The New York Times has certainly imploded, but every Sunday they have one very long piece of outstanding journalism, typically limning another depressing facet of our imperial decline. This week’s dead tree presents an odyssey through the natural gas boom, specifically the vast amounts of radioactive waste that are now found in drinking water all over the country, much of it in western Pennsylvania. “Hydrofracking,” the method used to recover tiny bubbles of gas from the surrounding shale, is apparently pretty messy.
One region of Texas has elevated rates of asthma but regulators can’t or won’t dissect the cause of the problem because “the area has had high air pollution for a while.” Local mom Kelly Gant’s reaction to this charming catch-22? “I’m not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist, or anything like that.” She just wants to look after her family.
In other words, to have any standing as a complainant against giant corporate interests that are poisoning her kids, she first has to tick off the full roster of illegitimate groups to which she doesn’t belong. It’s pretty depressing to think that the air has to be cleared that way before you can gripe about who’s befouling the air.
On the one hand, this is par for the conservative course. Nothing causes the right-wing to change its tune like seeing the effects of their ideology on their own. Of course Dick Cheney has been pro-same sex marriage; his daughter is a lesbian. Of course Nancy Reagan is an outspoken advocate of stem-cell research; Ronald Reagan died of Alzheimer’s. Maybe this Kelly Gant didn’t think too hard about this or that company spewing toxic vapors, because pollution is just an unfortunate byproduct of job creation, or maybe not. But disavowing any liberal label in order to demand something as basic as that is a sure sign of something.
What’s especially surreal is how far backwards we’ve been catapulted. I’m sure when the Clean Air Act became law–signed by Richard Nixon, more or less the anti-hippie–its critics prophesied doom for American industry, but it is simply not the case that to ask for breathable air was to be identified by any particular label, so much so that insisting on the very opposite is necessary.
If her entire family was gunned down at the mall, would she have to say through her tears and widow’s veil, “I’m not one of those anti-gun nuts, I just don’t want my family shot execution-style”? Can the right’s capture of public discourse be so advanced that the very term “clean air” is now suspect? If this issue intensifies, will it be shunted into the same meat-grinder as every other issue, to where we have ordinary human beings favoring clean air and big companies and their astro-turf groups rhapsodizing unregulated “liberty oxygen”? If clean air=liberals=freaks, then you, as patriotic Americans or good Christians or just plain normal people, ought to know whom to trust.
I can’t help but start tracing everything back to imperial collapse. At some point, certain industries will have commissioned enough long-term studies to know that we’re at the point of no return, so get what you can now and hope to ride out the catastrophe to come. If I were wealthy and privy to certain information, as, say, the heads of certain energy companies, I might press for the total repeal of all twentieth century progressive legislation, too. Better to face the inevitable with unshackled hands, even if it accelerates the rush towards the end. Cause and effect have united as one. We’re on our last gasps–which may or may not even be breathable.
Suck the Rainbow 