the US proud of the precious, rapacious child it had raised? No! First, Mitt Romney identified Russia as America’s biggest global threat in 2012, and then, four years later, all the liberals who had giggled at that bit of backward-looking hysteria decided that Mitt was right after all and that a good way to #resist President Cheeto would be to send antiaircraft missiles to the Babi Yar Reenactment Society in Ukraine. Some people and some countries just can’t take yes for an answer.
With the former Soviet Union foreclosed on, the last real threat to American global hegemony had been eliminated.I The future looked bright enough to necessitate shades, so to speak. The final piece of the project was to create a single market out of the hodgepodge of fractious cheese-producing nations in Europe.
Once the danger of Soviet invasion was gone, the ruling classes could begin turning Europe into a slightly grimier version of EPCOT. All the continent’s distinct nationalisms, with their meatballs and blackface Santas, would be preserved as local flair, while economic and political power were centralized in the headquarters of the new European Union. Unfortunately for the globalist schemers, European national identity proved more resilient than anticipated—something Slobodan Milošević could have told them in between genocides. So instead of going forward with political unification (dead-on-arrival), they went through the back door with a currency-based union, figuring that with time, the political institutions would catch up with the reality on the ground.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the End of History: a financial crisis in 2008 that the Euro system was completely incapable of handling. You can’t totally blame them; they were told that capitalism had won, and this kind of thing really wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. Despite that, the European Central Bank responded to the ’08 crisis with a Wahhabist-style neoliberal austerity that even the moderate consensus-makers in Washington didn’t have the stomach for. Cue permanent immiseration in the peripheral states of the Euro (the so-called PAWGs) who couldn’t devalue their currency to boost exports, and aid so-called labor reform in the rest of Europe. Today Europe can be divided into the countries with sun, good weather, great food, and sex but terrible economies and those with great economies but total darkness, awful food, and even worse sex. However, all of Europe remains strongly united against male circumcision, and as such is still far, far ahead of America.
All this economic hardship, coupled with a spiraling refugee crisis and the continued inability of political institutions to address any of it, has led to a big retro-trend across the continent: That’s right, the thirties are back! Dance marathons! Art Deco! The rise of organized fascist political movements!
Let us put aside this corporate fable of the American Century and turn now to the world you know and love. At the time of this writing, the War on Terror is now in its seventeenth year, becoming, as NatSec intellectuals like to put it, “a generational commitment.” It has gone from the unprecedented, epoch-defining focus of our national destiny to something we all just meekly accept and largely tune out as it hums along in the background as kids born in September 2001 reach military age. US policy currently involves allying with the “moderate” elements of Al Qaeda and the Taliban against newer, evil-er kinds of terrorists and their state sponsors. Outside of this very easy and base irony, one can assess the value of the war by entertaining a simple thought experiment: How much safer would both America and the rest of the world be right now if our government’s response to 9/11 was to pretend it didn’t happen and do absolutely nothing?
Would the Middle East be the cauldron of violence it is today? Would ISIS exist? Would we witness the same number of terrorist attacks in Europe? Would a million or so people have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Almost certainly not. But remember, for the national security class and the small cadre of Ford administration has-beens who came to power before 9/11, all these details are features, not bugs, of the War on Terror. The cascade of atrocities and disasters that issued forth from this US-led crusade, from ISIS snuff films to sectarian bloodletting to institutionalized torture to mass surveillance to the refugee crisis to an American culture warped by militarism and troop worship, is just further justification for why we must stay the course. Your ability to safely work in an office building, go to a concert, run a marathon, take mass transit, or fly in an airplane free from any unplanned inconveniences is at best incidental, and at worst actively hostile, to the goals and logic of the War on Terror.
The thing we call the War on Terror is, like pretty much every other war, a crude land grab for control of resources, oil pipelines, and good old-fashioned access to markets. The national security state used the pretext of 9/11 and the blowback from the Cold War as ways to drum up a chintzy version of the war economy from World War II and replace our fucked-up retail-debt economy after we killed the golden goose of American industry and manufacturing.
Infobox: Terms for NatSec Wonks in Other Countries
The world lay in ruins in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Allied victors knew mankind could not survive another cataclysm. In order to skirt destruction on a biblical scale, postwar leaders would resort to an affront to God even more devastating than nuclear weapons: wonks.
When tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States flared in a divided Berlin immediately after the war, both powers and their respective allies began stockpiling as many wonks as they possibly could. These technocrats were given the task of advising presidents, prime ministers, or really anyone who had similar backgrounds to the wonks themselves.
Now they’re a staple of modern government. Across all nations, wonks’ identifiable traits are social ineptitude and physical disagreeableness. Their habitats are foundations and think tanks. The only way they differ is in how they’re named. Below are samples of different wonk-nomenclature from across the globe.
RUSSIA: Mysl’ truslivyy (Thought Coward)
CHINA: Cèsuǒ tàijiàn (Toilet Eunuch)
JAPAN: Hiretsuna akushū basutādo (Dishonorable Stench Bastard)
FRANCE: Crétin fétiche (Fetish Moron)
UNITED KINGDOM: Spreadsheet Cunt
POLAND: Francuz (Frenchman)
SWEDEN: Skogsidiot (Forest Imbecile)
SOUTH KOREA: Laeteuwa mun saiui geunchinsang-gan chulsaeng-ui geeuleun adeul (Lazy Son Born of Incest between Rat and Moon)
INDONESIA: Pantat basah (Wet Ass)
GERMANY: [banned]
ISRAEL: בתולה שימושית (Useful Virgin)
BRAZIL: Pé obsessivo (Foot Obsessive)
SPAIN: Error en el blog (Blog Failure)
DENMARK: Frosne kønsorganer (Frozen Genitals)
SAUDI ARABIA: Alyahudi (Jew)
NORTHERN VIRGINIA: Tier-One Operator
Now, we don’t want to give you the impression that it’s all just simply blood for oil. A great deal of the blood is indeed being exchanged for oil, but the people who dreamed up this never-ending story think American control of the world’s oil supply is but a perk compared to restoring America’s martial spirit and imperial vigor. The fact is, we’ve been gun-shy about being a great power since Vietnam and pathetically idle since the end of the Cold War robbed us of a worthy adversary. The Twin Towers imploding on national television was just what we needed to put some fire in our bellies, spring in our steps, and vengeance in our hearts. For a Straussian, endless and aimless struggle against evil is just what the doctor ordered for our hyperindividualized and alienated culture, not to mention a great way to keep military budgets and their pleated trousers swole. The War on Terror is the bathtub our empire lies in, surveying a sunset over a wheat field in the Cialis commercial that is our twenty-first-century international statecraft.
While pretty much any president—including the one who actually won the 2000 election—would have attacked Afghanistan after 9/11, only George W. Bush and company were in the right place at the right time to really get this bigger project off the ground. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld: Afghanistan lacked any “good targets” to obliterate—and so it was off to Iraq. They wanted a twenty-first-century world stage dictated by American military might, and refused to accept a multipolar world in which powers simply used diplomacy to jockey for advantage. For the neocons and the defense establishment, though, that would be heresy, because we have the biggest military in the world, and, in the words of Madeleine Albright, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Sure, America can “negotiate” with other powers, but always “from a position of strength”—i.e., a big military presence where all the oil is.
Anyway. There’s no point in litigating the Iraq War too much. It’s the defining disaster of this new American Century. It should be sufficient to say that the justifications for it, from WMD to any supposed concern for the freedom and well-being of the Iraqi people, were obvious confabulations that fooled only those who wanted to be conned and those who just didn’t care because the thought of war excited them so much. This included pretty much all the media, government, and cultural elites of this country, and it remains the gold standard for how we should judge them. (One demographic decidedly not fooled was black Americans, almost 70 percent of whom opposed the war out of some sense that America is actually kind of bad.II) Meanwhile, our thought leaders in the government and media stuck with it as bravely as they could through the rising body counts and the Abu Ghraib revelations until around 2007, when they were finally forced by Bush’s top-to-bottom incompetence to give up the ghost.
By then, everyone reluctantly realized that there wasn’t going to be any good ending or VJ Day moment that would retroactively make their support of the Iraq War look noble or wise. They realized the money and credibility they invested in this project—clinched by a particularly impressive Herbalife presentation at the UN—was simply not coming back.
However, this is America, and in our country, no dream ever really dies. In this case, we were able to swap out George W. Bush for General David Petraeus as 2007’s figure of national leadership and competence and trade “Mission Accomplished” for “Uh, the Surge Worked?” And that was that. The Iraq War didn’t demonstrate American might or benevolence on the global stage the way we might have hoped, nor did it inspire any new national purpose or credo. But it was no real loss, either, because not a single person involved was ever held accountable, save for Chelsea Manning.
And then, in 2008, we got Obama, the living refutation of swaggering idiot cowboys like Bush and snarling, sneering blood drinkers like Cheney. Nevertheless, Obama pulled off a much trickier job: Febreze-ing our national conscience without ever truly reckoning with what happened or winding down our blood-soaked “strategic interests in the region.” Despite Obama’s gloss as a liberal beacon of hope, this was the moment the War on Terror stopped being an emotional spectacle in American life and became a new baseline for reality. It joined the background static of our society, with the imprimatur of both parties and therefore all acceptable points of view. It became something that simply is, existing perfectly outside the realm of politics and ideology. The days of “boots on the ground” and “nation-building” were over, and the phrase “War on Terror” now meant harnessing our technology to manage a global drone assassination campaign. We could even safely retire “War on Terror,” as the thing itself no longer required a name, so thoroughly metastasized was it throughout our body politic.
All this was far less upsetting for the public—the American public, that is—but all the more corrosive to our souls, precisely because of how invisible and consequence-free it now appears.
Still, it should be noted that while they may be out of power for now, the architects of the War on Terror remain at large. They’re ensconced in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, in think tanks, op-ed sections, and on cable news. Some have even taken up positions as leaders of the #Resistance to President Trump, but none of them have lost hope for a new Pax Americana. Their mission remains the same. For these “heroes in error,” the real prize is still, and always was, Iran. The Islamic Republic. The Shia Succubus. Iraq is just a Scrabble tile away from Iran, and while Saddam’s old stomping ground was merely supposed to be a launching pad toward the rest of the Middle East, Iran was always the real treasure, the site of a new, glorious, liberated American dominion to print AEI pamphlets and pump petro-dollars.
Iran is our real enemy because, for our national security planners, it represents the unthinkable: a genuine regional power with its own oil resources outside the US fold that isn’t a complete basket case. As such, we’re treated to the semiregular cant that Iran is the “greatest exporter of terrorism” in the world and—even more galling, considering who’s saying it—that it’s “meddling in the region” and is a “threat to its neighbors.” This is also why it’s considered gauche to bring up Saudi Arabia’s state sponsorship of terrorism and Wahhabism. For American NatSec intellectuals, be they of the Brookings Institution or the American Enterprise Institute, killing three thousand Americans and engineering the worst famine of the twenty-first century in Yemen is far more forgivable than getting away with an Islamic Revolution for forty years. This is why Saudi Arabia remains in good standing in the media and think tank zone, despite being patient zero for Islamic fundamentalism and terror.
Conservative pundits love to compare America to Rome, mainly because they want to be allowed to drape sheets around their asses and bring back slavery and man-boy love. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful analogy. Like Rome, we’re a deluded and decadent empire in terminal decline.
After a brief postwar golden era (for white people), the end of the twentieth century saw America open up the world economy so much that we stopped making things at all and just started buying them elsewhere to support our British, German, and South Asian pals. Nowadays it’s other people who make things—not least our erstwhile Communist enemy, China. Despite the gaudy, ongoing celebrations of American Exceptionalism, this country has been reduced to being the military arm of international capital: demoted from manager to rent-a-cop. Everything’s on credit, with a precarious and doomed balance between military spending and domestic debt.
Meanwhile, China, carved up by Europe in the nineteenth century, expelled those powers in the twentieth. They kicked off this century with a supercharged, state-guided capitalism that’s carrying out the most mind-boggling planned industrialization in world history.III They’re developing domestic markets, not just exports, and starting up their own imperial designs in Africa—the last remaining spot on the planet yet to be turned into a base for cheap industrial manufacturing. In twenty years, that pang you get when you see “Made in China” on a clothing tag will be replaced by a wince from seeing “Made in Africa,” and it may even sting a little more. But China is doing just what America’s done—what the world’s been doing—for the last two hundred–odd years: consuming and growing more and more each year, with no end in sight, driven by a deep, deep madness.
So brace yourself for a lot more talk about a showdown between democratic Western values and mammoth, red, Communist China, and remember that it’s all total horseshit. It’s just cover for a desperate scramble for resources on our wheezing, dying planet, as every country’s elites pile up last bits of obscene wealth to better withstand the inevitable collapse.
And what a collapse it will be! As Thomas Friedman pointed out in his thought-provoking bestseller Our Interconnected World, the world is more interconnected than ever. Ideas, capital, racist memes, and state repression flow through borders at the speed of imagination. Thanks to the digital revolution, a neo-Nazi in Budapest can now obtain a list of local Roma and their addresses from an anime-obsessed hacker in Quezon City on a platform funded by a paleolibertarian transhumanist venture capitalist in San Jose who is at that instant explaining the plot of Atlas Shrugged to a yawning high-class cam girl in Johannesburg, all at the click of a button. For you and the transnational ruling class, this means that world capitalism is churning toward its brutal denouement at maximum efficiency.
Yes, the world’s future is a veritable Choose Your Own Adventure of impending cataclysms. Runaway wealth inequality dramatically expands the underclass as nations race to the bottom to cut wages in a futile effort to slam the brakes on the inexorably falling rate of profit; throw in resource scarcity and overconsumption and we get rationing of basic human necessities among the global poor and outrage among the Western upper classes when the rare earth metals needed to manufacture their animatronic Boss Baby–themed merchandise have been exhausted. Or we could just have a good old-fashioned global economic depression once the cheap-credit house of cards falls over.
Of course, no roster of anticipatable apocalypses would be complete without the total ecological collapse caused by climate change. It turns out that two centuries of spewing industrial effluvium into the atmosphere to power the modern world wasn’t without its consequences. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 PPM. As of this writing, we’re over 410 PPM and rising. The concentration limit needed to prevent irreversible ecological damage is, uh, way less than that.
To be fair, it may be all right, as fossil-fuel industry scientists point out that the earth’s atmosphere had similar CO2 concentrations during such periods as the Solar Death Epoch and the Uninhabitable Era (a misleading name, given the various genera of bedbug that prospered during this period). We aren’t looking to cause a panic or anything, but to be perfectly honest, you should put this book down right now and look up the cost of a decommissioned missile silo in Svalbard.
We don’t have to tell you what climate change has wrought. You see the headlines on the Weather Channel website when you’re just trying to find out whether you need an umbrella today. It’s a five- to seven-degree-Fahrenheit increase in the global mean temperature (and that’s if we do nothing), ocean acidification (permanent end to Red Lobster’s Crabfest), half a meter or so of sea-level rise (which has already inundated a few insular countries), destruction of millions of acres of arable land (increased property values in the Yukon Territory), food insecurity, water insecurity, the return of ancient comic-book-villain-origin-story-caliber diseases unearthed from melted permafrost, immensely destructive tropical storms that cause precipitous drops in approval ratings for Republican administrations, sharp reduction of biodiversity, albedo effect, feedback loop, polar ice caps melting, malaria, war, refugees, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
People talk about the “coming apocalypse.” Take a closer look. The apocalypse is Puerto Rico annihilated by a hurricane. It’s villages in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal tortured by lethal flooding.
The apocalypse is already here; you just don’t live there yet.
Not too long ago, scientists agreed that a global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius was the absolute upper limit for preventing environmental catastrophe. This was the starting point for global negotiations to reduce carbon emissions. The international community, fully cognizant of the consequences of their actions—as directed by the US and rising countries like China and India, who felt left out of the first Industrial Revolution—said “Eat my ass” and ignored the warnings. The cutthroat cost-benefit analysis they offered was that transitioning to clean, renewable sources of energy would slow down economic development to an unacceptable extent. China and India wanted to know why they couldn’t litter their countryside with CO2-spewing, coal-burning power plants when countries like America and Britain built their wealth (and colonial empires) in the past century doing the same. And developing countries in places like Africa and Central America that have never enjoyed the fruits of a stupid consumerist society like ours had a thing or two to say about their resources being pillaged and their environment being destroyed to ensure that middle-class Americans and Chinese can afford Chaturbate tokens.
If a bleeding-heart cuck socialist atheist liberal professor were to become president of the United States, even they wouldn’t have the moral authority to say to people living in the Slumdog Millionaire reality, “You know what, we may have had our heyday stealing your resources and spewing noxious gases into the atmosphere to build a rich and entitled middle class, but you guys need to knock it off because the insurance premiums on our beachfront condos are getting out of control.” (And that’s if the American ruling class wanted to do something about climate change.)
Europe, populated as it is with self-loathing environment-loving sexual deviants, has tried to do its part, starting a continental cap-and-trade market that has accomplished little more than making bicyclists in Amsterdam feel smug and reducing the spot price of crude oil so developing countries can get cheaper dirty energy. Of course that’s before the US pulled out of the already watered-down and woefully insufficient Paris Agreement altogether.
So peace out, globalists. You can take away my diesel-burning backyard smelter when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Nobody wants to deal with the hangover from two centuries of untrammeled environmental extermination. Every earnest attempt at even ameliorating the effects of climate change has failed dramatically, and each time someone tried, global capitalism snuck away with cookie crumbs on its face, pausing only to make a cutesy “Who, me?” face to the camera right as another Bangladeshi village got buried in mudslides.
Capitalism would be moribund even in the absence of all this; climate change just gives an exciting, breakneck, life-and-death impetus to this struggle coming down the pike. It’s the Splash Mountain of teleologies. The dislocations created by climate change helpfully remind us that the political systems we live under are incapable of solving any fundamental problems or acting in the interests of anyone but the ruling class—and no number of bright-eyed Brookings Institution–trained technocrats can change that.
As business mindset futurist experts, we can tell you that these trends will lead to more nationalism, more terrorism, more weapons, more wars, more fracturing of the creaky global order in which the real enemies of humanity will never be identified so long as there’s an inexhaustible supply of people who don’t look like you to scapegoat, and more walls put up by rich countries to keep out those folks lining up just to get down.
And if the global order can’t even get its act together to forestall an imminent threat to its own survival, what should make you think it could handle any number of looming self-inflicted technological crises? Take a moment to imagine what new and exciting crowd-control weapons Elon Musk will sell to your government in the next few years. Think about what every country now understands about the human genome and what biological weapons will exist by the end of the next decade. The United States already spends well over half a trillion dollars a year on its military to defend against . . . what? Obviously, a handful of nukes alone would be enough to ward off any attempt to violate our territorial integrity, but goddammit, we need more to maintain our imperial dominion over a shrinking segment of a dying world. The rest of the global populace is still, understandably, not happy about this state of affairs.
For how long is this situation tenable? You don’t have to be the main character in the first third of a YA novel to realize we’re going to end up in a very bad place.
We’re sure that you, the idiot reader so stupid as to buy this book, can imagine a global order built on egalitarianism—one in which the productive forces of society aren’t spent on inventing new weapons of mass destruction and clever ways to brutalize dissidents but on ensuring that all people enjoy the fruits of their birthright, an order that holds human beings and their fundamental rights as sacrosanct, that believes the provision of basic human needs to be the sole objective of politics and the economy, that rejects violence and militarism in toto.
But that’s not your world. Sorry to bum you out. The rest of this book is kind of funny, though.
I. Except for the emerging public-private partnership of China, but how much of a threat could they ever become?
II. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Blacks Showing Decided Opposition to War,” Gallup, March 28, 2003, http://news.gallup.com/poll/8080/blacks-showing-decided-opposition-war.aspx.
III. From 1901 to 2000, America used 4.5 billion tons of cement. A couple years ago, China started buying a lot of cement. They went through 6.6 billion tons in just three years. Analysts fear that by the end of the decade, China will have more half-pipes per capita than the US.