With the nation hopelessly dependent on automobiles and runaway inflation pricing fuel ever more beyond the reach of lower-wage workers, the apocalypse is already here.

I.

DENY IT AS VEHEMENTLY as you choose, the apocalypse is upon us. I have sensed its imminence since the still-unexplained regional power outage of 9 November 1965 — I was riding home on the Eighth Avenue Subway when the electricity failed, and I was the young man, later mentioned in a couple of news reports, who organized and led the evacuation of the A Train that had died three cars into West 14th Street station. “Join hands so nobody gets lost,” I said, “and just like we’re finding our way out of a cave, we’ll go to where the fresh air comes in.”

There was no mistaking the apocalyptic prophecy of what we all came to call “the Blackout.” Emerging from the coal mine darkness of the subway station and seeing the entire de-electrified City nearly as dark beneath an ominously smirking full moon gave me a chill more intense than anything I’d ever felt, and my hackles rose again minutes later when I learned the outage extended north from the Ohio River deep into Canada, west from the Atlantic Ocean well into Indiana and Michigan. It remains the largest such technological failure ever known. Here thanks to Life magazine photographer Bob Gomel is what Manhattan looked like.

(Click on the picture itself for maximum enlargement. Gomel’s view is eastward across the Hudson River; the bright lines in the foreground are the headlights of vehicles on the FDR Drive, and the greens and purples in the darker areas are due to a condition called reciprocity failure, a characteristic of the old High Speed Ektachrome under extended exposure.)

Having already thus glimpsed the future of what was then the greatest city on the planet, I merely nodded when I began reading the conclusions of the male and female environmentalist Cassandras a decade later. I am after all a Celt: I had sensed the laughter of the Crone when I emerged from the subway — note again that grinning moon — and now intuition was confirmed by science. Even then, though, the apocalypse remained hardly more than an abstraction, something that would occur long after I had died.

But last weekend I saw the apocalypse first-hand. I saw it in the distraught face of a young mother in a Fred Meyer parking lot telling her two elementary-school daughters that “no we can’t drive out to grandma’s tomorrow because momma has to save enough ($3.45-per-gallon) gasoline to get to work all next week.” I saw it the nearly palpable fear of a man at the gas pumps, filling his automobile with $3.45 gasoline just as I was filling my own — “quick before the goddamn price goes up again,” he said. I saw it in the body language at the bus stops, where people forced by the price of gas to abandon their automobiles now wait patiently for buses that run far too infrequently, their archetypically American faces — white, black, brown, Asian — united in dull-eyed resignation.

Most of all I saw it in my own huge gas-price anger at how the politicians have betrayed us to Big Oil and Big Automotive and — with their decades of untold graft safely pocketed and banked — have abandoned us to the socioeconomic and cultural equivalent of an everlasting Hurricane Katrina: the price of gasoline in now obviously permanent runaway inflation, the price increasing nearly a penny a day and sometimes much as five cents a day. By Memorial Day it will be close to $4 per gallon and maybe already above that. By Labor Day it could be $5 a gallon — possibly $6 (and maybe even $7). Though the price will occasionally drop a bit — another Big Lie tactic to falsely reassure us all is well — the days of affordable gasoline and diesel are ended forever.

Though the yuppie environmentalists are already applauding this latest atrocity against those of us who have to work to survive, think for a moment about the disaster $5 gasoline (or even $2 gasoline) inflicts on people who, by deliberate decades of political and economic betrayal, have been denied adequate public transport: literally all of us everywhere in the United States outside the five boroughs of New York City.

When an already bitterly exhausting day at the McJob suddenly jumps from 10 hours to 14 hours or even 16 (because now that you can’t afford to drive, you have to get up two or three hours early to ride buses to the sweatshop); when now because of the cost of gasoline you have to shop by bus rather than car (and the buses run so slow and seldom it takes the entire weekend rather than just half of Saturday); when your life deteriorates into permanent exhaustion you suddenly recognize will be relieved only by death because the price of gasoline will never come down again; when you suddenly understand the politicians’ sudden promise to provide the public transport you so desperately need is just another Big Lie — that now it will never be built because its costs are thrust ever more out of reach by fuel-price-driven inflation — that is the apocalypse.

Its details are reflected in the fact I spent nine hours and drove 102 miles this weekend shopping for necessities. I burned 7.14 gallons of $3.45 per-gallon gas at a cost of $24.56.(With nearly 260,000 miles on its odometer, my carefully maintained 1992 Ford Tempo V6 — a gift from a friend eight years ago — still manages 26 miles per gallon highway but gets only 14 in town.) To accomplish these same errands here by bus would have taken a minimum of three days: one of the stores at which I shopped is seven miles away on a fairly direct line, a 20-minute drive but a bus ride of an hour and ten minutes; another is only four miles away but across town: again a 20 minute drive, but by bus, a trip of nearly three hours that includes two transfers. And these are one-way trips; the actual to-and-fro drive time is double, and the bus time — given the unavoidable waits and the scheduled infrequency — is at least triple and often more. By bus, the weekend’s shopping chores would have required four single-bus-route journeys, 17 hours total round-trip time including shopping, plus three multi-route bus trips, total time 21 hours including shopping — 38 hours total. My three-day estimate of how long these chores would have taken by bus is thus no exaggeration at all.

In New York City, which has the only genuinely adequate public transport in the entire United States, I could have bought these same items with a $2 subway ride to Midtown Manhattan, spent at the very most two healthy hours of walking from store to store and then boarded the subway for another $2 ride back home, after which I would have had the rest of the weekend to spend as I chose, perhaps visiting museums and galleries with the eloquent, elegant and comely woman who is my once and future wife.

But here in arrogantly sprawling Pugetopolis — the ecofornicated region around Puget Sound, where the ruling class promises us “Sound Transit” but delivers nothing save rhetoric, frustration and ongoing enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive — we are afflicted with a pair of now-obviously-terminal illnesses, conditions that turn any sort of shopping into white-knuckled confrontation with societal collapse and political betrayal: i.e. the apocalypse.

One of the apocalyptic ailments is Mad Mall Disease, which is vectored by Big Oil and Big Automotive and causes the reflexive total destruction of all central business districts. While Mad Mall Disease is epidemic throughout the entire United States outside of New York City, here in Pugetopolis it is uniquely combined with another far more insidious but equally deadly local condition: Seattle Xenophobic Transit Obstruction, the radical anti-public-transport bigotry chronically frothed up by Seattle’s “stop-Manhattanization (we-don’-wanna-be-like-Jew-York)” xenophobes and “subways-are-for-criminals” racists, with the associated hatemongering secretly encouraged by turf-protecting bureaucrats and enacted into unwritten but now irrevocable law by mercenary politicians — again of course all vectored and financed by Big Oil and Big Automotive.

Consequently the initial tremor of the apocalypse — the runaway inflation of petroleum prices — is already destroying men, women and children and threatening many more people — myself included — with inescapable ruin. And the human destruction, though notably worse here in forcibly non-Manhattanized Pugetopolis, is to one degree or another a nationwide disaster anywhere outside the five boroughs of New York.

Cuba, a socialist state with a genuinely Marxist grassroots consciousness, has coped very successfully with the same sort of crisis by developing localized agriculture and supplemental public transport as well.

But America’s one embryonic effort at localized agriculture, the Los Angeles South Central Farm (from which an entire ideology of economic democracy and sustainable farming might have grown), has already been destroyed by the bulldozers and jackboots of the corporate state — a bitter lesson in brutally crushed dreams and aspirations that demonstrates beyond any question that such alternatives will be summarily destroyed anywhere else they might be attempted within the United States — and possibly (note for example the again escalating official hostility toward Cuba) anywhere else in the world too. (For additional information on this atrocity — the story was methodically suppressed by corporate media — Google “south central farm” and “los angeles urban farm“)

Moreover Cuba was never a nation where violently grasping consumeroids battled to the death over the newest baubles, bangles, beads and gew-gaws, nor was Cuba ever a place where most of the population — even many of the abjectly impoverished — had been hypnotized to cling defiantly to their ever-more-unaffordable gas-guzzling automobiles and rage in tantrums of Transit Obstructus any time someone suggested there might indeed be a better way. The Cuban solution to the petro-apocalypse — undoubtedly the most intelligent solution humans have yet devised — will therefore never be the U.S. solution. Most of us are far too viciously selfish, far too selfishly sociopathic — and now after decades of methodical moronation into the ultimate Moron Nation — we are simply too stubbornly stupid to abandon the privately owned automobile until Gaia herself pries it from our cold dead hands.

But make no mistake: the biggest obstacle to adequate public transport — never mind the Cuban-style socioeconomic transformation that might actually let us survive what is to come — is the U.S. ruling class: the people who keep the Transit Obstructus types agitated and inflamed. The Cuban solution demands true community and genuine sharing — from each according to ability, to each according to need. But that sort of thing will never be allowed here. The U.S. ruling class wants everything for themselves, with just enough left over to ensure the slaves are kept alive — and so desperately hungry we’ll obey our masters without question.

The apocalyptic optimists have a somewhat more hopeful vision of course.

But the ruling class has already made it clear by its behavior in Los Angeles and New Orleans that we in the United States will never be allowed such humanitarian (and implicitly democratic) options. Thus “I can have it all” is vanquished forever, replaced by “will work for food” — the emergence of the new American Dream.

Tags: economy, gasoline prices, government waste, oil
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